BROADENING EDUCATION IN BIOETHICS

Bioethics education apparently is a sexy topic nowadays. In April 2012 the Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education, a predominantly American group of bioethicists, is organizing its second conference in Paris, France. In the same month, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC hosts an ethics education conference examining the medical experiments in Tuskegee and Guatemala. European scholars are united in the European Union funded project ‘Globalising European Bioethics Education’. The Asia–Pacific School of Ethics is having bi-annual meetings to examine and evaluate bioethics education in the region. In September 2012 another conference will take place in Israel, focused on exchange of experiences in bioethics education.

A major event last year was the establishment of the International Association for Education in Ethics (IAEE), a non-profit organization with the aims (a) to enhance and expand the teaching of ethics at national, regional and international levels, (b) to exchange and analyze experiences with the teaching of ethics in various educational settings, (c) to promote the development of knowledge and methods of ethics education, and (d) to function as a global centre of contact for experts in this field, and to promote contact between the members from countries around the world. The establishment of IAEE was in fact a logical outcome of the Ethics Education Program of UNESCO, launched in 2004 (Ten Have 2008).

In the context of this program, ethics teaching programs have been identified and described, initially in Central and Eastern Europe, the Arab region, the Mediterranean region, and Africa. Currently, 235 teaching programs have been validated and entered into the UNESCO Global Ethics Observatory database, covering 43 countries. In order to analyze the programs in sometimes very different educational settings UNESCO organized regional meetings of the instructors of those programs. Such meetings took place in Budapest (October 2004), Moscow (January 2005), Split (November 2005), Muscat (November 2006), Istanbul (March 2007), Marrakesh (June 2008), Abidjan (December 2008), Dakar (March 2009) and Kinshasa (July 2009). The advantage of the UNESCO Global Ethics Observatory is that for the first time detailed information concerning each teaching programs is available in comparative format.

Governmental policy-makers, administrators in universities and academies of science, and even bioethics experts themselves do not often have adequate information about what exists and what is lacking in the field of bioethics education. It is therefore necessary to provide and exchange accurate information about existing ethics programs so that the substance and structure of each program can be examined and various programs analyzed and compared.

The regional meetings of ethics experts also demonstrated two characteristics of bioethics education. One common finding was the vulnerability of ethics teaching programs. Often, the programs are taught by enthusiastic teachers but there is no firm institutional basis, nor any systematic effort to create a future generation of ethics teachers. The second finding was that bioethics teachers do not communicate.

They often have no idea what their colleagues in the same and neighboring countries are teaching. It seems that everybody is inventing the wheel anew. Information about teaching programs is managed as classified material. The idea that one might perhaps learn something from colleagues and possibly improve teaching programs is obviously not widespread.