AE: Health Care Ethics: Theory of Practice

School of Medicine

This course focuses on theoretical inquiry of health care as a practice—a social institution aimed at achieving the health needs of human beings. Specifically, it will explore health care ethics as a bridge between theoretical concepts like human agency and well-being and the practical activity of providing and receiving medical care. Decision-making capacity, surrogate decision-making, medically inappropriate treatment, maternal-fetal conflict, and brain death are ethical constructs in modern health care; this course will critically examine the deeper theoretical underpinnings of these ethical constructs and others. These connections will be developed within the context of clinical cases where judgments must be made and justified by actual stakeholders. This seminar fulfills a requirement for the M.D. Certificate in Biomedical Ethics for medical students in the Immersion phase; it also fulfills a Topics course credit for PhD students in the Department of Philosophy.