A Dash of This and a Pinch of That: The Role of Interdisciplinary Opportunities in Graduate Education

Arthur Caplan has argued that in order to practice bioethics, "you must know the law, you need to know the medical practice standards . . . you need to have some idea of the moral principles—both religious and secular—that you can draw upon to make an argument [and] you also need some sense of the cultural, social, and economic setting within which the medical care is being given" (Bourett 1997). Bioethics is a crossroads of many different, but intimately related, academic and nonacademic fields. One engaging in bioethics work—be it clinical consultation, academic research, or public-policy development— benefits greatly from a working understanding of the information and tools for analysis located in these disciplines. It is my view that the interdisciplinary educational opportunities provided by graduate programs in bioethics and the medical humanities are essential to the development of one's ability to navigate the complicated issues omnipresent in medical ethics.

The multidisciplinary nature of bioethics was one of the main features that first drew me to pursue graduate work in this field. In fact, my decision to apply to the University of Pennsylvania's Masters of Bioethics program was largely motivated by the program's interdisciplinary course requirements. At Penn, students are required to take a proseminar that introduces students to the different approaches to ethical issues; an ethical theory course; a philosophy course; a history, sociology, or anthropology course; a policy course; and, for those without a lot of clinical experience, a clinical ethics course. In these courses one is introduced to research methods and analytic tools unique to each of these discipline. Research projects and in-class presentations encourage students to consider the ethical problems through the lens of the theoretical framework of that field.

Interdisciplinary coursework is a real asset to those hoping to pursue a career in bioethics. Some of the most provocative and interesting research currently in the field of bioethics engages multidisciplinary approaches to complex issues. Coursework that covers a wide range of theoretical approaches provides students with the necessary skills to explore these issues from many angles and aids them in coming up with creative solutions that might not be apparent to one considering the problem from a single theoretical framework. Taking courses in these different fields teaches the students how to formulate questions from the perspective of one in that discipline, how to read the work of others in the field critically, how to analyze the particulars of the ethical problem being considered, and how to utilize the information obtained.

I have attended two very different programs with a focus in bioethics—the University of Pennsylvania's program already mentioned and Michigan State University's (MSU) philosophy Ph.D. program. The latter is primarily a philosophy program with the majority of its requirements being philosophy courses. The interdisciplinary educational opportunities are largely not the result of taking courses in different areas, though this option is available for students when appropriate. Rather those students focusing their philosophical studies on bioethics are exposed to the approaches of different disciplines in their seminar work in bioethics. Philosophy seminars on the topic of bioethics are taught by faculty who recognize the value of exposing students to interdisciplinary approaches. For example, a course on the topic of consciousness included readings from anthropological, sociological, medical, historical, and philosophical sources. This exposure helped to improve the students' critical-thinking skills and broadened their perception of the range of questions embedded in this topic.

In a seminar on narrative ethics the students were required to participate in a readers' theater of Margaret Edson's play Wit (1999). Students were able to explore the intersection between narrative theory from both philosophical and theatrical perspectives. In the readers' theater I portrayed Vivian Bearing, a successful professor of seventeenth-century poetry coping with her diagnosis of stage-four metastatic...