GORDON • GLOBAL ETHICS AND PRINCIPLISM [ 251 ] Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal Vol. 21, No. 3, 251–276 © 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press John-Stewart Gordon Global Ethics and Principlism ABSTRACT. This article examines the special relation between common mo- rality and particular moralities in the four-principles approach and its use for global ethics. It is argued that the special dialectical relation between common morality and particular moralities is the key to bridging the gap between ethical universalism and relativism. The four-principles approach is a good model for a global bioethics by virtue of its ability to mediate successfully between univer- sal demands and cultural diversity. The principle of autonomy (i.e., the idea of individual informed consent), however, does need to be revised so as to make it compatible with alternatives such as family- or community-informed consent. The upshot is that the contribution of the four-principles approach to global ethics lies in the so-called dialectical process and its power to deal with cross-cultural issues against the background of universal demands by joining them together. INTRODUCTION I n his landmark article “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics” (1982), Stephen Toulmin persuasively argues that (serious) problems cannot be solved by mere rationalistic approaches in ethics and that ethics was eventually saved by dint of having to deal with vital questions and concrete problems in medicine. Whether one is a proponent of, for example, prin- ciplism or casuistry, one certainly has to admit that a convincing ethical theory or method must have practical application. Analogously, it is about time to consider another vital and prominent issue in normative ethics—the universalism-relativism debate—that might profit from the bioethical ap- proach of principlism (otherwise known as the four-principles approach) that has been developed by Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress in their seminal book Principles of Biomedical Ethics (2009). In this re- spect, medicine not only “saved the life of ethics” but eventually saved the universality of ethics. This article approaches the demands of cultural diversity with regard to (a) global ethics by examining the dialectical rela- tion between common morality and particular moralities. Beauchamp and