BIOETHICS

University of Toronto Scarborough

An introduction to the main topics in bioethics, including informed consent, truth telling, medical assistance in dying, abortion, and genetic engineering. Providing good medical care is an ethical as much as a scientific challenge: it’s not enough to settle on a diagnosis and a treatment plan. What does the patient want? What’s in the patient’s best interest? How do we balance this patient’s needs against everyone else’s? Students work through the kinds of cases physicians and nurses face every day, culminating in simulated ethics consultations and an oral exam.

Death & Dying

University of Toronto Scarborough

“We’re all on the way out. Act accordingly.” So says Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in The Departed. But what does it mean to act accordingly? What does it mean to die, why (if at all) is death bad for the one who dies, and what attitude should we take toward it? The second half of the course turns to the definition of death and the ethics of assisted dying, with a focus on how Canada’s law has changed since 2016. Students also complete a “Living with Death” assignment: an experiment in confronting mortality outside the classroom, whether at a Death Cafe, in a hospice, or somewhere of their own choosing.

The Ethics of Pharmaceuticals

University of Toronto Scarborough

Drugs are among the most effective interventions medicine has, and the industry that produces them is among the most distrusted. This advanced seminar asks why both things are true. It follows the drug development pipeline from discovery through clinical trials, regulatory approval, prescription, marketing, and pricing, and shows how a handful of deep issues (paternalism, information asymmetry, and the trade-off between incentives and access) recur at every stage. By the end, students should be able to state the strongest version of both the critique of the industry and its defence, and to see which lever a given reform pulls and what it moves further down the pipeline.

The Ethics of Psychiatry

University of Toronto Scarborough

No other area of medicine is as ethically fraught as psychiatry. Part of the reason is scientific: the brain is the most complex organ, and the definition and classification of mental disorders remain unsettled. Part is social, having to do with how medicine and society have understood mental illness and its treatment. This advanced seminar takes up the ethical questions that follow, including decision-making capacity, involuntary treatment, and contested concepts such as addiction.

Bioethics and the Law

Osgoode Hall Law School, York University

An intensive course in Osgoode’s Professional LLM program for lawyers and health professionals on bioethical theory and how it relates to Canadian law. It begins with principlism and the overlap between ethics and law, then takes up informed consent and substitute decision making, confidentiality and the duty to warn, medical assistance in dying, abortion, and the ethical and legal challenges facing Medicare. Each topic pairs an ethics reading with a legal decision, with the aim of understanding how much of a role the law should play in resolving conflicts of value in health care.

Other Courses

University of Toronto

Topics in Bioethics · Honours Seminar (The Socrates Project) · Well-Being · The Good · Ethical Theory

University of Lethbridge

Bioethics · Disaster Ethics · Health & Society

Baylor College of Medicine

Medical School Bioethics (MS II and MS III)