Datum
19. November 2025
Online Talk
„Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care”
Online talk with Roi Livne
Organizer: the Social Studies of Ethics, Morality, and Values Network
19 November (4.30–5.30pm, UK time)
Registration: eventbrite link
This event will take place via Zoom. Please register via Eventbrite to receive a link to join the meeting.
Roi Livne will be talking about his book, Values at the End of Life: The Logic of Palliative Care (Harvard University Press). All are warmly welcome!
Over the past fifty years, “the end of life” has become the center of extensive economic, policy, ethical, and medical discussions in the U.S. 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.”
This talk summarizes much of the argument of “Values at the End of Life” (Harvard University Press, 2019). It analyzes the proliferation of conversations on “the end of life” as emblematic of a peculiar moment in human history. Ours is a period where modern growth stagnates and the main challenge developed societies face becomes delineating the limits of human agency and governing populations within these limits. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic analysis of the work of palliative care clinicians in three California hospitals, I follow how the limits of what can be done, medically and financially, to prolong life are communicated to severely ill patients and families. I use this empirical case to flesh out different dimensions in the concept of economization, which has recently attracted much theoretical attention in economic sociology.
About the speaker: Roi Livne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. An economic sociologist at heart, he studies everyday economic life and its intersections with morality. His has written about death and capitalism, the techno-politics of sovereign debts, and the first months of COVID-19. Presently, he is writing about the moral economy of pricing hospital care in the U.S., the notion of finitude in social theory, and the concept of economization.