Phil 386

PHIL 386: Heath Care Ethics
Instructor: Peter Andes

Course Description:

This course examines ethical problems that arise in the practice of health care. Topics include the nature and importance of informed consent, substitute decision-making and evaluations of patients’ best interests, end-of-life decision-making (including palliative care, euthanasia, and physician assisted-suicide), abortion and treatment decisions for infants, reproductive decisions (including the use of new reproductive and genetic technologies), distributive justice and access to health care, and the ethics of research involving human subjects. We will see how attempts to resolve practical problems will lead us to consider more general ethical questions about what it is for someone’s life to go better or worse, the nature and ethical importance of autonomous choice, what makes death bad, what makes killing wrong, and what general sorts of support we owe to others in need. We will navigate these questions by drawing on resources in moral theory, including the prima facie principles of biomedical ethics and general normative theories like utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue theory, and rights theory, as well as ethical methodologies such as reflective equilibrium.