Faculty & Staff
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Judith Andre, Ph.D. Professor E-mail: andre@msu.edu Phone: (517) 355-7553 |
I am a philosopher working in bioethics and the other medical humanities. My work involves teaching, speaking, and conducting workshops in a many different kinds of of settings: undergraduate bioethics courses, medical school modules, graduate philosophy seminars, gatherings of healthcare and other professionals. I have also worked extensively with hospital ethics committees.
My most recent book, Bioethics as Practice, ( University of North Carolina Press 2002) has an imaginary subtitle: Moral Ideals of a New Line of Work. (The publishers nixed it.) The book tries to capture the essence of bioethics as an activity, rather than as a set of texts. It looks at what bioethicists do (and should do), rather than at what doctors and nurses do. Because bioethics is interdisciplinary, I was able to write the book in a variety of voices, from personal reflection through allegory, moral argument, and linguistic analysis.
My next project has the working title Cosmopolitan Virtue: On Becoming Citizens of the World. Its thesis is that our concepts of virtue must develop as the world grows more interconnected. Generosity in a real village, for instance, is easy to recognize, and so is its opposite. But what counts as generosity, and what as selfishness, in the “global village”? It’s not only that the moral challenges are new; so is the newly large set of traditions from which we can draw. We can learn quite a bit about compassion, for instance, from Buddhism. In the book I will be particularly interested in the moral experiences of people who do global public health work.
My work, for 25 years now, has consistently concerned moral development and concepts of virtue: “Moral Growth, Spirituality, and Activism,” “Humility Reconsidered,” “My Client, My Enemy”, “Faith and the Unbelieving Ethics Teacher,” “Learning to See.” On the other hand, my publications are eclectic, ranging from issues of privacy through role morality and the limits of markets. I remain interested in the last of these particularly, since genetic science has raised new questions about intellectual property.
I earned my Ph.D. at Michigan State in 1979, and returned as a faculty member in 1991. In the intervening years I was part of the philosophy department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. I have spent my sabbaticals as a Fellow in Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Virginia, Chicago, and Toronto.
