Toronto Bioethics Workshop

The Department of Philosophy and the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto are pleased to announce the second annual Toronto Bioethics Workshop, taking place Friday, May 23rd and Saturday, May 24th at the St. George (downtown) campus of the University of Toronto.

The theme of this year's workshop is public bioethics. Many philosophers have written about bioethics for a public audience, including Peter Singer, Amy Gutmann, Françoise Baylis, and Michael Sandel, among many others. This work is characterized by being philosophically rich and directly applicable to a contemporary bioethical problem the public cares about (or ought to care about). The problem can be narrow (e.g., how well is some feature of medical assistance in dying working?) or broad (e.g., Sandel's essay, "The Case Against Perfection", in The Atlantic, or Baylis's book Altered Inheritance). This work isn't simply popularizing views that are already accepted by some bioethicists. Instead, it advances new ideas. Ambitious ideas are welcome. For a bioethics-adjacent example, see Jeff McMahan's New York Times essay "The Meat Eaters", in which he argues that eliminating meat-eating animals could be ethically acceptable.

The keynote speaker for the workshop will be Katie Engelhart, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who writes about medicine and ethics as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She is also the author of The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die.

Friday, May 23rd

1:00 pm–2:15 pm: Peter Zuk – "Mental Privacy, Self-Expression, and Hermeneutical Injustice"

2:30 pm–3:45 pm: Lukas Meier – "Your Automated Clinical Ethicist Will See You Now"

4:00 pm–5:15 pm: Adelle Goldenberg – "A Pro-Choice, Anti-Ableist Abortion Politics"

Saturday, May 24th

9:00 am–10:15 am: Mark Ornelas & Carmen Taylor – "Treating Sickle Cell Disease: An ethical case study for base-pair gene editing"

10:30 am–11:45 am: Wayne Sumner – "What's so Special about Medically Assisted Dying?"

11:45 am–1:15 pm: Lunch

1:15 pm–2:30 pm: Andy Baldassarre – "Pain Management as a Failed Proxy for Wellbeing"

2:45 pm–4:00 pm: Prabhpal Singh – "Resisting Commonsense and Taking Abortion Rights Seriously"

4:15 pm–5:45 pm: Katie Engelhart – "The Moral of the Story: Reporting from the Frontline of Bioethics"

Please RSVP here: https://forms.gle/5GguAvi9bGoyAFQ67