Toward Planetary Health Ethics? Refiguring Bios in Bioethics
Warwick Anderson
Abstract
In responding to perceived crises-such as the COVID-19 pandemic-in routinized ways, contemporary bioethics can make us prisoners of the proximate. Rather, we need bioethics to recognize and engage with complex configurations of global ecosystem degradation and collapse, thereby showing us paths toward co-inhabiting the planet securely and sustainably. Such a planetary health ethics might draw rewardingly on Indigenous knowledge practices or Indigenous philosophical ecologies. It will require ethicists, with other health professionals, to step up and become public advocates for environmental sustainability. The COVID-19 pandemic should be seen as opening a portal to planetary health ethics or ecologized bioethics.
Topics & Concepts
BioethicsMedical lawEnvironmental ethicsSustainabilityIndigenousEngineering ethicsPandemicPolitical scienceBiopowerSociologyCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)LawMedicineEcologyPhilosophyEngineeringBiologyPathologyInfectious disease (medical specialty)PoliticsDiseaseEthics in medical practiceClimate Change and Health ImpactsZoonotic diseases and public health