Capturing the lively discussions, presentations, and other events that make up the daily activities of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
California: A State of Turmoil
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2010 4:40 PM
Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters visited the Ethics Center last week to discuss the state of the state. His comments are available as a podcast.
SCU Philosophy Professor William Prior presents "a manifesto" on How Not to Teach Ethics, Jan. 27, noon, in the University's Arts & Sciences Building.
Prior's research and teaching interests include ancient philosophy, ethical theory, the history of skepticism, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. His publications include Unity and Development in Plato's Metaphysics (Open Court, 1985), Virtue and Knowledge (Routledge, 1991) and numerous articles. He has edited Socrates: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 1996, 4 v.) He is working on a book on the problem of the historical Socrates.
Students in Del Norte county had a chance to talk with author Francisco Jimenez, whose books, The Circuit, Breaking Through, and Reaching Out, are part of the Center's Character-Based Literacy curriculum, recently adopted by alternative schools in the county.
"This is the best stuff I've ever seen," Principal Suzie Dooley told the Daily Triplicate.
Jimenez talked with students by phone about the importance of education to his personal journey, from migrant work to a professorship at Santa Clara University.
A talk last week by Alex Mikulich, research fellow at the Jesuit Institute for Social Research, applied Catholic social teaching to racial problems. Mikulich looked particularly at college parties with racial themes. Although students often defend their attendance at these parties by saying they are just having fun, Mikulich talked about more serious consequences of white people mocking those of other races. Mikulich is co-editor and contributing author for Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence (Orbis, 2007).
A cornerstone of President Obama’s health-care reform efforts is a national web of computerized Personal Health Records (PHRs), provided by a burgeoning industry of health-IT providers such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM. But before this industry can be fully built out, health providers, technologists, and legislators need to agree on a slew of privacy and security safeguards and standards.
“Privacy Protections for Patient-Empowered Care,” a panel to be held January 20, 4:30 to 6 pm in the SCU Learning Commons, explores the issue with Paul Tang, MD, who sits on the privacy and security subcommittee of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, and Deven McGraw, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Privacy Project.
The presentation is part of the "IT, Ethics, and the Law" series, co-sponsored by the Ethics Center, the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, and the High Tech Law Institute, now in its ninth year.
"Kaleidoscopeof Unity" is the theme of this year's state conference of the Community Day School Network, Jan. 17-18, in Sacramento. Tom Kostic, Southern California director of character education for the Center, will speak at the conference, which will focus on topics such as resiliency, bullying, gangs, drugs, effective teaching, and special education. Kostic has coordinated the implementation of the Center's Character-Based Literacy curriculum in Orange County and other districts throughout California.
Navigating Borders in Bioethics: Ethical Challenges of Culturally Competent Healthcare
Friday, Jan. 8, 2010 9:39 AM
The cultural and ethnic diversity in the U.S. translates into incalculable cultural richness; yet it also provides occasion for a multitude of practical and ethical challenges in the achievement of "culturally competent" medical care.
They will be joined by Silvia Austerlic, Hospice of Santa Cruz County, and Dr. Marc Tunzi, Natividad Medical Center, Salinas/Univ. of CA, San Francisco, School of Med. The panel will address both the ethical justification for culturally competent health care and the implications for ethics of cross-cultural medical interactions.
The Ethics Center welcomes three new members to its Advisory Board:
Kathy Almazol, superintendent of schools for the Diocese of San Jose, presides over 30 elementary and six high schools. Almazol is an adjunct professor at SCU in the leadership program for Catholic education. She will be working with the Center's Character Education Program on the development of a Catholic education version of our popular Character-Based Literacy Curriculum.
John S. Bronson is an expert in strategic corporate and operational development. He was executive vice president for human resources at Pepsi-Cola Worldwide and senior vice president and head of human resources for Williams-Sonoma. He brings counsel to the Center on marketing, especially to Generation Y and Millenials.
Charles M Geschke co-founded Adobe in 1982 with John Warnock. Today they co-chair Adobe's Board of Directors. Geschke is a recipient of the John W. Gardner Leadership Award and the Entrepreneur of the Yar from Ernst & Young, Merril Lynch, and Inc. Magazine. He serves on numerous non-profit boards. He is passionate about ethics and deeply involved in Jesuit education.
Alex Mikulich, research fellow on race and poverty at the Jesuit Social Research Institute (JSRI), Loyola University New Orleans, speaks on "Catholic Social Teaching and White Privilege in the Age of Obama," Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010 5 - 8 pm, in the Wiegand Room, Arts and Sciences Building, Santa Clara University.
JSRI is a “think and action tank” created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to address issues of race, poverty, and migration in the Gulf South region from the perspective of Catholic social teaching. Mikulich is co-editor and contributor to Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence (Orbis, 2007) which won the College Theology Society’s 2008 Book of the Year Award.
He is currently co-writing a book addressing the role of white racism in the scandal of mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. Alex is collaborating with racial and economic justice research and advocacy partners in Mississippi as JSRI’s state liaison. He co-facilitates racial justice trainings and is a member of Pax Christi USA’s Anti-Racism Team (PCART).
Center Executive Director Kirk O. Hanson is one of six experts asked to interpret the Pope's recent encyclical, "Charity in Truth," for America magazine. He writes:
For a business ethicist, “Caritas in Veritate” demonstrates both the promise and the limitations of papal and church pronouncements on economic ethics. The promise is that Pope Benedict XVI explicitly mentions business ethics and goes beyond previous statements to address it. Whatever the pope says about business ethics will be heard around the world, a voice of ethical reason desperately needed amid the secular and self-interested concerns of our global economy.
