This study explores the role of person-hood in African philosophy in the quest to re-conceptualize responsibility in clinical trials. Mainstream research ethics principles, a.k.a., principlism, derive primarily from Western individualistic philosophical tradition (as opposed to personhood in the communitarian philosophical understanding). The principlist aim is specifically for the good of the individual with emphasis on his/her autonomy as a dominant theme, not community/population health. By contrast, the communitarian approach challenges current bioethical practice to reconsider and reground its arguments to be able to recognize that the psychological and philosophical thinking behind the research ethics principles which guide responsibility in clinical trials flows from some sort of a faulty logic (particularly when – as it is often the case – clinical investigators go from the Global North to conduct studies in the Global South). Thus, whenever this autonomy-cum-individual right-based ideology makes contact with communitarian (or communalist) tradition, there is the constant tendency for butting of heads. The communalist approach that is proposed here aims to change that by stringing together and finding meaning in the three themes of responsibility, clinical trials, and [African] selfhood. Hence, it is a topic that occupies the tricky terrain at the confluence of research in biomedical attitudes, the discipline of philosophy, and the disciplines within multiculturalism, including sociology and ecology.
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