Bioethics: Too Important to be Left to Bioethicists

Drawing on his work in disability studies and his experience as a father of a child with Down Syndrome, Bérubé will argue that an understanding of disability and human variation is critical not only for the humanities, but also for the life sciences and “applied” fields such as bioethics. Taking on the work of philosophers such as Michael Sandel, Julian Glover, Eva Kittay, Martha Nussbaum, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Singer, he will show that intellectual disability should be of crucial importance to intellectuals – and that our major intellectual traditions have largely failed to meet that challenge.