Bioethics Lecture Looks at Nihilism and Human Nature, March 24

Nihilism, human nature and biotechnology will be the focus of the next talk in Rochester Institute of Technology’s lecture series, Biotechnology: Our Future as Human Beings and Citizens.

Scholar and author Larry Arnhart will give his lecture, “Nihilism and Human Nature in Biotechnology,” at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, in Ingle Auditorium in the Student Alumni Union on the RIT campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Arnhart, professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, wrote the acclaimed Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (1998). He is associate editor for Ethics and Biotechnology and Bioengineering for The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Ethics. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Politics and the Life Sciences and Evolutionary Psychology.

“Larry Arnhart is a profound thinker,” says John Murley, chair of RIT’s Department of Political Science. “He will address the question whether the advances of biotechnology and biomedicine have made redundant the notion of a human nature, morality and the human good.”

The lecture series is co-sponsored by RIT and the New York Council for the Humanities. For more information, contact John Murley at 585-475-2064 or jamgcj@rit.edu or Sean Sutton at 585-475-4620 or sdsgsm@rit.edu.