Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics

Faculty Commitee | Faculty Associates in Ethics

University Faculty Committee

Arthur Applbaum

Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Faculty Fellow, 1987-1988
  • Faculty Committee, 2000-
  • Acting Director, 2004-2005, 2007-2009

Arthur Isak Applbaum is Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He directed the graduate fellowship program from 1990 to 2009 and was acting director of the Center in 2004-2005 and 2007-2009. He developed and teaches the Kennedy School's core course in political ethics. Professor Applbaum's work on political philosophy and professional ethics has appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Journal of the American Medical Association, Harvard Law Review, Ethics, and Legal Theory. He has written about the ethics of executioners and of butlers, and has consulted to the government about the ethics of spies. He is the author of Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Political and Professional Life (Princeton University Press, 1999). Recent articles include "Legitimacy Without the Duty to Obey" and "Forcing a People to Be Free." He has been a member of Harvard's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and chairs the ethics advisory board of a stem cell research foundation. Applbaum holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and an M.P.P. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Jerusalem and a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Values.
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Joseph Badaracco

John Shad Professor of Business Ethics; Senior Associate Dean; Chair, MBA Program, Harvard Business School
  • Faculty Committee, 1987-
  • Senior Scholar, 1989-1990

Professor Badaracco is a member of the Harvard Business School's General Management Area and has taught courses on strategy, general management, business-government relations, and business ethics in the School's MBA and executive programs. He is a graduate of St. Louis University, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA and a DBA. He is course head for the required first-year General Management course, and teaches second-year electives on business ethics. Professor Badaracco has taught in executive programs in the United States, Japan, and several other countries. He is the author of Loading the Dice, which compares business-government relations in five countries;The Knowledge Link, which Fortune magazine selected as one of the outstanding management books of 1991, and is co-author of Leadership and the Quest for Integrity. His more recent books include Business Ethics: Roles and Responsibilities; Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right, and Questions of Character. His books have been translated into ten languages. His newest research asks what can be learned about business ethics by focusing on entrepreneurs rather than CEO's. More Information

Professor Badaracco was a Senior Scholar in Ethics in 1989-90, and was the first tenured faculty member in ethics at the Business School. His efforts to integrate ethics teaching into the curriculum contributed in no small way to the establishment, in 2004, of the first required, full-length ethics course in the School's history. "Leadership and Corporate Accountability" focuses on the complex responsibilities facing business leaders today.


Nir Eyal

Assistant Professor, Global Health and Social Medicine (Medical Ethics), Harvard Medical School; faculty member, Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health
  • Faculty Fellow, 2009-2010
  • Faculty Committee, 2010-

Nir Eyal is Assistant Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine (Medical Ethics) at Harvard Medical School, and a faculty member of the University Program in Ethics and Health. His work in bioethics, political philosophy and consequentialist moral theory investigates questions about informed consent, markets in organs, and the global medical brain drain crisis. He is completing a book that defends a consequentialist approach to respect for persons and applies that approach to normative questions in bioethics and political theory. He will also explore when fully free, informed, and competent consent is necessary for legitimate intervention, and when lower levels of freedom, information, and competence are sufficient.  More information


Archon Fung

Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Senior Scholar, 2006-2007
  • Faculty Associate, 2007-2009
  • Faculty Committee, 2009-

Professor Fung's research focuses on the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. His Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2004), examines two participatory-democratic reform efforts in low-income Chicago neighborhoods. Current projects examine those same initiatives in electoral reform, urban planning and governance, public services, ecosystem management, and international labor standards. His most recent book is Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil). Professor Fung is the author of five books, three edited collections, and over fifty articles appearing in journals including Political Theory, Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics and Society, Governance, Journal of Policy and Management, Environmental Management, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Boston Review. He received two SB degrees and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  More information

Professor Fung was a Senior Scholar in Ethics in 2006-2007, and became a Faculty Associate of the Ethics Center at the end of that year.


Frances Kamm

Lucius Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Professor of Philosophy, Harvard Department of Philosophy
  • Faculty Fellow, 1989-1990
  • Senior Scholar, 2003-2006, 2008-2010
  • Faculty Associate, 2003-2009
  • Faculty Committee, 2009-

Professor Kamm specializes in normative ethical theory and problems in practical ethics related to medicine and law. She has received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association of University Women, Columbia Law School, the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School. She is a member of the editorial boards of Philosophy & Public Affairs, Utilitas, Legal Theory, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, and Bioethics, and the advisory board of Routledge International Library of Philosophy and the international advisory board of the Uehiro Center for Ethics, Oxford University. She serves on the steering committee of the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health. Her most recent publication is Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harms, Oxford Ethics Series (2006). She is also the author of Creation and Abortion (Oxford, 1992); Morality, Mortality, vols. I and II (Oxford, 1993, 1996); "Nonconsequentialism, the Person as an End-In-Itself and the Significance of Status" (Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1992); "Abortion and the Value of Life: A Discussion of Life's Dominion" (Columbia Law Review, 1995); "A Right to Choose Death?" (Boston Review, 1997); "Failures of Just War Theory" (Ethics, 2005); and "Terrorism and Several Moral Distinctions" (Legal Theory, 2006).  More information

Professor Kamm was a Faculty Fellow in Ethics (1989-1990), and has been a Senior Scholar in Ethics (2003-2006 and 2008-2009).  She has been a Faculty Associate of the Ethics Center since 2003.


