Medical Ethics and Law

We welcome applications from people with a professional or other serious interest in Medical Ethics and Law, including (but not limited to) doctors, nurses, lawyers, health care managers, intercalating medical students, radiographers, chaplains, charity and voluntary workers, social workers, hospice directors, medical and pharmaceutical researchers, philosophers, dentists, veterinary practitioners and health care educators. While the programme is designed to be accessible to healthcare professionals in full-time work, it is open to anyone who is suitably qualified and who can demonstrate sufficient academic aptitude. The programme has increasingly attracted recent graduates who wish either to build on previous study in law or ethics or to develop their studies in a new direction. It can provide a foundation for study at doctoral level for those interested in doing so.

Undertaking an MA in ethics will not give you a list of answers to moral problems. The moral problems worth looking at are all hard – there are no easy answers. What our programme can do is help you to work out answers for yourself, answers that are worth having because they are based on the best ethical thinking and reasoning we can manage, answers you can justify to yourself and others. The programme will introduce you to a variety of rival moral theories - all of which have their strengths and their weaknesses - as well as providing you with a range of analytical tools with which to assess different ethical and legal claims. It will also help you to communicate ethical and legal arguments to others in a clearer way.

Although ethical issues are rarely out of the headlines, much public ‘debate' about ethics in the media is (with occasional honourable exceptions) of very poor quality. It often consists of 'sound-bite' rhetorical assertions followed by counter-assertions, without any real examination of the ethical reasons for either position. Our courses will help you to construct, categorise and criticise different ethical arguments and to spot common fallacies. As well as critiquing others' arguments you will have plenty of opportunity to practise putting forward your own arguments in classroom discussion as well as in your written assessments. Ethics at Keele is a participatory activity, not a spectator sport!