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BioEdge: Climate change analysis needs bioethicists

BioEdge: Climate change analysis needs bioethicists

Bioedge

Climate change analysis needs bioethicists

by Michael Cook | 29 Jun 2019 | 1 comment

With climate change often described as the greatest moral challenge of our time, it is inevitable that bioethics should become involved. Earlier this month The Hastings Center organised a seminar to discuss whether bioethicists can help mitigate climate change.

Convened by Daniel Callahan, one of the first philosophers to call himself a “bioethicist”, the meeting brought together climate change scientists, political scientists, bioethicists, and academics.

“Both global warming mitigation and health improvements share some similar ethical problems and dilemmas,” said Callahan at the meeting. “While both ways are being pursued, the technological routes are socially attractive,” he continued. “They do not require behavior changes of any magnitude, and even better they are economically attractive. There is good money to be made on solar panels and wind machines. The seduction here is that the greater ease of technological solutions for global warming may minimize difficult cultural change.”

Hastings Center President Mildred Solomon explained the expanding role of bioethics in a radio interview:

it’s been our view that too often our field identifies the “bio” in bioethics too narrowly. We tend to look at ethical issues in patient care as they arise inside of clinics and hospitals. The field tends to look at how best to protect human research participants in clinical research. There are also public health concerns about how to encourage vaccination. All of these are very, very important and they are within the traditional boundaries of the field of bioethics. But too often bioethics has not really taken a deep look at the moral issues related to climate change.

Solomon believes that bioethicists need to break out of their silo to engage environmental scientists and ecologists so that they can deal with the weighty moral questions posed by climate change.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

It seems that President Trump and President Xi Jinping are best buddies again after mending fences at the G-20 summit in Osaka. They both want to defuse the tit-for-tat trade war which threatens the economic stability of the world economy. "We're right back on track and we'll see what happens," says Mr Trump, although that is not exactly the language of iron-clad guarantees.

The link to bioethics?

Well, it is a bit tenuous, but I’m disappointed that Trump did not bring up China’s egregious human rights abuses. If “egregious” seems offensive, how about flagitious or abhorrent? We’re talking about putting a million Uyghurs in concentration camps because they are Muslims. Some members of the United Nations have fewer than a million people.

And it appears that some of them, along with the persecuted Falun Gong sect, are being quarried for their organs. An article appeared in Nature this week reporting the results of a private investigation. It concluded that “forced organ harvesting is of unmatched wickedness even compared – on a death for death basis - with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century.”

Is the evidence incontrovertible? No, probably not. But that’s why Trump should have asked some pointed questions.