Podcasts from Ethics Center Events2007-08Politicization of Ethnic Identities and the Common Good in Kenya Stem Cells: Is the Ethical Controversy Justified by Promising Science? The Cheating Culture and America Today Ethics, Doping, and the Future of Cycling Contemporary Challenges to Free Speech in the Academy Can Digital Games Teach Civic Ethics? Backdating Stock Options: Ethical and Accounting Challenges Hanging by a Thread: United States Subsidies, African Cotton Producers, and the Fairness of International Trade U.S. farm bills have always been big business. But they have rarely been, as they are now, such big political issues. For the last weeks, debate over the current farm bill in congress has been pointed and ongoing. At the heart of that debate has been the question of whether huge subsidies should be maintained for growing such crops as cotton, soybeans, and corn for cattle feed. In turn, these questions about subsidies are connected to fundamental moral issues pertaining to trade, health, and the distribution of income. Today we will focus on the question of subsidies for cotton. Why should U.S. producers of cotton be heavily subsidized at all? Why should such producers be able to trade cotton on global markets on the basis of the advantages gained by such subsidies? And why should African producers of cotton correspondingly be put at a disadvantage in the global market – a disadvantage caused by the poverty of such farmers and by the support already wealthy American cotton producers gain by dint of receiving the subsidies? We are very pleased today to have two Santa Clara University faculty members to address this topic. Leslie Gray holds a joint appointment with the Environmental Studies Institute and the Political Science Department. She is a geographer, who teaches classes that emphasize global environment, development, and population issues. Her current research considers the environmental and equity dimensions surrounding global cotton production, focusing on how the agricultural subsidies given to farmers in wealthy countries affect poor farmers in West Africa. She has published articles on environmental policy, land degradation, and women's access to resources in Burkina Faso and Sudan. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright/IIE, the Social Science Research Council, and the Markkula Center For Applied Ethics. She has also done work for several international organizations, including Care, Catholic Relief Services, UNDP, ILO, and the World Bank. Professor Gregory Baker holds joint appointments in the Economics and Management departments. He successfully led SCU’s Food and Agribusiness Institute through the recent re-focusing of its work, and a re-structuring of the MBA agribusiness curriculum. His research has explored the human implications of agri-technology and identified food safety issues to be considered as technology enables increased production. He has done seminal work on issues relating to biogenetic foods. He has also recruited and taught leaders from developing nations in the Summer Management Institute of Agribusiness and has advanced the excellence of Santa Clara as a Jesuit university. Head Scarves and Human Rights: Do Muslim Women Have the Right to Choose to Wear a Head Scarf of Any Kind at Any Time in Any Place? Speakers: Roujin Mozaffarrimehr, Cynthia Baker, Mary Elaine Hegland, Beth Van Schaack In the United States, at least in legal terms, the right of Muslim women to choose to wear a headscarf or not is not in great dispute. But, in terms of cultural forces, we in the United States are surely affected by what is happening elsewhere in the world. And elsewhere in the world the issue of headscarves is hotly contested. In Iran, after the age of 9, a girl must wear a headscarf. In the public schools in France, Muslim girls may not wear headscarves and nor may students of other religions display outwardly religious symbols. In Turkey, the new Muslim president is seeking to change a longstanding law barring women from wearing headscarves in any government buildings. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament Jack Straw has required that any constituents whom he meets in his office must fully display their face, thus in effect restricting the use of the niqab or full covering preferred by some Muslim women. There is a central ethical question here: Should women have this choice to wear a headscarf or not? And these are the dimensions of the issue on which our excellent panel is sure to shed light. Roujin Mozaffarrimehr is a senior at SCU majoring in political science and Italian. She is Iranian-American, from San Jose, and has traveled often to see family in Iran. This year Mozaffarrimehr has a Hackworth fellowship with the Ethics Center. She will speak about her personal experience of dealing with this issue. Cynthia Baker is professor in the SCU Religious Studies Department and an expert in the area of gender, nationalism, and Jewishness from perspectives informed by cultural history and ethics. She has paid particular attention to the ways in which the stories—especially religious stories—that cultures tell about the past play an important part in how we create a sense of ourselves in the present. Professor Mary Elaine Hegland is from SCU’s Department of Anthropology. Her fieldwork has been in the Middle East and South Asia: Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. She has also worked among Iranian Americans in the