Bioethics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the ethical, legal, social, and philosophical dimensions of healthcare and the life sciences. Given its breadth, divergent frameworks inevitably emerge, each shaped by a mix of disciplinary paradigms, epistemic commitments, and unexamined assumptions. Yet the ideas and orientations that achieve institutional hegemony are not always those grounded in intellectual rigour or ethical clarity; they may also reflect dominant or reactionary political and ideological currents. These tensions are longstanding, but in an era of rapid technological transformation, the margin for error has narrowed considerably, making the consequences of our moral and epistemic failures increasingly profound, if not irreversible. In this context, Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory offers a promising basis for ethical discernment. The theory proposes that the brain’s two hemispheres attend to the world in distinct ways, giving rise to contrasting models of reality with identifiable cognitive and moral dispositions. While both hemispheres are essential, they are not epistemically or ethically equivalent. From this, three insights emerge: first, we can identify which hemispheric orientation tends to produce a more integrated and reliable sense of reality; second, we can better understand the paradoxes and tensions that structure our ethical experience; and third, we can trace the influence of these hemispheric modes in competing approaches to bioethics. Hemisphere theory thus provides the foundation for a novel meta-ethical framework capable of navigating the pluralism and conflict inherent in bioethical discourse, and of assessing the fidelity of ethical visions to the complex realities they aim to address.