Remembering Tom Beauchamp (1939-2025)

The Kennedy Institute of Ethics mourns the loss of our friend and colleague, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and retired Senior Research Scholar Tom Beauchamp, who passed away suddenly on February 19, 2025.
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Read the announcement from Interim Provost Soyica Diggs Colbert
Read the obituary in the Washington Post

Remembering Tom L. Beauchamp, 1939-2025

As early as his young teens, Tom Lamar Beauchamp, III began looking for the language, and the concepts—first in the social sciences, then in theology and ultimately in philosophy—that would allow him to wrestle with, speak about, and do something to address what he saw in the world as deeply concerning issues with the way that people were treated.

He found, within applied philosophy, a career; in philosophical ethics he, along with his co-author and collaborator James Childress, identified the principles and the language that allowed the rest of us to frame, speak and act in the biomedical arena—to confront what we deal with as human beings in the world.

In his many endeavors and professional homes, he found admiring colleagues, cherished friendships, and inspired students. We at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics will miss him terribly and will remember him with gratitude, respect, and deep affection.

Worldview and Orientation

Born in Austin, Texas in December 1939, Tom remembered being interested, as a teenager, in issues now known as social justice and human rights. In a November 2013 interview for PRIM&R’s (Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research) People & Perspectives digital story-telling library, Beauchamp remembered some early influences on his life. He particularly remembered two young Methodist ministers in Dallas whose “commitment to what today we might call ethics” inspired him to explore it further on his own, which he did by reading widely.

After reading about apartheid in South Africa, Tom became involved in sit-ins in Dallas because he realized that that city was quite segregated into a “tripartite society” with obvious separation of White Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Wanting to change this, he joined a small number of other similarly motivated people. While this civil rights group had some small effect—Tom said they really were purposefully ignored by City leaders to avoid bad publicity for Dallas—his interest in ethics and what is now known as social and political philosophy continued but went underground for some years as he sought graduate training in religious studies first and in philosophy. He developed philosophical doubts about religion, finally ending up in philosophy, but found that graduate training in that field simply wasn’t focused on issues in society like civil rights. At that time, philosophical education trained people to work on metaphysics and epistemology, not to address the real-life issues that people were confronting daily in personal, communal, and civic life.

Tom studied social sciences (mainly psychology) as an undergraduate at Southern Methodist University and was able to combine that degree with a Masters degree in Philosophy. He then began a graduate program in the Divinity School at Yale University called “Teaching and Research in Religion” that allowed students to pursue any interest in religion and to take courses from across the graduate school offerings. This time of exploration confirmed that Tom wanted to study normative ethics to deal with practical problems. He finished the graduate program at Yale and transferred to The Johns Hopkins University to work on a Ph.D. in Philosophy.

Georgetown

Tom was hired at Georgetown in 1970 in the department of Philosophy, focusing on the history of philosophy and specifically 18^th Century philosophy. He maintained an interest in that area—indeed, he was an internationally recognized scholar of Scottish philosopher David Hume —but once he arrived at Georgetown there was interest among students and other people in pressing issues of the day, including the Vietnam War, and other ethical concerns. Tom began to teach classes on these topics. The first class he taught was a course called “Freedom and Dissent;” it was the first course in applied ethics taught at Georgetown. He had to develop this and other applied ethics classes entirely on his own because he had no training in this area while in graduate school; it just wasn’t where the field of Philosophy was at that time.

Many people sleep in on Saturday or do errands or linger with coffee and a newspaper. The fact that both Tom Beauchamp and André Hellegers liked to work on Saturdays in their offices at Georgetown University changed the course of the field of bioethics, ethics education for many healthcare professionals, and the way that patients around the world are treated when they are ill and, indeed, at their most vulnerable and in need of being treated as creatures of moral worth. André Hellegers, M.D., a physician, was the Founding Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a newly established Institute in 1971 at Georgetown dedicated to researching, speaking about, and teaching on issues in the emerging field of bioethics. Tom was introduced to André through LeRoy Walters, Ph.D., another recent graduate of Yale, who was newly appointed to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics as one of its first faculty members.

Tom and André began to meet regularly for lunch at The Tombs, a Georgetown restaurant tradition near Campus, on Saturdays and talked about questions, cases, and pressing issues of the day. André was deeply concerned that physicians were not prepared to deal with the host of ethical issues that were beginning to arise. Tom’s ability to speak both from religious studies and philosophy brought new insights to these concerns. This ongoing conversation, that neither wanted to end, led André to offer Tom a job at the Kennedy Institute in 1974. This offer was sweetened by the offer of an office overlooking the Potomac River and the assistance of a secretary, opportunities not available to most people in Philosophy. Tom stayed connected to the Department of Philosophy but moved into offices in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and began a career in bioethics.

