The Report's editorial mandate is both to examine issues of current importance and to invite bioethics to broaden the range of issues it probes. Thus along with articles exploring the relationship between patients and doctors, or health policy, or any of the myriad other familiar concerns of ethics in medicine, from time to time the Report has published articles about public health, animal experimentation, or “environmental ethics” broadly construed. The most recent was the special supplement Nature, Polis, Ethics in the (...) November‐December (1998) issue. Some, of course, have argued that “bio‐ethics” ought always to encompass concern for issues beyond the bedside. When the biologist Van Rensselaer Potter proposed the term bioethics nearly thirty years ago, the field he had in mind lay at the intersection of ethics and the biological sciences in general. In light especially of Nature, Polis, Ethics's call for a substantive “humans‐nature ethics” it seems appropriate, therefore, to invite one of the earliest proponents of a generous understanding of bioethics to reflect on the character of the field and the questions with which it should grapple. Below Potter and colleague Peter Whitehouse share their thoughts on this most interdisciplinary of disciplines. —B‐JC, GK. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is done by philosophers operating within the strict canons of the discipline. Environmental ethics has been pursued as the traditional ethics of pure reason. Real bioethics is not pure, traditional, reasoning ethics. Real bioethics is done by realistic scientists1 and concerned biologists and physicians who have an intuition to help build a "Bridge to the Future,"2 whether of not their effort is labeled " bioethics." Among this cohort is Physicians for Social Responsibility and the editors of their new (...) journal, Medicine and Global Survival.3 These people are not professional ethicists. As realists they see the survival and well-being of the human species as a matter of organizational morality—a civic society directed to the "common good" worldwide, as soon as possible, and with a long-range perspective. Real bioethics is not merely biocentric or merely anthropocentric. Instead, real bioethics calls for an idealistic mix of biocentrism and the kind of humanism that is concerned with the needs, interests, and welfare of human beings, or, in other words, an enlightened or realistic anthropocentrism that acknowledges the central role of the biosphere in the continued existence and "common good" of the human species, as previously discussed in connection with global bioethics,4 a subject foreign to environmental ethicists. From any point of view, real bioethics falls in the context of the ideals of two Wisconsin professors who lived in the early part of the twentieth century, Aldo Leopold and Max Otto, as will be discussed later. (shrink)