Profile: Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald
Assistant Professor of Philosophy Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald gives
partial credit to President Bill Clinton for steering his intellectual interests
toward
the consideration of bioethic questions. It was not a personal meeting with
the commander-in-chief that produced a scholarly epiphany but the opportunity
to spend a year as a research analyst on the president’s 1994 Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, for which Boleyn-Fitzgerald probed
research subjects, scientists, and government officials.
That experience helped him steer his career journey down the path of biomedical and bioethic issues, where medical and technological advances have produced endless new questions to ponder. As he points out, “Plato and Socrates didn’t think a lot about the human genome project.”
A native of Marysville, Ohio, Boleyn-Fitzgerald joined the Lawrence faculty in 2001 after spending six years in the philosophy department at Louisiana State University, where, as the clinical ethicist for the Baton Rouge Health Forum, he served on the ethics committees of five area hospitals. Since his arrival here, he has directed Lawrence’s program in biomedical ethics, coordinating the annual Edward F. Mielke Lecture Series in Biomedical Ethics and promoting interchange between students and the area health care community. He also serves as a consultant to Appleton Medical Center and Affinity Health System on matters of confidentiality, competency, organ donation, and end-of-life issues ranging from families challenging hospital decisions, to hospitals challenging family decisions, to individual family members battling each other over treatment decisions.
His scholarly interests have led him to critically examine the relationship between health care professionals and the philosophical virtues of gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion. His article “What Should ‘Forgiveness’ Mean” was published in The Journal of Value Inquiry last year, and his article “Care and the Problem of Pity” appeared in the February issue of Bioethics. He also contributed the chapter “Experimentation on Human Subjects” to the book Companion to Applied Ethics, published in February 2003.