The Master Degree in Bioethics of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (FMUL), which has been taught for over a decade, is undoubtedly a major reference in bioethical education in Portugal. On the one hand, its main characteristics are scientific and pedagogical rigour and, on the other, it offers a multidisciplinary, broad, up to date, and attentive approach to ethical issues. Despite being taught at a Faculty of Medicine, it does not offer a strictly clinical perspective of ethical issues, favouring, instead, a multifaceted view of bioethics.

The structure of the degree enables consistent and multidisciplinary learning of bioethics. While being taught by Faculty lecturers, several external renowned lecturers and experts in various fields from national and international universities are invited to teach every year in all subjects of the degree.

The degree aims to train health professionals interested in this area and who have to deal with ethical issues on an everyday basis. For this reason, it has students with diverse backgrounds, which enhances the ethical debate in the sessions, encouraging several viewpoints on the same topic.

The degree is taught in a welcoming environment conducive to learning and discussion. The library of the Bioethics Centre provides students with vast and rich bibliography that enable them to prepare for assessment and conduct their master dissertations.

In addition to having taught me how to identify, reflect on, and deal with ethical issues that intersect with medicine, this master caused a “Copernican revolution” on me, as it placed the subject, that is, the human being, at the centre of the approach to bioethics, not the object. It taught me how to reflect and think of medicine in a radically different way: one issue that disturbed right from the beginning stemmed from the fact that bioethics is a reflection about which, in most cases, one has to make a decision; hence, a lecturer of this degree dubs it “science of the abyss”. The decision is something that, in bioethics, “is always there”.

I cannot end without writing about my experience of writing the dissertation1, qualitative in nature, where my initial (difficult) question was: why do we decide differently? What is the role of values in Bioethics? In science one does not always answer immediately to the questions about which we want an answer; sometimes, in an attempt to answer our own question, we raise other questions that are required to be able to answer the first one. This was undoubtedly my “magna” and unforgettable experience of the Master Degree in Bioethics of FMUL.
António J. Marques dos Santos
Internal Evaluation and Quality Assurance
Collaborating with the Bioethics Centre since 2009
antoniosantos@fm.ul.pt

1The master dissertation can be acceded at here