© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ , UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. INTERVENTION BIOETHICS: A PROPOSAL FOR PERIPHERAL COUNTRIES IN A CONTEXT OF POWER AND INJUSTICE VOLNEI GARRAFA AND DORA PORTO ABSTRACT The bioethics of the so-called ‘peripheral countries’ must preferably be con- cerned with persistent situations, that is, with those problems that are still happening, but should not happen anymore in the 21 st century. Result- ing conflicts cannot be exclusively analysed based on ethical (or bioethi- cal) theories derived from ‘central countries.’ The authors warn of the growing lack of political analysis of moral conflicts and of human indig- nation. The indiscriminate utilisation of the bioethics justification as a neutral methodological tool softens and even cancels out the seriousness of several problems, even those that might result in the most profound social distortions. The current study takes as a theoretical reference the fact that natural resources (which all of us are) are finite, and that cor- poreal, pleasurable and painful matters (which affect us all) are relevant. Based on these premises, and on the concept that equity means ‘treating unevenly the unequal’, a proposal of a hard bioethics (or intervention bioethics) is introduced, in defence of the historical interests and rights of economically and socially excluded populations that are separated from the international developmental process. From the 90s, new critical and theoretical perspectives emerged in the bioethics context. 1 This questioning has brought to Bioethics ISSN 0269-9702 (print); 1467-8519 (online) Volume 17 Numbers 5–6 2003 1 D. Clouser & B. Gert. Critique of Principlism. J Med Phil 1990; 15: 219–236; S. Holm. Not just Autonomy – the Principles of American Biomedical Ethics. J Med Ethics 1995; 21: 332–338; B. Gert, C. Culver & D. Clouser. 1997. Principlism. In Bioethics: a Return to Fundamentals. New York/Oxford. Oxford University Press: 71–92.