This article argues that teaching medical and nursing students health care ethics in an interdisciplinary setting is beneficial for them. Doing so produces an education that is theoretically more consistent with the goals of health care ethics, can help to reduce moral stress and burnout, and can improve patient care. Based on a literature review, theoretical arguments and individual observation, this article will show that the benefits of interdisciplinary education, specifically in ethics, outweigh the difficulties many schools may have in developing such courses.

In Engelhardt's secular bioethics, moral obligations derive from contracts and agreements between rational persons, and no infants or children and few adolescents meet Engelhardt's requirements for being a rational person. This is a problem, as one cannot have any direct secular moral obligations toward nonpersons such as infants and adolescents. The Engelhardtian concepts of ownership, indenture, and social personhood, which are meant to allow the theory to accommodate children and adolescents adequately, fail to give an Engelhardtian any actual means of determining the right action to take in difficult cases, even on his or her own terms. Thus, the theory is incapable of determining the morally correct action to take in cases involving children and therefore is unhelpful in dealing with moral questions involving children.

Since the Netherlands produced the Groningen protocol describing the methods to be used for pediatric euthanasia and Belgium passed laws authorizing euthanasia for children who consent to it, the issue of pediatric euthanasia has become a relevant topic to discuss. Most rejections of pediatric euthanasia fall into 1 or more of 3 categories, each of which has problems. This article shows how several recent arguments against pediatric euthanasia fail to prove that pediatric euthanasia is unacceptable. It does not follow from this that the practice is permissible but rather that if one is to reject such a practice, stronger arguments will need to be made, especially in countries where adult euthanasia or assisted suicide is already permitted.

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