1.1 Philosophical Ethics: PHIL 333A 99C 2022W2 Bio-Medical Ethics - BIOMEDICAL ETHIC

This is a course in Bio-Medical Ethics. It is offered to you through UBC's Philosophy Department, and I am trained in philosophy, not medicine. So, what does it mean to study ethics, when it is taught by a philosophy professor to students of philosophy?1 Here is one thing that it does not mean. As philosophers, we are not particularly interested in matters of descriptive ethics. As the term suggests, descriptive ethics is the attempt to describe a certain population's beliefs about some ethical issue. For instance, a sociologist may want to determine what British Columbians believe about the ethics of euthanasia; an anthropologist may want to determine how British Columbians' views on euthanasia differ from the Dutch. A historian may want to determine what Canadians believed about the ethics of euthanasia at a given point of time, say prior to World War 2. And a psychologist may want to determine what leads people to believe what they happen to believe about euthanasia. All of these ar

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• Emilie Wang