At the University of Washington, a world-renown hub of medical innovation, researchers team up across departments to find answers to some of health care’s most pressing problems. Programmers solve. Engineers build. Physicians treat. Patients win. But buried inside this collaborative approach to medicine are questions that science can’t answer: When does a physical impairment become a “problem”? Do all problems need to be fixed? How much input should patients have?

Lauren Hartzell Nichols is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy with appointments in the Program on the Environment and the Program on Values in Society. She teaches about environmental ethics, climate change, and animal welfare. “Students think that I’m going to tell them what the right thing to do is,” Hartzell Nichols said. “Instead, I give them 10 or 12 arguments about what the right thing is, and they all conflict. And I push them to sort through it.”