Program Philosophy
Bioethics is both a theoretical enterprise and a practical competence; it is essentially multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, and is necessarily given meaning by its social and cultural context. Bioethics is a branch of applied ethics, but as the name suggests, it is a discipline having a dual focus: first, it looks to biology, or more particularly medical science, but it also looks to the ethical issues raised by the revolutionary advances made by science and its applications, advances made at an accelerating rate throughout the twentieth century, with no sign of slowing in the twenty-first.
The program has two characteristic emphases: Bioethics in Social Context and Bioethics and Biotechnology. First, a general emphasis on the social, cultural, and policy contexts that shape all bioethics questions and issues is visible throughout the curriculum. Although the importance of incorporating the humanities, the social sciences, and even the arts may seem obvious, this is not a component of most bioethics education elsewhere. Second, a focus on bioethics and biotechnology takes advantage of WFU’s strong and growing presence in this area. Research in nanomedicine, genomics, pharmacogenetics, molecular and cell therapies, and the like is ongoing not only here at WFU but elsewhere in North Carolina.
The program has particular emphases without declaring particular specializations. This is in part because bioethics education is by its nature fundamentally generalist: Students need a reasonably broad exposure to ideas, discussion, scholarly literature, and experience, as well as a set of intellectual skills to be developed and practiced widely before being turned to special areas of interest. Even then, areas of special interest –such as a clinical ethics focus for a student who chairs a hospital ethics committee, or research ethics for an IRB administrator – are themselves often quite broad. And even apparently narrow areas of interest, such as regenerative medicine, potentially encompass a very broad range of bioethics topics and issues, including research ethics and regulation, ethical issues in biobanking and genomics, public policy, and religion.