From January 28 to 29, 2027, the first International Congress of Empirical Biomedical Ethics will take place in Lausanne, Switzerland, under the theme “Explain, Justify, Defend.” The congress asks how empirical data can inform normative justification – how to bridge the gap between what people do, think, believe, or value and what ought to be.
Abstracts can be submitted until September 30, 2026. The call reads:
International Congress of Empirical Biomedical Ethics
28–29 January 2027, Lausanne, Switzerland
Explain, Justify, Defend
Empirical biomedical ethics is a research field that is both old and new. It builds on a long tradition of field exploration to ensure research questions remain relevant to concerned stakeholders, while also representing an emerging scholarly community working to structure its approaches and methodologies. Biomedical ethics is inherently plural, shaped by interdisciplinarity, diverse cultural backgrounds, national and local contexts, as well as various moral frameworks. Where philosophers and theologians first laid down conceptual and theoretical groundwork to address ethical concerns in medicine, the empirical turn in biomedical ethics saw the social and health sciences bring in their own perspectives and methods to ground ethical judgments in the realities of clinical experience, patient and family perspectives, and complex social contexts. Medical professionals themselves have started to train in and engage with the field. While it is sometimes thought to occupy too much space and resources within the medical humanities more generally, biomedical ethics is still seeking to find its unique place among the philosophy, history, geography or sociology of medicine or science. Its defining trait – its normativity – is both the source of its internal disarray and what unifies it, what sets it apart and what intertwines it deeply into other fields.
As an emerging academic field and community, empirical biomedical ethics attempts to find coherence and to structure itself around one central question: how to bridge the gap between the descriptive and the normative, between what is – what people do, think, believe or value – and what ought to be.
The first International Congress on Empirical Biomedical Ethics (ICEBE) aims to bring together researchers, medical professionals and other concerned stakeholders from diverse backgrounds. Our goal is to foster dialogue, share methodologies and build a cohesive community around the central challenge of bridging the descriptive and the normative. In order to do so, it proposes to focus on a theme that can be explored both from a methodological or from a content perspective: Explain, Justify, Defend. As an academic field, how does empirical biomedical ethics attempt to explain the relationship between facts and values? How does empirical data inform normative justifications? Can concerned stakeholders’ actual beliefs and ideals be used to defend normative judgements and, if so, to what extent? But also, for example, how do clinicians explain their decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment in intensive care units, and how do these explanations align with or diverge from the ethical principles and legal frameworks governing end-of-life care? How do healthcare professionals defend or justify the unequal distribution of emotional labour carried out by doctors, nurses or care assistants, and how does it relate to wider gender dynamics?
We invite you to join us on January 28th and 29th in Lausanne, Switzerland to explore these questions, share your work, and shape the future of empirical biomedical ethics. Together, we can advance our understanding of how to explain, justify, and defend ethical judgments in medicine.
Scientific Committee
- Brenda Bogaert (Institute for Humanities in Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne)
- Pr. Richard Huxtable (University of Bristol, Bristol Medical School (PHS), Centre for Ethics in Medicine)
- Pr. Jonathan Ives (University of Bristol, Bristol Medical School (PHS), Centre for Ethics in Medicine)
- Agnes Kandlbinder (Institute for Humanities in Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne; University Research Priority Program: “Human Reproduction Reloaded,” University of Zurich)
- Cristina Murano (Department of Philosophy and Society, Faculty of Philosophy, University Complutense of Madrid)
- Sophie Püchel (Institute for Humanities in Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne)
- Morgane Romero (Université de Lausanne, Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches en Éthique (CIRE))
- Silke Schicktanz (Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University Medical Center Göttingen)
- Julia Tinland (Aix-Marseille Université, SESSTIM, CaLIPSo)
Call for Abstracts
- Word length: <300 words
- Format: Word, author(s)’s name(s), discipline(s) and affiliations on a separate 1st page
- Deadline: September 30th, 2026
- Submit to: https://icebe.sciencesconf.org/submission/submit
- Results: October 20th, 2026
- Registration fees: 65 CHF