Criticisms of principlism in bioethics: perspective from the north and from the south

Abstract

The principlism had a hegemonic character in the development of the bioethics since the publication of the book Principles of biomedical ethics, of Beauchamp and Childress, in 1979. This hegemony began to weaken with the first critical studies by authors from the United States and Europe in the 1990s. Immediately, however, bioethicists of Latin America also began to criticize the hegemonic and allegedly universal principlism. This article aims to systematize the criticisms of principlism and drawing on references of coloniality, described by Aníbal Quijano, present two distinct groups of critics: those who make their criticisms from the North and those who make them from the South. The northern group conceptually analyzes the principialism exploring the philosophical aspects and checking its validity as a moral theory. The southern group emphasizes that the application of principialism in poor countries intensifies inequality since this theory ignores the ethical nature of social problems. The prospect of coloniality is useful when shows how Northern countries monopolize the forms of control of subjectivity, culture and knowledge production in the Western world.