ethics news & views

EASL Forum accepting applications until Sept 16

The D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership is proud to celebrate the conclusion of its fifth year of programming and to announce the opening of applications for the 2004-2005 EASL Forum.

New film teaches health professionals the art of disclosing medical errors

A videotape entitled “Discussing Unanticipated Outcomes and Disclosing Medical Errors” was recently completed and made available to hospitals throughout the state.

The video was written and directed by John Banja, an Associate Professor at Emory University’s Center for Ethics, and is one of the products of grant #1U18HS11918-01 that was awarded to the Georgia Hospital Association Research and Education Foundation by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2001.

Center launches 'Student Think Tank' to plan, implement campus ethics events

This year the Center for Ethics will experiment with a new approach to its public events. In April the Center recruited a dozen student leaders to help it plan and implement undergraduate-oriented public programming for the 2004-2005 academic year.

Recruited students were drawn from:

• Ethics and Servant Leadership;
• Bridging Academics, Service, and Ethics;
• Science and Society; and
• Emory Living Wage Coalition (originally an EASL service project).

The diverse group of undergraduates also actively participates in student government and campus activist and service groups. At its initial May meeting, the Think Tank decided to focus its energies this year on the ethics of power, beauty/consumerism, professional ethics, and sexual orientation. Anticipated event formats will likely include film screenings, discussion forums, and student/faculty panels.

The group hopes to develop a major event tentatively titled “Sex, Shopping, and Self” for the spring semester.

Additional film screenings, workshops, and panels planned with the Student Think Tank will be publicized on campus and on the Center for Ethics’ website throughout the year.

Identity, intimacy and "hooking up"

On campuses across the country students find themselves confronted with-or invited into-the culture of “hooking up.” The term “hooking up” covers a spectrum of activities. It can refer to a casual or spontaneous spending time together, replacing other generations’ practices of “dating.” On the other hand, it more often refers to practices of casual sexual partnering with no particular implication of commitment or intention of building a relationship. This set of reflections focuses more on the latter sense of the term.

If national magazines and some significant research* are to be trusted, hooking-up often begins with youth early in their teen years. With a classmate, casual friend, or someone met for the first time at a party, one engages another in having sex. With or without mutual attraction, the coupling occurs. A more sustained relationship may develop, or they go their separate ways. This mode of easy “hooking up” invites, liberates, or pressures, participants to regard sex as a medium for meeting, almost as casual as a handshake or a cheek-kiss. It implies no particular responsibility to or for each other.

Oct 26 | Unilever Chair to address Goizueta, Center

Arjan Overwater, Chairman of Unilever Russia/Ukraine, will visit the Center for Ethics and Goizueta Business School 5:15pm, October 26 in Goizueta 204. He will speak about servant leadership in a corporate business context.

Summer faculty seminar explores new and ancient approaches to "the moral self"

During the latter half of May, fifteen Emory faculty participated in the 2004 Ethics Center’s annual faculty seminar. This year’s topic, “The Moral Self: Ethical, Psychological, Theological, and Cultural Constructions” witnessed three thematic approaches to the self emerge from the participants.

An interesting facet was the occasional resonance among perspectives that one wouldn’t ordinarily anticipate, such as the Buddhist view of self with the contemporary neurological understanding of self; or the “positionality” conception of self that is current in disability studies and feminism with the antiessentialist epistemology of someone like Richard Rorty.

In the end, our participants were respectful of David Hume’s famous observation that there is no impression of the self, such as the impression I have of this computer screen right now or of my visual memory of my grandmother. Yet, we cannot get very far in our moral lives and our moral communities without talking about one. Indeed, the Eastern insistence on the nonself—which I have great respect for—is nevertheless so persistent that it speaks to the natural human tendency to take our “selves” very seriously indeed. In any event and very briefly, here are three thematic treatments of the self that arose in the seminar:

Servant leadership Forum members, summer interns transform Atlanta

What can three people do in sixteen weeks? Quite a lot if they are motivated, creative, and committed. Three members of the 2003-2004 Ethics and Servant Leadership Forum undertook a relatively simple task that has begun to transform both the Atlanta Metro Juvenile Detention Center and the volunteer opportunities at Emory. These three students, Anita Husen, Eric Fyfe, and Leila Barker (and joined by colleagues Veena Guishani, Candance Chan and Ogedi Atukuwpa) started attending volunteer Saturdays at the Center and recognized the need for more mentors.

What began as a series of simple visits by the three, then the five of them, soon became a college-wide endeavour. The students not only undertook individual mentoring of youth at the Center, but they also put together a talent show and brought in Emory student musicians, dancers, and others to perform for the youth. Seeing the tremendous need at the Center, the students also held a series of trainings for Emory students interested in becoming mentors as well. About 60-70 students went through this training and have begun mentoring at the juvenile center. Anita Husen, one of the students organizing the project, received on behalf of her colleagues the Joel Andrew Geller Humanitarian Service Award. This $1000 award, designed to support students committed to undertaking community service, was used to further the work of the Servant Leadership Forum students at the juvenile detention center.

The students, unwilling to rest on their individual successes, also undertook a series of activities designed to formalize and institutionalize the project. The result is that MetroVision has been picked up by Emory Volunteers and beginning with the 2004-2005 academic year will be a formal part Emory University’s commitment to serving the Atlanta community.