Bioethics today is met with enormous challenges

When it was promoted in the 20th century, especially by Van Rensselaer Potter’s ¹ initiative to build a bridge to a better future, bioethics sought universality. Since the beginning, the aim was global bioethics ², having in mind, then and now, that this new ideology would only succeed if it were implemented in all of humanity’s societies and cultures.

As a natural consequence of the development of contemporary democratic civilization, this ideology should integrate the language of human rights, equality, and non-discrimination. However, despite the exponential growth in recent decades, bioethics currently faces the resistance of different cultural movements that reject a free and emancipatory view of the human person. More evident in societies of totalitarian nature, such a perspective is, at the same time, blocking the free development of bioethics and discouraging many minorities—who remain so solely because equality is yet to be considered a structuring value of human relations.

In this search for universality, bioethics must take on the strategic challenge of interacting with other scientific areas, such as the One Health approach. That is, bioethics also has the duty to promote global health, since this is a historical responsibility of current generations towards the coming generations.

The existence of concerted efforts at the international level is important in this post-pandemic phase, so that health problems that go beyond a single country or continent are effectively combated by a global ethics for global health. Therefore, global ethics and global health are part of an indivisible whole ³.

On the other hand, to be effective, bioethics must be accompanied by an appropriate legal and regulatory framework that anticipates in real time the rapid evolution of science and technology, whether in the field of genetics, such as human genome editing and genetic improvement, in synthetic biology and biomechanical synthesis, or even in the interface with artificial intelligence.

Bioethics and biolaw must be able to predict the evolution of medicine, science, and technology, presenting ethically appropriate responses, so that citizens feel calm and confident with the advancement of science and the integrity of researchers. Ethics committees are extremely relevant to ensure the core ethical values of medicine and the principles and good practices of research.

This crossroads where bioethics is can be a huge window of opportunity to reinvent a new path and definitively spread this concept on a global scale. Bioethics must adapt to the conjunctural reality of each society, always promoting universal ethical values and principles, especially those included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, published by the United Nations in 1948 ⁴, and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2005 ⁵. This variable geometry is necessary for its survival and globalization.

Revista Bioética, edited by the Federal Council of Medicine, when publishing research of high scientific quality in the field of bioethics and associated law, helps the scientific community face these challenges, anticipating great bioethical problems of humanity, without forgetting the concrete reality of societies in which its implementation is well established.

The year 2023 will be one of huge ambition for this journal, which is, today, an international reference in bioethics.

Referências

• ¹
  Potter VR. Bioethics: bridge to the future. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall; 1971.
• ²
  Potter VR. Global bioethics: building on the Leopold Legacy. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; 1988.
• ³
  Carneiro LA, Pettan-Brewer C. One health: conceito, história e questões relacionadas: revisão e reflexão. In: Miranda AMM, organizador. Pesquisa em saúde & ambiente na Amazônia: perspectivas para sustentabilidade humana e ambiental na região [Internet]. Guarujá: Editora Científica; 2021 [acesso 10 dez 2022]. p. 219-40. DOI: 10.37885/210504857
• ⁴
  Organização das Nações Unidas. Declaração universal dos direitos humanos: adotada e proclamada pela Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas (resolução 217 A III) em 10 de dezembro 1948 [Internet]. 1948 [acesso 10 dez 2022]. Disponível: https://uni.cf/2TsPK7X
  » https://uni.cf/2TsPK7X
• ⁵
  Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura. Declaração universal sobre bioética e direitos humanos [Internet]. Brasília: Ministério da Saúde; 2005 [acesso 10 dez 2022]. Disponível: https://bit.ly/37ZsXn6
  » https://bit.ly/37ZsXn6

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 Feb 2023
• Date of issue
  Oct-Dec 2022