Harvard Kennedy School
"Beyond the fellows, the Center created a rich experience by synthesizing opposites: theory and practice, humor and discipline, the formal and the informal. Though I was the diner and not the chef, the recipe seems to work its magic by combining disparate ingredients in just the right measure.
The cumulative effect of examining issues in deliberative ethics, torture, international law, political ethics, medical ethics, research ethics and the ethics of persuasion week after week was to leave no doubt that the most pressing and fruitful work lies where theory and practice meet."
Archon Fung, from the Annual Report 2006-07
One of the first faculties at Harvard to establish ties with the Ethics Center, the Harvard Kennedy School is a world leader in the study of ethics in public policy and government. With the Center's help and guidance, the Kennedy School has assembled a distinguished faculty in political ethics that is unrivaled. Today, the School counts among its professors Ethics Center affiliates Archon Fung, J. Bryan Hehir, Frances Kamm, Jane Mansbridge, Mark Moore, Samantha Power, Mathias Risse, and Kenneth Winston, as well as the Center's founding Director, Dennis F. Thompson, and its Director of Graduate Fellowships, Arthur I. Applbaum.
In 1991 the Kennedy School instituted an intellectually demanding, philosophically grounded required ethics course, the first professional school after the founding of the Center to do so. Designed and led by Applbaum and taught in several sections along with Kamm, Fung, and Risse, the core course for Master's of Public Policy students explores both the philosophical foundations of constitutional democracies and the specific ethical challenges students are likely to face in their careers in public life.
An ongoing curriculum review and reorganization plan placed the ethics faculty in the Democratic Institutions and Politics area, where they are establishing productive connections with empirical political scientists while continuing to serve as a resource on normative scholarship and teaching for the entire School. Under the review, the faculty reaffirmed its commitment to the Core Curriculum in ethics. The School's elective curriculum covers a wide range of topics in ethics and related fields. A partial list of courses suggests the range of faculty and student interests. Mansbridge, former faculty chair of the School's Women and Public Policy Program, teaches a course on "Democratic Theory" that traces the history of the ideas that shaped democracy from Aristotle to the recent Islamic thinker Muhammed Asad. Kamm, who joined the faculty in 2003, is a distinguished authority in contemporary ethical theory and in bioethics. Her "Proseminar in Bioethics" examines aspects of normative ethical theory that relate to bioethics, including aggregation and the distribution of scarce resources. Both Mansbridge's and Kamm's courses are cross-listed in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences curriculum. Winston, winner of the School's Manuel Carballo Award for excellence in teaching and a leader in developing new cases and teaching in overseas venues, developed two elective courses, "Ethics in Practice" and "When Cultures Meet: Working Across Boundaries."
Established in 1999 through a gift from Kennedy School alumnus Greg Carr, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the School has developed a unique focus of expertise on the most intractable human rights challenges of the new century, including genocide, mass atrocities, and the ethics and politics of military intervention. Under the leadership of Michael Ignatieff, the former director, former Fellow in Ethics Samantha Power, and Sarah Sewall, the Carr Center has sponsored a wide range of activities for students and scholars concerned with human rights.
The Carr Center's ambitious slate of lectures, conferences, and programs have addressed issues such as international responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, UN refugee policy, the Kosovo crisis, technology and human rights, and comprehensive security and sustainable development. In 2003, Power's book on U.S. policy responses to genocide in the 20th century, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, won the Pulitzer Prize.
The National Security and Human Rights Program examines military strategies for humanitarian intervention involving high-level military officers and international security officers. A colloquium series on America's longstanding habit of exempting itself from international human rights obligations and legal frameworks led to a vibrant intellectual exchange among many of America's leading scholars, as well as the 2005 book American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, edited by Ignatieff. A world-renowned public intellectual and scholar of human rights, Ignatieff left the directorship of the Carr Center to enter electoral politics in Canada, where he serves as a Member of Parliament. Selected highlights from recent and ongoing ethics-related activities at the School convey the community's broad interest in this field. In 2006, ethics was a major part of the Spring Exercise, an annual, two-week integrative simulation that focuses on real public policy problems, in this case, preparations for an avian flu epidemic. That same year, the Carr Center, in collaboration with the Ethics Center, presented a faculty seminar on "Intervention," part of an ongoing series chaired by Applbaum and Ignatieff. Presentations by Michael Blake, Stanley Hoffmann, Hehir, Martha Minow, Kamm and others focused on topics such as "Intervention, Sovereignty, and Human Rights" and "When Should Soldiers Disobey Orders?" A three-day conference on "Equality and the New Global Order" in 2006 assembled a stellar group of presenters from philosophy, economics, sociology, and political science, including Larry Summers, Amartya Sen, Norman Daniels, and Angus Deaton. The gathering was organized by Risse, who is emerging as a leading figure in the philosophical literature on global justice.
The School's reach in ethics is extended through the published works of faculty who contribute regularly to literature in the field. Volumes not previously mentioned include Applbaum's Ethics for Adversaries, about the morality of roles in public and professional life; Fung's Can We Put an End to Sweatshops?, a proposal for raising international labor standards through public deliberation and regulatory transparency; Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil, which focuses on balancing security and liberty in the face of terrorists' threats; Kamm's Intricate Ethics, an elaboration of nonconsequentialist moral theory; and Thompson's Just Elections, an account of what a fair electoral process in the United States would require. World events offer an ever-changing array of challenges at the intersection of politics and ethics. The ethical analysis of political life is an ongoing project, and one in which the faculty of the Kennedy School will continue to play a vital role for years to come.