This chapter examines the implications of color for bioethics discourse. Recognition that colors are associated with moral appreciations and that these associations need critical analysis not only implies that certain concerns such as structural violence, racism, vulnerability and discrimination should be higher on the agenda of contemporary bioethics, but it also demands that the field of ethical inquiry is expanded. Ethical examination should be reorientated towards contextual and structural conditions rather than focus on the individual perspective of rational and autonomous persons. This means that a broader framework of ethical approaches and principles must be employed than is currently applied. Contemporary bioethics perceives itself as color-blind. It assumes that when colors are not ‘seen’ or simply regarded as irrelevant or trivial particularities, differences in reality, and especially differences among people, do no longer exists. Erasing color as a relevant ethical consideration removes the possibility to explore why disadvantages and injustices prevail, and to analyse why people are affected and treated differently.
Consideration of color and its relevancy in healthcare ethics focuses attention to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Though traditionally connected in Western philosophy, they are nowadays mostly separated. Ethics is concerned with what is good and right, while aesthetics is concerned with beauty; it involves the senses, particularly seeing, when colors are concerned. Because the senses are considered as less reliable than reason, aesthetics is regarded as a matter of affection and intuition, thus personal taste. The common view of bioethics as an abstract system of moral principles and rules, working on the basis of arguments and rational reflection and with clear procedures for decision-making is nowadays increasingly criticized. These criticisms have articulated the crucial role of moral perception and imagination in ethical discourse. Before a moral judgment can be delivered and before moral reasoning and rational deliberation can take place, particular situations must be perceived as morally significant. Such perception requires moral sensitivity and experience but is also facilitated by the imagination that expands our perspective and situates ourselves in the circumstances of other people. Rehabilitating the role of perception and imagination in ethics re-establishes its connection to aesthetics as the science of sensory perception. This connection is furthermore reinforced with the new appreciation of emotions and feelings in moral reasoning and deliberation.
When it is concluded that ethical reflection and moral deliberation are not entirely rationalistic processes but connected to intuitions and emotions, the relevancy of color for ethics must be reconsidered. It is not a trivial side issue in our dealings with the surrounding world but it presents this world in specific ways and is omnipresent in interaction and communication with other people. At the same time, it conveys particular emotions, values and judgments, and therefore influences the intuitive process of making moral judgments. Perceiving a specific color or range of colors produces an immediate and intuitive experience which generates a value judgment prior to rational deliberation. In this way, ethics already starts in the concrete experience of perceiving which then necessitates critical examination and explanation with the help of systematic theory and moral reflection. Perhaps this is what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has in mind when he writes that ethics is an optics, a way of seeing.