Nancy Rosenblum

Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government, Department of Government, Harvard University
  • Senior Scholar, 2003-2004
  • Faculty Committee, 2007-

Nancy Rosenblum was appointed Chair of the Department of Government in 2004, having joined the department as a professor in January 2001. Her fields of study are the history of modern political thought, contemporary political theory, and constitutional law. Professor Rosenblum is the author of several books, including On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America, which was awarded the 2002 David Easton Award (ASPA). She is a member of the American Political Science Association Taskforce on Religion and Politics, and has contributed a chapter to their volume Religious Pluralism and the Logic of Congruence. Her memberships at Harvard include the Committee on Appointments and Promotions and the University Committee on Human Rights. Professor Rosenblum is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  More information

Professor Rosenblum was a Senior Scholar in Ethics in 2003-2004, and became a member of the Faculty Committee in 2007.


Tommie Shelby

Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy, Harvard University
  • Faculty Associate, 2004-2009
  • Faculty Committee, 2009-
  • Senior Scholar, 2009-2010

Professor Shelby is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Florida A & M University (1990) and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh (1998). Prior to coming to Harvard in 2000, he taught philosophy at Ohio State University (1996-2000). His main areas of research and teaching focus on racial and economic justice and on the history of black political thought.

Professor Shelby is the author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Harvard, 2005) and coeditor (with Derrick Darby) of Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Open Court, 2005). Other recent publications include "Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto," Philosophy & Public Affairs (2007); "Race and Social Justice: Rawlsian Considerations," Fordham Law Review (2004); "Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity," with Lionel K. McPherson, Philosophy & Public Affairs (2004); "Ideology, Racism, and Critical Social Theory," The Philosophical Forum (2003); "Parasites, Pimps, and Capitalists: A Naturalistic Conception of Exploitation," Social Theory and Practice (2002); and "Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression?" Ethics (2002). He is also the coeditor of the journal Transition.

His current book project, tentatively entitled "Justice and the Dark Ghetto," investigates the questions of justice that arise when thinking systematically about problems of race and urban poverty.  More information

Professor Shelby has been a Faculty Associate of the Ethics Center since 2004, and was a Senior Scholar in Ethics in 2009-2010.


Robert Truog

Professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesiology and Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School; Senior Associate in Critical Care Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital
  • Faculty Fellow, 1990-1991
  • Senior Scholar, 2001-2002
  • Faculty Committee, 2002-

Dr. Robert Truog is Professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesiology & Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Associate in Critical Care Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. Dr. Truog received his medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and is board certified in the practices of pediatrics, anesthesiology, and pediatric critical care medicine.  He also holds a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Brown University and an honorary Master's of Arts from Harvard University.

Dr. Truog has practiced pediatric intensive care medicine at Boston Children's Hospital for more than 20 years, and served as Chief of the Division for ten years. Currently, as Director of Clinical Ethics at Harvard Medical School he has a leadership role in teaching ethics across the undergraduate curriculum. As Executive Director of the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice, he creates and teaches highly interactive seminars to enhance the relational and communication skills of clinicians across a variety of topics, including breaking bad news, discussing organ donation with families, and disclosure of adverse events and medical error. As Chair of Harvard's Embryonic Stem Cell Oversight Committee (ESCRO), he is engaged in the interesting and difficult challenges of defining the ethical parameters of stem cell research.

Dr. Truog has published more than 200 articles in bioethics and related disciplines, and his writings on the subject of brain death have been translated into several languages. He recently authored national guidelines for providing end-of-life care in the Intensive Care Unit. He is Principal Investigator on an R0-1 grant from the NIH to improve end-of-life care in pediatric intensive care units.

He lectures widely nationally and internationally, and has testified before the President's Council on Bioethics and the German Parliament.  Dr. Truog is an active member of numerous committees and advisory boards, and has received several awards over the years, including The Christopher Grenvik Memorial Award from the Society of Critical Care Medicine for his contributions and leadership in the area of ethics.  More information

Dr. Truog was a Faculty Fellow in Ethics in 1990-1991 and a Senior Scholar in Ethics from 2001-2003. He was appointed to the Faculty Committee in 2002.


David Wilkins

Lester Kissel Professor of Law; Director, Program on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School
  • Faculty Fellow, 1989-1990
  • Faculty Associate, 1990-2009
  • Faculty Committee, 2009-

David Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Faculty Director of the Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, and Director of the Program on the Legal Profession. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He has published over 50 articles on the legal profession in leading scholarly journals and the popular press, and has co-authored (with Law School colleague Andrew Kaufman) one of the leading casebooks in the field. his more recent publications include: The Black Bar: The Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and the Future of Race and the American Legal Profession (Oxford University Press); Partner, Shmartner!  EEOC v. Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 1264 (2007); Valuing Diversity: Some Cautionary Lessons from the American Experience, in Managing the Modern Law Firm (Laura Empson, ed. 2007); Bridging the Diversity Gap: Five Lessons from the American Experience, 2007; Diversity League Tables: Ethnicity and Gender in the Legal Professions (Black Solicitors Network 2007); and Urban Law Graduates in Large Law Firms, Southwestern Law Review (2007).

Professor Wilkins' current scholarly projects on the profession include the After the JD study and the Center's Corporate Purchasing Project. His other research projects include empirical research on the development of "ethical infrastructure" in large law firms for a book on the development of the black corporate bar, to be published by Oxford University Press. He teaches several courses on lawyers and other related professionals, including the country's only four credit course on the Legal Profession.  He also teaches a seminar on The Future(s) of the Large Law Firm, and an introductory lecture for all first year students on the legal profession and careers. He is an instructor at the Center's Executive Education courses, and participate in curricular reform, including the creation of a new course for first-year students entitled Problem Solving. Professor Wilkins is a frequent speaker at academic conferences, law firms, other professional service providers, and bar organizations, both within the United States and around the world. He is a member of Harvard University's Task Force on Professional Schools.  More information

Professor Wilkins was a Faculty Fellow in Ethics in 1989-1990, and became a Faculty Associate of the Ethics Center at the end of that year.