Teaching Christian Health Care Ethics

One unique challenge in teaching Christian health care ethics involves helping students to appreciate the delicate context of clinical decision-making scenarios. Another challenge involves helping students to empathize with the perspectives and appreciate the expertise of various parties. Finally, students need clear examples of the dangers of reductive medical paradigms. Toward these goals, mock clinical ethics consultations can help students to value respectful ethical discourse and to build necessary virtues for effectively engaging in such dialogue, such as humility, gentleness, and prudence. The goal of mock clinical ethics consultations is to achieve deeper understanding of the moral dimensions of an assigned scenario and the human relationships at stake. This practice can serve as a model for other classroom activities in broad fields of Christian ethics that invite students to cultivate virtues for charitable dialogue, to apply ethical analysis to concrete scenarios, and to consider the relationship of class content to personal vocation.