2008-2009 | 2009-2010


News & Announcements  2011-2012

 June 2012 Congratulations to the EiS class of 2012! Our students wrote impressive honors theses on a variety of topics such as the ethics of drug patent laws and drug innovation, combating human trafficking, and higher education access for undocumented immigrants. The graduates are now moving on to law school, grad school, medical school, and exciting work opportunities. We wish them the best! For a full list of EiS graduates and their thesis titles, click here.

June 2012 Stanford undergrad Adrian Bonifacio, who was awarded a 2012 Human Rights Fellowship, is spending the summer in Hong Kong working with the Asian Pacific Mission for Migrants, an NGO that promotes and defends the rights of migrant workers. Read more.

June 2012  A recent Stanford psychology study by Benoit Monin (EiS Advisory Board Member) concludes that people chronically overestimate how happy their peers are (in part, thanks to Facebook), and this misperception leads to feelings of loneliness. Read more.

  May 2012 Congratulations to Eric Beerbohm (EiS alum '98) for winning Harvard University's 2012 Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Read more.


May 2012 Rob Reich, Director of the Ethics in Society Undergraduate Honors Program, was mentioned in David Brooks' New York Times OpEd column where he discusses why so many elite college students go into finance and consulting and whether this is a good thing. Read more. For more on this discussion, you can follow Rob's blog here.

May 2012 Debra Satz, Director of the Center for Ethics in Society, responds to Michael Sandels's "How Markets Crowd Out Morals" piece in the Boston Review. Read more.


May 2012 Debra Satz, Director of the Center for Ethics in Society, and The Stanford Report explore the moral limits of free markets in a democratic society. Read more.


April 2012 Congratulations to Dr. Gabe Garcia (Center for Ethics in Society Advisory Committee member) for receiving the 2012 Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize for his outstanding work training Stanford undergraduates to serve as volunteers in local health clinics. The Center's Rob Reich and Debra Satz were awarded the Roland Prize in 2010. Read more.

April 2012 On April 24, Debra Satz was the featured guest on KZSU's Entitled Opinions show. Satz and host Robert Harrison discuss the work of John Rawls as well as Satz's own Rawls-inspired work. Listen.


March 2012 Former Hope House tutor Sheena Chestnut Greitens talks about the "Soprano state" in a NY Times Op-Ed piece that builds off her 2005 honors thesis, "North Korean Involvement in Criminal Activity and Implications for International Security." Read more.

January 2012 Center post doctoral scholar Kendra Bischoff was recently sited in the Stanford Daily for her work with Sean F. Reardon (School of Education). Kendra and Sean's research found a significant increase in residential income segregation in the United States over the last four decades. Read more.

January 2012 According to Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower : Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 and a speaker in the Ethics & War series, Al-Qaida may be fading, but the anti-terrorism community and all those anti-terror laws are here to stay.  Read more.

December 2011 In a New York Times online Op-Ed piece, Alexander Berger (Ethics in Society class of 2011) discusses his decision to donate a kidney to an unknown recipient. Learn why he decided that the risks were small but the benefits were great and join the online discussion that his decision has spurred. Read more.

November 2011 As part of the Occupy the Future movement at Stanford, The Boston Review published "Ethics and Inequality,"  by Rob Reich and Debra Satz. The Boston Review will also publish additional articles by Stanford faculty who are invested in exploring lessons from the Occupy movement.

Former Ethics in Society honors student Aysha Bagchi named 2012 Rhodes Scholar. The Ethics in Society Program is delighted to announce that Aysha Bagchi has been awarded a 2012 Rhodes scholarship. Bagchi graduated from Stanford in June with degrees in Philosophy and History and honors in Ethics in Society. She was awarded the 2011 Lloyd Dinkelspiel Award and was the co-recipient of the Cook Prize for best Ethics in Society thesis for her thesis on “The Demands of Dignity: Settling Parental Disagreements in Homeschooling.” Bagchi is currently studying at the Hebrew University and will pursue the MPhil in Politics at Oxford.

Global Proverty: What are our obligtations? On October 11, Alexander Berger (Ethic in Society class of 2011) joined Peter Singer (Princeton) and Holden Karnofsky (co-Founder and co-Executive Director, Give Well) on a Princeton University panel, which focused on "accomplishing as much as possible with your giving."

