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Public Lecture Title: Good and Bad Helping: Moral Challenges with Beneficence

Thursday, September 15, 2022, 5:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater

"Sometimes helping people is straightforward. Often, however, it is not. We may be unsure what would be helpful, or how much help we need to provide. Maybe we don’t feel like helping, or perhaps we don’t like the person who needs our help. Helping actions can also sometimes be intrusive, condescending, misguided, or otherwise inappropriate. This talk will explore the moral challenges presented by beneficence, with an eye toward understanding what it means to help people well and how we can become better at this important moral task."

Karen Stohr’s scholarship focuses on how moral values and ideals get expressed in social life. Her published works address topics such as practical wisdom, moral imagination, beneficence, friendship, social conventions regarding disability, and the moral aims of dinner parties.

Professor Stohr is the author of three books – On Manners (Routledge, 2011); Minding the Gap: Moral Ideals and Moral Improvement (Oxford University Press, 2019); and Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, 2022). She often brings her work to public audiences as a guest on radio shows and podcasts. She recently co-authored a column for Washingtonian magazine called “Ask the Coronavirus Ethicist", and her work has appeared in a variety of additional public news outlets such as the New York Times.

Professor Stohr is a frequent guest speaker on topics in bioethics, including embryonic stem cell research, end of life care, the principle of double effect, the Henrietta Lacks case, and respect for persons with disabilities. She has served on the ethics committee at Providence Hospital in Washington D.C.

At Georgetown University, Professor Stohr teaches introductory ethics, bioethics, and undergraduate and graduate seminars in ethical theory, and she worked on the faculty team that developed and taught Georgetown’s first bioethics MOOC. One of her favorite aspects of life at Georgetown is her work with the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning.

Professor Stohr holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.