ethics news & views

Democrats’ dilemma & the nation’s:
Message from the Executive Director

By James W. Fowler. Recently I was asked, “What would you suggest to strengthen the Democratic Party in its efforts to reclaim influential leadership and electoral success?” The following is my answer:

The Democrats lost this election precisely because they and their candidates had no convincing way to address matters of religious faith. They were unable to model a public stance that, while not denying religious and cultural pluralism, articulates and models the substance, the values, and disciplines of a public faith. Ethics and just leadership depend upon such a values base.

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.

Message from the Director:
The ethics factor for our next president

What kind of role should ethics play in the choice Americans will make in the upcoming presidential election? Here I will draw on several classic approaches to ethics to suggest how those resources could serve a president and administration committed to employ moral practices and judgment in the processes of governance. Each of these ethics approaches can contribute to illumine moral dimensions of presidential policies and decisions. Taken together, perhaps they can provide useful ethical criteria for discernment and choice as we participate in the debates and the choosing of our president for 2005-2008.

I hope that our next president will have and work from an ethical grounding, and that he will choose a vice president, advisors and cabinet members who share his/her ethical commitments. It is vital that our leaders recognize that law and public policy, in the long run, must be kept accountable to fairness, justice, and compassion. How do we test candidates for an ethical compass? How do we define or identify the qualities of thought and leadership that would reflect both ethical commitment and ethical competence? What qualities and approaches should we expect from a president and administration steered by an ethical compass? I suggest the following:

Sustainable success: Interface CEO Ray Anderson on business and the environment

Ray Anderson founded Atlanta-based Interface, Inc. in 1973 to provide modular, self-adhesive carpeting to business customers. Interface is now the global leader in commercial floor coverings and related interior products.

As recounted in Anderson's book Mid-Course Corrections, in 1994 customers began to ask what Interface was doing for the environment. A global task force was organized to research and promote Interface's environmental position to its customers. The task force asked Anderson to make the keynote speech at its inaugural meeting. He had no idea what to say.

Choosing vocation: An open letter from the Dominican Republic

My dear students,

Our conversations of this past semester, across cups of coffee and tired burnt-orange chair pillows have been on my mind this holiday break. The country I am visiting this season keeps a pace that allows time for reflection and silence, two things lacking in the modern North American life, and issues of ethics and vocation have been able to take root and nest in me deeply.

Message from the Director:
Global challenges of reconciliation

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

English Folk Poem, circa 1764
From David Bolier, Silent Theft, 2002

In elementary school I had a splendid sixth grade teacher named Odessa Cooper. In our small town in North Carolina she wanted us twelve-year-olds to begin to understand ourselves as citizens of the world. She did not use the term “globalization”—it had not been invented then. But in her own indomitable way she opened our horizons to include international relations and a sense of the history of our country’s interactions with other nations.

Above all, she awakened us to an appreciation of the promise and the vital importance of the then young United Nations. She wanted us to develop a consciousness of, and commitments to, global interdependence and its responsibilities. In the intervening years since that era, global interdependence—and the political challenges it brings—have intensified immeasurably.

All in the family?
Religion, ethics & globalization

By Chance Hunter. Ravaged by decades of religious wars, the great powers of Europe in 1648 signed the Treaty of Westphalia, signaling the rise of the sovereign, centralized nation-state as the key actor in international affairs. Religious rivalries of course continued, but wars would now be fought for king and country, not doctrine. Society increasingly secularized, religion becomes just one facet of civil society among others. Secular ideologies—sometimes uncannily similar to the theological forbears—mobilized the masses for total war. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, rivalries between European nation-states (and their increasingly independent colonies) shook the world.

But now the global order based on the sovereignty of competing nation-states draws to a close. One nation-state towers over the rest. Called the “indispensable nation” by Madeline Albright, the United States demonstrated its dominance with now two wars with Iraq. But elsewhere, the nation-state seems lest robust.¹ The bonds of the expanding European Union grow closer, and a newly formed African Union hopes to follow in its footsteps. Periods of regional anarchy and genocide followed hard upon the collapse of failed nation-states in the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central Asia. And no nation seems able to challenge the US’ lead in military technology for decades to come.

[ Posted by Chance Hunter on August 15, 2003 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) ]

Miss Lizzie's Kitchen

Turnip greens, green beans, green tomatoes,
Grown in the garden just outside her kitchen door,
Mason jars of yellow-orange peaches, dense purple-red beets,
Sweet potato pies on the windowsill, their odor a siren call.
Chicken dripping off the bone after hours slow cooking,
She had raised the chicken, wrung its neck, watched it flap and flop all over the yard
soaking the ground with its blood.

