Past Events

Stanford TAPS presents a production of "Oh, What a Lovely War!"

A public discussion based on philosopher Avishai Margalit's Feb. 25 lecture.

A debate over meat consumption featuring John Mackey (Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Whole Foods Market) and Bruce Friedrich (Executive Director of The Good Food Institute)

Political Theory Workshop led by Barry R. Weingast

A panel discussion with former Congressmen Barney Frank (Democrat, MA), Dan Lungren (Republican, CA), and Mickey Edwards (Republican, OK) on the future prospects for bipartisanship in Congress.  Moderated by Professor Nate Persily, Stanf

A radio-play with music in one act as part of "The Ethics of Democracy" series.

Political Theory Workshop led by Tomer Perry

Political Theory Workshop led by Jennifer Morton

Political Theory Workshop led by Emilee Chapman

An all-day symposium sponsored by:

2nd Tanner Lecture: The consequences of America's War for the Greater Middle East.

Bernardo Zacka is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society. His research focuses on moral and political agency in adverse institutional conditions.

The Political Theory Workshop offers faculty and other scholars an opportunity to present "in progress" or recently completed work to a diverse audience from political science, philosophy, law, and other social sciences and humanities. All members of the university community are welcome to attend the workshop.

Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic.

Secular Humanism is a positive position, not merely the denial of anything transcendent.  Secular Humanists face familiar challenges, some intellectual, some practical.   Prominent among the former is the charge that secular humanism can

For the Ninth Annual Garfield Forum for Undergraduates, please join us as a panel of scholars discusses "Understanding ISIS."

Hollinger will address the question of the Christian religion’s relation to democracy as illuminated by the particular (and almost never discussed) case of Paul Blanshard, whose best-selling book of 1949, American Freedom and Catholi

Join us for a book signing and lecture with Clayman Institute Sociologist and author, Marianne Cooper.

This event will feature commentators Ira Katznelson and Margaret Levi who will be discussing Frank Fukuyama's Wesson lecture, A State of Courts and Parties. 

"The world's discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights," writes President Jimmy Carter.

Because of Edward Snowden’s remarkable public service, we know that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of some large firms, has amassed an unprecedented database of personal information.

In this morning event, we feature Quiara Alegría Hudes and Michael A. Rebell, who will comment on Danielle Allen's second Tanner lecture (Participatory Readiness).

In this morning event, we feature Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Tommie Shelby, who will comment on Danielle Allen's first Tanner lecture (Two Concepts of Education).

Join author Dave Eggers as he discusses topics related to his recent book, The Circle, in conversation with Tobias Wolff.

An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley is a three-act drama that takes place on a single night in 1912, and involves a wealthy middle-class family that is interrogated about the suicide of a young working-class woman.

The newspapers are filled with examples of ethical lapses on the part of elected officials, business leaders, and professionals in medicine, law, the academy, and law enforcement.

Every year, thousands of Americans witness wrongdoing on the job. These workers discover waste, fraud, abuse or malfeasance that could jeopardize the lives of others, or the well-being of the public.

William Deresiewicz will discuss his forthcoming book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. As a professor at Yale, Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply.

In her memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, Piper Kerman recounts the 15 months that she spent in the Danbury Correctional Facility.

See photos from the event, taken by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Do you owe more to family than you do to other people? But what is family? If you think about adopting a child, should you think first how it will affect the children you already have?

Pharmaceutical companies have come under fire for close financial relationships with university researchers and interactions with prescribing physicians.

This paper defends the limitarian doctrine, which entails that we all have a duty not to be rich.

Perfect Strangers tells the story of two unique and engaging characters. One is Ellie, who embarks on an unpredictable journey of twists and turns, determined to give away one of her kidneys.

This is a discussion of Lecture 2 of the Tanner Lecture from the previous night, "What Transactions Can't Do."

This is a discussion of Lecture 1 from the previous night's Tanner Lecture, "The Turn against Institutions."