Bay Area. Hegland’s publications deal with the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979; women and gender in religion and politics in Iran; change and continuity in an Iranian village; and women and gender in Shia Muslim rituals in Pakistan. Professor Beth Van Schaack is on the faculty of the SCU School of Law, where she teaches such classes as International Human Rights Theory and Practice and Contemporary International Issues. Her primary areas of research cover these areas as well. She has extensive hands-on experience with international law, including staff positions with the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Documentation Centre of Cambodia. Profit & Loss - White Privilege & its Consequences For Racial Justice & Equity In a packed lecture Monday, October 15, 2007, co-sponsored with the SCU Office for Multicultural Learning. Wise addressed white privilege and its consequences for racial equity and justice. Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. having spoken to over 80,000 people in 48 states, and on over 350 college campuses, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Law Schools at Yale, Columbia, and Vanderbilt. For more information about Wise, please go to: http://www.timwise.org/ The Iraq War, Justice and Responsibility - What should the United States Do For many, the Iraq War presents the greatest moral issue facing the country today: What should the United States do? The continuing U.S. military presence in Iraq is the focus of the debate. Msgr. Robert McElroy’s day job is pastor of St. Gregory’s catholic church in San Mateo. Previous to that he served, among other posts, as vicar general of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. When, however, he is not tending to the souls at St. Gregory’s and no doubt, too, to more concrete things like parish budgets, he is a public intellectual of national stature. He is the author of two books, The Search for an American Public Theology: The Contribution of John Courtney Murray and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs. He is also a frequent and deeply insightful commentator on many ethical issues facing contemporary Catholicism. Last spring he published in America, the national Jesuit newsweekly, an influential essay that garnered mention in the New York Times and that argued on just war grounds for why the United States must withdraw from Iraq. Thomas Henriksen is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has written and lectured widely on international affairs, political change, and "rogue states." He has also authored or edited 12 books or monographs and numerous articles on international politics, insurgency, and terrorism. His forthcoming book, due out in October, is called American Power After the Berlin Wall. In advance praise for the book, distinguished Oxford Professor Timothy Garton Ash called it a "remarkably comprehensive, detailed, and critical survey of America’s interventions across the globe since the fall of the Berlin wall." Among other topics explored in the book, Henriksen examines the troubled American efforts to transplant democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he calls for the formulation of a new grand strategy to confront terrorism. 2006-07The Ethics of Immigration Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson addresses one of the most hotly contested ethical issues in the United States, illegal immigration. Best known as a scholar of ancient warfare as well as a commentator on modern warfare, Hanson is also a fruit farmer and the author of Mexifornia, a book on the impact of Mexican immigration on the Southwest. In his talk, Hanson looked at three basic questions: Who benefits from illegal immigration? Why is the situation becoming more polarized? What are possible solutions? The Dilemma of Iraq: What Should the United States Do? Leon Panetta, former White House Chief of Staff and member of the Iraq Study Group, looks at how to resolve the crisis in Iraq. He discussed the implications of the situation not only for Iraq but also for the very fabric of our country and Constitution. Discounting and Disaster: Climate Change and Justice Betwee n Generations William Sundstrom, SCU professor of economics, and Keith Warner, member of the Santa Clara Environmental Studies Institute, argue for taking a more proactive approach towards limiting the harmful impact of global warming. Calling it an ethical as well as an economic issue, they ask hard questions about our responsibility to future generations and also discuss an ethical framework for doing a cost benefit analysis. Ethics and City Hall San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed highlights the reforms he has initiated since taking office in January 2007. Practical Sports Ethics Jim Thompson, founder and executive director of Positive Coaching Alliance, speaks on creating a culture of Level 3 Competitors—athletes who compete by the code of honoring the game. Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy UC, Davis Professor of Law and author of Deporting our Souls Bill Ong Hing questions current U.S. immigration policies. He urges understand the reasons that prompt immigrants to enter the United States illegally. Arguing that immigrants are very useful to this country and that they deserve respect, Hing recommends an immigration policy based on principles of common humanity. |
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