Genetic Engineering and Social Justice: Towards a Global Bioethics?

Abstract

The early 1970s witnessed major advances in two key component disciplines of bioethics. On the ‘bio’ side, research teams led by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in 1973 pioneered systematic means of cloning specific deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) fragments. The breakthrough made by recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques, as they became known, was genetic engineering. So great were the implications that from 1974 to 1978 the international scientific community voluntarily imposed a moratorium on rDNA experiments held to be particularly risky. That a technological revolution had taken place was not in doubt in the 1970’s, and is not questioned now (Wheale and McNally, 1988, p.41). On the ‘ethics’side, the advance was not as revolutionary. Nevertheless, when John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971 he was quickly acknowledged to have reshaped Western political philosophy by setting debates about justice at its center (Kymlicka, 1992, p.xi). Rawls himself held justice to be ‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (Rawls, 1971, p.3), and many political philosophers in the Western tradition have subsequently indicated their agreement by building on this premise to construct competing theories.