M.A. in Health Care Ethics: How Is Our Program Special?
For more than 15 years, Loyola has offered one of the very few graduate level programs that explores health care ethics simultaneously in its theory and in its very practical applications. Some programs emphasize, almost exclusively, a hands-on approach. In our way of thinking, this risks reducing health care ethics to a kind of unreflective craft. We have chosen here at Loyola to strive for a creative and responsible balance between some very practical kinds of learning about health care ethics and some more reflective learning about moral theory, moral reasoning, and intellectual and culture presuppositions that may underlie our everyday, unreflective moral decision-making. The Programs also take great advantage of what graduate seminars can offer, in their face-to-face encounters between students and faculty (and students and students) in a lively learning community.
A large number of Loyola's large philosophy faculty have a role in the graduate offerings in applied and theoretical moral philosophy, and a number of these play a central role in the health care ethics program. Currently four faculty are heavily committed to teaching and research in health care ethics, and other faculty are part of the program by offering courses in medical ethics, moral theory, and the history of ethics.
Classes are made up of students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Among our students have been physicians, nurses, chaplains, lawyers, pharmacists, social workers, administrators, dietitians, and philosophers. This diversity of past experiences, insights and perspectives, when brought to the seminar tables, enriches and enlivens the examination and discussion of ethical theories and their application to specific cases and public policy.
