Bioethics: An Open Educational Resource
Course Notes and Lecture Slides
1 About This Course
This is an open educational resource (OER) for a course in bioethics — the study of ethical issues arising from advances in biology, medicine, and healthcare.
All materials are freely available for non-commercial educational use under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license.
2 Course Materials
| # | Part | Topic | Slides | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Orientation | Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live? (week 0) | Slides | Notes |
| 1A | Principles & Reasoning | The Four Principles; Reading a Moral Argument | Slides | Notes |
| 1B | Principles & Reasoning | Ethical Theories as Lenses | Slides | Notes |
| 2A | History & Relationship | From Hippocrates to the Belmont Report | Slides | Notes |
| 2B | History & Relationship | The Clinical Relationship: Consent, Autonomy, and Confidentiality | Slides | Notes |
| 3A | Research Ethics | How Clinical Research Works (and Why It’s Different from Care) | Slides | Notes |
| 3B | Research Ethics | From Tuskegee to Today: Protecting Research Subjects | Slides | Notes |
| 4A | Reproductive Ethics | Abortion: Moral Status & Major Philosophical Arguments | Slides | Notes |
| 4B | Reproductive Ethics | Abortion: Law, Cases, and the Four Principles | Slides | Notes |
| 5A | Reproductive Ethics | Paternalism and Its Limits | Slides | Notes |
| 5B | Reproductive Ethics | Making Family: Markets, Surrogacy, and Parental Rights | Slides | Notes |
| 6A | Genomics & Enhancement | Reading Genomes: Prediction, Privacy, and Dual Use | Slides | Notes |
| 6B | Genomics & Enhancement | Engineering Persons: CRISPR, Enhancement, and Identity | Slides | Notes |
| 7A | End-of-Life Care | Death, Dying, and Advance Planning | Slides | Notes |
| 7B | End-of-Life Care | Euthanasia, Assisted Death, and Their Critics | Slides | Notes |
| 8A | Justice & Health Care | Theories of Justice and the Right to Health Care | Slides | Notes |
| 8B | Justice & Health Care | Why US Health Care Costs So Much — and Delivers So Little | Slides | Notes |
| 9A | Public Health Ethics | From Patient to Population | Slides | Notes |
| 9B | Public Health Ethics | False Beliefs and the Ethics of Correction | Slides | Notes |
| 10A | AI in Medicine | How Medical AI Works and Where It Goes Wrong | Slides | Notes |
| 10B | AI in Medicine | The Fifth Principle: Consent, Accountability, and Black Boxes | Slides | Notes |
| 11A | Gender, Identity & Disability | Gender-Affirming Care: Deciding Under Uncertainty | Slides | Notes |
| 11B | Gender, Identity & Disability | Disability, Identity, and the Limits of Autonomy | Slides | Notes |
| 12A | Animal Ethics | Moral Status of Animals and the Ethics of Research | Slides | Notes |
| 12B | Animal Ethics | Industrial Animals, Xenotransplantation, and the Frontier | Slides | Notes |
3 Case Studies
We offer comprehensive historical and clinical case studies to pair with specific lecture topics. Each case is available as a web page or a downloadable Word document for offline reading, annotating, or printing.
| # | Case Study Title | Primary Paired Lecture | Formats |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | The Seattle “God Committee”: Rationing Dialysis, Social Worth, and the Birth of Bioethics | Intro: Thinking with Cases | HTML / DOCX |
| 1 | Dax Cowart: Refusing Burn Treatment and the Limits of Patient Autonomy | L2B: Consent & Autonomy | HTML / DOCX |
| 2 | Tuskegee & Guatemala: Deception, Racism, and Vulnerability in Research | L3B: Protecting Subjects | HTML / DOCX |
| 3 | **Sylvain Lesné & the Aβ*56 Affair:** Research Misconduct, Replication, and the Amyloid Hypothesis | L3B: Protecting Subjects | HTML / DOCX |
| 4 | Kate Cox & Damla Karsan: Conscientious Refusal, Conscientious Provision, and Professional Integrity Post-Dobbs | L4B: Abortion Law | HTML / DOCX |
| 5 | Adriana Smith: Brain Death, Pregnancy, and the Limits of Fetal-Protection Law | L5A: Paternalism | HTML / DOCX |
| 6 | He Jiankui & the CRISPR Twins: Germline Editing, Consent, and the Limits of Scientific Self-Regulation | L6B: Engineering Persons | HTML / DOCX |
| 7 | Noelia Castillo: Psychiatric Suffering, Decisional Capacity, and the Limits of Euthanasia Law | L7B: Euthanasia & Assisted Death | HTML / DOCX |
| 8 | Singapore’s Health Care System: Cost, Access, Outcomes, and What the US Can (and Can’t) Learn | L8B: Why US Health Care Costs So Much | HTML / DOCX |
| 9 | Andrew Wakefield & the MMR-Autism Myth: Misinformation, Vaccine Hesitancy, and Public Trust | L9B: False Beliefs & the Ethics of Correction | HTML / DOCX |
| 10 | The Optum Algorithm: Racial Bias, Proxy Variables, and Justice in Medical AI | L10A: How Medical AI Works | HTML / DOCX |
| 11 | United States v. Skrmetti: Gender-Affirming Care, Equal Protection, and Evidence Under Law | L11A: Gender-Affirming Care | HTML / DOCX |
| 12 | David Bennett & the First Pig-Heart Transplant: Xenotransplantation, Consent, and the Rule of Rescue | L12B: Industrial Animals & Xenotransplantation | HTML / DOCX |
4 How to Use These Materials
- Slides are built with reveal.js — press
Ffor fullscreen,Sfor speaker notes,?for all shortcuts. - Notes are the full HTML version with a table of contents.
- All source files (
.qmd) are available on GitHub.
5 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
You are free to share and adapt these materials for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit.