Bioethics of Public Governance: A Strategy Towards the “Reduction of Inequality”

Abstract

Currently, the planet experiences a multifactorial economic, sanitary, military, epistemological, and ecological crisis that demands new efforts to overcome structural problems of the society. The proposal of a Bioethics of Governance (BG) addresses the challenge, from all countries and ideological colors, to cope with the crisis and its problems, by means of formulating principles that express the obligations of those who are in a position to guide the society towards solutions, minimizing human suffering, disease and death. The elaboration of the principles of BG would be similar to Medical Bioethics, recently extended to the UNESCO Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights. The set of BG principles should correspond to the minimal, basic obligation of people’s representatives at all levels of social organization (from local to national and global) to promote human development. In this chapter, we propose a method to democratically establish a set of BG principles, in a series of representative interdisciplinary meetings. Once the principles are established, they can be used for the people to control the actions of governments, by using public information technology systems and personal devices.