Are Bioethics and Environmental Ethics in the French‐Speaking World Too Western? A Reflexive and Inductive Thematic Analysis Based on French‐Language Conference Proceedings

We performed a meta-bioethics work based on a set of French-language conference proceedings. We aimed to assess what this material could tell us about bioethics in a French-speaking context, without making any prior assumptions. Therefore, we performed an inductive, then reflexive, thematic analysis of a sample of chapters. Overall, we inferred that most codes were not associated with, or could not reasonably be associated with, the theme of "environmental ethics," among the themes considered. This pattern seems not specific to our sample, and may raise two important and highly complex meta-bio-ethical issues, particularly with regard to Francophone Africa. These issues concern a Western cultural imprint of, first, bioethics and, second, environmental ethics, with regard to the moral status and/or interests of, respectively, the natural environment and supernatural phenomena.