A comprehensive analysis of the evolving conditions that provided for the emergence and autonomization of the field of bioethical inquiry, as well as the social, cultural and political background against which its birth can be set, should enlighten us about the problematic nature that characterises it from its very onset. Those conditions are: abuses in experimentation on human subjects, availability of new biomedical technologies, the challenging of prevalent medical paradigms and the ultimate meaning and purpose of medical care, new scientific (...) and social fields of concern dealing with ecology and environmental health, genetic engineering and biotechnologies, demographics, behavioural manipulation, reproductive medicine, etc., the upsurge of social movements raising issues of medical importance, and the need for an ethics for the technological age. The scope and meaning of bioethics is best defined by the overriding questions that open up the field of both theoretical and practical bioethical inquiry rather than by the individual responses given to such questions by the most prominent spokesmen in bioethics. (shrink)

This research attempts to throw light on and show the fundamental similarities and differences between the African and Western ethical conceptions by examining the foundation of ethics and morality in the two systems, using the Golden rule principle in African ethics and Kant’s categorical imperative in Western ethics as tools of comparative analysis. The African indigenous ethics revolves round the “Golden Rule Principle” as the ultimate moral principle. This principle states that “Do unto others what you want them to do (...) unto you”. This principle compares favourably with Immanuel Kant’s whose main thrust is found in his “Categorical Imperative”, with the injunction for us to “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” The categorical imperative becomes for Kant, the principle of universalizability, which according to Kant, is categorical and must be equally binding on everyone. This idea of Kant, we argue, compares with the “Golden Rule Principle”. Both are rationalistic and social but the limitations of Kant which we hope to point out, make it quite insufficient as the foundation of morality. The Africans’ which is more humanistic describes morality and is better served. The main difference between the two ethical systems lies in the fact that whereas the “golden rule” starts from the self and considers the consequences on the first before others, the universalizability principle on the other hand considers the consequences on others first before self. (shrink)

This thesis aims at working out a politics out of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. The angle taken on this question is ontological. Politics is inseparable from ontology. Every ontology is political and every politics is itself an ontology. The reciprocal relation between ontology and politics has been here identified as the question of their ‘parallelism’. This parallelism of the ontological and the political is first to be found in Spinoza’s thought. Spinoza can only write an ethics and a (...) politics on the basis of his analysis of substance. In this analysis the thesis of ‘parallelism’ occupies a central position. Spinoza’s theory of the univocity of being rests on this principle. This project is rehabilitated by Deleuze and Guattari in their own philosophy as a form of radical materialism. This form of philosophy guided by the principle of ‘parallelism’ has here been called: ontological materialism. Thus, not only is it impossible to understand their politics without grasping their ontology, but the complexities of it will only be understood after a study of Spinoza’s ontology itself. For these purposes the thesis has been divided into two parts. The first part concerns Spinoza’s thought. The second, concentrates on Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalisme et schizophrénie The analysis will concentrate on the passage from the first to the second volume as a translation of the continuities at the ontological level but also on the shifts that from this level necessarily occasion a movement in their conception of politics. This research along the Spinozist lines of the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari allows for their politics to be read as an ethics. In the final outcome the activity of philosophy itself is an ethics. (shrink)