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

<p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>This lecture was given on February 5th, 2026, at University of Scranton.</p><p><br /></p><p>To make a gift this June, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://truth.thomisticinstitute.org/pod" target="_blank">https://truth.thomisticinstitute.org/pod</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p>About the Speaker:</p><p><br /></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">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.&nbsp; 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).&nbsp; In 2019-20, he served as a Commissioner on the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights.&nbsp; 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.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Keywords: </span>Abortion, Conscience, Ethics, Euthanasia, Health, Medicine, Physician Authority, Patient Authority, Rights, Services</p>