So today’s talk was a little different from the others. It was a lot more like a standard political philosophy lecture than the applied ethics discussions that we normally get. As I have strong interests in political philosophy, the lecture was right up my alley, but I suspect some of you found it less interesting than I did. (But if you did find it interesting, do check out PHIL171: Justice. It’s offered every year and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in political theory, political philosophy, or ethics.)

I would like to open today’s discussion up to very broad issues that you might want to write about. Because Dr. Arnold’s talk was, in effect, about what a just society should look like, any post about a social issue will be sufficiently relevant. So feel free to write about the theory, but feel just as free to try to examine some concrete issues.

Thanks for a great quarter, and good luck on finals!

Hope you enjoyed today’s talk.

I think our discussion topic for this week is pretty clear, given the talk. I want to know what you think about these settlement-mills!

On the one hand, they aren’t at all honest about their practices, and it might even be the case that they conspire with insurance companies. So they are bound to leave some claimants with far less money than they deserve. On the other hand, they are cheap, quick, and accessible. They might be the very sort of quick remedy that the poorer population (especially with small claims) are looking for.

I’m personally genuinely conflicted about these firms. They are unprofessional, and as I said in class, their lack of transparency is certainly worrisome. But they do seem to be doing good. Without them, many people would sustain harm without any remedy.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Thank you for your patience today in waiting for Prof. Banks. I hope you enjoyed the talk nonetheless.

I thought Prof. Banks’s talk was quite approachable. He talked about the decline in marriage and the changing roles of men and women, both generally in America, and specifically (and especially) among African Americans. He then talked about why his book was so controversial. Particularly, Prof. Banks talked about the controversy around allowing black women (who are doing better socioeconomically than black men) to marry across racial lines. On the one hand, of course black women can marry as they will. On the other hand, some people (especially black men) think that doing so is in some sense betraying the black community.

I get the sense that the majority of us will be on the side of fully allowing interracial marriage. But I would like to hear thoughts on that, especially from those of you who think that black women should be somehow encouraged to marry within the black community (if there are some of you who do believe that).

I also want to hear thoughts on the general idea of academia discussing controversial issues. Do you think that some things should be left out of intellectual discussion?

Looking forward to it!

I hope you enjoyed today’s talk.

Ambassador Eikenberry, drawing upon his own experiences in Afghanistan, talked about the tough ethical decisions that a military and diplomatic leader has to make.

I think there are at least two ethical questions that you might think about for this blog response. The first question is a very practical one, and one that was brought into sharp focus with Ambassador Eikenberry’s example of the platoon leader. In short, American forces were in a deadlock with Taliban forces, and a few meters away from the American position were two corpses of enemy soldiers. The 110 degree weather quickly started decaying the corpses. Nevermind the smell and the horrific view– the corpses became health hazards. The platoon leader thus decided to burn the corpses. There was a journalist who captured that in video, and suddenly, the video was all over the news. And indeed, Ambassador Eikenberry told us that the platoon leader clearly violated the rules. So there’s public outrage in the States, in Afghanistan, and around the world. As a leader, you certainly need to take that into account. But you also need to take the institution’s integrity into consideration, as well as your authority within the institution (indeed, you should remain an effective leader), and your personal moral judgment about the act. Taking that (and any other issues you think are relevant) into account, what do you do?

The second question is more theoretical– indeed, it might be viewed as a question about democracy at large. So it’s a hard question to answer in a blog response, but it is certainly worth thinking about. Start with the idea that central to democracy is open political discussion about the toughest of issues– issues about which, among other things, people have passionate disagreements. As a citizen of a democratic society, then, you are a participant in that nation-wide political discussion, both as a speaker and as a listener. What moral duties, if any, do you have as such a participant? As a speaker, do you have the right to say just about anything you want, as long as it is a genuine opinion of yours, and as long as it is political in nature? Are you, for example, allowed to say things that are terribly offensive and perhaps even uncivil? As a listener, do you have the obligation to listen to, or at least to allow, anything that is said? Or are you, in certain cases, warranted in silencing the opinions of others?

I look forward to reading your thoughts– I always read them. These issues are very controversial, though, so do remember to be civil.

Thanks!

Albert Pak

For those of you who made it, I hope you enjoyed today’s talk.

