This advanced bioethics seminar will explore the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) in bioethics. It invites students to critically assess how intelligent and computer-based modeling systems are transforming healthcare, public health, medicine, and clinical research. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into decision-making, diagnostics, drug development, behavioral health, elder care, and genomics, new ethical and social challenges, such as being able to predict patient preferences in end-of-life decision making, are emerging. Correspondingly, enduring moral considerations can become heightened, such as concerns of bias and discrimination. As such, we will explore the optimism and promise of AI systems as well as moral risks and downsides through the lenses of ethics, relational care, and legal and regulatory frameworks. Finally, a distinctive feature of the course is its inquiry into how AI tools might be used within bioethics itself: for example, in ethics consultation, analysis of large-scale policy data, or simulation of ethical scenarios. Students will be encouraged to evaluate whether and how AI might augment ethical reasoning or present new risks to human moral judgment
In this class, we will explore the tensions that emerge in a democracy, as rule by the people, when matters of scientific knowledge and authority arise. We will ask, can a democracy be equipped to answer complex moral questions that require technical knowledge, such as in the case of gene editing and artificial womb technology? To do so, we will explore the procedures, mandates, and outcomes of the various institutions in our democracy, including the executive branch’s regulatory institutions and advisory councils, the legislature and its laws, the judiciary and legal decision-making tradition, the public itself including social media and journalism, and finally, in deliberative democratic forums. We will examine various pressing bioethics questions and how they get addressed differently in these divergent contexts to imagine a more ideal world to fuse scientific prowess with moral compasses.
This course will survey the writings of the various president’s bioethics councils beginning in 1974 to the most recent bioethics commission established by President Obama. This course will consider the intersection bioethics, law, and public policy by looking at the role and recommendations given by the various councils. By reviewing the writings of the various council by a topical approach, and considering the history and surrounding political circumstances, students will critically engage with the material.
By taking a deep-dive into seminal and contemporary cases as well as the surrounding literatures, this skills-based course will build students’ competency with the methods of case analysis that lies at the core of medical, research, and healthcare ethics. Cases will be drawn from clinical, research, healthcare, and policy ethics. By the end of the course students will have gained an appreciation for the interplay between theoretical considerations and real-world cases and will have gained proficiency in their ability to analyze the weigh the morally relevant variables at play in novel medical and healthcare cases. Bioethics field-specific skills that we will work on include concept articulation through in-class discussion and writing (both research paper and short answer/longer essay questions).
The goal of this course is to explore the emergence of bioethics as a field. In so doing, we examine bioethics’ major events (cases, laws, court decisions, and reports), institutions (hospital ethics consult services and IRBS), professionalization (journals and jobs), and concepts (autonomy, beneficence, justice, etc) chronologically to explore its development. We begin by unearthing ancient, pre-modern, and early twentieth century ideas toward medicine, science, and the body. Next, we examine how the atrocities of World War II and the Nuremberg Codes catapulted us into a new paradigm of human subject research and doctor-patient relationships. Following this, we will analyze the historical developments in the twentieth century that led to the birth of bioethics as a field, including the use of the term “bioethics” in the 1960s and 1970. Finally, we explore the key controversial cases of the times and the development of technologies and institutions that will bring us through to the Covid Pandemic and current moment.
Topics explored include research ethics, end-of-life decision making, doctor-patient relationships, genetics, public health ethics, reproductive ethics, organ transplantation, scarce resource allocation, and more. Frameworks employed feature gender, race, ableism, justice, biopolitics, sexuality, and religion. Technological developments emphasized are human genome mapping, IVF, organ transplantation, ventilators, stem cells and cloning, and gene editing. Lastly, institutions highlighted include IRBs, presidential commissions, and hospital consult services.
The broad intent of this course is to highlight the importance of ethics in biomedical research and to explore how critical ethical thinking can be used to analyze personal decision-making, public regulation, and the law concerning advanced biomedical sciences/technologies and their clinical applications. This course will (a) provide a foundation in traditional biomedical research ethics including its history and regulatory framework; (b) a consideration of the ethical issues that arise in particular subcategories of biomedical research, such as in genomics, COVID related research, and research conducted in low- and middle-income countries; and (c) instruct students in how to apply ethics to contemporary issues in research and technology.