Between Essentialist and Constructivist Approaches: What Model of Bioethics for Africa? Guidelines for a Grounded, Relational, and Critical African Bioethics

Abstract

In contemporary debates, African bioethics is often forced to choose between two theoretical poles that are equally inadequate when taken to extremes: a normative essentialism that protects the dignity and value of life, but risks freezing African cultures into a homogeneous and ahistorical image; and a moral constructivism that opens the space for deliberation, pluralism, and contextual adaptation, but may dissolve into relativism or into a mere local translation of normative agendas developed elsewhere. Based on a critical review of French- and English-language literature conducted on PubMed and Google Scholar, this article examines the strengths and limitations of these two approaches for addressing contemporary bioethical issues in Africa. The analysis draws on major African contributions to bioethics, on the continent’s relational philosophies—notably Ubuntu and certain Bantu and Mossi anthropological concepts—as well as on emblematic debates concerning the status of the embryo, surrogacy, health equity, the governance of biomedical innovations, and the One Health paradigm. The central argument is that the choice between essentialism and constructivism constitutes a false dilemma. An intellectually robust and socially effective African bioethics must be built at the intersection of three requirements: a strong anthropological foundation that recognizes the intrinsic value of human life; a critical hermeneutics attentive to the plurality of African societies and the historical transformation of their norms; institutional mediation capable of translating these resources into the fields of education, research, care, public health, and the regulation of biotechnologies. The article thus proposes a model of African bioethics that is relational, personalist, and critical. Relational, because it understands the person through their constitutive bonds with others, the community, generations, and the living world; personalist, because it rejects any reduction of the human being to their functional, economic, or contractual capacities alone; and finally, critical, because it does not sacralize either tradition or modernity, but subjects both to the scrutiny of justice, vulnerability, and dignity.