In addition to issues in clinical medicine and clinical research, the mid 1970s was a time when people sought ethical guidance for the problems that human beings faced in various professions. During those years, Tom wrote texts and articles on business ethics, nursing ethics, and journalistic ethics, among other topics. However, he became best known for his work in biomedical ethics, including work with another Georgetown colleague, the first Joseph P. Kennedy Chair in Christian Ethics, James F. Childress.

Belmont Report and Principles of Biomedical Ethics

In 1974, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin invited Tom to write about justice for the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (National Commission), the first US bioethics commission and the first such entity in the world. The Commission was brought into existence as a result of the National Research Act in 1974 after the discovery of the US Public Health Service’s unethical research on untreated syphilis in African American men in Tuskegee, Alabama. At the same time, a Yale religious studies graduate, James Childress, had also been contacted to write a paper on another topic (maybe ethical theory, Tom recalls) for the Commission. Beauchamp and Childress were recruited to write papers for the Commission because the Commissioners were experts from many different fields and spoke in different disciplinary languages; both Tom and Jim were supposed “to provide them with something that everyone could understand.”

In 1975 KIE director André Hellegers recruited Jim Childress, who was then at the University of Virginia, to the Kennedy Institute to become the first holder of the Joseph P. Kennedy Chair in Christian Ethics. Now together at the KIE, Tom and Jim would soon find themselves working on what would become the renowned book Principles of Biomedical Ethics. It came about as a result of the convergence of several activities and events.

First, Tom and Jim became involved in the newly formed and soon-to-be famous Intensive Bioethics Course (IBC). As Tom described it, “LeRoy Walters [Kennedy Institute director] was a schemer—in a positive sense— thought big and had fresh ideas for an intensive bioethics course (IBC) in 1974 that would talk about bioethics and other issues like preserving nature (now environmental ethics).” A few years into the IBC, Tom and Jim were asked to teach all the ethical theory for IBC: the Deontological side would be handled by Jim and the Utilitarian side would be covered by Tom. They had taught this way for a couple of years when an IBC attendee put them in touch with an editor at the Oxford University Press (OUP) who asked Tom and Jim if they would be interested to turn their IBC lectures into a book. A meeting was soon arranged in DC with the chief medical editor at OUP in NY. The contract for the book was signed within 3 weeks. Tom stated, “it was clear that the book would be focused on principles from the start because we were teaching the [IBC] course that way.”

About five weeks after the OUP contract for the Principles book, Tom was asked to become the staff philosopher for the National Commission after Stephen Toulmin’s return to the University of Chicago. Tom arranged a leave of absence from Georgetown and went to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be their employee. In his recollections, he chuckled because the person doing the intake at the National Institutes of Health could not record the fact that he was a philosopher as his profession on the intake form because they just did not have philosophers at NIH. They said he had to be something else. Tom volunteered that his undergraduate degree was in social science and with that more acceptable profession, he became an employee at the NIH.

On the second day of work, Tom was asked to work on a report that would outline the basic moral principles the National Commission would work with to guide research involving human subjects. The report would be called the Belmont Report (after the place a recent staff retreat had been held, The Belmont Center, operated by the Smithsonian).

Tom clearly stated that research, writing and discussions on the Belmont Report draft and on the Biomedical Ethics text with Jim Childress, were occurring at the same time and informed one another.

The Belmont Report (1978) still serves as the foundation of research involving human subjects for the US and has been adopted by other countries around the world. It puts forward three ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence (doing good) and justice. In remembering that work, Tom said that he argued for the principle of autonomy, but the Commissioners wanted respect for persons because it was a concept they thought would be better understood by the general public. Tom wasn’t happy with that choice because there was a huge, complicated literature about persons with no single definition of persons accepted in both philosophy and law. But there also wasn’t a long history about autonomy to draw on. The Belmont Report kept the principle of respect for persons but did not define what a person was. Tom said that it should be a principle of autonomy or respect for autonomy and that would cover people with the ability to make decisions for themselves. For people who are definitely persons but are not autonomous, they should be treated under the principle of beneficence (not under autonomy). “You become a caretaker for them if you are the physician or, if they are institutionalized, both the caregiver and protector.”

Work on the Belmont Report influenced and strengthened what was covered in the Principles of Biomedical Ethics text. Belmont discussed research ethics, a topic that Tom and Jim had not considered before in their lectures for the IBC, that solely focused on clinical medicine. However, when it was published in 1979, Principles of Biomedical Ethics contained the ethical principle of respect for autonomy (not respect for persons) and the principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence (do no harm), and justice. Tom observed that we had an immediate audience and connection between ethical principles in Principles of Biomedical Ethics and the ethical principles in The Belmont Report because both became the foundation for official ethics of National Institutes of Health.

