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Daniel Callahan is Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus of the Center. He was its cofounder in 1969 and served as its president between 1969 and 1996. He is also co-director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy. Over the years his research and writing have covered a wide range of issues, from the beginning until the end of life. In recent years, he has focused his attention on ethics and health policy.

He has served as a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Medical School and is now a Senior Scholar at Yale. He received his B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. He has honorary degrees from the Charles University, Prague, the Czech Republic, the University of Colorado, Williams College, Oregon State University, the State University of New York and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Dr. Callahan is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences; a former member of the Director’s Advisory Committee, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and of the Advisory Council, Office of Scientific Responsibility, Department of Health and Human Services. He won the 1996 Freedom and Scientific Responsibility Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Works edit

He is the author or editor of 41 books, including Taming the Beloved Beast: Why Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System (Princeton University Press, August 2009); Medicine and the Market: Equity vs. Choice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); The Research Imperative: What Price Better Health? (University of California Press, 2003); False Hopes (Simon & Schuster & Rutgers University Press, 1998); The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death (Simon & Schuster, 1993); What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress (Simon & Schuster, 1990); Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society (1987); The Tyranny of Survival (1973); Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (1970); Ethics in Hard Times (1982); and, with his wife, Sidney Callahan, Abortion: Understanding Differences (1984). He has contributed articles to Daedalus, Harpers, The Atlantic, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New Republic, Health Affairs, and other journals.

Selected Publications edit

Taming the Beloved Beast: Why Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System (Princeton University Press, August 2009).

“Finite Lives and Unlimited Medical Aspirations,” in Marcus Duwell and Christoph Reman, eds. The Contingent Nature of Life (Dordrecht: Springer 2008).

“Consumer-Directed Health Care: Promise or Puffery?,” Health Economics, Policy, and Law [UK] 3, no. 3 (2008).

“Health Care for the Elderly: Should Limits Be Set?”AMA Virtual Mentor (June 2008).

“Europe and the United States: Contrast and Convergence in Health Care,” Medicine and Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2008): 280-293.

“Unsustainable: Hard Truths About the American Way of Life,” Commonweal (June 20, 2008).

“The Blame Game,”Hastings Center Report 38, no. 4 (July–August 2008).

“Cutting Medical Costs,”America 198, no. 8 (2008).

“Organized Obfuscation: Physician-Assisted Suicide,”Hastings Center Report 38, no. 5 ( Sept-Oct 2008).

Involvement and affiliations edit

Director, International Programs, The Hastings Center, 1997–Present
Fellow, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, 2004–Present
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Yale University, 2004–Present
Senior Lecturer, Harvard Medical School, 1998–Present
Doctor of Humane Letters (Honorary), Oregon State University, 1997
Visiting Fellow, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, 1996
President and Co-Founder, The Hastings Center, 1969–1996
Executive Committee, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, 1990–1996
Honorary Professor, Charles University Medical School, Prague, Czech Republic, 1996
Advisory Committee on Scientific Integrity, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991-1992
Consultant, Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, 1992–1998
Advisory Editor, Ethics in Science and Medicine, 1975–Present
Editorial Advisory Board, Advanced Studies in Professional Ethics, 1986–Present
Advisory Board, Medical Humanities Review, 1986–Present
Board of Editors, Journal of Medicine, Ethics and Law, 1987–Present

Education edit

PhD, Philosophy, Harvard University, 1965
MA, Philosophy, Georgetown University, 1957
BA, English and Psychology, Yale University, 1952

Theoretical Expertise Ranking edit

Three Stars. Experts MDs, JDs (Lawyers), PhDs and Religious Leaders with significant involvement in end-of-life issues. [Because end-of-life dilemmas require medical, ethical, legal, and in some case religious considerations, we view MDs, PhDs with a bio-ethical focus, and JDs/religious leaders with significant involvement as "experts" in the euthanasia debate.] [Note: Experts definition varies by site.]

Memorable Arguements edit

Daniel Callahan, PhD, Director of International Programs at The Hastings Center, wrote in his June 1994 article, "Setting Limits: A Response," that appeared in The Gerontologist:

We could not possibly guarantee indefinitely to the growing number and proportion of the
elderly all of the potentially limitless fruits of medical progress at public expense without seriously distorting sensible social priorities... The average per capita costs of the elderly are significantly higher than for younger people. Public policy must take account of, and work with, those averages... Age matters...
It matters when, as we can now see, meeting the health care costs of the elderly as a group begins to threaten the possibility of meeting the needs of other age groups. In the nature of the case, moreover, there are no fixed boundaries to the amount of money that can be spent combating the effects of biological aging and attempting to forestall death in old age. It is an unlimited frontier. One could say exactly the same thing about trying to save the life of low birthweight infants... There are no end of possibilities there as well, and thus, some very good reasons to set limits to those efforts... It is no more an anti-aging act than it is an anti-baby act to set limits (for instance, on neonatal care) in order to avoid pursuing unlimited, potentially ruinous possibilities..."

Daniel Callahan, PhD, Director of International Programs at the Hastings Center, stated the following in his 2004 book The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care:

This path to peaceful dying rests on the illusion that a society can safely put in the hands of physicians the power directly and deliberately to take life, euthanasia, or to assist patients in taking their own life, physician-assisted suicide... It threatens to add still another sad chapter to an already sorry human history of giving one person the liberty to take the life of another. It perpetuates and pushes to an extreme the very ideology of control--the goal of mastering life and death--that created the problems of modern medicine in the first place. Instead of changing the medicine that generates the problem of an intolerable death (which, in almost all cases, good palliative medicine could do), allowing physicians to kill or provide the means to take one's own life simply treats the symptoms, all the while reinforcing, and driving us more deeply into, an ideology of control.

Daniel Callahan, PhD, Director of International Programs at the Hastings Center, wrote in his 1995 article "Vital Distinctions, Mortal Questions: Debating Euthanasia and Health Care Costs" that appeared in the book Arguing Euthanasia that:

The distinction between killing [active euthanasia] and allowing to die [passive euthanasia] is still perfectly valid for use... The distinction rests on the commonplace observation that lives can come to an end as the result of (a) the direct action of another who becomes the cause of death (as in shooting a person), or as the result of (b) impersonal forces where no human agent has acted (death by lightning or by disease)... At the center of the distinction between killing and allowing to die is the difference between physical causality and moral culpability. On the one hand, to bring the life of another to an end by an injection is to directly kill the other—our action is the physical cause of death. On the other hand, to allow someone to die from a disease we cannot cure (and that we did not cause) is to permit the disease to act as the cause of death.