Medical Ethics Summer Seminar

Medical Ethics Summer Seminar

Instructors: Farr Curlin, MD (Duke) and Christopher Tollefsen, PhD (University of South Carolina)

Dates: June 10–13, 2025

The Civil Discourse Project at Duke University hosted the 2025 Medical Ethics Summer Seminar from June 10-13, designed for physicians-in-training and open to nurses and other health professions students. The seminar was led by Dr. Farr Curlin, MD (Duke) and Dr. Christopher Tollefsen, PhD (University of South Carolina).

The seminar invited students to examine the central ethical questions that arise in the everyday practice of medicine and to interpret those questions through a moral framework drawing from both natural law and medicine’s traditional orientation toward the patient’s health. This framework was contrasted with principlism and consequentialism as participants considered what sort of practice medicine is, whether it has a rational end or goal, and how medicine contributes to human flourishing.

Through the examination of clinical cases, the seminar explored ethical concerns that arise perennially in medical practice, including the nature of the clinician-patient relationship, the limits of medicine, the meaning of autonomy, the place of conscience in the physician’s work, the difference between an intended effect and a side effect, proportionality, human dignity, sexuality and reproduction, the beginning of life, disability, end-of-life care, and death. The seminar equipped participants with intellectual tools to help them discern how to practice medicine well in the face of medicine’s clinical challenges and moral complexities.