Global bioethics with humility and responsibility.

Global Bioethics may be seen as the ultimate quid pro quo for the Land Ethic called for by Aldo Leopold in 1949• The core of that idea is conveniently expressed in the dedication of my first book on bioethics to Leopold directly quoting him. In the second of four paragraphs h~ had said: There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations .. And in the fourth paragraph he had said: An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. Leopold's Land Ethic, as ethic, is clearly an intuitive call for a new morality.