Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Evil in the 21st Century: September 11 and Beyond
September 10, 2002 @ 7:00 pm
Marshall Community Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Using contemporary examples, Card explores what distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs. Is evil today worse or on the rise? What makes a person or institution evil? Is evil an inevitable aspect of the human condition? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there some we should tolerate? How can we best live with evils?
Card is the Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at UW-Madison, where she has taught since 1966. Her recent books include the forthcoming The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, to be released in September by Oxford University Press, as well as The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck and On Feminist Ethics and Politics. She is also engaged in a project on the responses to such atrocities as genocide and major terrorism.
Harry Brighouse
Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ethics in Politics? A Look at the Wisconsin Elections
October 8, 2002 @ 7:00 pm
Stoughton Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Brighouse looks at the ideal of a just society, and explains what it means for Wisconsin politics today. He looks at our elections and asks which candidates have incorporated the demands of social justice into their programs.
Brighouse is a political philosopher who has written numerous articles about social justice, and has been involved in politics as an activist since he was 14. He is also an expert on education policy, and is a frequent commentator in the national media in the UK. His most recent book is called School Choice and Social Justice. He recently appeared in the Ken Loach movie Bread and Roses.
Rodney Stevenson
Professor of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Crisis in Business Ethics: Enron, WorldCom, and the Culture of Greed
November 12, 2002 @ 7:00 pm
Sun Prairie Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Stevenson adresses the ethical failures, criminal activities, and other factors associated with the recent round of corporate scandals at companies such as Enron and WorldCom. These scandals have resulted in some of the largest bankruptcies in history; substantial harm to the investors, employees, and customers of these corporations; and widespread economic damage reaching far beyond the companies themselves. He will discuss how the recent crisis in business ethics calls for reforming business behavior, reinforcing regulatory controls, and reconsidering the social-corporate contract.
Stevenson teaches the MBA Business Ethics Course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Business, where his research focuses on business ethics and social responsibility, social control of economic enterprise, and public utility regulation. He has written on a wide variety of issues associated with business ethics, economic power, the public utility industries, and the need for regulatory oversight of markets and business activity.
Harry Brighouse
Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Should We Teach Patriotism?
January 14, 2003 @ 7:00 pm
DeForest Area Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, there has been a distinct increase in patriotic feeling among Americans. Among the results of this heightened sentiment is a renewed call that schools should teach children to be more patriotic. Teaching American history and literature, and requiring the pledge of allegiance (or 'moment of patriotic observance') in schools are among the most visible manifestations of this trend. This response is not limited to the political right: much of the political left also argues that children should be taught history and literature patriotically-but the two sides often disagree about the meaning of patriotism.
Professor Brighouse argued that it is entirely respectable for people to love their country, but also that they have no specific obligations to their country or fellow-countrymen, and, further, that it is wrong for schools to inculcate patriotism (whether from right or left) in students. It is wrong because it wastes valuable instructional time, interferes with learning, and violates the basic precepts of a free society.
This lecture is the fourth of six public programs in the 2002-2003 Humanities Forums on Contemporary Issues series, organized by the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities and the Dane County Public Libraries with support from The University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Continuing Studies.
Harry Brighouse has taught in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Philosophy since 1992. He works on the foundations of liberal theory and the place of education and the family in liberalism. He is currently working on the significance of positionality for egalitarian justice, on development theory and liberal egalitarianism, on the fair distribution of power, and on whether parents have rights over their children. Professor Brighouse has also written extensively about education policy, and is co-editor of the new journal Theory and Research in Education.
Jean Lee
Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Origins of American Patriotism
February 11, 2003 @ 7:00 pm
Monona Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Historian Jean Lee presents an examination of the formation of patriotism in the early United States, and the ways in which the founding generation tried to define it. Taking into account the social, cultural, and political roots of patriotism, Professor Lee will explore patriotism as a key driver in American history through its links to war, gender politics and roles, and the development of an American national identity.
Professor Jean Lee's teaching and research interests at the UW include the American Revolution, cultural memory of the Revolution, and the Chesapeake River region in the 18th century. Her publications include the book The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County (W.W. Norton, 1994), which was awarded prizes from the Maryland Historical Society and the American Association for State & Local History, and articles such as Historical Memory, Sectional Strife, and the American Mecca: Mount Vernon, 1783-1853 in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (2001).
Rebecca Walkowitz
Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Patriotism and Civility: A Literary Perspective
March 11, 2003 @ 7:00 pm
Middleton Public Library
This event is one of the Forums on Contemporary Issues events.
Patriotism is not new as a topic of literature, but in the 20th century, many writers have made literature a topic of patriotism. This trend began during World War I, when poets and novelists decided that writing about war and national allegiance meant writing about language, and the political slogans and literary aphorisms that express and encourage patriotism. It also meant thinking about the ways that patriotism distributes, transforms, controls and obstructs language in everyday life. The World War I writers argued that there is no civility without language: that civility exists only in so far as individuals can speak, feel, agree and disagree, both in public and in private. Recent writers have come to propose that literature not only serves to describe the conditions of patriotism but that it also serves to compensate for and change those conditions. Professor Walkowitz will examine these issues through two poems by Wilfred Owen, who wrote and died during World War I, as well as several more recent works in the literature of patriotism.
Rebecca Walkowitz earned her A.B. from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges, her M.Phil from the University of Sussex, and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. Her research and teaching encompasses British and American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially contemporary narrative fiction and film; modernist theories of culture and the aesthetics of nationalism, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism; narrative theory, critical theory, and cultural studies, styles of political commitment in contemporary narrative; McCarthyism and American culture after World War II.
