Intellectual Statement of Purpose

I began my individualized major in Bioethics out of sheer interest in the topics of this
subject area, as well as its relevance to my goal of becoming a physician. My objective was to
learn about ethical issues in the health sciences (such as euthanasia, abortion, and informed
consent), and to pick up the critical reasoning skills needed to navigate through these matters as
they appear within the hospital or clinic.
Since pursuing this highly interdisciplinary field, not only have I learned about these
issues, but the very way in which I think about these matters as ethical issues has changed. In
other words, my intellectual horizons and critical thinking skills have expanded so significantly
that I have learned to challenge the very way in which Bioethical issues are framed. I have also
begun to understand the way in which such problems can have broader socio-historical or
political roots, and how Western biomedicine and even the field of Bioethics itself can serve to
obscure the systemic causes of these ethical issues.
Frequently, for instance, ethical issues within medical settings are framed by Bioethicists
as dilemmas between individual doctors and their patients, and that such dilemmas can be
solved with simple solutions that reconcile the moral responsibility of the physician and the
agency of the patient. This, in particular, is the mode of thinking used in hospital ethics
committees or Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), two kinds of committees whose prominence
in medical centers is due to campaigns by Bioethicists in the 1960s and 70s. Framing issues in
this way, however, ignores the way in which such ethical issues can be the result of broader
societal, political, and historical problems. These may include the presence of a dysfunctional
public health system, systemic inequalities that lead to the unequal distribution of health care or
wealth throughout a society, a troublesome economic system rooted in exploitative capitalist

practices of certain segments of the population, or even a combination of these factors. Such
problems, in turn, can be shaped by ideologies like capitalism that can provide doctrines for the
troubling organization of entire populations. By obscuring these deeper issues facing a nation or
society in favor of a narrow doctor-patient focus, in addition, hospital ethics committees and
other Bioethics organizations can derail efforts to reform the healthcare system as a whole.
Because these committees and IRBs have also functioned as bureaucratic mechanisms for
getting research published as fast as possible and providing legal protection for doctors,
Bioethics has historically functioned as an obstacle against greater societal changes.
In making these discoveries through my study of Bioethics, I have learned if I am to
pursue a career in medicine and encounter such problems in the future, it is not enough for me to
examine these problems as pertaining only to myself and my patients. Rather, I must utilize a
critical perspective that contextualizes such problems within the political, economic, societal,
and historical realities shaping my practice, and understand when I can no longer penetrate such
problems as a doctor, but as an intellectual engaging with the broader public.