Events

“Powerful new genetic tools allow scientists to alter the DNA of any organism—with tests on human embryos already underway. Even more ambitious, synthetic biologists on the verge of creating the genetic material for a living organism from scratch are setting their long-term sites on fashioning a fully synthetic human genome. With bold promises of disease resistance and controlling human evolution, this explosive progress has ignited ethical debate. As we rewrite our code of life, how will we revise the code we live by?”

On Saturday June 4th, NYU Center for Bioethics Director S. Matthew Liao will be joining a panel of distinguished scientists and bioethicists at the NYU Global Center’s Grand Hall for Salon: Life in Our Image – the Ethics of Altering the Human Genome.

Meet the Panelists:

A widespread view in moral psychology holds that empathy and sympathy play key roles in morality and in prosocial and altruistic actions. Recently, some psychologists and philosophers have challenged this trend, arguing that empathy does not play a foundational or causal role in morality. The anti-empathic view has two major theses. First: empathy is not a necessary precondition for moral approval and disapproval. Second: empathy is prone to biases that render it potentially harmful and frequently produce morally undesirable results. The counterintuitive conclusions are that empathy plays no essential role in morality and that it interferes negatively with the ends of morality; therefore, it should not be cultivated.

In this talk Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira will argue against both theses. First, Dr. Passos-Ferreira will argue that empathy plays a necessary role in human moral development, contending that empathy – understood either as vicarious sharing of emotion or as affective perspective shifting through simulation and imaginative reconstruction – is fundamental to the development of moral agency. The absence or deficiency of these processes (e.g., in autistic and psychopathic people) leads to the absence or deficiency of a crucial element of our morality. Second, Dr. Passos-Ferreira will argue that empathy is desirable as a moral emotion and, there is a moral benefit associated with empathic feelings. Dr. Passos-Ferreira will also argue that there are certain morally demanding situations in which empathy is our best guide to moral judgment.
 

Claudia Passos-Ferreira is a philosopher and a clinical psychologist.  She studied psychology at Rio de Janeiro State University and obtained a Ph.D in Public Health in 2005.  She has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Social Medicine Institute at UERJ where she taught bioethics and issues in neuroscience, psychopathology and psychoanalysis.  She has also been a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Rio de Janeiro Federal University, working on the interdisciplinary project “Ethics and Biotechnologies” as well as on an international project on cross-cultural moral development. She is now pursuing a second Ph.D. in philosophy, focusing on the development of consciousness, self-consciousness, and moral agency in children.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2016
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Location TBD

The NYU Center for Bioethics invites you to Minimum Core Obligations: Human Rights in the Here and Now, a talk presenting research carried out by Professor John Tasioulas as a consultant to the World Bank on the notion of the ‘minimum core obligations’ associated with economic, social and cultural human rights, such as the rights to education and health. The idea of minimum core obligations, which is a nascent doctrine in international human rights law, is heavily contested both as to its meaning and utility.

Professor Tasioulas offers an account of the concept of  minimum core obligations as those obligations associated with a human right that must be immediately fully complied with by all states. They are, in that sense, obligations to which the doctrine of ‘progressive realization’ is inapplicable. Professor Tasioulas distinguishes this understanding of the minimum core from interpretations that add extra elements, such as justiciability, non-derogability or special normative grounding. Having set out the concept of a minimum core obligation, he then explains the value of this concept as a response to the problem of priority-setting when implementing human rights obligations. He also offers guidelines for determining the content of minimum core obligations, taking as an illustration the treatment of the human right to health.

The paper concludes by addressing three major challenges: (a) is the minimum core the same for all states, or should it vary in light of their different resource levels? (b) if the minimum core is invariant across states, does this render it objectionably  insensitive to important contextual differences? and (c) is the recognition of a ‘minimum core’ of human rights obligations potentially counter-productive in practice insofar as it poses a risk of unduly downgrading the importance of non-core obligations.

John Tasioulas is the inaugural Chair of Politics, Philosophy & Law and Director of the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy, and Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. During the Spring quarter of 2016, he is a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Professor Tasioulas has degrees in Law and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne, and a D.Phil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He was previously a Lecturer in Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow and Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he taught from 1998-2010. His most recent appointment was as Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London.

His research is in the areas of moral, legal and political philosophy, with a special emphasis in recent years on human rights and international law. Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘On the Foundations of Human Rights’ in R. Cruft, M. Liao and M. Renzo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (OUP, 2015), ‘Custom, Jus Cogens, and Human Rights’, in C. Bradley (eds.), Custom’s Future (CUP, 2016) and ‘Just Global health: Integrating Human Rights and Common Goods’ (with E. Vayena), in T. Brooks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice (OUP, forthcoming).

Professor Tasioulas is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and a member of the Academia Europaea. He has delivered the ‘Or ‘Emet Lecture at Osgoode Hall Law School (2011) and the Natural Law Lecture at Notre Dame Law School (2012). He serves on the editorial boards of theAmerican Journal of Jurisprudence, the American Society of International Law Studies in International Legal Theory, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Moral Philosophy and Politics.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Kimmel Center, Room 905
60 Washington Square South
New York, NY, 10012
Lunch will be served

In this talk, Professor Frances Kamm from Harvard University will consider some views of why death is bad and when one death is worse than another. She will investigate whether and when living in a reduced state is to be feared and when it makes sense to go on living and at what cost. She will examine these issues by considering the views of the philosopher Shelly Kagan and the medical doctor Atul Gawande.

Friday, March 25, 2016
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
5 Washington Pl, Room 101
New York, NY, 10003
Reception to Follow

Is being loved as a child a human right? The fulfillment of children’s rights to be loved are made more complicated by poverty, unwanted pregnancies, the challenges often involved in adoption and the fact that each year, thousands of children leave foster care at age eighteen without ever finding a permanent loving family. This practical, philosophical and provocative discussion will explore the justification for a fundamental right of children to be loved and our societal obligations to provide such love for them.

Panelists:

Join us on Thursday, February 25th
Lunch Reception at 12:45PM
Panel Discussion Begins at 1:15PM
NYU Kimball Hall, 1st Floor Lounge 
246 Greene St, New York, NY 10012