Please join us for our next Social Studies of Ethics, Morality, and Values Network Meeting when Roi Livne will be giving a talk about his book, Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care, published by Harvard University Press
This talk will take place via zoom. Please register to receive a zoom link.
Over the past fifty years, “the end of life” has become the center of extensive economic, policy, ethical, and medical discussions in the U.S. Health economists measure and evaluate its cost; ethicists debate the morality of various approaches to “end-of-life care”; policymakers ponder alternative “end of life”-related policies; and clinicians apply a specialized approach (hospice and palliative care) to treat patients whom they diagnose as being at “the end of life.” This talk summarizes much of the argument of “Values at the End of Life” (Harvard University Press, 2019). It analyzes the proliferation of conversations on “the end of life” as emblematic of a peculiar moment in human history. Ours is a period where modern growth stagnates and the main challenge developed societies face becomes delineating the limits of human agency and governing populations within these limits. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic analysis of the work of palliative care clinicians in three California hospitals, I follow how the limits of what can be done, medically and financially, to prolong life are communicated to severely ill patients and families. I use this empirical case to flesh out different dimensions in the concept of economization, which has recently attracted much theoretical attention in economic sociology.
About the speaker:
Roi Livne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. An economic sociologist at heart, he studies everyday economic life and its intersections with morality. His has written about death and capitalism, the techno-politics of sovereign debts, and the first months of COVID-19. Presently, he is writing about the moral economy of pricing hospital care in the U.S., the notion of finitude in social theory, and the concept of economization.
