WINTER CONFERENCE ON BRAIN RESEARCH
Brain Talk Town Meeting
The purpose of the Brain Talk Town Meeting is to open a dialogue between scientists and non-scientists. The meeting will start with a scientific presentation aimed at non-scientists, which will be followed by an open discussion period involving questions from the audience.
The 2026 Brain Talk Town Meeting
The 2026 Brain Talk Town Meeting will be held on Monday, January 26th, 2026, from 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM. Travis Rieder, Ph.D., will present his talk titled Catastrophe Ethics: How to be Good in a World on Fire.
Modern life is morally exhausting and confusing. Everything we do seems to matter. But simultaneously: nothing we do seems to matter. The problems are too big for a person’s individual contribution to make a difference. How do we live a morally decent life when we can’t even get our arms around the problems? While traditional ethics may harbor ambitions for telling us precisely what we are morally required to do, catastrophe ethics aims to answer a slightly different question: what sort of life can you justify in the face of today’s threats? With particular attention to climate change and environmental health, Rieder will elaborate his account of catastrophe ethics, suggesting how to resist the seductive pulls of both purity and nihilism. He will demonstrate how in a world where nearly everything we do implicates us in various systems and structures, there are a lot of opportunities to engage in moral work that is constant and creative, and that matters.
Travis N. Rieder, Ph.D., is a bioethicist and moral philosopher at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where he splits his time between teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level, research, and communicating with the public. Although he’s written on a fairly wide variety of topics, the vast majority of his scholarship, speaking, and writing for the public falls into one of two research programs.
The first involves the ethical and policy issues raised by pain, pain medicine, opioids, other drugs, addiction, and North America’s drug overdose crisis. Travis’s entry into this topic was quite personal, after a motorcycle accident in 2015 left with him with a crushed foot, lots of pain, and an extended series of reconstruction surgeries. His experience with opioids and the difficulty getting off of them launched his interest in the topic, and eventually became the subject of a TED talk and his first book, In Pain.
His most enduring research interest, however, has involved the overarching theme of “catastrophe.” In particular, Travis is concerned with how to engage in ethical reasoning about our own, individual lives in a time dominated by massive, structural threats that are too big and too complex for any one of us to meaningfully address on our own. This has led to many publications on climate change, pandemics, food ethics, and even overpopulation—and is the subject of his second book, Catastrophe Ethics.