ethics news & views: Rethinking just war: Fall 2002 events focus

May 01, 2002

Rethinking just war: Fall 2002 events focus

Several Center for Ethics staff, students, and board members met in April to evaluate the Center's past three to four years of public programming and to begin to plan for the future. Out of that meeting came a consensus for a new model of public events programming for the Center: the "cluster model."

While the Center has long enjoyed success in its public lectures, workshops, and seminars, the singular nature of each event has made it difficult to foster a sustained dialogue across the campus on any one ethical issue. Under the cluster model, the Center will devote a semester or more to an ethical issue, with one or two keynote speakers framing a cluster of smaller workshops and seminars in between.

The "cluster events" focus for the fall 2002 semester will be "rethinking just war." Just war theory has been reformulated from age to age as the technology and practice of warfare has changed. New technologies—bioweapons and so-called "smart weapons"—and new practices—terrorism and panoptic mass media presence—have changed the nature of warfare in the post-Cold War world. The horrible safety of "mutually assured destruction" and the primacy of conventional warfare seem no longer to apply. Preparations for genetics- and space-based weapons can only promise more changes in years to come.

Negotiations are already under way with several possible keynote speakers for the fall. Details will be finalized this summer and made available through the Center's website and listserv. The spring 2003 semester will likely see a focus on media ethics.

For more information about the Center for Ethics' public events, please contact Chance Hunter.

[ Posted by Chance Hunter at May 1, 2002 07:51 AM |