Religious ethics, medical ethics, political ethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, bioethics: a never-ending sequel of terms that began in 1892, when Felix Adler (1851-1933), questioning Christian and Jewish control of moral dogmas, established the Society for Ethical Culture in New York. Nowadays the terms moral philosophy and ethics are often mistaken for each other and this gives rise to misunderstandings. So far, the development of ethical norms in Western culture has been based on the distinction between theological ethics and humanistic ethics. The former follows Aristotle's, according to whom everything has a ultimate goal that is God. On the contrary, humanistic ethics bases moral philosophy on man's own demands, first of all survival. So it appoints moral philosophy to guarantee the survival of man as an individual or as groups of individuals co-operating and living together in peace. This duality peculiar to Western culture can now be overcome and integrated within rational and naturalistic grounds, as required by the advances in scientific knowledge. We suggest to call it "global bioethics".
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