The job of a religious leader is hard to define. We ask them to counsel us when we are faced with challenging circumstances and we look to them to help us celebrate life's joyous milestones.

This is Lecture 2 of the Wesson Lectures. Professor He's title for the series is "An Empirical Theory of Authoritarian Deliberation."

Ethics are important. The economic divide between the developed and developing world highlights the ethical dimensions of energy access in a climate-constrained world.

Produced by the Yale Law School Visual Law Project, this film explores the conditions and impact of solitary confinement in a Connecticut maximum security prison.

The concept of the poverty trap has played a central role in the economics of poverty and development.

Does the law take mental illness into account when determining guilt and punishment?   Should it?  Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg will discuss the insanity defense and related doctrines.  Judge Stephen Manley, a leader in the men

This event is co-sponsored with the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Religious Studies.

In early 2007, George Packer published an article in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the Americans in Iraq, with litt

Concern about rising economic inequality arises because of its implications for today’s society and of what it implies about where we are headed in the future. Are inequalities within countries going to continue to widen? This lecture asks what can be learned from historical experience and from economic models of the generation of inequality. It explores the long-run development of inequality of income and wealth in the US and in Europe. When have we succeeded in reducing inequality? It argues that we need to go beyond first year economics in order to understand the forces influencing wages and capital incomes, and that the subject of inequality should be re-integrated into the mainstream of economics.

Thinking of joining or creating a start-up? Considering a career in corporate America? Pursuing an MBA?

A forthright conversation about the role of money in the art world. How do wealth and its privileges shape art, patronage, and curatorial practice today? This dialogue, addressing the phenomenon of the artist as celebrity, and the spectacular presentation of art in the auction house and the museum, will feature Amy Cappellazzo, Chairman, Post-War and Contemporary Development at Christie's, Scott Rothkopf, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and, Julia Bryan-Wilson Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, UC Berkeley. Moderated by Professor Richard Meyer ( (Art and Art History, Stanford).

Scotty McLennan, Dean of Religiouos Life at Stanford, was in conversation with New York Times writer Michael Winerip.

Maddow's visit to Stanford is two fold.

A discussion of wealth in Israel.

Thinking about a career in engineering? What are the ethical issues unique to the field of education? What are some of the challenges you'll face?

Saez's lecture will present evidence on income inequality from the World Top Incomes Database.

The philosopher Peter Singer compares the way most of us live to seeing a child drowning in a shallow pond and declining to save him so as not to muddy our clothes.

A comic monologue about one man's belated struggles to become a provider.

Rosa Lee Harden, co-founder of Social Capital Markets (SOCAP), will be preaching at Memorial Church in their University Public Worship series. SOCAP is a multi-platform organization dedicated to the flow of capital towards social good.

• Lecture I: October 10
  The Productivity Problem in Higher Education
  5:30-7:00pm at Cemex Auditorium, Knight Management Center
   
• Lecture II: October 11

The Gilded Age -- the time when the nation’s egalitarian ideals get overwhelmed by an acceptance of corporate capitalism, unbridled accumulation, and social inequality. Not quite. According to historian Richard White and literary critic Gavin Jones, the Gilded Age saw surprising responses to the embarrassment of riches.

Engstrom will examine a peculiar form of unexamined personal injury law practice that has proliferated across the United States. These law firms, which she calls settlement mills, are characterized by their high claim volume, aggressive advertising, significant delegation to non-attorneys, entrepreneurial focus, and quick resolution of claims, typically without initiation of suit.

Banks will discuss the difficulty and satisfactions of writing truthfully and forthrightly about sensitive racial issues.

Leaders of military commands and government organizations operating in conflict zones often face ethical dilemmas as they carry out their missions. Integrity in reporting is vital, but bearers of "bad news" are sometimes understandably concerned with professional ramifications.

