An Anthropological Approach to Bioethics

1 Course Unit

Bioethics and anthropology have a complicated relationship. Though the two disciplines have long studied overlapping topics, the contribution of anthropological work to bioethical discussions and associated health policy interventions has been limited. This course will investigate whether and how anthropology can contribute to ethics and characterize the unique perspective that the discipline adds to bioethics topics. We will begin by carrying out an anthropology of bioethics, exploring how bioethics developed as a field with a specific philosophical and political orientation and a particular conception of which issues in health, illness, and medicine are worthy of attention as ethical problems. Next, we will clarify how anthropology can contribute to bioethical theory and debate by considering decades-old, ongoing debates about the relevance of (descriptive) social scientific findings to the development of (prescriptive) bioethics frameworks. Finally, we will apply an anthropological lens to bioethical problems. We will use anthropology's global, ethnographic orientation to explore a series of classic bioethics topics (e.g., the rights of research subjects, the allocation of medical resources, the uses of genetic testing, the withdrawal of life-sustaining care), examining how anthropologists' conclusions about these topics might differ from bioethicists', why, and with what ramifications. 1 Course Unit