Can Legal Theory Save the Life of Healthcare Ethics?

Full Title: Can Legal Theory Save the Life of Healthcare Ethics? A chat about the practice of practising healthcare ethicists

Speaker:

Dr. Ann M. Heesters, MA, PhD (Phil.)
Senior Director, Department of Clinical and Organizational Ethics, UHN
Education Investigator 2, TIER (The Institute for Education Research)
Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
Member, Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto

Jason Lesandrini, FACHE, LPEC, HEC-C
AVP Ethics, Advance Care Planning and Spiritual Health
Wellstar Development Center

Abstract

Although ethics consultation has had a place in healthcare for many decades, the nature of the work is not well understood by many of its critics as well as its defenders. Practising Healthcare Ethicists (PHEs) have been described as compromised and ineffectual, politicised and undemocratic, and their promise to offer sound advice has been deemed irredeemably incoherent in the context of value pluralism. In a recent book, Ann Heesters has argued that attention to debates familiar to legal theorists (the relationship between law and morality, and the supposed tension between democracy, and the role of an expert judiciary) can help PHEs to engage critics with a renewed confidence and some fresh approaches to perennial, and hitherto unproductive, arguments.

Jason Lesandrini, a PHE, who is also a health care executive and AVP of Ethics in a large American Healthcare system will be joining Ann in a conversation about these claims, and will offer a glimpse into his own reasons for believing that there is reason for optimism about the future of the field.

Additional Details:

The event is free and is open to the general public.

The direct link to the seminar will be sent out to registered participants 2 hours before the event. The JCB Bioethics Seminars are now being live-streamed to our YouTube channel. If you don’t receive the link 2 hours before the event, please head over there and click on the live stream. Subscribe to our channel to receive notices of upcoming events.

Questions?

Please email Terry Yuen, jcb.ea@utoronto.ca.