NYU Bioethics Master's Program: Life, Health & Environment

The New York University Master's Program in Bioethics: Life, Health & Environment promotes a broad conception of Bioethics encompassing both medical and environmental ethics through conferences, workshops, public lectures, and graduate courses. Based in Arts and Science, it draws on courses as well on faculty affiliates and programs in the schools of Medicine, Law, Education, and Public Service.

Although still taught separately in most universities, Medical Ethics and Environmental Ethics have in recent years grown closer in concerns and concepts. Initially focused on doctors, patients, and research subjects, medical ethicists have increasingly taken up social issues of access to healthcare, drug testing and distribution, and spread of disease on both local and transnational scales. Once focused on preservation of wilderness, natural resources, and biodiversity, environmental ethicists are more and more concerned with the “built environment” and its impacts on human health and wellbeing.

Likewise, the two fields have advanced moral principles and concepts similar enough to invite close comparison—for example, “Above all do no harm” with the Precautionary Principle; the “sanctity” of human life with the “intrinsic value” of non-human life; just distribution of healthcare with just distribution of environmental burdens; personal responsibility for individual health with collective responsibility for “environmental health.”