Patrick Smith

Recent calls to address racism in bioethics reflect a sense of urgency to mitigate the lethal effects of a lack of action. While the field was catalyzed largely in response to pivotal events deeply rooted in racism and other structures of oppression embedded in research and health care, it has failed to center racial justice in its scholarship, pedagogy, advocacy, and practice, and neglected to integrate anti-racism as a central consideration. Academic bioethics programs play a key role in determining the field’s norms and practices, including methodologies, funding priorities, and professional networks that bear on equity, inclusion, and epistemic justice. This article describes recommendations from the Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force commissioned by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors to prioritize and strengthen anti-racist practices in bioethics programmatic endeavors and to evaluate and develop specific goals to advance REDI.

Collaboration between the arts and health sectors is gaining momentum. Artists are contributing significantly to public health efforts such as vaccine confidence campaigns. Artists and the arts are well positioned to contribute to the social conditions needed to build trust in the health sector. Health professionals, organizations, and institutions should recognize not only the power that can be derived from the insights, artefacts, and expertise of artists and the arts to create the conditions that make trust possible. The health sector must also recognize that, while it can gain much from partnership with artists, artists risk much—namely, the public's trust—when they are in such partnerships. This essay unpacks these claims and considers the care and ethical considerations that must be brought to these partnerships to yield constructive pathways for ethical collaboration as well as for both establishing public trust and continuing to hold the health care profession accountable for becoming more trustworthy.