American universities and the local communities in which they reside often interact in the spirit of pursuing the common good. Their noble intentions may appear simple, but the relationships and processes necessary for the partnership can become complex, nuanced and ever-changing.

For decades, parents with children with Down syndrome were told to take them home and love them, as they were considered to have irreversible intellectual disabilities.

Over the past decade, public support for the death and the number of death sentences imposed have decreased substantially. Several jurisdictions have abolished the death penalty during this period. Marshall -- who has been involved in death penalty cases for more than two decades -- will discuss these developments, with a particular focus on the current effort to repeal the death penalty in California, the State with the largest number of death row inmates.

There are two important conditions that are designed to regulate a justified behavior in a war: Distinction (between combatants and civilians) and Proportionality.

Respondents:
Joshua Cohen (Political Science / Philosophy / Law, Stanford)
Stephen Ansolabehere (Governmnet, Harvard)

A Socratic dialogue with attendees about dealing with personal moral risk. The centerpiece will be a case by Bowen McCoy entitled "The Parable of the Sadhu," which describes ethical issues he faced on a trek in the Himalayas.

Sebastian Junger is the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of WAR, The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont and Fire.

Post screening discussion: Ian Olds (Director, The Fixer) in conversation with Robert Crews (History, Stanford)

Ms. Meredith will explore the ethical dilemmas facing philanthropy. Philanthropy in the USA boasts $300 billiion annually in unconstrained private resources as gifts from individual philanthropists, foundations and corporations to impact social change. Is that reasonable and should philanthropy have such influence on society as a whole? What are the issues on the blurring of the lines as nonprofit organizations want a revenue stream and for-profit businesses want a mission? What are the ethcial dilemma's facing nonprofits daily as they accept private gifts or government funds then they must manage to outcomes, or not? How do nonprofits report on their successes or failures as they meet compliance issues for reporting to the government and their donors? The IRS has a 99.4% acceptance rate for nonprofit organization applications so should anyone really be able to create a nonprofit that can accept charitable gifts? What are the implied conflicts of interest? These are just a few of the many issues that we will discuss.

Ancient Philosophies as Ways of Life

The U.S. military completed the drawdown in Iraq in December 2011. That drawdown was made possible by a variety of factors, to include the so-called "Surge" in 2007 and 2008. The Surge itself was hugely controversial at the time it was announced and remained so through the Presidential election cycle. This talk will provide insight on the political pressure senior leaders in Baghdad were under and how they thought about assessing the success of the Surge as they reported back to Washington, to include the heated September 2007 testimony to Congress by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The example of how General Petraeus, who Colonel Miller worked directly for at the time, set the parameters for thinking about the problem and preserved his decision space will be the focus of the discussion.

For the past two years, Winograd has collaborated with Joshua Cohen to teach a course at the Stanford d.school called Designing Liberation Technologies. Small interdisciplinary student teams develop new ideas for dealing with problems in health and development in some of the poorest neighborhoods (“informal settlements”) of Nairobi, Kenya. The ideal is for the students to create innovations that can bring real improvements to people’s lives. The reality is that we are only one part of a larger technical/economic system, and our efforts to do good may actually create more problems than they solve. We don’t have answers, but have grappled with some of the questions about how students with a bounded amount of commitment can ethically work in an environment that is distant, both in miles and in culture and wealth.

This talk focuses on the issues of justice that arise in listing decisions, the way organs are distributed, and in the solicitation of organs; as well as the ethical challenges and opportunities present in Donation after Cardiac Death.

Carol Rosenberg has covered the proceedings in the U.S. prison camps in Guantánamo Bay for The Miami Herald for nine years. Earlier this year, she was awarded the Robert F.

