PHIL 422: Honors Seminar

PHIL 422-001: Migration, Ethics, and Health
(Fall 2025)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T

Horizon Hall 3014

View the schedule of classes

Section Information for Fall 2025

We live in an age of extreme mobility. While migration has been a human constant, the past
decade has brought an unprecedented number of migrants fleeing uninhabitable conditions in the
countries or regions where they have been living. These people, displaced by famine, drought,
disease, armed conflict, persecution or some layered combination, often endure these conditions
only to find themselves in another set of hostile circumstances as they try to find their way
toward safety, at least, and a life of thriving at best. This class examines forced migration and
health ethics, considering how the health of people who feel forced to migrate is threatened and
identifying the ethical concerns that arise for them as they move from place to place. We will
take a journey approach and start with departure, consider detention and encampment, arrival
and integration in destination countries, analyzing the cultural norms, political, economic, social
policies, and institutional structures encountered along the way that thwart health and ethical
treatment of migrants, raising concerns about principles like respect for human dignity,
autonomy, and privacy. We will be focusing, above all on justice, and the ways in which
structural injustice undermines or eliminates the potential for some people to live a healthy life.
The final section of the course will critically examine arguments concerning responsibilities for
health justice for migrants, for governments and government personnel, international
humanitarian organizations and their staff, health professionals, and civil society. 

Course Information from the University Catalog