Augustine Yaw Frimpong-Mansoh

Over the last two decades or so, the need to decolonise bioethics and make it inclusive, equitable and accommodative of voices from the traditionally marginalised global South has received increasing attention in academic scholarship. The recent publication by Pratt and de Vries offers a very comprehensive critical analysis and thoughtful overview of the issue, using global health ethics as its starting point.1 I fundamentally agree with their characterisation of the issue as an ‘epistemic justice’ problem. I further find their recommended conceptual and practical ideas for measuring epistemic injustice and ethical responsibilities to promote epistemic justice very thoughtful and insightful. However, I find their responses to possible objections to their arguments a bit hasty and unclear, especially the idea that ‘greater epistemic justice calls for global health ethics to advance a transcultural framework of ethical values and principles’ (p. 7). They look ambiguous on their position on the fundamental global bioethical question regarding the possibility of an intercultural ethical framework. I think the question of whether there are global ethical values and principles that are commonly shared among human beings in the global world is a fair and legitimate issue that deserves deep attention and a persuasive answer by those who call for more inclusive and equitable global bioethics. I attempt to flesh out this issue in a bit more detail to further enrich the discussion. Pratt …

This thesis is a Humean dialogue with David Hume on his influential ideas that are of contemporary philosophical influence and importance, in particular his ideas on the relation between morality and science. It interprets Hume's view of science in terms of his theory of causation and examines the connection that his causal theory of scientific explanation bears with his moral theory. The connection that Hume's causal theory bears with his moral theory has not been sufficiently appreciated and given a serious attention. This thesis defends the connection and argues that Hume's naturalism about morality defends continuity between moral inquiries and scientific investigations in terms of their explanatory functions. Hume defended a moral science to ground moral explanations and judgments in scientific foundation. Naturalism is often confused with realism. Rejecting recent interpretation of Hume as a "naturalistic realist," I argue that Hume saw moral truths as not validated by mind-independent moral facts, as realist claim. Instead, in the Humean account, we induce moral truths from values that we project onto the world by collective agreement. This idea is supported by Hume's convention theory of collective agreement. Hume's causal theory of moral behavior raises many puzzles. It seems that his naturalistic theory cannot say anything coherent about free human agency and judgments of moral responsibility. His theory also raises issues about moral luck. The thesis discusses the problems and many more, such as the place of normativity in Hume's naturalism about morality. My Humean dialogue with Hume is an effort to reconstruct his ideas in a clearer and systematic fashion in response to new insights and challenges raised by our contemporary philosophical and scientific developments. My objective is not to respond to Hume's arguments as repositories of dead historical ideas to be criticized and dismissed. Rather, I engage in a dialogue with the rich ideas of Hume as a sympathetic and questioning reader to reawaken them into a new life by rearguing them in sustained and systematic ways that make the best out of them, and examine what can be learned from them.

The paper examines two forms of naturalistic moral realism, “Micro-structure realism” and “Reason realism”. The latter, as we defend it, locates the objectivity of moral facts in socially constructed reality, but the former, as exemplified by David Brink\'s model of naturalistic moral realism, secures the objectivity of moral facts in their micro- structure and a nomic supervenience relationship. We find MSR\'s parity argument for this account of moral facts implausible; it yields a relation ship between moral facts and their natural- scientific constitution that has a queer, slapped- together quality. We argue that the relationship needs to be spelled out by a process of social construction, involving collective intentionality and constitutive rules. We explain how our constructivist model of RR differs from a form of it defended by Michael Smith, which analyzes moral facts by reference not to construction but rather to a hypothetical situation of full rationality. We agree with Smith, as against Bernard Williams, that a rational agent may have reasons for acting that go beyond the agent\'s “subjective motivational set,” but we locate such reasons by reference to the agent\'s member ship in an actual community, and we explore the prospects for moral objectivity given this constraint on moral reasons.

The paper examines two forms of naturalistic moral realism, “Micro-structure realism” and “Reason realism”. The latter, as we defend it, locates the objectivity of moral facts in socially constructed reality, but the former, as exemplified by David Brink\'s model of naturalistic moral realism, secures the objectivity of moral facts in their micro- structure and a nomic supervenience relationship. We find MSR\'s parity argument for this account of moral facts implausible; it yields a relation ship between moral facts and their natural- scientific constitution that has a queer, slapped- together quality. We argue that the relationship needs to be spelled out by a process of social construction, involving collective intentionality and constitutive rules. We explain how our constructivist model of RR differs from a form of it defended by Michael Smith, which analyzes moral facts by reference not to construction but rather to a hypothetical situation of full rationality. We agree with Smith, as against Bernard Williams, that a rational agent may have reasons for acting that go beyond the agent\'s “subjective motivational set,” but we locate such reasons by reference to the agent\'s member ship in an actual community, and we explore the prospects for moral objectivity given this constraint on moral reasons.

This paper discusses how to apply a collective decision model of the principle of voluntary informed consent in African communitarian culture, in a culturally sensitive way, in order to protect research candidates from potential exploitations and abuses. Dismissing cultural and ethical skepticism surrounding the global application of the principle of voluntary informed consent, the paper ultimately concludes that international collaboration on diagnostic and therapeutic medical research in Africa, especially HIV vaccine trials, is a moral imperative.