Under what conditions does the American public support using nuclear weapons? Is there a general "nuclear taboo" and, if so, how strong are the public's inhibitions against using nuclear weapons? New survey experiments there is only a weak normative aversion against the use nuclear weapons and the aversion has few characteristics of a taboo. When nuclear weapons are seen to offer significant advantages over conventional weapons, large portions of the American public prefer nuclear strikes over conventional optio

In an age of farmers’ markets, CSAs, and a generally heightened awareness of our food system and the perceived importance of buying organic and eating locally, there remains a rather large, but hidden and largely unknown truth about so-called sustainable food: it is entirely possible that it was picked by the hands of a slave. This may seem absurd considering the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution and that we have a legal system that functions reasonably well. But the reality is that farm workers are an excluded class of people from the labor laws that protect the rest of us and the consequences are often appallin

Award-winning documentarian and Stanford alumna Abigail Disney will talk about her latest project, PBS mini-series Women, War & Peace — the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the roles of women in pe

Lori Shoemaker has been a Delegate with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Uganda, Yugoslavia and Albania and she will be discussing how the ICRC operates and what this means to its Delegates on the ground.

Jeff McMahan is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.

This event is sponsored by the Aurora Forum.

Our panel of experts will focus on the question: Should we film war?

Panelists:

Allyson Hobbs (History) presented this Ethics@Noon talk on March 24, 2011. Click here to learn more about the other Eth

Stephen Macedo (Politics / University Center for Human Values, Princeton) presented this Ethics@Noon talk on April 11, 2011. 

Jonathan Glover (Ethics, King's College, London) gave an Arrow Lecture on February 24, 2011.

The Challenge of Sustainability
Lecture I: Frameworks
Lecture II: Puzzles

Scholars engaged in African field research know that their presence can be deafening. Indeed, the cacophony we create constantly threatens to overwhelm the melodies we seek to explore and understand.

Harry Elam, Stanford's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, presented this Ethics@Noon talk on February 4, 2011. 

Tim O'Brien is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and July, July (Winner of the National Book Awa

This panel discussion features: Richard Goldstone (Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa), James Campbell (History, Stanford) and Peter Berkowitz

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.

Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark S

Susie Linfield is author of "The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence" (University of Chicago Press).

The Long and Tragical History of Post-Partisanship

Speakers and titles for this workshop are listed below:

Torture and the Forever War: Living in the State of Exception
Lecture 1: "Imposing the State of Exception: Constitutional Dictatorship, Torture and Us"

• Empirical Social Science: What's Ethics Got to Do with It?
  Alison Morantz (Law School)
   
• From Ethics in Society to Law Practice
  

Designing a Path to Sustainable Development

Self Government in our Times
Adam Przeworski (Politics, NYU)
Respondent: James Fearon (Political Science, Stanford)

• Bringing Healthy Foods to Schools: The Consequences of Childhood Eating and Activity Habits
  Kirsten Tobey (Founder and COO of Revolution Foods) 
  

There were two lectures during this academic year: one in the fall and one in the spring.

Democracy in Dangerous Places

Paul Collier (Economics, Oxford / Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford)

• Why Not Toss a Coin? Lotteries and Justice
  Peter Stone, Political Science
   
• Obesity and Public Policy
  

• The Real Dirt on Farmer John (Film)
  

• Ethical Challenges for the Legal Profession

Participation, Progress, and Professional Opportunity: A Report Card for the First 35 Years of Title IX

Linda Jean Carpenter,Professor Emerita Brooklyn College

On the Side of Angels
Lecture 1: Glorious Traditions of Antipartyism and Moments of Appreciation
Lecture 2: Partisanship and Independence: The Moral Distinctiveness of Party ID

On February 16th and 17th 2006 the Center on Ethics hosted

Children and Your Coaching Career
Myra Strober Stanford GSB (Moderator)

Kristen Smyth, Head Coach, Stanford Gymnastics

Stephanie Erickson, Head Coach, Harvard Soccer

Exiles, Exodus, & Promised Lands

Respondents:

• Inequality and the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Of Women, Woman and Linchpins: Considerations on Okin's Contributions to Political Thought