Hey folks, I just want to say at the top here that this episode deals with some heavy themes like death and suicide. So keep that in

mind if you're listening with kids. An ethicist is someone who studies morality. You know, what's right,

what's wrong, how we ought to act. A clinical ethicist does that work in the middle of a

hospital, where the questions they have to address are heartbreakingly real and high stakes.

Questions like, who should make decisions for a patient in a coma? When should a doctor honor a

patient's wish to stop treatment?

These can be excruciating dilemmas, which got me wondering.

There was surely a career that you could have done that would have featured more giggles, more lightness.

Like, what do you think it was about you that propelled you into this fraught moral domain?

I love grappling with tough questions.

I think that for me, the joy in life isn't necessarily the giggles part.

It's the making sense of life part, the

integration of all the bits of life that make it meaningful. Esther Berkowitz is a clinical

ethicist at a large hospital system in the US. She says for her, the search for meaning began as a kid

with conversations around the dinner table.

It's perhaps typified by the fact that when our older son went to college and had to write his college application essay,

and you could choose to write about anything you want, his essay was titled Dinner Table University.

And he described our family dinner table, much like I would describe the one I grew up with,

which is that your dinner table becomes how you learn about how to think about life.

They're just things that shape the kind of inputs that you bring to decision making. It's how you want to live your life. They're just things that shape the kind of inputs that you bring to decision-making.

It's how you want to live your life. Why does this matter to you? Are you going to act on it?

Well, that is a great insight. It's like reconciling beliefs and actions is a critical part of

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