Global Bioethics and Peace: Ethical Limits in the Face of the Morality of the Mightiest

January 26, 2026
Author: Dra. María Victoria Fernández Molina 
Versión en Español

There are times when moral vocabulary, that is, what each person considers “right,” “just,” or “necessary”, becomes dangerous, not because of its content, but because of its use. When a political community presents its own vision of the good as if it were universal and, moreover, attempts to enforce it by force, morality ceases to be an ethical compass and becomes an alibi for the imposition of particular interests. To illustrate this point, it is helpful to look to ancient history, where we already saw what happens when morality is separated from law and imposed as a mandate: violence ceases to be the exception and begins to operate as the norm, with consequences that ultimately overwhelm those who unleash it.

Let us recall Thucydides and his account of the episode in the Peloponnesian War, which retains a disturbing symbolic power today: the dialogue between Athens, an imperial power, and Melos, a small island that seeks to remain neutral. Melos appeals to justice; Athens responds from the logic of power: “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The outcome is devastating: ethics does not appear as a limit to power, but as a language displaced by “necessity.” This episode is not important for the historical fact itself, but for the structure it reveals that when power declares common justice irrelevant, what is broken is not only a city, but the possibility of invoking shared rules.

That is the core of the contemporary problem: it is not merely a matter of moral disagreements, but of the attempt to transform a particular morality into a universal rule outside the bounds of ethics and law, and to normalize the exception. The result, as Thucydides already observed, is usually a cascade of precedents: if force “works,” it becomes the method; if it becomes the method, international coexistence degrades into a mere correlation of power, thus returning to the times of colonization.

The tragedies of the 20th century, and particularly the two world wars, forced the international community to clearly codify a fundamental ethical conviction: that human life has intrinsic and absolute value, immune to the will of any political power. In this historical context, human dignity transcended the realm of philosophical and moral reflection to become a cornerstone of international law.

The process of institutionalizing this conviction was consolidated with the postwar architecture: the Charter of the United Nations and, shortly thereafter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As an example, the Declaration begins with a programmatic affirmation of universal scope: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This statement does not seek to homogenize cultures, but rather to establish a universal minimum ethical standard: every person must be treated as an end in themselves, entitled to rights simply by virtue of being human.

Since then, International Human Rights Law (IHRL), with its strengths and weaknesses, has developed as a normative and institutional framework built upon treaties, committees, regional tribunals, rapporteurships, and interpretative standards, that seeks to provide concrete guarantees for human dignity. The idea of ​​universal, interdependent, and indivisible rights was explicitly reinforced by the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993): “All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated.”

This transition from moral outrage to normative commitment is crucial for understanding why international law was conceived as a guarantor of peace: because, without common rules, dignity is left at the mercy of power; and without protected dignity, peace becomes a tactical pause, not a universal good.

The role of international law in peacebuilding is not limited to “prohibiting war”; It consists, above all, of creating a framework of limits and procedures that allows for the resolution of disputes without force being the primary tool. The UN Charter establishes as its central purpose “the maintenance of international peace and security” and to do so “by peaceful means” and “in conformity with the principles of justice and international law.” Therefore, the normative core of this consensus is the principle of non-aggression, expressed in the prohibition of the threat or use of force. Article 2(4) enshrines the obligation of States to refrain from the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.

This norm fulfills an ethical and practical function: reducing the arbitrariness of power and protecting populations from interstate violence as a form of “moral correctness” or political engineering. Therefore, international law, understood in this way, is not a naive ideal: it is a minimal moral technology to prevent a return to the logic of Melos. Its promise is not perfection, but something more basic: predictability, accountability, and a common language to challenge abuses. When a power, whoever it may be, attempts to replace that language with “its” morality, what it erodes is not a legal formality, but the mechanism that allows the most vulnerable to invoke limits against the most powerful.

For this reason, international human rights law and jus ad bellum form a continuum: both seek to dismantle the argument that force can be legitimate simply because it “produces” a desirable result. International law attempts to reverse this logic: the proclaimed ends do not, in themselves, justify the means, and human dignity cannot be subordinated to the will of the powerful.

Thus, human rights function as the legal language of dignity. Their core is not merely ornamental: they obligate states to respect, protect, and guarantee minimum conditions for human life; and they do so with a claim to universality that, properly understood, is not cultural uniformity, but rather the equal value of every person, without discrimination.

Universality (no one is left out), inalienability (they cannot be relinquished as if they were a concession), and interdependence (they are mutually reinforcing) are features that make it especially pertinent to speak of dignity as a “structuring principle” and not as mere rhetoric. The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993) expresses this clearly: the international community must address human rights globally, with the same emphasis.

However, this system faces a crisis of effectiveness. In contexts of securitization, polarization, and geopolitical calculation, the law can be instrumentalized or ignored; and rights, reduced to mere discourse. This is where global bioethics becomes a particularly suitable tool: it does not replace law, but it can reignite its ethical foundation and provide interdisciplinary methodologies to make visible the human and ecological damage that power dynamics tend to conceal.

Along these same lines, we find that integral ecology, a great ally of global bioethics, offers a key insight that is now unavoidable: peace cannot be understood merely as the absence of armed conflict, but as a condition for the possibility of the common good in a finite common home. When the international order degrades toward imposition, the effects are not limited to the diplomatic sphere: they extend to the daily lives of millions of people.

