Daniel Wikler, Ph.D. Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health, Harvard School of Public Health

Plenary Speaker Topic: Bioethics and Global Health: New Issues, New Actions

For most of its relatively brief history, bioethics was concerned with the ethics of clinical medicine, as practiced in middle-class settings in the richest countries. The debates were about euthanasia, informed consent, genetic counseling, and many other dimensions of these doctor-patient relationships. In more recent times, attention has shifted to how society should respond to advances in biomedical science and biotechnology, including stem cells and cloning. But perhaps these were not the most important issues that bioethics might have addressed – though they were all important. For one thing, these debates were mostly about the concerns of a minority of the globes people. The greater numbers living in poverty, much more heavily burdened by disease, had different problems. For another, the focus in most of these discussions was the fate of the individual patient. But ethical questions about health arise also at the population level. Health disparities; priority-setting among competing health needs; and numerous other issues bear on the wellbeing of entire populations and their resolution affects what happens to nations and peoples. We are entering the period of population-level and global bioethics, a novel set of challenges, requiring new intellectual resources; and one that can make a contribution to global justice.

Panel Moderator - Medical Ethics

Seminar TopicDilemmas of Health Resource Allocation
Deciding how to allocate resources for health requires us to establish priorities among health needs under resource constraints. These problems are unavoidable, universal, and highly varied; but most involve variations on a small number of central themes. In this seminar, participants will join Prof. Wikler in responding to a series of health resource allocation dilemmas, each of which is distilled from cases that often recur in health systems in developing countries, where resource constraints are most severe.

To learn more about Dr. Daniel Wikler click here.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/daniel-wikler/