Global bioethics: it's past and future.

Abstract

A google scholar search for “global bioethics” returns citations situating ethical analyses within the evolving social and physical features of the global environment. Such work is consistent with Van Rensselaer Potter’s “Global Bioethics” (1988) and its application of bioethics to global issues of health and human survival such as nuclear war and what he called “global warming”. Ruth Macklin, in this special issue (SI), offers the Covid-19 pandemic as such an issue and delineates global bioethics from “international bioethics” which address countryspecific issues isolated from wider global influences. A search for “global bioethics” in non-academic search engines returns items about international bioethics, and not global bioethics. This editorial concludes this special issue (SI) by underscoring links between its contents and the history of global bioethics, offering a view to the future of global bioethics as a field and future aims and scope of this journal. It turns out that the field contributed to the establishment of this journal although it’s contents shifted over time into Macklin’s international bioethics. This SI examines what global bioethics might bring to the often distressing global environments of the 2020’s and associated animosities, misinformation, and information overload. It’s authors show how globalization influences health and increases dependence of individuals and populations on global systems for essential resources: food, water, shelter, air, and more. Globalization seems driven primarily by industrial and corporate entities that have wealth and power. In maximizing growth and profit for their shareholders, they may choose to embrace health-promoting or health-harming strategies and policies. Authors herein suggest that examining competing interests like these in a global (as well as international and local) context may increase transparency and better inform decision-making and policies to protect human health and survival long into the future. Several things surprised me in the process of reading the contents of this SI. One was Rosemary Tong’s explicit wish that she had paid more attention to Potter’s views early in her career. Another was something she and others herein state that I had not known that Potter’s views contributed to establishing the International Association for Bioethics (IAB), International Association for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB), and International Bioethics Committee (IBC). Like Macklin, Tong turns to pandemic planning and cooperation while offering some history. Tong hopes “for a future, care-based feminist global bioethics... [because] unless we human beings learn how to care for each other...we cannot hope to respect each other’s rights” or protect and share resources essential for human health and survival. Macklin pragmatically concludes that diplomacy is “a necessary ingredient” in engaging with “ethical aspects of relations between and among nations or regions”. Effective diplomacy must surely require both care and respect, making their views synergistic. In his IAB presidential address on global bioethics, Alistair Campbell (1999) called for greater attention to social and political influences in and on health and healthcare, greater diversity of methods used, and greater critique of Western norms and approaches which tacitly support “the idea of constant economic progress as an end for humanity” (pp. 3–4).