An aroma of warmth filled Miss Lizzie’s winter kitchen,
The sticky southern summer caused beads of sweat to line her magnificent brow,
One-eighth Cherokee, she never mentioned it, and we were told never to as well,
She was taught it was dirty…Indian blood.
Her father had taken her out of school at ten, put her to work in the Georgia fields,
“Girls don’t need to learn to read.”
She remained angry seventy-five years later: “I could have been something!”

Miss Lizzie and my mother always went together to vote
once Miss Lizzie was allowed to register.
Their ages the same, their skin colors and stations different,
They named one another “sister,” sharing confidences across decades;
She stood once between my grandparents to prevent a blow.
Occasionally she’d come to “borrow a little change.” We knew for someone else,
but never asked…bail, brakes, a funeral, perhaps a back alley abortion, or to repair one.

A photograph of Miss Lizzie at eighty-five hangs on my wall,
She dressed especially for the occasion, some of her radiance camouflaged
by a purple dress and costume jewelry; loosed her crown of braids, her profile diffused.
Frail at ninety, she listened intently as one by one the stories found their way
To her kitchen, a sanctuary as beautiful as her newly churned butter rounds,
Marked in geometric pattern with the blunt end of a dinner knife,
As secure as her seasoned black iron skillet filled with hot corn bread.

Apology, forgiveness, and disclosing medical error

Consider the following hypotheses: (1) When health professionals realize they have committed a serious, harm-causing error, their feelings of humiliation, betrayal of the patient, and fear of lawsuit can be so unbearable that many will resort to all sorts of conscious and unconscious strategies to diminish or eliminate the emotional pain they are experiencing; and (2) When individuals who have gone for health care strongly suspect that they have been seriously harmed by a medical mistake, they will often experience intense feelings of bewilderment, sadness, and anger. If these feelings are not addressed, they can easily escalate into sadistic rage.

Is unilateral war against Iraq unjust? Message from the director

As this edition of our magazine goes to press the world watches the drama of the United States and our President moving troops and the tools of war in great numbers into the Middle East. With a growing sense of gravity, this nation and our allies are divided over the question of whether the US should declare war on Iraq in order to bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein. We have a United Nations mandated international team of weapons inspectors combing the palaces of Hussein and the military installations of his regime.

[ Posted by James Fowler on March 01, 2003 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) ]

Rethinking just war

A year since the World Trade Center bombing, most Americans should feel confident that they can describe what constitutes an unjust war. But as the US considers a second invasion of Iraq in a dozen years, civilian deaths during the recent operations in Afghanistan and moral ambiguities surrounding US military operations in Somalia and the Balkans should cause Americans to revisit just war thinking.

First formulated in the fifth century as the Roman Empire crumbled, just war theory has changed as the context of warfare has changed.

Breach of trust: the naked truth

My friend and mentor Carlyle Marney, when he was a pastor of the First Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, would regularly go and speak at the annual Cowboy Camp Meeting in West Texas. He came to know and befriend a wiry cowboy in his early sixties named Joe. Joe had painstakingly saved from his earnings and then borrowed enough money to enable him to purchase his own herd of one hundred or so cattle. He planned to pasture and fatten them and make his first income from investment profit in more than forty years of riding herd. That early spring there came the worst blizzard in a hundred years in West Texas. Joe, along with many other cattlemen, lost his entire herd, frozen to death in the blizzard.

[ Posted by James Fowler on September 01, 2002 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) ]

Beyond the dream: from ubuntu to embrace

Recently, I remonstrated with a student concerning a set of unacceptable behaviors. He retorted that there was nothing illegal or immoral about them. I said they may be legal and “moral,” but it’s not the right thing. Ethical action—or doing the right thing—requires a new consciousness that calls many time-honored approaches into question. This is true, it seems to me, in intercultural pursuits in America these days, especially in higher education. It may be time to abandon the “I have a dream” rhetoric of the last fifty years and look to an ethic based on truth and reconciliation. The nostalgia of the Lincoln Memorial moment will have to be surrendered if the harmonious ordering of differences called peace is to reign in our country and our world.

[ Posted by Edward Branch on September 01, 2002 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) ]

Corporate ethics: values and valuations

Investors who were waiting for the other shoe to drop after Enron must feel as if they’re in Imelda Marcos’ closet.

The ethical wasteland called Enron—a shell game that happened to be the Bush administration’s closest corporate ally—was one thing. But accounting irregularities began to seem pervasive when they were revealed at such huge employers as WorldCom and then Merck, named by Fortune magazine as America’s “most admired corporation” for seven consecutive years until 1993.

