Questions of the morality of public policy should come to the fore at the WTO summit. Moral and ethical questions concern how we should behave. To resolve them, we must invoke criteria that enable us to decide what should or what should not be done. This is built into the human condition as much as language itself. Unless broadly and carefully applied, international trade law will merely confound and exacerbate these cultural differences.
Cultural criteria are more than just personal preferences.
Instead, they represent culturally shared judgments about the hierarchy of right and wrong, good and bad. At the WTO conference at least six different forms of ethical valuation are vying for primacy and political dominance in considering the morality of biotechnology. Almost anyone who offers an opinion on ethical matters in biotechnology expresses their concern from one or another of these different traditions or some combination of them. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed for research and educational purposes only.