<![CDATA[Biomedical science is becoming more of a challenge to received ethical suppositions concerning personhood, identity and the boundaries of medical intervention. The most controversial of these developments is the proposal of head transplantation, which is a hypothetical procedure that goes down to question the moral responsibility, the scope of informed consent and human dignity. The current discussion on head transplantation takes place to a great extent in Western philosophical and bioethical paradigms that prefer psychological continuity and brain-centred explanations of identity. This paper adds to these arguments by considering the issue of head transplantation through the perspectives of Yoruba moral philosophy, and especially, the notion of the term, Ori. The paper takes a normative moralistic approach to interpreting Orient, where the term is intended to be understood in metaphysical terms, instead of using it as the place of moral agency, responsibility, and social recognition. By dissecting the concept and making a comparative discussion with the present-day bioethics, which discuss the issue of face and limb transplantation, the paper contends that brain continuity is not enough to ensure continuity of ethics. Yoruba ethics emphasizes embodied agency and communal recognition as the key factors in the maintenance of moral identity, which is frequently deemphasised in mainstream bioethical theOries. The paper has concluded that although head transplantation is a speculative process, cross-cultural views can help in the ethical analysis of the same. The application of Yoruba ethical ideas to bioethics worldwide is useful in enhancing global bioethics by expanding the scope of evaluative criteria beyond personal autonomy and cognitive persistence to provide a more comprehensive way of explaining the notion of personhood in the face of the emerging biomedical technologies.]]>
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