War, coercion, and normalized exceptions break down networks of care, displace populations, exacerbate food insecurity, and weaken institutional capacities. In material terms, “imposed morality” often ends up producing systemic and asymmetrical damage: environmental degradation, humanitarian crises, hunger, forced migration, and healthcare collapse. In moral terms, the trust that allows us to recognize the other as an interlocutor, rather than an object of coercion, is further fractured.

Here, integral ecology converges with International Human Rights Law, as both insist that dignity is not abstract and demand social, economic, cultural, and environmental conditions for its protection. Therefore, fragmentation, "security first, then rights"; "interests first, then legality", is often the first symptom of the loss of the horizon of peace. When the international system tolerates exceptions, what erodes is the possibility of sustaining a project of the universal common good.

At this point, we must not forget that global bioethics was largely born to address dilemmas that extend beyond the clinical setting and transcend borders: public health, structural inequalities, the climate crisis, emerging technologies, and intergenerational injustice. For example, Van Rensselaer Potter proposed a bioethics oriented toward survival and sustainability; Henk ten Have expanded it to encompass global justice and solidarity as a response to contemporary interdependence. However, the dilemmas discussed earlier have regressed, reverting to those debated at the beginning of the 20th century, only now they arise from a materialist perspective grounded in the principles of ethical egoism.

Therefore, it is essential to reflect on how global bioethics can contribute to the restoration of respect for and protection of human dignity and the improvement of institutions, so that they are equipped to face the challenges posed by the evolution of economic interests and power. To this end, this discipline offers three advantages that can make it invaluable for building peace.

First, it integrates dimensions that law usually treats separately. International human rights law is normatively compact, but it can become technocratic if it is separated from its ethical foundations and material realities. Global bioethics compels us to view dilemmas as systems: concrete lives, structures of inequality, ecological impacts, and transnational responsibilities. Therefore, the joint work of both disciplines can pave the way toward peace and respect for the individual and our common home.

Second, global bioethics provides a grammar of responsibility toward the future, since the consequences of armed conflict and peace have intergenerational effects. One only needs to review the history of Europe, Africa, or Latin America itself to grasp the depth of the damage that armed conflicts inflict on subsequent generations. For this reason, global bioethics places at its center the care of those yet unborn, without whom dignity becomes short-sighted.

Finally, thirdly, global bioethics rearticulates ethics and human rights in a universal key without falling into hegemonic moral paternalism, since peace is not built by imposing “a morality,” but by upholding a universal ethical minimum that has already been recognized by the international community through rights and commitments. In this sense, the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO, 2005) is especially relevant because it explicitly justifies bioethical principles based on the concept of human dignity and respect for human rights. Furthermore, it recognizes that cultural diversity cannot be invoked to violate the dignity and rights of peoples or cultures.

Therefore, integrating global bioethics and International Human Rights Law allows for a coherent response to ethical and legal dilemmas in a world treated like a chessboard; this time from the perspective of the universality of dignity, the care of future generations, and the protection of our common home, avoiding fragmented solutions. In other words, global bioethics can take up the mantle when international law is ignored, not to replace it, but to make evident once again what is at stake. When morality is used as a weapon, global bioethics reminds us that authentic ethics is about limits and care; and that international law is not an obstacle to justice, but its minimum requirement in a pluralistic world.

As already mentioned, Antiquity had already understood that a morality detached from ethics and law does not protect justice: it empties it. The problem is not that different moralities exist, as this is inevitable, but that some seek to place themselves above the common order and replace debate with force. The UN Charter and the international human rights system arose precisely to prevent the world from returning to the logic of ultimatums.

For all these reasons, building peace requires upholding a basic consensus: force cannot be the instrument to “educate” the world; human dignity cannot become a strategic variable; and our common home cannot be collateral damage in power projects. At this threshold, global bioethics, in dialogue with international human rights law and integral ecology, offers a suitable tool to reorient international action towards care, cooperation, justice, and peace: not as a decorative ideal, but as an ethical requirement for shared survival.

Bibliography

• Fernández Molina, M. V. (2025) ‘Un análisis de la bioética global desde el derecho internacional de los derechos humanos’, Medicina y Ética, 36(3), pp. 1074–1132. doi:10.36105/mye.2025v36n3.05.
• Naciones Unidas (1945) Carta de las Naciones Unidas. San Francisco: Naciones Unidas.
• Naciones Unidas (1948) Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos. París: Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas.
• Naciones Unidas (1993) Declaración y Programa de Acción de Viena. Conferencia Mundial de Derechos Humanos, Viena, 25 de junio de 1993.
• UNESCO (2005) Declaración Universal sobre Bioética y Derechos Humanos. París: Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura.
• Potter, V. R. (1988) Global Bioethics: Building on the Leopold Legacy. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
• ten Have, H. (2016) Global Bioethics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
• Tucídides (1996) Historia de la Guerra del Peloponeso. Trad. A. Guzmán Guerra. Madrid: Gredos. (Libro V, Diálogo de los melios).

María Victoria Fernández Molina is a researcher at the Inter-American Academy of Human Rights (AIDH) of the Autonomous University of Coahuila (UAdeC) and collaborates with the Anáhuac Center for Strategic Development in Bioethics (CADEBI). She is a Research Scholar at the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights (Rome). She holds a PhD in Human Rights from the University of Deusto, a Master's degree in Bioethics and Biolaw from the UNESCO Chair, and a Bachelor's degree in Law from the University of León (Spain), with a specialization in International Relations and International Law from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research interests include global bioethics, human rights, and food sustainability. 

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