Philosophical Bioethics Workshop

Date: Monday & Tuesday (2 & 3 June 2025)
Time: 8.30am to 5.15pm
Venue: NUSS Kent Ridge Guild House, 9 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119241

About the workshop

This workshop aims to bring together scholars and practitioners, both within Singapore and internationally, in the field of philosophical bioethics to discuss recent advancements and future directions. This includes (but is not limited to) philosophically-informed topics in clinical ethics, public health ethics, population-level bioethics, research ethics, neuroethics, reproductive ethics and AI ethics. The workshop aims to showcase current work in philosophical bioethics through a series of 40-minute presentations followed by a 20-minute Q&A. Additionally, given the growing number of philosophers and bioethicists in Singapore working in areas the area of philosophical bioethics, this workshop aims to bring these scholars together in order to inspire further collaboration.

Programme

Day 1 (2 June 2025)

Time	Activity	Speaker
9.00am – 9.10am	Coffee
9.10am – 9.20am	Opening Remarks	Professor Julian Savulescu (NUS CBmE)
9.20am – 10.10am	The Uneven Costs of Predicting Health Risks and Its Implications on Distributive Ethics	Dr Harisan Nasir (NUS CBmE)
10.10am – 11.00am	Beneficentrism in Bioethics	Dr Owen Schaefer (NUS CBmE)
11.00am – 11.15am	Break
11.15am – 12.05pm	Reconceptualising Regret	Chong-Ming Lim (NTU Philosophy)
12.05pm – 12.55pm	Injustice Is Not Equivalent to Inequity: Reductive Assumptions about Health Inequities and the Application of Theories of Justice to Public Health	Assoc. Professor Carina Fourie (University of Washington)
12.55pm – 2.30pm	Lunch
2.30pm – 3.20pm	Algorithmic Bioethics	Professor Julian Savulescu (NUS CBmE)
3.20pm-4.10pm	Discrimination, Relevance, and Healthcare	Shalom Chalson (NUS CBmE)
4.10pm-4.25pm	Break
4.25pm – 5.15pm	Universal Health Coverage: Solution or Siren? Some Preliminary Thoughts	Professor Larry Temkin
5.15pm	End of day 1

Day 2 (3 June 2025)

Time	Activity	Speaker
9.00am – 9.10am	Coffee
9.10am – 10.00am	Neuroethics and the Moral Mind-Body Problem	Assoc. Professor Sean Aas (Georgetown University)
10.00am – 10.50am	Experimental Philosophical Bioethics	Assoc. Professor Brian Earp (NUS CBmE)
10.50am – 11.05am	Break
11.05am – 11.55am	Do patients implicitly agree to treatment?	Stacy Chen (University of Toronto)
11.55am – 12.45pm	The Ambivalent Wisdom of Moral Disgust	Dr Brandon Yip (Singapore Management University)
12.45pm – 2.15pm	Lunch
2.15pm – 3.05pm	Flexible and Inflexible Creation	Assoc. Professor Abelard Podgorski (NUS Philosophy)
3.05pm – 3.55pm	The Ecological Morality of Nudging	Dr Yeo Shang Long (NUS CBmE)
3.55pm – 4.10pm	Break
4.10pm – 5.00pm	Two arguments for hedonism reveal our moral destiny	Assoc. Professor Neil Sinhababu (TBC) (NUS Philosophy)
5.00pm – 5.10pm	Closing Remarks

Speakers

Sean Aas is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He is a philosopher and bioethicist interested, among other things in human embodiment — the diversity of embodied capacities, the boundaries and basis of our rights in our bodies, the moral significance of the physical embodiment of our minds.

Carina Fourie is the Benjamin Rabinowitz Philosophy Chair in Medical Ethics and an Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department, University of Washington (UW). She is also an Adjunct at the Department of Bioethics and Humanities, UW Medical School. Her research and teaching interests are in bioethics, political philosophy, and feminist ethics. She has published work on theories of equality and justice, health inequities, feminist bioethics, moral distress, and inequalities in global health partnerships, among other topics.