The limitation is that while the Vatican could have access to the best advice in the world regarding practical economic and business affairs, it rarely takes advantage of it. This encyclical, like other church statements on economic matters—including the 1986 U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter, “Economic Justice for All”—reflects only the most limited insight into the practical moral problems of people in large and small businesses.
This case, by Hackworth Fellow Kari Kjos, illustrates some of the ethical issues facing young people as they contemplate health care reform. The fictional Jim Smith must decide whether it is right that he buy health insurance if the others in his age cohort do not, and whether his premiums should be used to subsidize the more expensive care needed by the elderly.
Kjos is an SCU senior, whose Hackworth Fellowship supports her in developing ethics programming for her peers. Kjos has been working to involve her fellow students in a discussion of health care reform.
Students in this quarter's "Social and Ethical Dimensions of Biotechnology" class presented a poster session today, sharing with classmates, faculty, and other members of the University community the fruit of their research. Posters dealt with topics from gene therapy to human cloning, from genetic testing to personalized medicine.
Social Media: Challenges and Opportunities for Public Officials
Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009 3:16 PM
City councilmembers, ethics commission members, and other local officials gathered at the Ethics Center in November to surface some of the shared challenges they face in incorporating social media into public processes. The group consensus was that new media present real opportunities to involve new audiences in public issues, but officials raised concerns about various ethical pitfalls, especially in the areas of transparency and access. (summary) The Public Sector Roundtable meetings quarterly to address ethics concerns for local government officials. The next meeting will focus on gift policies.
Health Care Reform: An Insurance CEO's Perspective
Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009 2:44 PM
With Congress debating the details of health care reform legislation, the Center was pleased to host Bruce Bodaken, CEO of Blue Shielf of California, for two-day residency on health care reform and social justice. Bodaken met with faculty and students, and gave a public presentation outlining his views on key ethical issues such as economic disparities in health outcomes, generational justice, and access to insurance for people with pre-existing conditions.
Was Army Major Nidal Hassan a terrorist or was he suffering a mental breakdown? Campus Ethics Director David DeCosse, who teaches the ethics of war; Center Executive Director Kirk O. Hanson, and SCU Associate Professor of Political Science Peterminowitz speak with Communications Director Miriam Schulman on the shootings at Ft. Hood. (podcast)
Is it all right for a city councilperson to be text messaging with a spouse during a public meeting, and if so, is that message part of the public record? If four out of five councilmembers join a Facebook discussion on an issue before them, is it a meeting and subject to state Open Meeting Laws.? Can a councilperson create a link from their page on the city's Web site to a separate personal Web site or blog, and if so, are there restrictions on the kind of material that can be posted on the separate site?
These issues all came up during a discussion of Social Media and Government Ethics at today's Ethics Roundtable for Local Officials. The group of mayors, councilmembers, city managers, ethics commision members, and other public servants meets quarterly to talk about the ethical challenges they face in their work.
SCU Political Science Professor Jane Curry will be one of three panelists in a discussion Nov. 16, "Should the United States Promote Democracy Throughout the World?" Curry's ongoing research is on how societies deal with their authoritarian history. It is based on research she began in 2002 in Poland, South Africa, El Salvador, and the other states in Central and East Europe.
She will be joined by Farid Senzai, SCU assistant professor of political science, whose current research explores U.S. democracy promotion in the Middle East, U.S, and Cynthia Boaz, assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State and an expert in global nonviolent struggles.
David DeCosse, Director of Campus Ethics Programs, met on November 11 with Santa Clara University ROTC officers, their commander, Lt. Col. Shawn Cowley, and one of their Army instructors, Captain Rob McMahon. In a three-hour class on the ethics of war, Dr. DeCosse and the cadets addressed such issues as the moral justification for killing in war; the use of the ethical principle of double effect in making judgments about the protection of civilians; and the ethical questions arising from the case of the Navy Seal Lt. Michael Murphy, who posthumously won the Medal of Honor after a 2005 battle in Afghanistan in which he and his Navy Seal colleagues refused to kill Afghan civilians who then revealed the Seals' position to the Taliban. Dr. DeCosse teaches the Ethics of War and Peace in the Department of Religious Studies at SCU. The Ethics Center looks forward to continuing its fruitful engagement with the officers of SCU's ROTC unit.
In 1963, Stanley Milgram performed a series of experiments that showed ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful--sometimes even dangerous--electric shocks to innocent people if they were told to do so by an authority figure. SCU Psychology Professor Jerry Burger recently conducted a partial replication of Milgram’s famous obedience studies that allowed for useful comparisons with the original investigations while protecting the well-being of participants. He will discuss his findings at a talk November 12, "Why Otherwise Good People Sometimes Do Bad Things."
SCU students have been debated whether the campus should institute a medical amnesty policy, which would protect from University punishment anyone who called emergency services for an incident of alcohol poisoning. Kari Kjos, a senior and one of the Center's 2009-2010 Hackworth Fellows, spoke at an event on the subject co-sponsored by the Ethics Center and Associated Students of Santa Clara. Kjos addressed the issue of medical amnesty and responsibility.
California: A State of Turmoil
