Exploring Bioethics - NIH Office of Science Education - National ...

teaching strategies that will help you and your studentsexamine these questions and others like them.The modules’ activities invite your students to grapplewith new questions that no one can predict now butthat society is most assuredly going to have to contendwith over the coming decades, as biomedical sciencecontinues to advance.Four Important Reasonsto Teach Bioethics1. Advance students’ science understanding.Teaching bioethics can serve as a way to teachscience to students who otherwise might not beengaged with the subject. Bioethics provides a realworldcontext for introducing and underscoring the“need to know” science concepts. Case studies helpstudents see the relevance of the science contentthey are learning and motivate them to apply theirscience understanding to issues of social relevance.Bioethics may also inspire students to gain a deeperunderstanding of the scientific facts so they canmake well-reasoned ethical arguments.Bioethical issues interest students across a rangeof learning abilities and inclinations. The NationalScience Education Standards point to the need forstudents to understand the role of science in societyand to recognize how science influences and isinfluenced by economic, political, and social issues(National Research Council 1996). National standardsalso ask that students be able to understandand evaluate costs and benefits associated withtechnological advances.2. Prepare students to make informed,thoughtful choices.Studying bioethics is a way to deepen students’understanding of medical research and its impacton society. Biomedical and clinical research has ledto dramatic breakthroughs in the understanding ofdisease and disease prevention as well as new treatments.New knowledge requires a citizenry capableof making informed decisions to guide personalchoices and public policy. This supplement givesstudents an opportunity to prepare for the scientific,medical, ethical, personal, and public-policy choicesthey will face as adults in the 21st century.3. Promote respectful dialogue among people withdiverse views.Engaging in bioethics discussions helps develop students’ability for reasoned dialogue, especially amongstudents with different perspectives. It also encouragesstudents to think about choices from a variety ofviewpoints and interests, thus facilitating respectfuldiscussions of potentially contentious issues. Theseskills are fundamental for an effective democracy.4. Cultivate critical-reasoning skills.Bioethics activities emphasize the importance ofjustification, a process of giving reasons for views.Research indicates that people have more difficultyreasoning in the ethical domain than in any other.Even many adults tend to rely on rules and often resistdelving deeply to consider the reasons for the rules, orto see whether there are ever appropriate exceptions.Others believe that moral truths are wholly subjective,resistant to reasoned analysis, and that any one opinionis as good as any other. Exploring Bioethics givesstudents the chance to develop their ethical reasoningskills so that they can critically analyze problems in amore careful and nuanced way.Thinking Like a BioethicistExploring Bioethics aims to help students develop theskills and confidence to handle a wide array of ethicalissues—now and in the future—as patients, familymembers, citizens, and possible policy makers. Themajor approach of the supplement, summarized belowand presented in detail in Module 1, is to help studentsbegin to think like bioethicists by presenting some ofthe concepts and procedural methods bioethicists use.First, a caveat: the phrase “thinking like a bioethicist”might imply that there is a single way to approach ethicalquestions, but nothing could be further from the truth.Just as there is no one way to do science, there is no oneway to do ethical analysis. Nevertheless, there are keyconcepts and skills on which bioethicists tend to rely.Concepts and Skills in BioethicsThis curriculum supplement presents a set of fourkey questions that can be used to clarify an ethicalproblem. It encourages students to develop the habitof mind (or skill) to always ask the following four questionswhenever they face an ethical choice:4 Exploring Bioethics