CU in the City, Ottawa – Selling the Body, Morality and the Market by Dr. Panitch

FASSten your seatbelts, The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is coming to CU in the City!
CU in the City is a popular series of talks that shares invigorating FASS research in communities across Ottawa and Canada. The next edition of CU in the City features the Philosophy Department‘s Dr. Vida Panitch who will be discussing how morality fits into our market-centric society.
Selling the Body: Morality and the Market
In a market economy, why are some things wrong to buy and sell? Why should our market transactions be restricted when it comes to things like citizenship, nobel prizes, university degrees, friendship, and human body parts and intimate labours? In this talk we will explore the reasons philosophers have offered for drawing moral boundaries surrounding certain goods and services, and particularly those involving the human body.
Dr. Vida Panitch’s research interests lie in the areas of distributive justice and bioethics. Her work explores the extent to which the concepts of equality, exploitation and commodification can serve as normative guides to the just distribution of health-related goods and services, both domestically and internationally. While her doctoral work addressed the normative foundations of liberal welfare programs geared to basic need satisfaction (including the need for health), her current work applies the concepts of equality, exploitation and commodification to assessing the moral permissibility (or impermissibility) of emerging commercial global health practices.
