The Need to Re-historicize Bioethics: Global and Mexican Perspectives

October 22, 2025
Author: Enrique Mendoza Carrera
Versión en español

“We, who know, are unknown to ourselves”

F. Nietzsche, 1887

Transcript of the presentation by Dr. Enrique Mendoza Carrera at the Dialogue Panel “Re-historicizing Bioethics in Mexico: the Voice of the Former Presidents” within the celebration and commemoration of the 30 years (1995–2025) of the Academia Nacional Mexicana de Bioética (ANMB), held on October 9 and 10 at the Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Forenses of UNAM.

I feel very honored—as a former president—of the Academia Nacional Mexicana de Bioética to have this opportunity to address you from this thought and voice that incorporates a review of the past, a premise that this academic meeting grants us, “Between History and Future,” from our experience with bioethics with the full intention of understanding its evolution up to the present and, as we might very poetically say: to enable better circumstances toward the future, from a possible conscience, detached from the real conscience as a sphere of uncertainty and social, cultural, economic, scientific, technological changes, which has resulted in a context of hyper-positivity, a digitalized culture, that communicates us—but does not connect us—that has brought the distant closer in virtual terms, but that, in exchange, has taken from us the face-to-face and the close, warm gaze of people.

Bioethics, since its consolidation in the 1970s in the world, has been narrated mainly from an Anglo-Saxon, hospital, and principlist horizon, which considered a starting point from an ethics of minimums, as a realization and care toward the alter ego necessarily sufficient.

Figures as relevant as Van Rensselaer Potter, André Hellegers, Tom Beauchamp, James Childress, etc., set the initial course with an emphasis on biomedical ethics and the clinical dilemmas of industrialized societies. However, this dominant account has invisibilized—since then—traditions, social struggles, and diverse contexts that have also shaped the evolution of bioethics, even from before the seventies, such as Eng. Leopold in agriculture in the USA, whom Dr. Potter himself considered the first bioethicist, and Dr. Raquel Carlson with her Silent Spring.

In this sense, as a sphere that we need to rescue and give a fair status to, that seeks to establish the dynamic bases of our discipline in a growing ethics of maximums, that marks the pace to try to solve the great problems the world has, which many try to deny, but which are a reality in different aspects, all vital in terms of survival and health.

For these reasons it is urgent to re-historicize bioethics: that is, to reinterpret its origins, genealogies, horizons, theories, and methodologies to respond to contemporary global challenges and local contexts, such as that of our country. Today more than ever it is necessary to understand the channels of an “effective history,” “a fusion of horizons,” and to prevent an “ethical debt” to those human beings to whom we are supposed—or should—leave a legacy of humanity.

Re-historicize: it is a hermeneutic and critical act. Re-historicizing does not mean denying the past, but rereading it critically, genealogically, considering that genealogy differs therefore from the history of historians, in that, rather than attempting to account for the past, it raises the need to inquire into the processes that have made a present configuration possible in history. There is no doubt that it is the problem of freedom that actually runs through his early works aimed at unveiling the deep structure of the relations of knowledge of our time. The result is a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge (Foucault, 1996).

In this sense, bioethics cannot be reduced to a chronology of texts and committees, but must be recognized as a living field, in tension between hegemonic discourses and alternative experiences. This implies including historically excluded voices: Indigenous epistemologies, feminist bioethics, community traditions, and situated knowledges. As Paulo Freire (1970/2020) points out, critical consciousness consists of recognizing the world not as something given, but as something transformable; this principle can also be applied to the history of bioethics.

Re-historicizing bioethics at the global level, which began internationally from the traditional account centered on the “principalism” of Georgetown Universito and on the ethics of biomedical research after the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki. Nevertheless, today it is evident that this perspective is insufficient, given that it is necessary to understand deeply some key precepts:

Broadening the horizon: Potter (1988) proposed a “global bioethics” oriented toward the survival of the planet, anticipating what Edgar Morin (2000) would call an ethics of complexity. In this precision, it is important that bioethics can define its course toward:

• The Decolonization of bioethics: authors such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) and Walter Mignolo (2007) warn that modernity produced an “epistemicide” that invisibilized non-Western knowledge. Bioethics needs to open itself to an epistemic pluralism.

• New emerging fields: algorethics, neuroethics, ecoethics, and quantum ethics represent expansions that show how bioethics must dialogue with artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and the life sciences in a transdisciplinary framework.

• Planetary Ethics: as Leonardo Boff (2002) indicates, the care of the Earth and of humanity are inseparable; a re-historicized bioethics must also be a bioethics of the common home: our Earth, which fosters a sense of community to understand that, like life, we only have one planet.

Re-historicizing bioethics in Latin America and Mexico is to seek a foundation that has its basis in this same Latin America, where bioethics has been historically linked to the defense of human rights and to the critique of structural inequality. Let us see some of them as examples of Latin American approaches:

Volnei Garrafa (2005) has developed the “bioethics of intervention,” focused on social justice and equity. Fernando Lolas (2002) has underlined the cultural dimension of bioethics, and Carla Zavaleta (2020) has proposed a bioethics of clinical consciousness in public health.

Bioethics in our Mexico: it was socially signified from the Comisión Nacional de Bioética and the Academia Nacional Mexicana de Bioética (1995), which constitute institutional milestones, isolated and with little movement as regards public health policies, more oriented to academic development than to the incorporation of ethical solutions for civic life. Nevertheless:

Great challenges persist: inequity in health, the marginalization of Indigenous peoples, the so-called “marginalized medicine” or rare diseases (diseases without diagnosis and treatment), and the weak culture of patient safety.

