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. Tim Weiskel is the director of Harvard University's Environmental Values and Public Policy Program Copyright 1999, Environmental News Network All Rights Reserved Mounting scientific evidence suggests that we should not rush to judgment nor be driven into hasty decisions about biotechnology based on its immediate potential for profit.