The 2024 Project

This research project aims to advance understanding of the overlapping religious, moral and medical hazards and benefits of early diagnosis.

Knowing when, and from what, you are most likely to die is information that is becoming available with increasing clarity and precision. This project addresses questions of the societal impact of such knowledge. If I know I am likely to die at 50 I might cease my pension contributions, withdraw from the workforce and spend my remaining years in leisure. To determine whether or not this is ethically acceptable requires philosophical inquiry. What will it mean for me to be committed to another person for a fixed time rather than with on a horizon of much greater contingency? How will my relationships with my children be affected if their birth certificate can carry that child’s likely ‘end-date’? Individuals will respond to the availability of such knowledge, as well as the knowledge itself, on the basis of their community’s practical wisdom – embedded in narratives of the mundane as well as of the ultimately significant or sacred. This project extends the work of the university’s Mackenzie Institute for Early Diagnosis into the Faculties of Arts and Divinity.

This site is currently under development. More information will be added soon.