Twice Thinking: Women and War In preparation for our Oct 12 Women, War & Peace talk by Abigail Disney, Stanford scholar Anne Firth Murray and historian Estelle Freedman comment on the impact of war on women through different scholarly lenses. Read more.

Undergrad Miles Unterreiner expressed his thoughts about war in his weekly Stanford Daily column entitled War in pieces: "I thought about what our inexperience meant. Here assembled was a class of exceptionally bright young minds, and we did not know what war was. We were shocked by the face of war because we had never looked it in the eyes." Read more.



News & Announcements  2010-2011

A 30-year Commencement Weekend tradition, Class Day features a "final lecture" from a renowned Stanford professor. This year Rob Reich was chosen. Read the announcement and a review of Rob's Class Day talk.
 
Please join us in congratulating Ethics in Society Senior Alexander Berger. Alexander was recognized with two prestigious awards. Early in May, he was awarded the 2011 Dean's Award for Academic Achievement, the highest honor an undergraduate can achieve at Stanford! Read more. 

Two days later, Alexander was named the winner of the Stanford edition of the “1 Degree Challenge,” which asked students to come up with the “Next Big Idea” for using social networking for social good. Congratulations Alexander! Read more.

Please join us in also congratulating Ethics in Society Senior Aysha Bagchi. Aysha was awarded the 2011 Dinkelspiel Award. This award, given to two undergraduates, recognizes their distinctive contributions to undergraduate education and to the quality of student life. Read more.


January 2011
Joshua Cohen comments on Google's philanthrophy efforts (New York Times, Jan. 31, 2011). Read more.


January 2011
Rob Reich responds to New York Times' "Do Home Schoolers Deserve a Tax Break?" article (Jan. 4, 2011) . Read more.


December 2010
In the Dec. 2 issue of The New York Times, Rob Reich joins the debate over charitable deductions and tax policies that support nonprofit groups ("Nonprofits Fear Losing Tax Benefits"). Read more.


October 2010
On October 21, Provost John Etchemendy announced that Rob Reich had been appointed one of four Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education for 2010-2011. The Bass University Fellows in Undergraduate Education Program recognizes faculty members for extraordinary contributions to undergraduate education, including faculty members from graduate and professional schools. Read more.


 

October 2010

"The Moral Costs of Free Markets" - Live at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco! Debra Satz joins Ken Taylor and John Perry for a live taping of Philosophy Talk, Oct 17 @ 12:00. Get details.









News & Announcements 2009-2010

July 2010
In a July review of Debra Satz' new book, “Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets,” Troy Jollimore notes that "...the market’s stock has perhaps never been higher, and the idea that the voluntary exchange of goods between free individuals might answer every significant economic, social and even ethical question has perhaps never been more widely accepted. But in the midst of all this celebration of the market’s virtues—and let us admit, as Satz is perfectly willing to admit, that a market can indeed be a very efficient and effective means of coordinating complicated activities among a large group of individuals with differing agendas—there are also some reasons for concern. Efficient, after all, does not necessarily imply admirable or just (or even, on occasion, tolerable)." Read full review (truthdig.com).

July 2010
Debra Satz and Rob Reich have edited an excellent collection of papers in honor of Susan Moller Okin. Together, the papers comprise an extended conversation about the commitments of Okin’s liberal feminism. There is quite a bit of deserved praise for Okin in the volume—for her intellectual passion, courage, and insight. And there is criticism. Of particular interest are the disagreements among the volume’s authors concerning how Okin’s liberal feminism should be understood. The disagreements we find here are no surprise. They concern questions that have always engaged scholars of liberalism: Is liberalism—is Okin’s liberalism—complacent or radical? How is the commitment to equality in liberalism—in Okin’s liberal feminism—to be understood? And how is liberalism’s—Okin’s liberal feminist—call for equality to be reconciled with the call for liberty? Read full review (from Social Theory and Practice, Department of Philosophy, Florida State University).

June 2010

Chosen by this year's graduating seniors, Debra Satz was honored to give this year's Class Day lecture. For over forty years, this event has featured a popular Stanford professor, delivering a last lecture to graduates and their family and friends. You can read a review of the talk, which was entitled "The Moral Limits of World Markets."

