Medical Ethics, Philosophy & History
Public health and clinical care are continuously confronted with ethical questions, ranging from how to fairly allocate limited resources, to how emerging technologies reshape health practices, and to how research communities operate with scientific integrity and public accountability. Addressing these challenges requires more than practical solutions: it demands critical reflection on how health systems are organized, how scientific knowledge is produced, and how clinical relationships and professional responsibilities are shaped and enacted in clinical, research and public health settings. At the Medical Ethics, Philosophy and History of Medicine Programme, we study the ethical, philosophical, and historical dimensions of health care and biomedicine to better understand and guide this critical reflection.
Aims
By integrating normative and conceptual analysis with empirical research, we aim to contribute to responsible clinical practices and scientific conduct, as well as to just and sustainable health systems.
We study how emerging biomedical and digital technologies reshape clinical practices, professional responsibilities, and concepts of health and disease, and develop ethical frameworks to guide their responsible development and implementation and ensure alignment with patients’ and healthcare professionals’ needs and values. We examine how health systems can be organized to sustain just and equitable access to care, particularly in the face of scarcity and growing societal, financial and ecological pressures. And we analyze how scientific communities produce and govern knowledge, and how they function within democratic societies. Through this work, we contribute to the integrity, accountability, and societal embedding of biomedical research and innovation.
Education, advisory work, and ethics support
We provide teaching, training, and ethics support to (future) health care professionals and researchers, fostering critical reflection, careful reasoning, and awareness of professional and societal responsibilities. We teach ethics, philosophy, and history across all Erasmus MC curricula: from, ), Clinical Ethics, Learning How to Reason (Argumenteren kun je leren), and Ethical Leadership in Societal Health Crises in the medical bachelor’s and master’s programmes, to courses on the ethics and societal implications of new technologies in the clinical technology and nanobiology bachelor’s programmes, to This Thing Called Science in all five research master’s programmes, where students learn to reflect on their role and responsibilities as scientists.
Our Expertiseteam Ethiek facilitates moral case deliberation to assist clinical teams with decision-making about ethically complex patient care. Also, our team offers research integrity courses to PhD-candidates and Principal Investigators. In doing so, we support clinicians, biomedical researchers, and policy-makers in navigating complex moral questions and in implementing innovations in ways that safeguard quality of care, equity of access, and the integrity and democratic legitimacy of health care and science. By serving in advisory roles for national and international organizations and institutions, including the Dutch Health Council and the National Health Care Institute, our staff is actively involved in shaping national health policies.
Research and teaching priorities
- Ethics of Emerging Technologies
- Examine the ethical implications of new and emerging biomedical and digital technologies, and develop normative frameworks to guide the responsible design, implementation, and governance of these technologies in clinical or public health care settings, including screening programmes.
- Expensive Medications and Equitable Access
- Investigate ethical dilemmas arising in the context of increasing scarcity, and help devise fair access models for expensive medications, including cell and gene therapies, and guide allocation and prioritization decision-making.
- Moral Change in Medicine
- Examine how medical practices, professional norms, and societal values co-evolve over time, and use historical analysis to inform the critical evaluation and responsible transformation of present-day health care practices.
- Collective Action
- Analyze how health systems have historically been organized to address shared health needs, and how they can be reconfigured to ensure just and equitable access to care, with attention to both public health and planetary health.
- Classifications of Health and Disease
- Investigate how changing biomedical classifications, emerging (biomarker) technologies and research practices shape understandings of health, disease, patient identity, and the organization of health care.
- Science & Democracy
- Study how scientific and medical communities function within democratic societies, including the role of industry in shaping research agendas and knowledge production.
- Scientific Integrity
- Strengthen ethical standards, transparency, and accountability in the conduct and governance of biomedical research.
- Research Ethics
- Examine emerging ethical issues in clinical and biomedical research, and advance ethical frameworks for responsible research involving human participants, biospecimens, and personal or clinical data.
- Clinical Ethics
- Analyze ethical dilemmas arising in clinical care settings, help support clinical decision- or policy-making about ethically complex cases, and promote quality of care.
Staff
Hannie Aartsen
Assistent professor
Hannie Aartsen on LinkedInIneke Bolt
Assistent professor
Ineke Bolt on LinkedInTimo Bolt
Associate professor
Eline Bunnik
Associate professor
Eline Bunnik on LinkedInFloor Haalboom
Assistent professor
Floor Haalboom on LinkedInNoortje Jacobs
Associate professor
Krista Tromp
Assistent professor
Krista Tromp on LinkedIn