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Bioethics

bioethics@pugetsound.edu

Director

Suzanne Holland
253-879-3750

Administrative Support Coordinator

Connie Baird
253.879.3745

Office Hours

Monday-Thursday
8:30am-3pm

Program Description

Is it ethical to genetically enhance humans to be “better than well”? Should we keep someone on life support in order to gestate her fetus? What is brain death anyway? What do we owe the starving poor? Explore these questions—and other challenging issues facing society as a result of advances in medicine, health, and science—in the interdisciplinary program of bioethics.

The program is unique at Puget Sound and rare among liberal arts colleges. Students analyze moral, cultural, and historical issues at the intersection of life sciences and humanities. Topics include regenerative medicine and human stem cell research, global health, race, culture, gender and health care, global warming, genetic screening, human population growth, embryology, reproduction, death and dying, and neuroscience. Faculty members from several departments provide the cross-disciplinary perspective that is the hallmark of this concentration.

 

Who You Could Be

  • Clinical research coordinator
  • Environmental scientist
  • Community housing specialist
  • Attorney
  • Family nurse practitioner
  • Physical therapist

What You’ll Learn

  • Analyze, understand, and integrate the challenging issues facing society as a result of advances in medicine, health, and science
  • Moral, cultural, and historical issues at the intersection of life sciences and humanities
SAMPLE COURSES
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This course provides students with tools of ethical analysis so that they can think critically about pressing contemporary moral issues through the lens of justice. The course focuses on ethical methods from world Christianity and western philosophy. The course introduces both ethical theories and justice theories, and examines multicultural perspectives of the long-standing religious, theological, and philosophical understanding of justice. It analyzes how social justice concepts have been applied in different cultural contexts, including nonwestern communities. Students examine different models of justice and their implications for contemporary moral issues (e.g. racism, healthcare, social welfare, capital punishment, human rights, immigration, refugees, property rights, and the environment). The class includes interactive lectures on justice theories and students actively participate in discussions on selected case studies. Course readings may include excerpts from Aristotle, Aquinas, Mill, Locke, Calvin, Kant, Rawls, Sandel, Nussbaum, Singer, Cone, Williams, Hauerwas, and Ahn.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic PerspectivesKnowledge, Identity, and Power

This course examines Western philosophical and religious understandings of moral issues brought on by advances in health care, science and technology. In this course, students will learn the "Principles approach" to bioethics, as well as other ethical approaches to the difficult moral issues raised by contemporary medical science and its clinical applications. To that end, case analysis will be used extensively in this course. The course is designed to help facilitate connections for students between medical/scientific advances, ethics, religious values, and American public policy about technology and health care. Each class session will alternate between theoretical and medical/scientific considerations, and the concreteness of bioethical case analyses.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives
Prerequisites
Credit will not be granted for both BIOE/REL 292 and BIOE/PHIL 292.

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind that exists at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and anthropology among other fields. There are now burgeoning research programs devoted to developing accounts of the cognitive foundations of morality and religion. This is an upper level survey of some of the leading views from these fields. Topics to be covered may include: the role of emotions and reason in moral deliberation; the nature of our moral intuitions; whether the scientific study of the mind can help us decide between competing moral theories; whether cognitive scientific accounts of moral psychology show morality to be a sham; the elements of mind involved in the formation of religious belief; whether religion is a kind of evolutionary byproduct; whether religion is a part of human nature; and whether scientific accounts of the cognitive foundations of religion show religious beliefs to be irrational.

Code
Connections 200-400 Level

This course examines a number of ethical theories - theories attempting to provide a systematic account of our beliefs about what is right and wrong, good and bad. The course examines a range of answers to questions like the following: What makes for a good life? What, if anything, is of value? What does morality require? Should we care about moral requirements and, if so, why? Is there a connection between morality and freedom? In addition to a careful study of various classic views, we will consider recent defenses and critiques of these views.

Code
Artistic and Humanistic Perspectives

The study of evolution and ethics ' at the intersections between biology, the human sciences and philosophy ' has received a lot of attention in recent years. News stories abound that give, in sound byte form, the (often controversial) ethical implications of conclusions regarding evolutionary theory. Drawing upon historical and philosophical approaches, this course provides students with an interdisciplinary framework from which to understand and study such debates. The course examines the historical context of previous discussions regarding the implications of the theory of evolution for ethical theories, and examines modern debates regarding the normative implications that may or may not result from different interpretations of the conclusions of evolutionary biology.

Code
Connections 200-400 Level

Disability studies offers perhaps the most trenchant critique of "the hegemony of the normal"--that is, the reification and privileging of certain numerical indices (for example, IQ score; body mass index; weight and height; complete blood count; range of motion; brainwave frequencies; and other such measurements which are then regarded as "better" or "worse" than comparable numbers). While certainly accepting the importance of such measurements in designing treatments and strategies to improve the quality of life for people living in pain, disability studies seeks to balance this "experience-distant" emphasis on "the quantified life" with "experience-near" insights. Thus disability studies seeks out, reflects on, and tries to incorporate and prioritize the meta-biological realities of the lived experiences of people with disabilities (defined here as lifelong or chronic biological and/or psychological impairments), especially in policy-making endeavors inspired by ideals of social justice. Hence this course focuses on issues of power, disparity, and diversity of experience and identities, particularly as these affect and are affected by the minds and bodies of individuals who "have" (or are socially close to people who "have") conditions that mark them as "not normal". Unlike studies done from the perspective of the healing professions, where non-normalcy is regarded as a condition to be helped or remedied, this course, following the perspective of disability studies, is less concerned with identifying and "fixing" deviation from some statistically defined ideal range, and more directly focused on socially grounded, ever-dynamic identity construction and its relation to emancipatory social change, especially when these processes involve confrontations between individuals with disabilities and the various social institutions (e.g. education, health care, legal and economic systems) they (or their caregivers) must deal with throughout their lives.

