Undergraduate - UnitATS1264 - Biotechnology, justice and the law

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2012 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered, or view unit timetables.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Offered	Clayton Second semester 2012 (Day) South Africa Second semester 2012 (Day)
Coordinator(s)	Clayton - Dr Michael Selgelid

Notes

Previously coded CHB1020

Synopsis

The unit investigates how the law and public policy should respond to advances in medicine and biotechnology and covers: whether employers and insurance companies should be permitted to discriminate among applicants on the basis of their genetic profile; whether the law should protect individuals' genetic privacy or whether we have a duty to share our genetic knowledge; whether the law should act paternalistically to prevent people from harming themselves; whether people who are partly responsible for their own bad health should receive lower priority of care in hospitals, or whether advances in knowledge in the biological bases for behaviour give us reason to doubt individual responsibility.

Outcomes

On successfully completing this unit, students will have:

familiarity with the key philosophical approaches to discrimination, autonomy, responsibility and equality as they apply to debates within bioethics;
skills enabling them to think critically about key ethical, policy and legal issues raised by recent advances in medicine and biotechnology;
the ability to make informed judgements about those ethical, policy and legal issues.