Roi Livne, PhD, presented at the Bioethics for Breakfast event on October 4, 2018, offering perspective and insight on the topic “Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care.” Leonard Fleck, PhD, moderated this session.
Over the past forty years, “the end of life” has become the center of extensive economic, policy, ethical, and medical discussions. Health economists measure and evaluate its cost; ethicists debate the morality of various approaches to “end-of-life care”; policymakers ponder alternative “end of life”-related policies; and clinicians apply a specialized approach (hospice and palliative care) to treat patients whom they diagnose as being at “the end of life.” How are those many-faceted conversations emblematic of this particular moment in history? How are the limits of what can be done, both medically and financially, to prolong life communicated to severely ill patients and families? Dr. Livne’s analysis drew from a combination of historical and ethnographic work conducted with palliative care clinicians in three California hospitals.
Roi Livne
Roi Livne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. An economic sociologist at heart, he studies everyday economic life and its somewhat awkward intersections with morality. His book, Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care is forthcoming this February in Harvard University Press. The book develops a historical and ethnographic account of the deeply personal relationships between financial considerations, emotional attachments, and moral arguments that motivate end-of-life decisions in American hospitals. Livne’s other research is on the techno-politics of sovereign debt management. He has published in the American Sociological Review and Socio-Economic Review.
MSU Bioethics 