Edited by A T Alora, J M Lumitao, preface by E D Pellegrino, introduction by H T Engelhardt. Georgetown University Press, 2001, £44.50, $59.95, pp 162. ISBN 0–87840–874–6.

This book is a case of “too little, too late”: too little in that it represents voices not from the developing world as a whole but from a particular Catholic viewpoint in the Philippines, too late in that others have already gone “beyond a Western bioethics”—which, in any case, is not the unified and rigid set of principles that the authors make it out to be.

The publication is a long delayed spinoff of a series of bioethics seminars held in Manila and Houston under the leadership of H Tristram Engelhardt Jr, who has contributed an introduction to the volume on Western bioethics reconsidered. (As Engelhardt writes: “Like good wine, this work has come slowly into its own” (page xii). Engelhardt’s bias is evident in the phrase he uses early on in this introduction, “the customary American/western European indoctrination in …