Time at the Kennedy Institute

During his 36 years at the Institute, Tom taught undergraduate/graduate and graduate classes through the Department of Philosophy and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics ranging from “History of Modern Philosophy” and “Hume” (based on his enduring interest in the history of philosophy) to “Methods of Applied Ethics,” “Methods in Bioethics,” “Informed Consent,” “A Proseminar in Ethical Theory,” and a “Seminar in Philosophical Topics in Biomedical Ethics.”

Tom chaired many dissertation committees. Graduate students that he mentored and taught went on to found, direct, and teach at many of the bioethics centers at major institutions across the United States and Canada. His students are a “Who’s Who” of people trained in bioethics.

He worked on several editions of Principles of Biomedical Ethics with Jim Childress; Oxford University Press published the 8^th edition in 2019. He edited and authored volumes in the multivolume Clarendon, Oxford critical editions on the works of David Hume and co-authored a classic text, The History and Theory of Informed Consent (Oxford, 1986) with Ruth Faden, a social scientist, leader in the field of bioethics, and his beloved wife. He also wrote The Human Use of Animals (Oxford, 2^nd ed. with four co-authors) and Philosophical Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 2001) as a basic resource in ethical theory. He co-edited comprehensive volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (with R.G. Frey) and The Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics (with George Brenkert). Tom mentored Visiting Researchers who came to the Institute from many different countries and from institutions across the US to learn from him for a few months or a year. His mentoring of these individuals spanned efforts to help judges in their country make better decisions in legal cases involving biomedical issues, to help work out knotty problems in their books and courses on ethical theory, and sometimes to improve their understanding and teaching on the principles. He taught every year in the KIE’s ongoing and interdisciplinary Intensive Bioethics Course (the next will occur in June 2025). He was a sought-after small group leader for professionals who attended the course from many fields connected to bioethics.

Awards

Recognition of his work spans the many fields in which he has written. In 2004, Tom and his co-author James Childress (who had returned to the University of Virginia), were honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) in recognition of their outstanding contributions and significant publications in bioethics and the humanities. ASBH is the main professional association for the professionals from several fields working in bioethics.

In 2010 he received the Henry Beecher Award of the Hastings Center, the oldest bioethics organization in the world, for a lifetime of contributions to research ethics and other areas of bioethics. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Research Ethics from the Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research (PRIM&R). In 1994, he was the first recipient of Indiana University’s “Memorial Award for Furthering Greater Understanding and Exchange of Opinions between the Professions of Law and Medicine” and in 2003, he received Georgetown University’s Career Recognition Award, awarded to one faculty member each year for distinguished research across an entire career.” He has been the recipient of several National Science Foundation awards, including one to advance work in animal research ethics and another to study the voluntariness of parental decisions to consent to enroll their child in pediatric cancer trials.

Tom’s quest to address wrongs he saw in society helped found the new field of bioethics. Tom Beauchamp’s life touched many in academic fields with his scholarship, teaching, and insightful analysis. Beyond the classroom and the library, however, his work to address issues in biomedical ethics means that the doctor or nurse or other healthcare professional standing at your bedside may know the Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics that Tom Beauchamp and Jim Childress described and developed to guide ethical delivery of clinical medicine and informed consent. The researcher leading the clinical trial in which you enroll should be guided within the framework of the Belmont Report’s ethical principles governing respect for persons, doing good (beneficence), and doing no harm (nonmaleficence).

Beloved Teacher, Colleague and Friend

Dan Sulmasy, Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, remarked, “It is not an exaggeration to say that, through his work in bioethics, he has had more impact on medical practice than most physician scientists. Clinicians around the world not only learn but also put into practice the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice that Tom first articulated 50 years ago. Georgetown and the world have lost a great scholar and teacher.”

When Tom taught, he would stride into the classroom in crisp, pressed shirts. He would step behind the podium and roll up his sleeves in precise and neat folds to just below the elbow, open his folder of notes, and begin to deliver an intense, content-filled, and engaging lecture at a rapid pace. He was known for making coffee so strong and black that a spoon could stand upright in the cup and he never measured the coffee, just filled the filter to the brim.

“Professor Beauchamp was an incredible professor in addition to being a pathbreaking scholar,” a former student has posted online. “I remember his history of modern philosophy class fondly, in part because it was the first time I ever felt treated by a professor as an interlocutor-in-training. He pushed his students while being so warm, inviting, and kind. I eventually decided to pursue a career in academic philosophy and can honestly say that I wouldn’t be the philosopher I am without his guidance, support, and influence. He will be missed!”

Though our hearts are heavy, those of us who had the privilege and pleasure of friendship and collaboration with Tom will always remember his kindness, intellect, and integrity. He was a beloved colleague and a generous and wise mentor and teacher. We extend our deepest condolences to his beloved wife and our dear colleague Ruth Faden, and to his family.

With thanks to Laura Bishop, PhD and Roxie France-Nuriddin

Tagged: Scholars; Tom Beauchamp