Ethics of Humanitarian Field Work Featuring Dr. Chiara Lepora

Dr. Chiara Lepora has spent more than a decade providing medical care throughout the Middle East and Africa, working with Medicines sans Frontiers (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) and other agencies to increase access to care in some of the most volatile circumstances.  Alongside her direct humanitarian work, Dr. Lepora has published in leading philosophy journals to engage with foundational questions about the ethics of humanitarian aid and complicity. Drawing on her extensive field experience, Dr. Lepora will address foundational humanitarian questions about the nature of complicity and compromise, recognizing that we are often forced to make moral decisions in non-ideal circumstances.

Dr. Chiara Lepora currently works for the International Committee of the Red Cross as a Detention Doctor in Algeria.  Prior to that she worked with Medicines sans Frontieres’s (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) for over a decade, leading medical humanitarian programs in countries throughout the Middle East and Africa.  Dr. Lepora has published scholarly books and articles in leading outlets in philosophy, including On Complicity and Compromise (Oxford, 2013), engaging in pressing questions about individual and collective complicity in the face of global injustices. Dr. Lepora trained as a medical practitioner at the Universities of Pavia and Lisbon and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is featured in an award-winning documentary film about Doctors Without Borders, Living in Emergency (2008).