"Debate 2: euthanasia" Prof Julian Savulescu and Prof Charles Camosy

Past Event

Date
19 October 2012, 5:00pm - 6:30pm

Location
Graduate Training Room
Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG

This debate is hosted by the Institute for Science and Ethics, an Oxford Martin School Institute and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

Title: "The Possibility of Religious-Secular Ethical Engagement: Euthanasia"

Speakers:

  • Professor Charles Camosy, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics, Fordham University
  • Professor Julian Savulescu, Director, Institute for Science and Ethics, Oxford Martin School

Biographies:

  • Charlie Camosy is Ast. Professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University, where he has been since finishing his PhD in theology at Notre Dame in 2008. His published articles have come from the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, the Journal of the Catholic Health Association, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and Commonweal Magazine. His book Too Expensive to Treat?--Finitude, Tragedy, and the Neonatal ICU (Eerdmans, 2010) won second place in the 2011 Catholic Media Association awards in the 'social issues’ category. Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization was released with Cambridge University Press in May of 2012. Camosy was recently selected for the international working group "Contending Modernities" which will try to bring secular liberalism, Catholicism, and Islam into dialogue about various difficult issues in the Western public sphere. He is also the founder and co-director of the Catholic Conversation Project and a member of the ethics committee at the Children's Hospital of New York.
  • Julian Savulescu is Director of the Institute for Science and Ethics, one of the 10 founding Institutes within the Oxford Martin School and holds the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford. He directs the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics within the Faculty of Philosophy, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, which is one of three strategic centres in biomedical ethics in the UK funded by the Wellcome Trust. He In 2009 he was awarded a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant on Cognitive Science and Religious Conflict.
    He is a recognised world leader in the field of practical ethics. He is the author of over 290 publications and has given over 240 international presentations. In 2009, he was awarded the title of Monash Distinguished Alumni for outstanding achievement, and was selected as the winner of the ‘Thinkers’ category of The Australian’s Top 100 Emerging Leaders awards, presented by the Prime Minister at Parliament House. He has presented at conferences across the world including the World Economic Forum at Davos (2009) and the Mont Pelerin Society’s Annual Meeting in Tokyo in 2008. Distinguished lectures include the Tanner Lectures (Oxford, 2009), the Crown Lectures (Duke, 2008), the Herbert Spencer Lectures. He was the Australian Society for Medical Research’s (ASMR) National Lecturer and Medallist in 2005 and presented to the Royal Institution in 2009. He has made numerous appearances on TV, radio and in the print media, including on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope and various primetime national news broadcasts. Before becoming a philosopher, he trained as a medical doctor and worked in genetics. One of his visions for the development of applied ethics is to lead informed debate for both the public and for medical practitioners. In 2010, he was one of the leading commentators in the media regarding the ethical issues arising from the the creation of the first living cell from synthetic materials (dubbed ‘Synthia’) by Craig Venter in the US. His co-authored paper ‘Synthetic Biology and the Ethics of Knowledge’ (later published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, November, 2010) was included in the Obama Bioethics Commission Briefing Book for the meeting of the U.S. Presidential Commission on Bioethics, July 2010.