Rights, Liberties, and the Nature of Medicine – Prof. Christopher Tollefsen

Prof. Christopher Tollefsen argues that medicine is fundamentally ordered to health, not preference satisfaction, and he shows why that matters for abortion, euthanasia, physician authority, and conscience.

This lecture was given on February 5th, 2026, at University of Scranton.

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About the Speaker:

Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. He has published over 100 articles in journals and edited collections, and a similar number of popular essays in venues such as Public Discourse, First Things, and National Review. He is the author of Lying and Christian Ethics and the forthcoming Killing and Christian Ethics, and is co-author of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (with Dr. Farr Curlin) and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (with Robert P. George). In 2019-20, he served as a Commissioner on the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. He has twice been a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and in 2024-25 was a Visiting Fellow at the DeNicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame.

Keywords: Abortion, Conscience, Ethics, Euthanasia, Health, Medicine, Physician Authority, Patient Authority, Rights, Services