Abstract
Contemporary bioethical issues are inherently cross-cultural and global in their nature. This is not surprising because bioethical matters touch everyone in many and different ways. Moral quandaries in healthcare, life sciences, and biotechnology arise ubiquitously across natural and human boundaries, the boundaries between and within nation-states, ethnicities, cultures, communities, and social groups. In addition, the simultaneously large-scale and intimate interactions between and within different cultures and civilizations and the rapid pace at which they change are phenomena that distinguish our times from previous eras. Bioethics – as a particular domain of public discourse and an academic discipline – has thus been rapidly evolving not only in the United States and other Western countries but also on a global scale over the past 50 years.