Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby

Public Lecture Title: Designing Influence: Ethics of Choice Architecture in Medical Decision Making

Thursday, October 26, 2023, 5:00 pm, Northen Auditorium

Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby is a philosopher whose research focuses primarily on the ethical issues raised by research on human judgment and decision-making (e.g., decisional biases and heuristics, behavioral economics). For example, what are we to make of autonomy and rationality given our many frailties in judgment? Is it morally permissible to use knowledge of these biases and weaknesses to influence people’s decisions and behaviors? Under what conditions/circumstances? Is this manipulation? If so, what is the moral status of manipulation - might it sometimes be permissible or even morally desirable? These questions are taken up in her book on this topic: Good Ethics and Bad Choices: The Relevance of Behavioral Economics for Medical Ethics (MIT Press).

Dr. Blumenthal-Barby has been the recipient of a prestigious Greenwall Faculty Scholar Award in Bioethics and a Pfizer Bioethics Fellowship. She has served as the Principal Investigator on four awards from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to study and improve decision making in advanced heart failure. Most recently, she received funding as a Co-Principal Investigator to study ethics and decision making in pediatric deep brain stimulation through the NIH BRAIN initiative. She has also received funding as Principal Investigator from AHRQ to study the utilization of an AI/machine learning system that predicts personalized risks using big data.

She has published more than 100 articles in bioethics, philosophy, and medical journals as well as served on several expert panels and committees related to bioethics and medical decision making. She directs the undergraduate medical education ethics curriculum at BCM, has taught courses and advised graduate students in ethics at Rice University, and co-directs (on the BCM side) the Rice-BCM Health, Humanism and Society Scholars Program for undergraduates.

Dr. Blumenthal-Barby received her Ph.D. in philosophy, with a specialization in bioethics, from Michigan State University in 2008.