The world seems ever smaller and ever quicker: environmental, public health, industrial and cultural processes operate ever more on a global, rather than a local scale. Does this process, sometimes known as globalisation, draw us closer together, or drive us further apart, from a moral point of view? In recent years, bioethics has addressed many of the issues that arise in the context of globalisation: solidarity, conflict, and autonomy; human rights, liberty and toleration; the political and economic context of health care and inequalities in health; environmental and public health change. At the same time, bioethics has often been merely an agent of obscure political forces, and has been challenged for its emphasis on autonomy over considerations of justice. This study brings together scientists from the fields of medicine, law, and philosophy. The texts are the results of a conference the Europäische Akademie held in 2003. The group developed its thesis in open discussions of foundational and applied problems of bioethics from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.

Contributions to one of the most controversial topics of modern societies

Inhalt
Cultural Rationality and Moral Principles.- Morality and Culture: Are Ethics Culture-Dependent?.- Neither Golden Nugget nor Frankenstein. The need to Re-embed Food Biotechnologies in Sociocultural Contexts.- Beyond GM Foods: Genomics, Biotechnology and Global Health Equity.- Patents on Biomaterial A New Colonialism or a Means for Technology Transfer and Benefit-Sharing?.- From the Corporeal to the Informational: Exploring the Scope of Benefit Sharing Agreements and their Applicability to Sequence Databases.- Access to Essential Drugs, Human Rights and Global Justice.- Access to Essential Drugs: the Ethical Challenge of Allocating Obligations.- Why is it Morally Wrong to Clone a Human Being? How to Evaluate Arguments of Biopolitics, Biomorality, and Bioethics.- Bioethics and (Public) Policy Advice.