New Malaise: Bioethics and Human Rights in the Global Era

Perhaps the greatest challenge for bioethics is to re-socialise the way we view ethical dilemmas in medicine. Restoring such problems to their full social complexity is our best vaccine against ignoring a large part of the human race. The concept of human rights can sometimes be pronounced as a universal enhancer, but it was designed to protect the most vulnerable. The proper beneficiaries of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - however unhelpful it may be in our age of individualism, affluence and relativism - are the poor and the powerless. As the burden of disease falls on the poor and marginalised, we have the opportunity to contemplate the plight of the majority of humanity and ask, simply, whether when we say 'everyone' we really mean everyone. In the United States, the context of many ethical discussions is that we must do our best to manage our vast wealth.