Suitable Bases for Global Bioethics: A Critical Response to Marco Annoni

Marco Annoni argued in Bioethics that neither the specified principlism of Beauchamp's and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics (PBE) nor the 2022 revision of the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) by the World Medical Association can provide a suitable basis for global bioethics. In response, we first show that Annoni's effort to disqualify PBE's specified principlism as a suitable basis for global bioethics fails, primarily because of its faulty assumptions about the nature, dominance, and authority of PBE's specifications of principles, whether for particular decisional contexts or for particular moralities. We then turn to his attempt to discredit the ICoME as a possible basis for global bioethics because of what he views as its "lack of political legitimacy," its "undefined moral foundation," and its "lack of an explicit procedure to solve internal conflicts between its principles." We present a range of arguments to show that these efforts also fail, leaving both the ICoME and PBE's specified principlism as viable contenders for a suitable basis in global bioethics.