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Courses / Undergraduate / PHIL

PHIL 118CNS

Medical Ethics

Jennifer Hawkins

Description from DukeHub

Examination of ethical issues in the practice of medicine. Course examines the concepts of well-being, health, and disease; patient autonomy; the ethics of informed consent; problems assessing decision-making capacity; ethics of making decisions for incompetent patients; ethical issues of advance directives; the ethics of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia. Course also looks at ethical dimensions of decision-making for particular vulnerable groups: elderly dementia patients, permanently unconscious patients, and people with various disabilities. The focus is on clinical medicine, but the course serves also as a foundation for further study in bioethics.

Skills

  • clinicaldescription: "patient" and 4 more

AI-resilient: 3 of 5

  • No: Physical, lab or field work
  • Yes: Live work with people · "patient"
  • Yes: Judgment someone is accountable for · "ethics"
  • No: A craft you practice with your hands or body
  • Yes: Small, in-person format · seminar, 15 seats per section

The checks lean on Microsoft Research, Working with AI (2025), which found generative AI applies least to physical work and hands-on work with people. A signal, not a promise. How the score works

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