© 2013 I.V.Mikhel
2013 – № 2 (6)
Key words: bioethics, India, economics, culture, globalization, global spread of technologies, Third World countries
Abstract: This review gives a brief analysis of views of Vandana Shiva, a leading representative of Indian bioethics. She focuses on ecological, economic, cultural and moral consequences of global spread of bio-technologies for the life in Third World countries.
As a field of academic knowledge, university subject and a special form of public politics, bioethics appeared in the USA in 1960-70s. Ten years later Western European countries suggested their versions of bioethics adjusted to cultural interests of industrially developed Old World nations. The fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union set the stage for the third period in the spread of bioethical movement, which resulted in emergence of bioethics in Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Russia. At the same time bioethics appeared in Eastern and Southern Asia.
India belongs to the countries of ‘the third wave’ of bioethical movement of 1980-90s. In contrast to the ‘first’ and ‘second waves’, India is a typical Third World country. That is why the concerns of Indian bioethicists in many respects differ for those that set the bioethical agenda in Northern America and Europe. In the West bioethics is first of all a reaction to new biomedical technologies, while its debates address the consequences of the use of these technologies on human bodies. In India bioethics draws on the issues of environment and protection of bio-cultural diversity. Indian bioethics focuses not on individual bodies, but on the body of the Earth (land, water, plants and animals) and human populations that inhabited its surface. Indian intellectuals seek to analyze the consequences of the spread of biotechnologies and globalization in general.
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