The academic president as moral leader: James T. Laney at Emory University

Dr. Stuart Gulley's recent book, The Academic President as Moral Leader, succeeds in illuminating several very important dimensions of Emory University's growth and change in the period when Dr. James T. Laney served as its President, from 1977 to 1993. Gulley's study gives a fascinating account of the search process that led to Laney's appointment, including the roles of the Woodruff brothers in helping to influence the presidential choice, and the solid bond of friendship and trust that Laney forged with them. It captures the dynamism and energy called forth from faculty and administrators by the challenges of determining how the new inflow of resources of the $105,000,000 gift given by the Woodruffs in 1979, should best be used to strengthen the University.

Double punishment and constitutional rights

Generally, the United States court system is set up so that once a person has been convicted of a crime, they serve the sentence appointed to them by the judge. Once they complete that sentence, they are released back into the community. Society hopes that these people are rehabilitated, that their time in prison serves as deterrence from committing future crimes, and they become law-abiding citizens who never return to the penitentiary. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. The US has a high rate of recidivism.

Reconciliation trip finds servant leadership in Bolivia

Each day, the principles of servant leadership greet me as I enter my office. A simple piece of white paper hangs on my bulletin board, reminding me of them: Listening. Empathy. Commitment to the growth of people. Building Community. Awareness. And the list goes on. In my work with the Ethics and Servant Leadership program, I am often in conversation with students about these principles—their meanings, their applications, their limitations. While we try to ground these principles in concrete examples from all sectors of professional life, we rarely have the opportunity to observe first-hand situations in which servant leadership is practiced.

Disabled or crippled? A new ethic of ableness

I am unabashedly crippled. I am not “disabled”, not “physically challenged”, not “differently-abled”. I have tried all of the politically correct euphemisms for disability to describe myself as a person with cerebral palsy and none of them seem to fit. The truth is there is nothing politically correct about my limp. I am crippled.

Message from the Director: testing Emory's moral atmosphere

“Emory University’s mission lies in two essential, interwoven purposes: through teaching, to help men and women fully develop their intellectual, aesthetic, and moral capacities; and through the quest for new knowledge, and public service, improve human well-being.” (From the Mission Statement of Emory Univesity, emphasis added.)

The ethics of marketing baby milk formula in developing nations

Breastmilk is a natural, safe and free human product. As Gabrielle Palmer explains, "Lactation is the very core of our identity…we call ourselves after the mammary gland, 'mammals'—animals that suckle their young." Breastfeeding has been seen by millions of mothers, in all societies throughout history, as a natural extension to the process of pregnancy and birth. A baby is born expecting to suckle, and a labouring mother will naturally produce milk in anticipation of this. Breastfeeding creates a strong maternal bond between mother and child, and it is designed to protect the baby against a number of conditions such as pneumonia and diabetes. Breastfeeding is a skill that needs to be learned, yet no woman is naturally unable to do it. Some have problems producing enough milk, some suffer from feelings of awkwardness or sore breasts. But with a little guidance and encouragement, any child can be nursed naturally.

[ Posted by Megan Fisher on June 01, 2001 | Permanent Link | Comments (5) ]

Ethical implications of gene testing

What exactly do we know from the Human Genome Project? Up until now, the project has resulted in sequencing the DNA of a majority of the human genetic code. While the DNA sequence may have the capacity to tell us all the physical and possibly even behavioral characteristics of a person, we are not yet able to glean this information from a person's DNA. In other words, the human genetic code has not been cracked completely. Currently, we know the function of only a small percentage of the estimated 30,000 genes in the human genome. Before we try to discover the function of every gene, we need to prepare for the implications that will result, especially regarding gene testing in the medical field.

Subsidiary companies, economic boycott, and big tobacco: the case of Phillip Morris

Carlo Filicie's article "On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant Atrocities" makes the argument that Americans have an obligation to know about the actions of our government and the governments of other countries, both within the United States and abroad (Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 12 Number 3; August 1990).

Dealing with death: doctor-patient dialogue

Consider the following scene: Mrs. Johnson, beloved grandmother of three, lies in a hospital bed, surrounded by her family and hoping for good news from pending medical tests. Having experienced sudden pain, she worries that something may be seriously wrong. Perhaps a broken bone or surgery may be involved? Her physician walks in and delivers bad news, standing at the foot of the bed and reading from the chart. The woman's internal injuries stem from undetected, malignant cancer, and she will die. After citing statistics and standing through an awkward silence, the doctor mutters a word about questions and walks from the room, leaving the patient shocked and her family tearful.

Virtue ethics and servant leadership

In recent years, servant leadership has become an increasingly popular approach in the corporate world. Companies such as Whole Foods Market, The Container Store, and Southwest Airlines have adopted its principles. Fortune Magazine dedicates an issue each year to "The 100 Best Companies to Work For in America," and many of those in the top ten utilize the practices of servant leadership.

