Events › Issues in Medical Ethics: From Treating Children to End of Life

Your instructor for this two-session mini-course will be Mark Sheldon, Distinguished Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Philosophy at Northwestern University and member of the faculty of the Medical Ethics and Humanities Program at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. 

Prof. Sheldon will be focusing on two specific areas in this mini-course. The first is end-of-life issues: the definition of death, the control of pain, and whether physician-facilitated death should be permitted, as well as euthanasia. A contrast will be drawn between what is currently permitted in the United States and what is permitted in the Netherlands and several other countries. The second session will be devoted to children and the decisions we tend to allow parents to make, and the limitations that the state places on those decisions. What are the rights or interests of children versus the prerogatives of parents, versus the protections that the state wants to impose? Discussion will focus on parental refusal on religious grounds of certain medical interventions, as well as vaccines.

Sheldon has published and presented widely on a variety of issues in medical ethics, including informed consent, confidentiality, the forced transfusion of children of Jehovah's Witnesses, children as organ donors, disclosure, and the use of Nazi research. He has contributed book chapters and published in a variety of journals, including The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Hastings Center Report, The Philosophical Forum, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He has served as guest editor of two journals, Theoretical Medicine and The Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. He has served a three-year term as a member of the Committee on Philosophy and Medicine of the American Philosophical Association, and served as co-editor of the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine from 2000
until 2019.

This mini-course will take place both in person--in the Community Meeting Room--and online as a webinar. Registration is required. All registered participants will receive the webinar link 1-2 weeks before the event and may then choose either participation type, with no need to let the organizers know. No cancellation required.

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