Daniel Brudney Speaks on Medical Ethics at Peking University

All day
Peking University Health Science Center

Brudney summarizes his Beijing talk on medical ethics:

‘In the United States (and other countries) by law any patient who is deemed to “have decisional capacity” may accept the treatment recommended by her medical team – or she may reject it.  And she may reject the recommended treatment even if doing so means that she will die, and even if rejecting the treatment seems to be foolish.  Many people think that this legal arrangement is clearly morally proper.  I, too, think it is morally proper, but I also think it is not at all clear why it is morally proper.  Is it because the patient always knows best?  That seems unlikely.  Is it because we ought to respect the patient’s “autonomy”?  What does that mean?  Anyway, is autonomy — whatever it is — really more important than life itself?  In this talk, I hope to lead you through my own puzzlement about this issue.  Perhaps, in the end, you will share it.’

Daniel Brudney is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College, Associate Faculty in the Divinity School, Associate Faculty at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and co-chair of the Human Rights Program. Brudney writes and teaches in political philosophy, philosophy and literature, bioethics and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Harvard, 1998).  During 2014-15, Brudney is the Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Philosophy. Brudney has visited Beijing before, in April 2013, when he spoke on at the University of Chicago Center on  “The Ideal of the Social Contract in Western Philosophy.”