May 2010

The Center's 2009-10 Newsletter is now available. 

May 2010

Rob Reich and Debra Satz began the Hope House Scholars Program in 2001. For these efforts they will share this year's Miriam Aaron Roland Volunteer Service Prize. The award, given by the Haas Center for Public Service, recognizes faculty who make significant contributions through public service and encourage their students to do the same. Read more.

February 2010
On February 4, Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, addressed the issue of obesity in America and claimed that American will solve its obesity problem when eating junk food becomes as socially unacceptable as smoking cigarettes. "...we need to get seven-year-olds to say to their parents, 'Please don't take me to McDonalds.'" Read the Palo Alto Weekly's review of the talk.


January/February 2010
In the January/February issue of Stanford's alumni magazine, Debra Satz discusses the rewards of teaching ethics. Read the article.








January 2010

Debra Satz was named Senior Class Day Speaker  by the graduating class of 2010. Read the announcement.






January 2010
The New York Times ran an interesting article on Teach For America that reports on the findings that TFA corps members, after their two years of teaching, score lower on civic engagement measures than applicants to TFA who were accepted but did not matriculate or than corps members who were accepted but dropped out before completing two years of teaching. In the article, Rob Reich discusses the types of students that are attracted to TFA. Read the article.


December 2009
The IRS has approved more than 50,000 organizations for every year of the past decade, leading to a massive growth in the nonprofit sector. What kinds of organizations are most often approved? How strict or lax is the approval process? Rob Reich, along with two undergraduate students (Lacey Dorn and Stefanie Sutton), released a new report that examines the approval of nonprofit status by the IRS. The report, "Anything Goes: Approval of Nonprofit Status by the IRS", was recently mentioned in the New York Times. Read the article.


November 2009
Ann E. Cudd (University of Kansas) reviews Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (edited by Debra Satz and Rob Reich).



October 2009
Harvard University Press recently released Josh Cohen's new book, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays. Over the past twenty years, Joshua Cohen has explored the most controversial issues facing the American public: campaign finance and political equality, privacy rights and robust public debate, hate speech and pornography, and the capacity of democracies to address important practical problems. In this volume, Cohen insists that political philosophy is part of politics, and its job is to contribute to the public reasoning about what we ought to do.




October 2009
After completing Rob Reich's "Food and Politics" sophomore seminar, Brian Wong's editorial entitled "A Carnivore's Dilemma" was published in The Stanford Daily.




September 2009
Scott McLemee reviews Why We Cooperate, in a September issue of "Inside Higher Education." Why We Cooperate, published by Boston Review Books, is based on the Tanner Lectures given by Michael Tomasello in October  2008. In the book, Tomasello describes his comparative studies looking at the behavior of human infants and our closest primate relations, especially chimpanzees.








News & Announcements 2008-2009

May 2009
Center Director Debra Satz speaks about our Hope House Scholars Program in her talk entitled "Riches for the Poor." This program, now entering it's 9th year, brings humanities courses to recovering addicts in Redwood City. (Hear her talk on YouTube.)




May 2009
Toward a Humanist Justice, a new book honoring and examining the work of the late Susan Moller Okin, former colleague and friend. Okin taught in Stanford's Political Science department and was also the Director of the Program in Ethics in Society. Contributors to the volume were: Nancy Rosenblum, Josh Cohen, Elizabeth Wingrove, John Tomasi, David Miller, Molly Shanley, Cass Sunstein, Ayelet Shachar, Alison Jaggar, Chandran Kukathas, Robert Keohane, and Iris Marion Young. Read a recent review.





January 2009
Jay Hancock, columnist for The Baltimore Sun, mentioned our January 13 "Liberals and Libertarians: Kissing Cousins or Distant Relatives?" panel discussion in his recent blog entry.

December 2008
Eamonn Callan and Debra Satz discuss the controversial issue of public funding for special education and explore the link between equal opportunities in education and equal citizenship.

October 2008
The Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford has received a new $5 million gift from longtime supporters Bowen H. "Buzz" McCoy, '58, and his wife, Barbara.

October 2008
As part of new food movement, more consumers consider ethics when choosing what to eat.