Turner Bryan Stanley, Dumas Alex
Department of Sociology, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY, 10016-4309, USA,
Med Health Care Philos. 2013 Nov;16(4):663-70. doi: 10.1007/s11019-013-9500-6.
This article makes a contribution to the on-going debates about universalism and cultural relativism from the perspective of sociology. We argue that bioethics has a universal range because it relates to three shared human characteristics,--human vulnerability, institutional precariousness and scarcity of resources. These three components of our argument provide support for a related notion of 'weak foundationalism' that emphasizes the universality and interrelatedness of human experience, rather than their cultural differences. After presenting a theoretical position on vulnerability and human rights, we draw on recent criticism of this approach in order to paint a more nuanced picture. We conclude that the dichotomy between universalism and cultural relativism has some conceptual merit, but it also has obvious limitations when we consider the political economy of health and its impact on social inequality.
本文从社会学角度为关于普遍主义和文化相对主义的持续辩论做出了贡献。我们认为生物伦理学具有普遍范围，因为它涉及人类的三个共同特征——人类的脆弱性、制度的不稳定和资源的稀缺。我们论点的这三个组成部分为“弱基础主义”这一相关概念提供了支持，该概念强调人类经验的普遍性和相互关联性，而非其文化差异。在阐述了关于脆弱性和人权的理论立场后，我们借鉴了近期对这种方法的批评，以便描绘出一幅更细致入微的图景。我们得出结论，普遍主义和文化相对主义之间的二分法有一些概念上的优点，但当我们考虑健康的政治经济学及其对社会不平等的影响时，它也有明显的局限性。
