The University of California, Irvine Center for Health Ethics was created to explore and address important, challenging, and timely ethical issues related to the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities, and populations. The Center will examine such concepts as health equity, social justice, and human flourishing, and consider what socioeconomic structures and institutions are needed to address existing health disparities and inequities. The Center will also support critical analysis of different modes of moral reflection, and consider how such frameworks help us understand particular health practices and policies.
Many of the earliest health-focused ethics centers established in the U.S. prioritized studying topics falling within the scope of medical ethics, clinical ethics, and the ethics of biomedical research. Acknowledging the valuable contributions early medical ethicists made in such domains as moral dimensions of end-of-life care and the ethics of clinical research, this orientation toward ethical controversies situated in clinical settings sometimes resulted in ethics scholars giving only limited consideration to broader social, political, and economic determinants of human health. Over time, the boundaries of moral reflection expanded with the gradual emergence of such areas as public health ethics, global health ethics, health and human rights, and environmental bioethics. The UCI Center for Health Ethics will strive to contribute to this widening of the moral imagination. The Center’s focus on health ethics is informed by an understanding of individual health, public health, population health, and global health as shaped by powerful social, economic, political, cultural, historical, and commercial factors. Such factors include histories of racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, and other forms of oppression, marginalization, and exclusion. In many cases, such histories continue to shape contemporary lives, social structures, and communities.
To provide several examples of general areas of inquiry the Center for Health Ethics will support, the Center will serve as a conversation space and research hub for scholars addressing such subjects as the ethics of public health and public health policy, global health ethics, and ethical, legal, and social issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some examples of additional topics the Center will address include:
- responsible health communication and efforts to address health-related misinformation and disinformation;
- understandings of health equity in public health and other fields;
- ethical, legal, and social dimensions of emerging health technologies such as stem cell therapies, regenerative medicine, and gene editing;
- ethical dimensions of efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the health sciences and health professions and contemporary challenges to making such fields and professions more inclusive and accessible;
- hyperbole, promissory rhetoric, and the responsible development of health technologies;
- moral dimensions of community-based participatory research and other forms of collaborative, community-situated health scholarship;
- ethical applications, misuses, and abuses of artificial intelligence/machine learning tools in health research and health care.
The Center for Health Ethics is guided by a pluralistic and inclusive approach to scholarship, critical reflection, and public engagement. Center members bring to research, debate, and public engagement activities a variety of theories and methodologies from public health, the social sciences, the humanities, nursing, and other fields.
Reflecting its initial establishment as a School-based Center situated within UCI’s Program in Public Health, approximately half of the Center’s founding faculty members have their academic homes in one or more of UCI’s four public health departments. Other members of the Center are based in the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Humanities, School of Social Sciences, or School of Social Ecology. All Schools within UCI’s College of Health Sciences are represented by founding faculty members. Further recruitment of Center faculty members will proceed within the Program in Public Health, UCI’s College of Health Sciences, and the wider UCI academic community.
The Center for Health Ethics will support numerous activities intended to promote moral reflection related to human health and wellbeing. For example, the Center will host presentations featuring invited speakers, respond to emerging developments by organizing topical public events, welcome visiting scholars engaged in health ethics-related research, support the development of health ethics research initiatives, and foster the creation of new health ethics-focused educational offerings.