Philosophy 181 - Medical Ethics

Contemporary medicine gives rise to a variety of moral and philosophical questions. Some of the questions we will discuss include: Is the concept of disease objective? What moral duties do we have to those at the beginning and the end of life? How should limited health care resources be distributed? What are the responsibilities of medical researchers towards their subjects? Do we have reason to be worried about the growth of technology in medicine? Are the basic institutions of medicine just? The goals of this course are to improve our understanding of the arguments on different sides of these questions, and to acquire some tools to evaluate those arguments.