The Wrong Kind of Survival with Murilo Karasinski

Can a society survive in a way that is morally wrong? Answering this requires a prior question. What survives when a society survives? A society may preserve its institutions through the erosion of the forms of life those institutions were created to protect. Van Rensselaer Potter gave bioethics a language for this problem by distinguishing five forms of survival and identifying acceptable survival as a bioethical aim. This lecture returns to his global bioethics in an age shaped by artificial intelligence and ecological disruption. Drawing on examples from medicine and public life in Brazil and the United States, it examines cases in which system continuity depends on arrangements that diminish human dignity, weaken collective agency, and exhaust the ecological conditions on which life depends. Deep bioethics extends the inquiry to relationships among health, ecosystems, and future generations. The wrong kind of survival begins when systems created to sustain life make life serve their own survival. --- Event Details: