Research Area: Public Bioethics

Making the Moral Case Against Vigilante Justice

Travis Rieder, an associate research professor and the director of education initiatives at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, published an essay in the Dec. 13 New York Times titled “The Moral Case Against Vigilante Justice.”

In the essay, Rieder argues that being subjected to such broken systems shouldn’t break our morals: “This tragic situation should motivate us to change the institutions and structures that have failed so many people. But not to give murder a pass, and especially not to glorify it.”

Rieder has a long and difficult personal history with the U.S. healthcare system and insurance industry, as he detailed in his 2019 book In Pain. Despite that experience, he makes the case that “feeling bad for someone’s plight — or even sharing it — doesn’t make that person’s actions permissible. The accused man may well have been wronged by the health care system, as many people reading this most likely have. But he still committed murder.”

On the same day, Berman Institute faculty member Mario Macis was interviewed by the Baltimore Banner about consumers’ distrust of private insurance companies.

In a national survey Macis co-authored, private insurers rated lower on trust than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Medicare and Medicaid. Doctors and nurses rated highest. The reason, Macis said, is the belief that insurers prioritize profits over their clients’ health and well-being.

“This perception that the motivation of insurance companies — and pharmaceutical companies, too ― is making money destroys trust in these institutions,” he said.

Another factor is that requests for coverage are often denied, which contributes to a feeling that “insurance companies are not keeping their promise,” Macis said.

Berman Institute-Produced Bioethics Podcast Recognized with Three 2024 Signal Awards

playing god?, the 10-episode podcast launched in October 2023 by the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics in conjunction with Pushkin Industries, has received three awards in this year’s Signal Awards, a national competition recognizing the most meaningful and potent podcasts being made today, as judged by a collective of leaders in the field. Recognition for playing god? included:

The 10-episode first season of playing god? shared the deeply personal stories of people caught at the life-and-death crossroads of medical innovations and ethical dilemmas, attracting more than 200,000 listeners.

To expand the podcast’s reach, its producers have partnered with a group of nationally recognized K-12 educators from across the country to develop educational materials that will enable teachers to use each episode as source material for a lesson on bioethics. These lesson plans will be available on the Berman Institute’s website in November.

A second season of playing god? is currently in production and will debut in early 2025.

Faculty Receive Discovery Award for Project Highlighting Children with Medical Complexity

“‘Feels Like Home’: Lived Experiences of Children with Medical Complexity and Their Families,” an interactive audiovisual experience that will bring multiple audiences into the homes of children with medical complexity (CMC) and their families, has been named the recipient of a 2024 Discovery Award given to interdisciplinary faculty teams across Johns Hopkins University.

Led by Rebecca Seltzer, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, and Lauren Arora Hutchinson, Director of the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, the project will result in three distinct outputs:

  •  An audio documentary intended for broad public audiences that explores how families with CMC experience their home environment, a unique blend of hospital and traditional home;
  •  A short film to immerse the viewers in how families with CMC adapt/build their home environment to meet their child and family’s needs, capturing both challenges and ingenuity;
  • An interactive website to house the multimedia created and collected through this project.

“We envision the audio documentary and short film to be used on broader scales as teaching and advocacy tools. This could include incorporating them in medical provider training programs; using them as central discussion elements at conferences, panels, and live events; sharing short snippets in policy-making spaces,” said Dr. Seltzer.

The interactive website created during the initial phase will begin as a dynamic hosting platform for the audio and video deliverables and grow over time into a hub where audiences come to get resources and share their own stories.
The Discovery Awards encourage faculty from various disciplines to collaborate in addressing multifaceted challenges and pushing the boundaries of understanding. Altogether, the winning project teams—chosen from 286 proposals—include 148 individuals representing 11 Johns Hopkins entities.

“This project is an example of how the iDeas Lab can work with faculty from the outset of a project to envision and create outputs that will reach and immerse audiences beyond academia, getting them to think deeply and differently about topics,” said Arora Hutchinson. “The Lab has a team of creative producers – specialists in audio, video, and digital media who produce podcasts, videos, screenplays, films, and interactive projects – who look forward to creatively engaging with families with lived experiences on this important matter and making sure their unique perspectives are heard and shared.”

In addition, Abigail Brickler, a production assistant at the iDeas Lab, has experience as the caregiver of a parent with medical complexity and brings that important perspective to this project. Other key partners on the project include parent caregivers of children with medical complexity and the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center.

“This project’s deliverables are both public-facing and family-centered, which we hope will foster feelings of community amongst similarly-situated families and promote a shared sense of humanity amongst audiences who perhaps were previously unaware,” said Seltzer.

Bringing Bioethics into the Classroom

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics is partnering with a group of nationally recognized K-12 educators from across the country to bring bioethics into science classes everywhere.

Drawing upon the Institute-produced podcast playing god? for its source material, this collaboration is producing free lesson plans and related educational materials for teachers who wish to introduce their students to complex ethical questions generated by the development and use of new scientific and medical innovations. Each episode will serve as a unique case study that explores bioethics principles and inspires lively discussions.

“As science and medicine advance at an ever-increasing pace, new innovations raise new questions about their ethical use. The Berman Institute is committed to bringing these bioethics discussions beyond the boundaries of academic research,” said Jeffrey Kahn, the Institute’s Director.

“We are developing new approaches to sharing bioethics in effective and compelling ways with the general public. That was part of the motivation behind creating the podcast, and the creation and distribution of these educational materials will enable us to engage students in bioethics topics earlier in their education.”

Launched last fall, the 10-episode first season of playing god? shared the deeply personal stories of people caught at the life-and-death crossroads of medical innovations and ethical dilemmas. After garnering more than 200,000 listeners, the podcast’s producers sought to expand its reach by creating educational materials that would enable teachers to use each episode as the source material for a lesson on bioethics.

To develop the materials, the Institute has turned to teachers participating in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program, which provides accomplished K-12 STEM educators the opportunity to spend 11 months working in federal agencies or in U.S. Congressional offices, applying their extensive knowledge and classroom experiences to national education program and/or education policy efforts. Eight of the Fellows, drawn from public and private schools across the country, formed an advisory board that is helping shape, review, and pilot the educational materials.

“Students today have tremendous interest in the societal impacts of technological innovation, but it can be challenging to find appropriate, relevant materials to engage and educate them on these topics. This collaboration provides teachers such materials, suitable for a wide range of grades and subjects,” said Samantha Willsey, a science teacher from Indiana and 2023-2024 Einstein Fellow “As an educator, it has been incredibly rewarding to work with the researchers at the Berman Institute and develop something that will benefit so many students and teachers.

Each of the podcast’s 10 episodes will have a suite of accompanying educational materials, available this fall, that include a summary, glossary of terms and bioethics concepts, a discussion guide for teachers, suggestions for group and individual activities, supplemental readings, and list of related careers. Each lesson incorporates the stories told in the podcast to prompt students to recognize the societal impact of science and technology, and to deliberate and form solutions to tough ethical challenges.

A second season of playing god? will launch in early 2025, and the Berman Institute plans to develop educational materials for those episodes as well.

“The insight and knowledge of the teachers on our advisory board has been invaluable,” said Berman Institute faculty member Amelia Hood, who drafted the educational materials. “We hope this is just the first of many collaborations with K-12 educators as we strive to share bioethics with as many audiences as possible.”

Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices

Modern life can be full of tough and unsatisfying choices. On one hand, everything we do seems to matter and have great importance. But on the other hand, it can sometimes seem it’s all for nothing. To Travis Rieder, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, this realization led to an obsession in recent years with answering the question: How do each of us live a morally decent life in an era defined by problems that are too big and too complex for any one of us to solve by ourselves?

Rieder’s attempt to wrestle with this question led to his new book, Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices (Dutton), a warm and personal guide that provides the tools to build a strong moral compass in today’s world.

Read an excerpt from Time Magazine.

From seemingly mundane issues like whether to use a disposable plastic water bottle, to booking a flight for a vacation, to bigger questions like investing in an electric vehicle or having children, Rieder shows how to navigate the issues that often seem to have no good or easy answers. The decisions people make daily all contribute to massive, structural, collective problems.

Catastrophe Ethics includes a tour of the contributions of philosophers like Plato and Kant, as well as old fashioned ethics exercises like trolley problems that involve sacrificing one person on a track for several people. But as Rieder points out, people need to expand their understanding of ethical concepts for modern society.

“I don’t think an ethic of purity is realistic, because we cannot excise ourselves from the massive problems of today,” Rieder says. “But I also want to resist the slide into nihilism. Just because you can’t save the world by yourself doesn’t mean that what you do doesn’t matter.”

Rieder is the Assistant Director for Education Initiatives, Director of the Master of Bioethics degree program, and Associate Research Professor at the Berman Institute. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Center for Public Health Advocacy within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In the book, Rieder offers an ethics starter kit to help readers solve the problem he calls “The Puzzle”: How do each of us live a morally decent life in an era defined by problems that are too big and too complex for any one of us to solve by ourselves?

Other topics include:

  • How to realize that even the most personal, intimate decisions do not escape responsibility and that how one chooses to live does matter, even if our actions don’t seem to make much of a difference. Whether it is through our decisions to travel, commute long distances by car, or even just our choices about what to eat, everyone contributes to many massive systems that cause harm—most of them without knowing it. Although it can feel that what we do does not matter, that line of thinking can lead to moral emptiness. Rather, facing a problem head on can lead to finding meaning.
  • Why ethics is hard to understand. Philosophers like Kant and Plato are important, but they did not face the same issues that we do today. There’s also the added difficulty of how to determine what we should do and how we should live, especially when psychological pressures make it seem like the choices that should be made are obvious.
  • How our moral duties include not engaging in disinformation. We all learn about the world every day and participate in the spread of information through discussion with others. We need to take care with how we get information, how we share that information, and holding others accountable whether they are family or friends, or even public figures.
  • That ethics is for both sides of the political spectrum. There are multiple ways to live a good life. With all the possibilities of political and personal engagement, it’s not a question of either/or, but of what specifically aligns with our values, preferences, and strengths.
  • How to use your moral tool kit. How can we decide what efforts to participate in and where to contribute our effort? One way is to map out the kinds of reasons that we have to withdraw from morally problematic activities and engage in good ones, and then to take a clear-eyed look at the challenges that stand in our way. We aren’t required to do everything, but we ought to do something, and this process can help us to organize our efforts.

“In a world where nearly everything we do implicates us in various systems and structures, there are a lot of opportunities to participate in good and bad, and so a lot of careful reasoning to do,” says Rieder. “The bad news is that this can feel overwhelming: everything we do seems to matter. But the good news is that we get to matter. The moral work is constant and creative, as we need to (get to!) decide constantly how to structure our lives so as to respond to the threats around us.”