H. TRISTRAM ENGELHARDT, JR.

MORALITY, UNIVERSALITY, AND PARTICULARITY:

RETHINKING THE ROLE OF COMMUNITY IN THE
FOUNDATIONS OF BIOETHICS

I. LIBERALS, LIBERTARIANS, AND CUL TURALIRELIGIOUS

CONSERVATIVES

An assessment of bioethics at the threshold of the new millennium must

begin by acknowledging the numerous competing visions of the field, as
well as their divergent foundations. There is a received authorized
account with a kind of governmental establishment in much of North
America and the West. It regards issues both moral and bioethical within
the framework of liberal cosmopolitan assumptions: morality is seen to be
grounded in autonomous moral agents who contract with each other in the
realization of social structures and who should favor autonomous free
choice and fair equality of opportunity over particular, especially
traditional familial and communal moral commitments. There is also the
libertarian liberal insight that, when moral strangers meet, they will have
no source of common authority other than their own consent. By default,
the authority of their common undertakings as moral strangers must be
understood as drawn from the permission of moral agents, not from God
or from a content-full authoritative understanding of moral rationality.
Unlike the cosmopolitan liberal, the libertarian liberal recognizes that the
circumstance of moral pluralism within which permission is the source of
authority does not support the conclusion that autonomous individual
choice should have a value over other goods, including those celebrated
within the context of traditional moral communities.
Over against these liberal visions, there are traditional understandings
of human flourishing, which ground their authority neither in a supposed
prior value of autonomous individual liberty, nor in the permission of
moral agents, but rather in a connection with God, nature, or an
experience of reality that discloses a possibility for human realization and
flourishing not justifiable in discursive, rational terms. Such communities
range from those within which traditional Christians, Moslems, Jews,
Parsees, Daoists, and Buddhists live their lives to the religious/cultural
communities one finds embodied in Confucianism and Shintoism. Within

Julia Tao Lai Po-wah (ed.), Cross-Cultural Perspectives all the (lm)possibility a/Global
Bioethics, 19-38.
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
20 H. TRISTRAM ENGELHARDT, JR.

these communities there may be understandings of the appropriateness of

abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction, physician-assisted suicide,
and euthanasia, which will be on the one hand at odds with cosmopolitan
liberals and on the other hand much more content-full than what is
available to libertarian liberals who must regard all that persons fashion
as moral strangers as creations of human choice, not as disclosures of
fundamental reality or enduring orderings of values.
Each of these perspectives makes plausible a different understanding
of bioethics. Within the context of liberal cosmopolitan commitments, the
libertarian liberal is a challenge to aspirations to all-encompassing health
care policy, while the cultural/religious conservative is a challenge to the
particularity of the cosmopolitan liberal. The cultural/religious
conservative gives evidence for holding that the cosmopolitan liberal also
belongs to a particular community of faith, however secular. The
CUltural/religious conservative will also have grounds for suspicions
concerning the cosmopolitan liberal in that cosmopolitan liberal
convictions have undermined robust, traditional communities in the West
and throughout the world. Where all morality must be chosen
authentically and autonomously, one is invited to step out of history and
tradition, thus losing the orientation provided by the community of one's
ancestors. The libertarian liberal, in contrast, is pleased peaceably to
make space for as many communities as there are persons to fashion
them. Libertarian liberals take the project of robust communities seriously
without commitment to any in particular. Finally, cultural/religious
conservatives understand why their particular community carries a truth
unknown to others and therefore why it has special access to the human
good and human flourishing.
This essay will address the dialectic among these three moral
perspectives. It will first layout how the cosmopolitan liberal perspective
arrogated to itself the status of the moral vision acclaimed by consensus.
The essay will then tum to the grounds for the absence of consensus in
bioethics and for the presence of the moral pluralism that de facto defines
bioethics across the world. The conflicts between the moral visions
compassed by this pluralism will be described under the category of
culture wars to indicate the conflicts between the cosmopolitan liberal
moral vision and those who understand its particularity and arbitrariness.
Finally, the character of communities will be explored in greater depth,
leading to the conclusion that the bioethics of the next millennium will
find itself plural in character and in its foundations.