Daniel I. Wikler is an American public health educator, philosopher, and medical ethicist. He is currently the Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Population Ethics and Professor of Ethics and Population Health in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. He is Director and a core faculty member in the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health. His current research interests are ethical issues in population and international health, including the allocation of health resources, health research involving human subjects, organ transplant ethics, and ethical dilemmas arising in public health practice, and he teaches several courses each year. He is a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
From 1972 to 1975, he was also awarded a Teaching Fellowship in the Department of Philosophy. He began his career working on natural language semantics at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and mathematics. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was professor of philosophy in the UW-Madison Department of Philosophy, professor in the Department of the History of Medicine's Program in Medical Ethics, and professor in the medical school of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, serving from 1975 to 2002. From 1980 to 1981, he served on the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine in Washington, D.C., as Staff Philosopher for Biomedical and Behavioral Research. He served as the first staff ethicist for the World Health Organization, and remains a consultant to several WHO programs. Prof. Wikler was co-founder and second president of the and has served on the advisory boards of the and the Pan American Health Organization Regional Program in Bioethics. While at the World Health Organization, he instituted an international collaboration among philosophers and economists on ethical, methodological, and philosophical issues raised by WHO's work in measurement of the global burden of disease and in developing methods for .
Wikler writes, lectures, and advises in bioethics and professional ethics, both internationally and in Greater Boston, including at Harvard. During the summers, he also attends and teaches at a summer program at Fondation Brocher | Accueil outside Geneva. He is considered a world expert on ethics of the medical definition of death, specifically related to the dead-donor rule with regard to organ transplantation. He serves on numerous Harvard University and other professional committees and advises several student groups, including the , sponsor in March 2008 of the National Undergraduate Bioethics Conference. Until 2010, Wikler was the co-director of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Program on Ethical Issues in Global Health Research, a program of both empirical and theoretical research on ethical issues in health research, particularly in developing countries. Versions of the course have been taught in over a dozen developing nations, including Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and UAE. The Program offered fellowships for scholars in developing countries and sponsored an intensive each year for an international clientele. A version of that program is now operated by Harvard Chan School's ORARC.
Wikler, D., "A crisis in medical professionalism: time for Flexner II". InDenis Arnold, ed., Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine, Cambridge University Press, 2009
Brock, D., Wikler, D., Ethical Challenges In Long-Term Funding For HIV/AIDS, Health Affairs 28, 2009, 1666-1677
Schmidt, H., Voigt, K., Wikler, D. Carrots, Sticks, and Health Care Reform — Problems with Wellness Incentives, New England Journal of Medicine, 2009
Cash, R., Wikler, D., Saxena, A., Capron, A. Casebook on Ethical Issues in International Health Research, Geneva: World Health Organization, 2010. Translated into five languages; second edition forthcoming.