Commercialization of the academy: Reconciling Emory's mission and economic interests

Just as ethics includes the "ethics of character" in personal terms, there is also a kind of ethics of character that applies to institutions. During last month's Reconciliation Symposium I was asked to participate in a panel on "Commercialization of the Academy: Reconciling Emory's Mission and Economic Interests." I shaped my reflections on the strong ethical guidelines included in several passages from Emory's 1992 mission statement. Let me quote:

Message from the Director: practical ethics becomes personal

At this writing my family and I are still recovering our equilibrium after the funeral and burial of my wife’s oldest sister, who died after four weeks of intensive care. Suffering from a rare lung infection, she was in an induced coma for most of the last four weeks of her life. In a state-of-the-art hospital she received all of the antibiotics available for the combination of infections and threats she faced. She was intubated for the first two weeks of this struggle, and then breathed with a tracheotomy until her death. The decline in her condition could be measured by the increasing percentage of oxygen required to support her breathing.

What is Ethics? An incomplete glossary from the staff at the Ethics Center

A·ble·ism (v.) 1. Prejudice or discrimination against persons with disabilities, including physical, mental, and developmental disabilities 2. Excluding such persons from the human "norm," most often by assuming that they need "fixed" in order to live full lives [see also "racial discrimination"] [links] [more]

Gearing up in Ethics Leadership in a New Millennium

During 1999-2000 the Center for Ethics and its director underwent a five-year review. Conducted by the Provost’s office, the evaluation brought three distinguished scholar-ethicists to Emory in March. They spent two days on campus, speaking with numerous faculty members, administrators and a number of students. The review team included Dr. John Fletcher, founder of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Virginia, Dr. Elizabeth Kiss, Director of the Kenan Center for Ethics at Duke University, and Dr. Bernard Lo, Professor of Ethics at the Medical School of the University of California at San Francisco. The report they presented to the Provost reflected careful listening and great thoughtfulness. Their evaluations strongly affirmed the Center’s growth and development since 1995. They also challenged the Center by pointing to areas of potential excellence that beckon as it continues to strengthen its teaching, research and service components. On the basis of both an internal review and this committee’s external evaluation, President Chace and Provost Chopp invited the present director to continue in the leadership of the Center. I have accepted this invitation with enthusiasm and excitement, and I am eager to continue pursuing their mandate to foster the growth of ethical teaching, research, and service at Emory.

Campaign Finance Reform: mapping the moral terrain

• George W. Bush hits $60 million in campaign funds; Gore trails with $24 million.
• $500 million in "soft money"(1) contributions projected for the 1999-2000 election cycle (double the 1995-1996 cycle.)(2)
• $1.5 billion in total contributions given in 1998 (an off-election year).

Dr. King's Agenda for the New Millennium

We recognize Martin Luther King, Jr.'s seventy-first birthday this month. King was blessed with a brilliant mind and with the gift of some great teachers. He was grounded in the music and the preached theology of the black church traditions. As a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University, and through a trip to India, he informed himself with the knowledge and disciplines of Mahatma Gandhi's methods of nonviolent protest for social justice. King frequently placed the American struggle for civil and human rights in the context of global awareness and concerns. In his mind and faith, the nonviolent fight for justice and full participation for all Americans could not be separated from the larger struggle on every continent toward liberation for "all God's people."

The Ethics of Shaping a Life

What makes for a well-lived life? How does one go about making educational and career choices that enable one to lead such a life? And how can schools, parents, and other concerned adults help young people make more life-giving choices? Having thought about and struggled with these questions myself, I am delighted to add my voice to the ongoing conversations related to character formation and ethics at Emory and beyond.

Message from the Director: Integrity

Stephen L. Carter's 1997 book entitled Integrity makes good reading as this nation moves into the impeachment trial of President William Jefferson Clinton. Carter, a professor of law at Yale University, points to three steps or dimensions of our being able to act, lead, or respond to life's challenges with integrity:

[ Posted by James Fowler on February 01, 1999 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) ]

Message from the Director: what it's all about

In the issue that follows you receive your invitations to meet people and experience encounters and exchanges that may enrich and challenge - and even change you. This year's schedule of lectures, conversations, workshops, and conferences represent the public offerings of the Center for Ethics of Emory University.

You will meet David Whyte, British poet and advocate for bringin heart - courage, conscience, compassion - to leadership in our large corporate organizations. Tom Insel, working scientist and chief administrator of the Yerkes Primate Center, will engage you with his research on mating patterns of mammals and share what his research may tell us about human mating patterns and monogamy.

[ Posted by James Fowler on September 01, 1998 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) ]