This course is designed to help you build essential skills for thinking about, understanding, and engaging with reasoning about ethics, while learning how these skills have been used by philosophers to investigate central issues and debates arising in the ethics of medicine at the intersection of fundamental philosophical ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. After completing modules that introduce you to the course and these important methods, you choose three from the following four bioethics modules: abortion, dementia and advance directives, the philosophy and ethics of psychiatric classification and conditions, and the Comforting Delusion Objection to psychedelic therapy.听Each unit lasts three days, with work submitted at the end of each unit.

Learning Objectives

  • Discover essential skills for understanding, thinking and reasoning about, and engaging with ethical reasoning (in general and in bioethics);
  • Apply these reasoning skills to engage with and address ethical dilemmas in medicine, drawing upon foundational ideas from metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science;
  • Demonstrate the ability to identify key claims and arguments offered by professional philosophers about issues related to autonomy, well-being, and the self in at least three of the following topics: the ethics of abortion, advance directives, the philosophy and ethics psychiatric conditions and classification, or psychedelic therapy and the Comforting Delusion Objection;
  • Do one or more of the following:
    • Take part in philosophical inquiry by making use of at least one standard way of engaging in philosophical discussion (from Professor Olivia Bailey's guide on participating in philosophical discussion), either on a discussion board or in a novel writing activity;
    • Connect learning of key concepts, terms, principles, and claims from the material to other "real world" issues or your own life experiences;
    • Formulate a plausible line of objection to a philosopher's argument of your choice by utilizing specific critical thinking skills and philosophical reasoning methods developed in the Critical Thinking Bootcamp;
    • Apply course material and critical thinking skills to evaluate and rectify erroneous or flawed answers that are expressed clearly and persuasively (such as those generated by an AI like ChatGPT);
    • Design and produce a comprehensive lecture video series on a chosen article, synthesizing its main ideas into slides and recordings, and introducing one novel connection or insight.

In this course, you will

  • Learn and develop fundamental 鈥渟oft-skills鈥� that generalize to thinking about ethical issues (in your life, in bioethics, and in the world more generally);
    • You don鈥檛 need to have any background in this from previous philosophy classes! You鈥檒l learn 鈥渘eed-to-know鈥� basics in the first unit and then you鈥檒l learn them more as I use them to explain the content of the course in lecture videos!听
  • 鈥淒esign your own version of the course鈥� by choosing (a) which Bioethics content to learn and (b) which activities you鈥檒l do to earn the grade that you want;
    • Some activities are required for certain overall grades (e.g., writing a short critical response for earning an overall A-, and additionally doing the Create a New Lecture Video series for earning an overall A) but you get a good deal of flexibility to 鈥渃hoose your own adventure鈥�!
  • Expand your understanding of how people have thought, and continue to think, about pressing issues at the intersection of medicine, ethics, and other fundamental philosophical questions.