Ethical Issues in the Biotechnology Industry: Introduction to the Special Issue

摘要

This Special Issue of the Journal of Business Ethics springs from two distinct sources of inspiration. In particular, it is inspired by what I see as a need on the part of each of the fields of Business Ethics and Bioethics. First, this Special Issue responds to a need on the part of Business Ethics to engage further with what is, by many accounts, the most exciting and controversial industry on the planet today. Biotechnology is an industry into which millions of venture capital and tax dollars are being poured, and an industry that has drawn significant public attention and generated considerable controversy. It is an industry that has promised nothing less than revolution in health-care, in agriculture and in a range of industrial processes. Given both the public salience and the vaulting ambitions of this industry, the corporations that make it up are faced - whether they acknowledge it or not - with a range of complex ethical choices overlapping with, but in many ways different from, the ethical choices faced by companies in other industries. The biotechnology industry is thus deserving of increased attention from academics engaged in the study of business ethics.