Online Program

Oral

The field of bioethics today faces difficult questions about its future capacity to address newly emerging challenges in health and biomedicine, particularly as those domains increasingly intersect with broader environmental issues. The term “bioethics,” in its earliest incarnations, emphasized an ecologically framed value system. Only in the late 20th century in the U.S. was priority given to the anthropocentric and positivistic biomedical context of human health concerns. Biomedicine, like many professional fields, evolves over time in always-changing cultural and ecological environments. Contemporary social justice issues and climate change concerns have significant impacts on human health and wellbeing. But biomedical systems are slow to evolve and remain oriented around short-term, easily quantifiable goals within disconnected institutional systems. Bioethics’ alignment with biomedicine can deny a richer critical response to problems of health and wellbeing. Although one of the originators of the term, Van Rensselaer Potter, referred to bioethics as a bridge to the future, we find contemporary bioethics struggling to support the ethical contextualization of biomedicine. This panel, bringing together advanced scholars and young researchers, will examine a range of questions within public health at the intersection of environmental ethics, population ethics, and medical bioethics.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH) , Masters Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES)