Beyond a western bioethics?

Like theology and ethics generally, bioethics has increasingly developed a global consciousness. Controversies over AIDS research and access to affordable AIDS treatment have generated new awareness about the importance of international collaboration as well as the difficulty of achieving moral consensus across economic, political, and cultural divides. Advances in scientific and medical knowledge through initiatives such as the Human Genome Project invite new questions about the nature of health care as a common good. This budding global consciousness serves as a starting point for examining contemporary challenges to the secular, principle-based Western bioethics that has dominated national and international debate for three decades.