CHAPTER 8: THE RELEVANCE OF BIOETHICS TO THINK ABOUT BIOECONOMY: THE CROSS CONTRIBUTIONS OF LEOPOLD AND POTTER

Abstract

Our aim is to study the Leopold-Potter relationship in order to draw lessons from it but also a judgement concerning the bioeconomy that the public authorities currently intend to set up (OECD, European Union...). It seems to us that articulating Leopold’s land ethic and Potter’s bioethics allows us to think of a bioeconomy embedded in a bioethics. Moreover, this bioeconomy can constitute an original benchmark against which to compare the bioeconomy that governments are implementing today. The bioeconomy as these authors present it therefore implicitly reveals the limits of the bioeconomy that we are seeking to apply today, and which we may fear will pose many problems in the context of the ecological crisis.