Code
Knowledge, Identity, and PowerSocial Scientific and Historical Perspectives
1/3

Experiential Learning

A sampling of ways our students learn through experience:

  • Kate Gladhart Hayes '20 was awarded a summer research grant in 2019 for her study "The Half-Life of Environmental Racism: Reproductive Justice and Nuclear Technology on Indigenous Lands" after spending summer 2018 in Spain on the Madrid Summers internship program.
  • Samantha Lilly '19 won a prestigious Watson Fellowship for a year of international travel and study following graduation, pursuing her topic "Understanding Suicidality Across Cultures.” This continues research she did during her summer 2019 research grant, "An Ethnographic, Experimental Philosophical Inquiry into Attitudes and Perceptions Toward Suicidality."
  • Grant Garcia '18 spent summer 2017 studying comparative healthcare of Northern Europe system in a classroom setting and clinical medicine in Copenhagen, Denmark and Vienna, Austria in a hospital setting.

Stories

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Puget Sound Pre-Med Student on a Mission To Provide Equal Access to Health Care

On a typical weeknight, you can find Capriana Jiang ’23 at the Neighborhood Clinic in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood. Each night, the free clinic sees about a dozen patients. Jiang is a clinical support volunteer, helping…
Read more about University of Puget Sound announces faculty appointments to endowed positions
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Faculty

University of Puget Sound announces faculty appointments to endowed positions

The Office of the Provost has announced appointments of four endowed professorships starting in fall 2022. The multiyear positions represent some of University of Puget Sound’s 10 endowed professorships, which support…
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Students

University of Puget Sound Students Take a Plunge for Science

Chris Nicol ’24 was freediving for lobsters off the coast of San Diego, Calif., when he realized that the cold water was impacting how long he could hold his breath. As an exercise science major with a minor in neuroscience and…

Where Graduates Work

Our graduates work at:

  • Washington State Department of Health (staff attorney)
  • Oregon Health & Science University (clinical research assistant)
  • UW Microbiology (research scientist)
  • PIONEER Technologies Corporation (staff environmental scientist)
  • University of Chicago (research and evaluation consultant)

Where Graduates Continue Studying

Our graduates continue their studies at:

  • Lewis & Clark Law School 
  • Northwestern University (M..S, health communication)
  • The George Washington University (master’s degree, public policy analysis)
  • Iowa State University College of Agriculture & Life Sciences (master’s degree, ecology and evolutionary biology)
  • Vanderbilt University School of Nursing (master’s degree, family nurse practitioner)
MEET THE FACULTY
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Ha Jung Lee
Associate Professor, Religion, Spirituality, and Society and Bioethics

With research focused on end-of-life decision-making by ethnic minority immigrants, Prof. Lee teaches courses in both the religious studies department and Bioethics Program.

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Ariela Tubert
Professor, Philosophy

Prof. Tubert's research is in moral philosophy and action theory. She also has interests in social and legal philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, and ethical issues in artificial intelligence and the environment.

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Jung Kim
Professor, Exercise Science

While researching the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in regulating rodents' skeletal muscle phenotype, Prof. Kim also teaches a variety of courses, including human physiology and ethics in sports.

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Kristin Johnson
Professor and Director, Science, Technology, Health, and Society

Prof. Johnson focuses on the history of the life sciences and the relationship between science and religion since the 17th century, with special interest in the naturalist tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Siddharth Ramakrishnan
Professor, Biology and Director, Neuroscience

Prof. Ramakrishnan teaches high-level biology and neuroscience courses while focusing research on sensory-motor integration, developmental biology, and neuroendocrinology.

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Sam Liao
Professor and Chair, Philosophy

Prof. Liao researches on the interactions between minds and social realities. In practice, this broad interest gets him to explore connections between imagination, cognition, values, art, and more.

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Gregory Johnson
Visiting Assistant Professor, Biology

Prof. Johnson teaches a wide range of biology courses Cell Biology and Biochemical Pathways/Processes, as well as serving as the Faculty Chair for Health Professions Advising.

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Suzanne Holland
Professor, Religion, Spirituality, and Society, John B. Magee Professor of Science and Values, and Director, Bioethics

Prof. Holland teaches courses in ethics and values, including topics in gender studies and bioethics. Her research interests include ethics in human genetics, biotechnology, religion, and culture.

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BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Copenhagen, Denmark
DENMARK

Samantha Scott '17 spent a term at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad studying the Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness.

2019 National Bioethics Bowl team
NATIONAL BIOETHICS BOWL

Simone Moore '20, one of the university's first Posse Scholars, was active in a variety of aspects of campus including Adelphian Concert Choir and student government, as well as being part of the Ethics Bowl team participating in the National Bioethics Bowl in 2019.

Sri Lanka
SRI LANKA

Samantha Lilly '19 spent the summer of 2017 in Sri Lanka completing a psychology internship with a mental health placement.