Bioethics: Environmental

Abstract

Environmental bioethics is an undertaking that seeks just social arrangements that can promote human well-being and, at the same time, preserve the natural environment, both now and in the future. The core of the environmental bioethics portfolio consists of three basic issues: technology, toxics, and consumption. Environmental hazards have negative human health impacts, but the role of bioethics is not to achieve the goods of health, but to identify, articulate, and contribute to the maintenance of ethical goods: fairness, equity, rights, dignity, and so forth. Taking justice seriously as a bioethical good will require attending to the health equity implications of our environmental future. Climate change will have adverse public health and infrastructure impacts globally and increase health inequities between nations and groups. Bioethics must reorient itself according to its original environmentally inclusive aspirations in order to be able to address issues that have both human health and ecosystem implications which either cannot or should not be addressed in isolation. To that end, the clinical and graduate bioethics programs have an obligation to ensure that environmental bioethics is elevated to a core competency.