Bioethics in East Asia: Development and Issues

The East Asian countries have a long history of cultural achievement with their own ethical perspectives rooted in a rich religious and philosophical background. These traditions acknowledge the importance of family in one’s existence and, as compared to the West, there is less emphasis on individuals. During the rapid transition to modern Western medicine, these traditions were not considered in the development of local bioethical frameworks in East Asia. At the same time, East Asian nations were experiencing changes in social and economic structures, mostly led by developments in science and technology. Thus, East Asian societies were initially quite unfamiliar with the newly introduced concept called “bioethics”. To deal with sensitive bioethical issues the Western bioethical approach was adopted, without sufficiently taking into account local traditions. This chapter presents a historical development of bioethics followed by a description of the main issues and challenges in the development of bioethics discourse in East Asian countries.