Dr. Reed and Mr. Betcher led a very interactive discussion about ethics of campus-community partnerships, using a hypothetical case study.

This was definitely one of the talks in which the relevant ethical issues were quite transparent. So I’ll leave it up to you to take up any of those threads.

If you want a suggestion on what to discuss, though, I was particularly interested in the question of what moral obligations (if at all) a campus has to its neighboring communities. On the one hand, one might think that a college is primarily an institution to educate and to research — and thus that there is little room for obligations to community members. On the other hand, there seem to be several arguments to suggest that colleges do have such obligations, directly or indirectly. Perhaps it’s a part of the university’s mission to benefit society at large. Or perhaps a university, in order to attract the best students, needs to benefit society because students want to be a part of a college that does that.

Another interesting issue is that of a power imbalance in contracts. Suppose that two parties are trying to reach an agreement, but that one of the parties does not have the capability of fully understanding the terms of the agreement. Does the more capable party have an obligation to the less capable party to explain the terms of the agreement? (One interesting way to think about this issue is to draw a parallel to informed consent. Can the less capable party really enter into an agreement if it is not informed about its content?)

Looking forward to reading your opinions!

I hope you all enjoyed today’s talk. Thank you for dealing with the technical difficulties, and for those of you who were at lunch, it was nice meeting you!

So Dr. Bischoff’s talk on education equity had, as I saw it, three parts. First, she presented us with some evidence to show that there is inequality in education right now. Second, she demonstrated that measuring equality in education in itself is a very difficult task. And third, she gestured towards some of the ethical issues that arise in the topic of education equity.

I think this was one of those talks in which the relevant ethical issues were quite transparent — indeed, equality of education is, at least from personal experience, a frequent topic for those late night conversations that seem (at least at the time) incredibly deep. So feel free to comment on any of those ethical issues.

I have to say, though, that one ethical issue interests me above others — so if you have thoughts on this, I would love to read them. Dr. Bischoff framed this issue as “liberty v. equality,” and I think that’s a great wait to put things. Any policy to promote equality must redistribute resources and standardize the range of choices that we have, thereby restricting our liberty. As applied to education, the attempt to provide equal education means, necessarily, that resources must be redirected from the well-off to the others, and that perhaps some educational options (e.g., private schooling or home schooling) must be banned. That’s, of course, a stroke against liberty.

So we have two great ideals — equality and liberty — and they seem to contradict one another in this difficult case of education. Of course, I’m not saying that we should have complete equality or complete liberty. As with many other things, we need to strike the right balance. So my question is, how would you go about finding that balance? How much should government (or some other organization) actively redistribute resources in the name of equal education?

Looking forward to reading what you have to say!

Prof. Craig Garner talked about the recent work that his lab is doing on neurobiological approaches to treating Down syndrome. The talk itself consisted largely of the science behind his work, and then we proceeded to explore some related ethical issues in the ensuing discussion.

Of course, our discussion here should focus on ethics, but I just want to make a quick side-comment. I personally appreciated how excited Prof. Garner was about the science– about neurotransmitters, inhibition/excitation, synapses, etc– because it really made things easier for me to follow him. This is often said about a lot of people, but I really thought that his enthusiasm was contagious. I found myself wanting to better understand the science behind Down syndrome. I hope you guys felt the same way!

But of course I was also thinking about the ethical issues involved here. Again, feel free to discuss any moral issue that you found relevant– but I would especially be interested in hearing your thoughts about informed consent in cases where, like here, others are making decisions for the patients. (The concept of informed consent is a quite developed one in bioethics, and you can read a very comprehensive review of the literature here. For something more fun and accessible, listen to Onora O’Neill on medical consent.)

In class, we discussed the possibility that some people with Down syndrome might have sufficient cognitive capacity to give informed consent. But what about the other cases when the patient clearly cannot grasp information to be able to consent in a meaningful way? In those cases, we usually have relatives give consent on behalf of the patients. I’m wondering what ethical complications there might be in such cases.

I think the worry becomes particularly visible when the treatment leads to some change in personality. I think many of us have the intuition that we should be in control over decisions that affect our personalities– we like to think, after all, that we have the power to change our personalities when we determine to do so. And that power is important to us.

