Friday, May 25, 2007

On ethics and agreements

Last weekend Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, formerly called the University Center for Ethics and the Professions, celebrated it's 20th anniversary with social events and a series of speeches and panel discussions.

Among the panelists were University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann; Samantha Power, a Kennedy School of Government professor and Pulitzer Prize winner for "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide"; and intellectual property rights guru Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University.

If you missed the event, it's worth having a look at this write-up of the keynote address by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, who was Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1998.

Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, Sen said ethics is a subject about which "It is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent." He discussed three guiding questions: What do we want from a theory of justice? How can we make room for lasting disagreements in ethical matters? And how is fairness linked to justice? He argued, as he has before, that disagreements about moral principles are healthy and ought to be respected, but that there is room for a kind of clearing in the forest where vastly divergent views can be discussed and debated: "there is a domain of agreement, with the possibility of further cultivation of agreed arrangements.... It is not, I would argue, a hopeless enterprise."

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:43 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss