PHIL42530: Biomedical Ethics (online)

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• This module equips students with a practically applicable, theoretically rigorous understanding of major topics in biomedical ethics. Thinking through permissibility and requirement, duties and rights, care and community membership, and medical access and inequality in the context of human and animal life are deep and longstanding concerns of the health professions. With the advent of new technologies, the erosion of the distinction between human and machine capabilities, and fast-evolving ethical awareness of rights and responsibilities in both human and animal realms, these issues are becoming even more crucial in our time. Synthesizing theoretical analysis and contemporary real-world case studies, this module equips students with the knowledge and critical analytic skills to tackle, in rigorous and practical ways, the most contentious biomedical ethical issues at the intersection of medicine, public health, law, history, and philosophy, with an eye on challenges that the future may hold.

• Taking a topic-led approach, the module employs work and methods from philosophy, history, clinical bioethics, and law. The topics covered in the course may develop in response to events in both the world and the literature. As well as more familiar topics such as principlist accounts of bioethics and legal-ethical issues, the treatment of animals, end and beginning of life, the course will include issues coming to prominence more recently such as race, non-western bioethical and medical traditions, issues relating to artificial intelligence in medicine, and environmental bioethics. (These lists are illustrative only.)

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Understanding of different theoretical perspectives on ethical action in a variety of settings
• Knowledge of specific episodes, historical and/or contemporary, from different parts of the world, that illustrate this theoretical knowledge
• Knowledge of key historical and contemporary contexts and questions around which ethical concepts were formed
• Awareness of how the existence of multiple epistemologies and power dynamics affect the development of bioethics and shape its major questions
• Awareness of biomedical ethical issues that may arise with future developments and disruptions

Subject-specific Skills:

• Comprehension of novel ideas and conceptual frameworks relating to multiple bioethical traditions in multiple cultures
• Charitable yet critical engagement with medical, legal and bioethical literature and thought
• Ability to critically engage historical and contemporary sources and ground questions in their biomedical context
• Ability to engage in public discussion on relevant topics and apply the knowledge learned in this context

Key Skills:

• Express ideas clearly and succinctly in writing and discussion
• Comprehend complex ideas, propositions and theories
• Defend opinions by reasoned argument
• Seek out and identify appropriate sources of evidence and information
• Tackle problems in a clear-sighted and logical fashion
• Communicate complex ideas clearly and persuasively to a wider audience

• Seminars (held online), discussion boards, reflective writings, and recorded discussion groups will provide the opportunity for students to present their own work in progress, to test their understanding of the course material, and defend and debate different opinions on theories and questions presented in that material.
• Delivery will support asynchronous engagement to accommodate students with different time commitments and in different time zones
• Guided reading provides a structure within which students exercise and extend their abilities to make use of available learning resources.
• The summative essays test knowledge and understanding of the course material, and the ability to identify and explain philosophical questions raised by the natural and medical sciences, and, using relevant research material, to present relevant philosophical theories and arguments that claim to answer those questions, and to make reasoned judgements on the merits and demerits of such theories.

Ongoing feedback will be offered in seminars based on project proposals and essay planning. The summative project mark for will take into account the responsiveness to such feedback, and progress through the term.

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