So we have a treatment that could significantly enrich the lives of patients with Down syndrome by increasing their cognitive capacities. And yet there is the worry that, in prescribing those treatments onto the patients, we are somehow breaching the patients’ autonomies.

How worried are you about that specific challenge? In general, what sorts of problems are there in making decisions for others about medical treatments?

Again, of course, feel free to comment on other relevant ethical issues as well. Looking forward to reading your thoughts!

Since this is the first post of the quarter, let me make a few preliminary remarks. First, I will be posting on this blog every Friday before 5pm regarding the day’s talk. Your blog responses should be posted as comments to my post (again, you need to write 6 responses this quarter, and they should be ~300 words). Second, in my post, I will usually offer some suggestions as to what you could address in your responses. Today’s talk was great in that Prof. Marshall really emphasized the ethical issues involved in the death penalty, especially from the point of view of a reformer like himself. Oftentimes, the ethical issues will be less obvious– so my suggestions will try to bring them out. Third, I encourage you to make your responses as much of a part of a discussion as possible! Try to respond to the thoughts of those who posted before you, agreeing where you see fit, disagreeing where you see fit.

Now to today’s talk. Prof. Marshall’s talk on the death penalty was filled with ethical problems and questions, and many of them were obvious– feel free to comment on any of them. But his three main points were as follows. He first talked about the ethics of devoting so much human resources to save the life of a single man (remember the surgeon who challenged him at the cocktail party). Second, he talked about the possibility of “Friendly Fire”; If the death penalty is an effective deterrent, then the abolition of the death penalty would allow for a lot of violence that would not have existed with the death penalty. Third, Prof. Marshall talked about the worry that, in advocating the abolition of the death penalty, one is oftentimes advocating an alternative (though perhaps lesser) evil– life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

To start the discussion off, I want to offer two thoughts in response. First, I wonder how legitimate the surgeon’s challenge to Prof. Marshall was. Are we really morally required to spend our resources in the most efficient way possible? If that were the case, then I guess Prof. Marshall would have been required to say no to the plea of the wrongfully convicted death row inmate to review the case– he would have been required to say something like, “Sorry, I have to spend my time dealing with other problems in this world, and I realize that your life may have been wrongfully taken away from you, but I am morally required not to help you.” I think there is a pretty strong intuition that something has gone wrong there. Perhaps what we’re required to do is not to spend our resources in the most efficient way possible, but rather not to ignore the moral injustices that come to our attention, given the sort of life that we’re leading.

Second, I want to offer one way of thinking about the death penalty– i.e., within the framework of a theory of punishment in general. I’ve heard at least four general functions of punishment that legitimize the state’s use of it– punishment as retribution, punishment as rehabilitation, punishment as prevention, and punishment as deterrent. Retribution is the idea that the society can “get back” at the criminal for the crime; rehabilitation is the idea that the society, through punishment, rehabilitates the criminal by “teaching” him that the crime was wrong; prevention is the idea that the society can remove the criminal from society in order to prevent that criminal from engaging in future crimes; and deterrent is the idea that punishment serves as a general reason for people not to commit crimes. You can read about more of these functions (and much more on the philosophy of punishment) here. But given this framework for understanding what punishment is supposed to do, how well does the death penalty serve the functions of punishment?

Those are just two thoughts that I have, but as I mentioned before, feel free to comment on anything that Prof. Marshall talked about, or, even more broadly, anything that is relevant to his talk!

And, as always, feel free to email me with any questions or concerns (aypak@stanford.edu).

Looking forward to reading your responses!

This is our class blog. I will be posting every Friday after the talks so that you can comment on them (to fulfill the blog requirement). Please browse the posts below for some past discussions, all of which are quite interesting.

And again, feel free to email me with any questions or concerns!

David Demarest
Courage versus Culture
Watch the news and its impossible to miss the many morality plays as they unfold — whether in politics, sports, business, or even in academia. Large and small organizations all have cultures that endorse or prohibit, cultures that celebrate or condemn, cultures that expose or ignore. In the midst of those cultures, however, it’s individuals that make decisions, and their ethics and their courage to act upon those beliefs will determine how those decisions get made. This will be a conversation about real cases involving these issues and how we can learn from them.