(4) The Future of Global Bioethics: Challenges and Opportunities The future of global bioethics presents its distinctive set of challenges. In particular, several scholars have criticized the current expansion of bioethics, questioning both its legitimacy and overall usefulness in orienting global research and policy-making. The first family of critiques questions the capacity of global bioethics to conjugate the need for shared ethical standards with the respect of cultural diversity and value-pluralism. It has been argued that bioethics, as currently understood, tends to reflect the value-system of the society and culture in which it has originated, and thus to foster a mostly First-world, white, male, and Anglo-American perspective (REF XXXX). For instance, the centrality and prominence assigned in bioethics to the respect of “personal autonomy” might be at odds with other value-systems and cultures in which a key social role is played by families or communities rather than by individuals. Indeed, in the last decades there has been a flourishing of identity-based bioethical approaches–from feminist bioethics to Islamic bioethics–, which have been elaborated in reaction to the universalizing tendency of mainstream bioethics. A more radical critique along the same line is that the project itself of a “universal bioethics” is hopeless because there exist irreducible moral disagreements between different individuals, who are then like “moral strangers” (Engelhard 2000). According to this set of critiques, thus, bioethics does not possess the legitimacy and/or the resources for individuating truly shared ethical standards at the global level. The second family of critiques, instead, accuses bioethics of having become a roadblock along the path of scientific progress rather than a useful safeguard for protecting individuals and society. For example, in an article on the Boston Globe, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that, given the promises of vast future advancement in biomedicine, “the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence. Get out of the way” (Pinker 2015). A more targeted version of this critique questions the specific way in which current bioethical supervision is organized in and for research. For instance, Jonathan Baron, in his book Against Bioethics (2006), has argued that, “the field of applied bioethics (…) has become a kind of secular priesthood to which governments and other institutions look for guidance, but it lacks the authority that comes from a single, coherent guiding theory in which practitioners are trained” (Baron 2006: 4). 1 According to these critiques, bioethics now possess a sort of “iatrogenic effect”: originally meant to ensure that scientific research was for the benefit of all, it has now become one of the reasons for which scientific progress is delayed at the expenses of everyone. While the above critiques have generated some debate, if taken literally they arguably provide a slightly unfair portrait of the current status of bioethics. Indeed, it is true that moral and cultural differences do not always facilitate the reaching of a consensus, and yet it is not the case that in front of pressing practical issues it is impossible to reach a series of shared local agreements even on morally loaded issues. 1
This iatrogenic function may occur at the regulative level when national or international institutions impose absolute bans or restrictions on certain kind of research for “ethical” or “precautionary” reasons. It may, however, occur also as the level of overseeing institutions–as in the case of local bioethical committees which delay or stop clinical experimentations because of the lack of coordinated practices and scientific expertise (Corbellini and De Luca 2015).
Likewise, it is true that bioethical institutions may sometimes unduly slow down scientific research, and yet it is also true that without such institutions we would likely assist to many more cases of abuses and exploitation in scientific research as the ones that, over sixty years ago, have motivated the birth of bioethics in the first place. However, the greatest merit of the above critiques lies not in their providing a decisive argument pro or cons bioethics, but rather in their highlighting the major challenge for its future. Among such challenges, the key one is that regarding the way in which bioethics
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