X Annual Swedish Symposium on Biomedicine, Ethics and Society: Seglarhotellet, Sandhamn, 9-10 June 2008:
Dual Uses of Biomedicine: Whose responsibility?
Margaret Somerville, McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, Canada
Abstract of keynote presentation:
Preventing the “Life Sciences” from Becoming the “Death Sciences”: Ethics, law and codes of conduct in dual use research
Bluntly stated, the overall goal of implementing ethics, law and codes of conduct in dual use research is to prevent the life sciences from becoming the death sciences through bioterrorism or biowarfare.
I believe that ethics can function as one, among many, means to counter bioterrorism, provided it is embedded in science from its inception.
To achieve that goal requires knowing the principles that should inform the ethics and law that govern science; appreciating factors - such as uncertainty, complexity and potentiality - that can affect how well we can put those principles into practice on a day-to-day basis; accepting that achieving our goal is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process that requires monitoring and, when necessary, change; understanding how scientists and others view ethics and breaches of ethics; and recognizing that a conjunctive, rather than disjunctive, approach using multiple and diverse means is required to achieve the best outcome possible in terms of ethics in any given circumstances.
Further, while it is essential to focus specifically on the ethics of dual use research, we also need to have some idea of the larger, emerging “ethics picture” of which this ethics is a part. I will briefly introduce concepts, explored in my book, The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (House of Anansi Press, 2006), such as the relevance of multiple ways of human knowing to ethics; the need for a “shared ethics” on boundary crossing issues; the idea of “human ethics”, as well as human rights and human responsibilities; the potential of employing a concept of the “secular sacred”; the need to take account of moral risk, as well as physical risk; competing current worldviews with respect to science and its appropriate governance, in light of its impact on fundamental concepts of what it means to be human and on important societal values; and how we might make ethics an “infectious condition”.
