Bioethics and Public Health

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The protection of public health meets many policy and ethical challenges while prioritizing community welfare. Disasters, epidemics, wars, and other health emergencies place special burdens on health care systems and medical professionals. Biomedical principles help to ensure that patient safety, human rights, and citizen involvement are respected during phases of public preparedness, communication, mobilization, treatment, and recovery. Particular attention is given to clinical ethics, triage ethics, pandemic ethics and vulnerable populations, vaccine and drug trials, research ethics and patient rights, justice in health care distribution, health surveillance, and big data. Many questions at the intersections of public health, medicine, and ethics will be explored: How have technoscience advances in the health sciences exemplified principled values at every stage – from experimental research to translational application? Why must the public carefully consider moral principles that motivate diverse and sometimes opposed convictions about public health programs? Where does the public’s ability to understand health science, and the public’s moral judgments about medicine, play a critical role in the development and deployment of new healthcare technologies? How might government measures to paternalistically protect and improve public health come into conflict with other important values such as liberty, autonomy, and justice? Where can balances be found between maximizing health benefits for a whole population and serving the particular needs of disadvantaged and vulnerable groups and individuals?