Toronto Bioethics Workshop

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto is 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.

We invite proposals for presentations on this theme. 'Bioethics' includes anything related to health, healthcare, health research, public health, research ethics, clinical ethics, neuroethics, and reproductive ethics. 

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.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 750 words to [email protected] by 11:59 pm Eastern on February 15th, 2025. Abstracts should be prepared for anonymous review. Each session will include 45 minutes for the presentation followed by 30 minutes of Q&A.