Prof. dr. Carlo Leget
Professor of Care Ethics
Carlo Leget (1964) is full professor of care ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands since 2012. As chair of the care ethics department, he is responsible for the Master in Care Ethics & Policy at his university, and his research focuses on the intersection of care, meaning and end of life issues. He is a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands, was vice-president of the European Association for Palliative Care from 2012-2019, co-founder of the EAPC reference group spirituality.
Leget has a background in theology, medical ethics and care ethics. He is currently director of research at the University of Humanistic Studies.
Carlo Leget developed a model for existential care at the end of life in a secularized society, based on the medieval art of dying tradition: the diamond model. He wrote three books and a number of scientific papers and chapter about the model, some of which have been translated into German, Spanish and Portuguese. The Diamond model is widely used in end-of-life care in The Netherlands and Belgium, it has been integrated in a medical model for monitoring palliative patients and will be validated and tested in 7 European countries from January 2024 in the EU-project Raphael on care for palliative patients with heart failure.
Carlo Leget has a long history of interdisciplinary collaboration and research at the crossroads of ethics, philosophy, medical science, nursing science, anthropology, psychology and theology. His current research centers around the development of care ethics combined with empirical research about the vulnerability of people in different stages of life, loss and grief, fundamental questions about moral epistemology, and phenomenology.
In 2023 Carlo Leget founded the Center for Grief and Existential Values together with his Danish colleague Mai-Britt Guldin in Aarhus, Denmark. The center focuses on integrating different disciplinary perspectives on loss and grief and is especially interested in the existential dimension of loss and grief.