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Presidential address: Global bioethics -- dream or nightmare?

For many of us present at this opening of this fourth world congress of Bioethics here in Tokyo there may be a feeling of the fulfilment of a dream. This joint endeavour of the International Association of Bioethics and the Asian Bioethics Association is a powerful signal that Bioethics is not merely a Western philosophical pastime, but is a discipline that unites East and West, North and South in a common quest for solutions to the countless moral dilemmas of modern medicine and of the evolving biological sciences. To speak of a dream reminds us, perhaps, of the famous speech of Martin Luther King, in which he hoped for, prayed for, genuine racial reconciliation and the dawning of justice for the poor. Perhaps in this Congress, with participants and speakers from all corners of the globe, we will see how the richness of human cultures blends together in a common understanding of the obligations and the opportunities of human inventiveness and moral agency in health care. Perhaps. But is `global bioethics' necessarily the fulfilment of such a dream, or is it perhaps a nightmare, the promotion of a lowest common denominator, homogenised Bioethics? In his poem, The Shield of Achilles, the English poet, W.H.Auden, has retold the legend of the magic shield of Achilles, in which all the glories of ancient culture were revealed to the person gazing upon its surface. But the shield which Auden describes, in its picturing of the callous anonymity of modern societies, shatters the dream of richness and nobility and puts in its place a bleak scene of conformity and meaninglessness: