Bioethics and ayurveda.

Bioethics, which is the title of this national conference, is a term that implies far more than medical ethics which dominates its sessions. What is bioethics? It is no more and no less than the ethics of living or ethics of life, which evolved from non-life over millions of years. Humans are a product of the evolutionary process like all other species, but they are unique insofar as they not only participate in the evolutionary process but also command and determine the future, as brought home so vividly by global warning. Nevertheless, as Professor Hubert Markl remarked, there is a circular relationship between nature and humankind because human concepts are nature’s concepts. Human technological and economic inventiveness is no more than nature’s way of acting upon itself and shaping its own future. The outcome could be glorious success or disastrous failure in either case, nature acting through humankind bears partial responsibility for the outcome. This is fundamentally an ethical question. Are we right, for example, to cause the profoundest changes in biodiversity in all the 3 billion years of evolution by the mindless destruction of all living species to accommodate 10 billion human beings and their domesticated slave species of animals and plants? To make a sustainable future, we have an obligation to act in accordance with the dictates of reason and moral norms, and remain responsible for what we do. It is this undoubted fact of nature that makes us look for guidance to bioethics, without which life would be replaced by fossils. I would, therefore, compliment the organisers for placing the deliberations of this conference against the austere background of bioethics.