Editorial Note

Editorial Note Jing-Bao Nie (bio) and Ruth Fitzgerald (bio) Bioethics, as both an academic field and a public discourse on a global scale, has been evolving rapidly over the past several decades. The importance of cross-cultural and global bioethics as a subfield of bioethics is strongly reflected in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ). Since 1991, KIEJ has published a number of articles and some thematic issues in this area. Among many others, it has facilitated a series of debates in the development of a cross-cultural and international bioethics, including the issues of universalism and multiculturalism (Vol. 8, No.3 & 4, 1998), the eastern and western perspectives on personhood (Vol.9 No.4, 1999), and the (im)possibility of the common morality (Vol.13 No.3, 2003) (some features of these debates will be critically discussed in the first paper of this special issue). Actually, as early as 1979, the previous format of the KIEJ—the Kennedy Institute Quarterly Report—already published a special issue on medical ethics in China when China just initiated the transformative social polices of “reform and openness” and “economic development.” Nevertheless, as also reflected in KIEJ, the existing scholarship in cross-cultural and global bioethics has paid only scant attention explicitly to methodological matters. Partly because of this, many deeply rooted but highly problematic modes of thinking have continued to prevail in this vital bioethical subfield. To help amend this inadequacy, all the papers in this thematic issue aim to investigate the following methodology-related questions in one way or another: • What are the advantages and limits of currently dominant approaches to comparative, cross-cultural and global bioethics? • What are the essential elements of new methodologies of comparative, cross-cultural and global bioethics? • How can empirical and inherently normative studies based in anthropology and other social sciences be better integrated with inquiries of bioethics and especially the development of transcultural and transglobal bioethics? [End Page ix] This issue explores a wide range of theoretical and practical bioethical issues—from indigenous voices to global justice, from ADHD to universalism. But the overall objective is to develop a transcultural and transglobal approach to bioethics. In our collaborative search for this, we have nevertheless come up with several different (not one largely unified) but highly related modes. Hopefully these alternative methods will turn out to be constructive in promoting more meaningful transcultural and transglobal conversations in the field of bioethics. At least, we hope that all together the papers will show convincingly that new methodologies are sorely needed to adequately address the pressing practical and theoretical challenges arising in cross-cultural, comparative, and global bioethics. The five papers by an international team of authors tackle the common theme from a variety of intellectual angles. Academically, these papers are operating in such disciplines as bioethics, anthropology and sociology, philosophy (European continental and Anglo-American analytic traditions), Asian and Chinese studies, indigenous studies, psychiatry and medicine, literature, and medical humanities. Geographically and culturally, the authors are from China, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Canada, and South Africa. Four authors of three papers, including two guest editors, are faculty members at the Bioethics Centre and the Department of Anthropology in the University of Otago in New Zealand. Although being a very multicultural society, NZ is a small country (or better, “big village”) in the vast southern Pacific Ocean that many Chinese would call “the land of Peach Blossoms” (shiwai Taoyuan, an imagined idyllic place with beautiful landscapes and free from the world’s madness and turmoil from classical Chinese literature). Yet, New Zealanders (“Kiwis” as they would like to call themselves) have been keenly playing their due (often more than due) role in global affairs from not only their national- and self-interests but also their fostering of a renaissance of indigenous culture and their moral commitments to themselves and others in the world. The first two articles constitute a pair presenting the methodology of “transculturalism” for bioethics, one an outline of its key elements and the other its application to a practical bioethical issue. The article by Jing-Bao Nie and Ruth Fitzgerald draws attention to two troubling methodological assumptions in the extant writing...

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