Professor Julian Savulescu is the Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and Director for the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an award-winning ethicist and moral philosopher trained in neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy. He has held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford since 2002. He is Visiting Professorial Fellow in Biomedical Ethics at Murdoch Children’s Research institute and Distinguished International Visiting Professor in Law at the University of Melbourne where he leads the Biomedical Ethics Research Group.

Larry S. Temkin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and an expert in ethics, and social and political philosophy. He is the author of Inequality, Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning, and Being Good in a World of Need.

Chong-Ming Lim is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University, and incoming Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. His research interests centre on topics in political philosophy and applied ethics.

Owen Schaefer is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He received his DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford University, and has completed fellowships at the National Institutes of Health’s Department of Bioethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. His primary interests lie in the ethics of developing novel biomedical technologies. He has written on big data, research ethics, AI ethics, gene editing, human enhancement, precision medicine, vaccine allocation, assisted reproduction and in vitro meat.

Abelard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and former Murphy Fellow at Tulane University. His primary research interests are in normative and applied ethics, rationality, and epistemology. His recent projects concern the relationship between rationality, morality, and time, and what to do when our choices themselves affect important inputs into our evaluation of our options. He is also interested in applied ethics, including animal ethics and the ethics of procreation.

Associate Professor Brian D. Earp, PhD, is director of the Oxford-NUS Centre for Neuroethics and Society (OCNS) and the EARP Lab (Experimental Bioethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Relational Moral Psychology Lab) within the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS). Brian is also an Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Psychology at NUS by courtesy.

Brian holds degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities and is a Research Associate of the Uehiro Oxford Institute at the University of Oxford, where Brian directs HOPE: The Hub at Oxford for Psychedelic Ethics. Brian is also Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University and The Hastings Center, and is an elected member of the UK Young Academy under the auspices of the British Academy and the Royal Society. See www.brianearp.com for more information.

Dr. Yeo Shang Long is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, with a joint appointment with the Department of Philosophy.

He received a PhD in philosophy from the Australian National University in 2020, and a BA (Hons) in philosophy and economics from NUS in 2015. He was also an NUS Overseas Postdoctoral Fellow at Monash University in 2023.

He works in moral and political philosophy. His specific research interests include the reliability of moral judgments and its implications for policy and practice, the ethics of nudging, and how philosophy, politics, and economics interact to inform public policy.

Neil Sinhababu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. He is author of Humean Nature, published by Oxford University Press in 2017; and Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence, published by Cambridge Elements in 2025. His arguments for desire-belief accounts of motivation have appeared in Philosophical Review and Noûs, and his 2025 paper “Heidegger’s Argument for Fascism” has appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Harisan Nasir graduated with a PhD in Public Health from Rutgers where he examined the meaning of “actuarial fairness” and its use as justification for risk-adjusted premium pricing in public and private insurance. His interests are in bioethics, public health ethics and the normative aspects of health economics and policy. He is currently working on methods in measuring health inequalities and the normative implications of applying probabilistic knowledge to actuarial pricing in health insurance.

Shalom Chalson is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE) in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. She works in social, political, and moral philosophy. Her main research has been on the conceptual foundations of wrongful discrimination. Before joining CBmE, Shalom pursued her PhD in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She holds a Master’s in Political Science from the National University of Singapore and a Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) in Philosophy from Nanyang Technological University.

Brandon Yip is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Singapore Management University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University (previously the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy) and received his Ph.D from the Australian National University. He works on a range of interconnected questions in moral psychology, epistemology, and meta-ethics, with an eye to how these connect with broader questions in social philosophy.

Stacy S. Chen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interests are in clinical ethics and global health ethics, informed by her background in international relations and bioethics.

Venue

NUSS Kent Ridge Guild House, 9 Kent Ridge Drive, Singapore 119241

Contact

For more information, you can email Dr Harisan Nasir (medhun@nus.edu.sg)

People

CBmE Team

Education

Centre for Biomedical Ethics (CBmE)

NUS, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine Block MD11, Clinical Research Centre, #02-03, 10 Medical Drive Singapore 117597

Initiatives

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