Concepts from the Global South

This theme will call upon and contribute to the productive potential of inclusive conversations between bioethics scholars across the Global South and Global North, to develop new concepts and theories to enable equitable global health bioethics research on radical value disagreement. This will lay the groundwork for future collaborative global bioethics work addressing radical value disagreements. 

The theme is guided by three insights: 

• Whereas mutual understanding is important for effective collaboration, conceptual agreement may not be a necessary condition.
• Disagreement is not just an uncomfortable obstacle to be overcome but an enduring condition and a potentially enriching resource for a globally inclusive world.
• Several communities in the Global South, for historical, ethnic, and religious reasons, have elaborated models for successful engagement with deep-seated value disagreements. 

We will unpack the overlaps and gaps that exist between the concepts of difference, disagreement, consensus, convergence, tolerance, and other related concepts in bioethics and political philosophy from the Global South. 

In collaboration with low and middle-income country partners we will explore the requirements for fairness and effective collaboration. The conceptual exploration will be accompanied by empirical studies of cases of communities and societies in the Global South that have successfully tried models of ethical engagement amidst deep-seated disagreements on values. 

Our goal will be to tease out inclusive and equitable models of ethical engagement and deliberation that can be applied in global health ethics focusing on our work in Africa. We will engage with existing bioethics networks across the continent.