Global Bioethics: Building on the Leopold Legacy

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION IN 1971 A BASIC TENET OF BIOETHICS was that ethical values cannot be separated from biological facts. 1 At about the same time that my book Bioethics, Bridge to the Future appeared, bioethics as an outgrowth of medical ethics was being developed at Georgetown University and at the Hastings Institute. For many it came to mean exclusively the ethics of how far to exercise the medical options that are technically possible, such as organ transplants, the use of artificial organs, abortion, sterilization, artificial contraception, chemotherapy, informed consent by the patient, freedom of choice in procreation or abortion, fertilization in vitro, surrogate pregnancy, and future developments in genetic engineering. These issues in general have short-term, immediately visible consequences and all have to do with the maintenance and prolongation of individual lives. With the focus on medical options, the fact that bioethics had been proposed to combine human values with ecological facts was forgotten by 2 GLOBAL BIOETHICS many: the ethics of how far to exercise technological options in the exploitation of the environment was not associated with the term bioethics. The time has come to recognize that we can no longer examine medical options without considering ecological science and the larger problems of society on a global scale. An example of an issue in global bioethics involves the medical options concerning human fertility in confrontation with the ecological need to limit the exponential increase in the human population. Regardless of the advances in health care-not to mention those in agricultural production, conservation of natural resources, and preservation of the natural environment-no program can hope to succeed without the acceptance of controlled human fertility as a basic ethical imperative for the human species. Yet any ethical framework that accepts this premise will obviously run counter to some of the ethical positions taken by several of the most powerful religious and political groups that exist today. When I coined the word "bioethics" in 1970, I was influenced by C. H. Waddington perhaps more than by any other individual. Born in 1905, he served as professor of animal genetics in Edinburgh from 1946, gaining expertise in embryology, genetics , and evolution. He became essentially a bioethicist before the word was invented, a man concerned with the need to develop ethical theory in the light of biological knowledge, an aim similar to my own. "What is demanded of each generation is a theory of ethics which is neither a mere rationalization of prejudices, nor a philosophical discourse so abstract as to be irrelevant to the practical problems with which mankind is faced at that time."2 He was aware of the philosophers' claim that it is logically impossible to pass from "is" to "ought" and that to make such an attempt is to commit the "naturalistic fallacy." He said first, Building on tbe Leopold Legacy We can with perfect logical consistency, conceive of an aim or principle of policy which, while not in itself in its essence an ethical rule, would enable us to judge between different ethical rules. It is for such a principle that I am searching, and which I claim to be discoverable in the notion which I have referred to as 'biological wisdom.' ... To a theory which attempted to discover a criterion for judging between ethical systems the refutation of the naturalistic fallacy would be largely beside the point. (50-59) Earlier he had said, In the lifetime of any human individual these three types of activity-becoming an ethicizing being, formulating one particular system of ethical beliefs, and criticizing those beliefs by some supra-ethical criterion of wisdom-are not clearly separated in time but certainly overlap with one another. 3 Here he defined the supra-ethical criterion as "the general good," "the ethical system of general validity," or as "biological wisdom" (26-27). I insist that survival is an even more basic supra-ethical criterion. I was also influenced by an article by Margaret Mead asserting, "We need in our universities . . . Chairs of the Future,'" which inspired me to assume the role if not the title; and an article by Theodosius Dobzhansky4 provided the linchpin for the whole structure of bioethics in my mind. It was only after reading these three authors that I belatedly discovered Aldo Leopold, who had said so much so simply. I dedicated my book to him, although it contained no text-references to his work, hence my present emphasis...