Bioethics and Human Rights: Curb Your Enthusiasm

A call for global bioethics has been made. In an age of pandemics, international drug trials and genetic technology, health has become global and bioethics must follow suit. George Annas is one of a number of thinkers who recommend that bioethics should move beyond the traditional field of patient-doctor interactions to encompass a broader range of health issues. Medicine, argues Annas, must "develop a global language and a global strategy that can help improve the health of all the world's citizens". Individual countries cannot address global health issues, and culture-specific principles are insufficient to address global bioethics issues. We will need a language and moral framework based on a foundation of universally shared, cross-cultural judgements about humanity that also recognises moral pluralism.