Profs & Pints Philadelphia: Medical Ethics and “The Pitt”

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “Medical Ethics and ‘The Pitt,’” an interactive discussion of how physicians navigate tough questions, with Sean Aas, associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, research scholar at its Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and author of the innovative textbook Bioethics: 50 Puzzles, Problems, and Thought Experiments.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/medical-ethics-and-the-pitt .]

Nothing has higher ethical stakes than the field of medicine, where decisions can be life-or-death. And nowhere are the stakes of medicine more evident than in the emergency department, where split-second decisions can forever alter the course of the lives of patients and, sometimes, practitioners.

Life-or-death decisions drive the drama of the blockbuster HBO Max television series The Pitt, which has explored a host of ethical issues associated with medical triage, surrogate decision-making, the distribution of scarce resources, the role of medicine in society, and the intersection of clinical care and social justice.

Such decisions have long been the focus of Sean Aas, a philosopher who teaches medical ethics at all levels—to undergraduate and graduate students as well as medical professionals—and advised researchers about the ethics of ongoing clinical trials in his previous capacity as a fellow at the National Institutes of Health. He recently began using The Pitt in teaching bioethics at Georgetown.

Learn the basics of medical ethics—and have a blast being involved in interactive discussions of how to apply them—when Dr. Aas comes to Philadelphia’s Black Squirrel Club to give a talk prescribed for fans of The Pitt and anyone who simply loves to think.

He’ll start buy reviewing basic concepts in medical ethics. Then he’ll give his audience a chance to apply such concepts by reviewing and discussing some of the most dramatic dilemmas presented in The Pitt in its first two seasons.

Audience members will have a chance to judge for themselves how well characters handled decisions, and then they’ll take part in both small-group and large-group discussions of whether and how these judgments can be justified. They’ll learn how to think more philosophically about ethical dilemmas in medicine and in everyday life. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Guests are welcome to arrive any time after 5:30. Talk starts at 6:30.)

Image by Canva.