Freire’s critical pedagogy offers a useful framework to understand that Mexican bioethics must be not only normative, but also emancipatory, oriented toward social transformation and the integration of philosophical communities.

The challenges that drive re-historicization are those that carry out a differentiation; that is, 21st-century bioethics faces problems that did not exist in the seventies of the last century, namely the dimensions:

1. Global: they now include the social phenomenon of artificial intelligence, biotechnology and gene editing, transhumanism, climate crisis, mass migrations.

2. National: the precariousness of the health system, structural violence, territorial inequality, corruption, and insufficient bioethical regulation.

These challenges demand a transdisciplinary and situated bioethics, capable of dialoguing with science, technology, politics, and culture.

Conclusions

Re-historicizing bioethics is an exercise in critical memory and hope. It means recovering its multiple roots, recognizing its silences, and reorienting it toward justice, dignity, and sustainability. Mexico, with its experience in human rights, public health, and critical consciousness, has much to contribute to the global debate. In a world marked by complexity and vulnerability, the re-historicized bioethics must be plural, planetary, and profoundly human.

The need to re-historicize bioethics. That is, to narrate again, reinterpret, and re-signify its history so that it responds to current global challenges and, in particular, to those of Mexico and Latin America.

This proposal goes beyond chronology: it is not only about telling the history of bioethics, how it arose in the U.S. in the 1970s (or of F. Jahr (1927) of the last century), but about recognizing silenced or marginalized histories. In no case should silence prevail.

It is to set ourselves the challenge of a new hermeneutics: re-historicizing implies reading bioethics in the light of contemporary problems (AI, climate crisis, health vulnerability, pandemics, coloniality of knowledge).

Furthermore, I have additionally reviewed in detail the academic topic of the “ethical debt for the generational change permeated by technology,” which can be understood as an emerging concept that combines three planes: the ethical, the generational, and the technological.

The notion of “ethical debt” refers to the responsibilities that one generation accumulates toward another, not only in the material or economic (as spoken of in intergenerational economics), but in values, care of the environment, fair access to opportunities, and the transmission of capacities to live with dignity. In this case, the debt is related to: intergenerational equity: what kind of world, institutions, and technologies does the adult generation bequeath to the young? As for the cultural and moral legacy: it is not enough to leave tools, but also criteria to use them responsibly.

In the current context, the change from one generation to another is deeply traversed by technological transformations (AI, biotechnology, digital platforms, precision medicine, etc.). This generates tensions: regarding digital divides: young digital natives versus adults who adopt late. New forms of power and exclusion: those who master technology may concentrate social, educational, or economic advantages. Reconfiguration of identities and values: the relationship with time, the body, intimacy, and the community changes radically in each generation.

Technology as permeation has to do with the fact that technology is not a simple instrument, but an environment that “permeates” daily life and that transforms: it is necessary, emergently, in education: that access to knowledge is mediated by algorithms. Health: from telemedicine to quantum artificial intelligence, which modify diagnoses and clinical decisions. Politics and citizenship: public action and ethical deliberation shift toward digital spaces.

Global bioethics (from UNESCO, WHO/PAHO) posits the obligation to integrate justice, equity, and respect for dignity in technological development. In the ethics of complexity (Morin), the responsibility to think about the impact of our actions on long chains of generations is underlined. Authors like Hans Jonas spoke of a “principle of responsibility” toward the future: that is, to act today thinking of the consequences for those not yet born.

“Ethical debt” in this framework means that the adult generation is obliged to prepare just, critical, and sustainable conditions so that younger generations can inhabit a world intensely mediated by technology, without becoming trapped in inequalities, biases, or unforeseen risks.

References

• Boff, L. (2002). The Essential Care: Ethics of the Human, Compassion for the Earth. Madrid: Trotta. 
• Foucault, (1996). Hermeneutics of the Subject. Altamira Press. Argentina. 
• Freire, P. (2020). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Siglo XXI. (Originally published in 1970). 
• Garrafa, V. (2005). Intervention Bioethics: A Latin American Perspective. Revista Brasileira de Bioética, 1(2), 103–120. 
• Lolas, F. (2002). Bioethics and Medical Anthropology: Foundations and Perspectives. Acta Bioethica, 8(2), 179–186. 
• Mignolo, W. (2007). The Idea of Latin America. Barcelona: Gedisa. 
• Morin, E. (2000). The Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future. UNESCO. 
• Potter, V. R. (1988). Global Bioethics: Building on the Leopold Legacy. Michigan State University Press. 
• Santos, B. de S. (2010). Epistemologies of the South. Mexico: Siglo XXI. 
• Zavaleta, C. (2020). Clinical Consciousness and the Ethics of Care in Latin American Public Health. Revista Peruana de Bioética, 2(1), 15–27.

Dr. Enrique Mendoza Carrera has been president of the Academia Nacional Mexicana de Bioética during the 2016–2018 board. He is Managing Partner of the firm Asesoría en Bioética, Educación y Salud, S. C., where he promotes ethical training in research. He has actively participated in research ethics committees, particularly in psychiatry, and in the evaluation of biomedical protocols. He is currently a member of the Seminario Interdisciplinario de Bioética (SIB) and has a prolific bibliographic production in bioethics. 

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