The trilemma of designing international bioethics curricula

Excerpt

Cultural diversity is certainly one of the challenges one faces when designing curricula for international bioethics students. Piasecki et al. contend “[…] it is very difficult if not impossible to create an ethnically and culturally neutral message, but what really matters is not the message itself, but the forum: where critical ideas and reflections are discussed by the students. The values […] should be clearly declared, but there should be space to contest them” (Piasecki et al. 2018, this issue). We certainly agree with both the importance of transparency of the values inherent in a teaching program as well as the idea of allowing critical discussion of said values. However, as to ‘the message itself’, i.e. the content of bioethics curricula, however, we claim that it is imperative as well. In fact, when designing a bioethics curriculum with the aim to teach it in international settings, you face the following trilemma. Either you develop a curriculum with the intention to promote some normative ethical theory or you do it without that objective. If you do endorse a normative theory within your curriculum, it will either be moral relativism or some universal ethical theory. All three options involve their own specific problems. …