Sydney Health Ethics Launch and Miles Little Annual Lecture

This event will celebrate the launching of Sydney Health Ethics. This centre for ethics and social research, teaching and engagement related to health was formally known as the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine (VELiM). The Centre has changed its name to better reflect the diversity and breadth of its activities and position itself to engage with groups from across the university and the community. VELiM was founded in 1995 by the Inaugural Director Professor Miles Little. To celebrate his significant and continuing contribution to scholarship in this area we will hold an annual lecture named in his honour. The first of these lectures will be given as part of the official launch of the Centre by one of our close collaborators: Professor Wendy Rogers.

Should bioethicists try to change the world? Reflections of an accidental activist

Bioethics is a practical discipline. Academic work in bioethics contributes to debates on matters that affect people’s lives, such as the right to life, end of life care, or access to health care. But by and large, bioethicists’ arguments are directed towards other academics. Academics write papers for journals and give papers at their own specialty conferences. They prize scholarship that is rigorous and reflective, that recognises and embraces complexity and uncertainty. These academic values are in tension with being an activist. Activists want to change things – to causally affect the world in certain ways. Being an activist requires pragmatism, simplicity, certainty and above all, action. Activism may undermine good scholarship. It may damage academic credibility and reputation, and be institutionally unpopular. Many of these tensions have arisen during my own involvement in international efforts to end forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. This experience has blurred the lines between my academic work and activism, in both constructive and potentially concerning ways. Here I share my reflections on the responsibilities, risks and rewards of being an academic activist.

Speaker: Professor Wendy Rogers, Macquarie University

Wendy Rogers is Professor of Clinical Ethics at Macquarie University. Her current research, funded by the Australian Research Council, investigates conceptual and practical issues to do with overdiagnosis. As well as research in many areas of bioethics, Wendy has contributed to national policy development on research ethics, clinical ethics and the ethics of organ donation. Over the past two years, she has become an activist seeking to end forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. She is the inaugural chair of the International Advisory Committee of the International Coalition to End Organ Pillaging in China.