Please join us for the next virtual event in the Bioethics with Bigger Impact series on April 18th 3-4pm Eastern time on Confronting Climate Change in a “Perfect Moral Storm”.
Environmental and Racial Justice in the Face of Climate Change
Are ethicists “asleep at the wheel” in protecting planetary health? Global warming is intertwined with persistent problems of social justice, systemic racism, the U.S. history of colonial oppression, and the dominance of capitalist consumerism over health and health care. Why are these bioethical injustices? Why are these issues still not a central concern for many? How can ethicists contribute to policy decisions and health and technological innovation to respond to the urgent challenges of climate change and environmental injustice?
In this final panel discussion in the Bioethics with Bigger Impact series, Nancy Tuana, Dupont/Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University, and Stephen Gardiner, Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment, University of Washington, will sort through these questions in conversation with Romy Opperman, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor-designate, Department of Philosophy, New School for Social Research.
This event is free and open to all audiences. We look forward to a lively conversation among attendees with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Please follow this link to register.

The Bioethics with Bigger Impact Series
The Bioethics With Bigger Impact Series is an outgrowth of a symposium in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, co-edited by PEWS Faculty Affiliate Elizabeth Lanphier, along with her colleague and mentor Larry Churchill. The essays in the symposium ask how scholarly contributions of bioethics and bioethicists could be made more relevant to public policy, to health and technological innovation, and to the public at large. The symposium is particularly focused on how bioethics can be put to work on the most pressing issues of our time, including climate change, global pandemics like COVID-19, and the necessary ongoing work of anti-racism, all of which crucially impact health and equity.
Because of the focus on how bioethics can have a bigger impact, especially outside of academia, Lanphier and Churchill felt it was important to hold these conversations with broader audiences, creating opportunities for people with diverse backgrounds and interests to gather together, to listen, to ask, and to discuss.
From this project emerges the Bioethics with Bigger Impact series, in partnership with the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine and Johns Hopkins University Press, hosted by the Hastings Center, and cosponsored by the University of Cincinnati Center for Public Engagement with Science and the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy along with several bioethics centers from around the country. The series brings together symposium authors and additional experts doing cutting-edge work in bioethics to impact health and healthcare well beyond the academy.
Catch up on the Bioethics with Bigger Impact Events
Recordings of all the talks in the Bioethics with Bigger Impact Series are hosted on the PEWS YouTube Channel, with additional accessibility features including closed captioning. The previous events were “Communicating Ethics Challenges in Crises”, about bioethics communication, and “Unpacking Neglected Social Factors to Ensure Impact”, about social determinants of health and transformational justice.