Ethics Center Marks 20th Anniversary

Harvard’s first inter-school center, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, celebrated its 20th anniversary this weekend, and its graduates, benefactors, and current members turned out in force to eat, drink, and—of course—debate.

A keynote address on Friday by Lamont University Professor Amartya Sen, a former fellow at the center, and two panels on ethics drew prominent guests and speakers alike, including former Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard Corporation member Nannerl O. Keohane, and University President Derek C. Bok, who was a driving force behind the center’s creation in the 1980s.

After presiding over a vigorous question-and-answer session with Sen and other panelists, the center’s outgoing director, Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy Dennis F. Thompson, expressed disappointment that the panel could not go on longer.

“I’m eager to continue the argument with each of them,” he said.

Among the panelists—all former fellows of the center—were University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann ’71, who has written a book with Thompson, Samantha Power, a Kennedy School of Government professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, and Internet law guru Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University.

Discussion at the panels ranged from the ethical dilemmas surrounding government responses to genocide, to the proper allocation of healthcare services, to wages for service employees at wealthy universities.

“These problems are real, they are hotly debated...and they need to be solved,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former fellow and prominent bioethicist who spoke in one of the panels.

The audience included movie star John Malkovich and Academy Award–nominated producer Andrew Karsch, among others.

Part of the weekend affair spotlighted Thompson’s work. He has led the center since its inception and will leave the post at the end of the academic year.

“Harvard is not notorious for cooperation, and in that sense it really is a tribute to Dennis’s political skills that [the center] survived and thrived,” Emanuel said. “I think there are very few people who could have done it.”

At a dinner Friday night, Bok recounted his efforts more than two decades ago to convince Thompson to head the project.

“He, that scoundrel, would not come!” Bok said, in reference to the eight years he waited for Thompson to accept the post.

As guests celebrated the center’s first 20 years, Thompson said that there are still challenges ahead for the Safra Center and other ethics institutes.

“The biggest challenges are still what they’ve always been,” Thompson said. “In general, people say they want to talk about ethics, but they really want to avoid the subject.”

Both Thompson and Arthur I. Applbaum, a professor of ethics and public policy at the Kennedy School, who will direct the center on an interim basis next year, said one of the center’s greatest contributions has been to bring together scholars of many different stripes.

“One of the really very nice aspects of the ethics center has been to be a meeting place for various kinds of normative disciplines,” Applbaum said.

Thompson also credited the center’s fellows with ramping up ethics education at many of Harvard’s schools and starting similar centers around the globe.

“We have populated all the professional schools with ‘insurgents,’ I call them—former fellows that have gone out and first they were guerrillas,” he said. “Now they’re established people teaching these courses. And now there are also these mini-centers all over which we don’t try to control. We’re kind of a catalyst.”

As the last panel ended, Applbaum found evidence that the center still has its work cut out for it.

“Twenty years isn’t quite enough,” he said. “We haven’t even figured out whether ethics is singular or plural.”

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.