Ethics in Practice

Every Tuesday afternoon at the Kennedy School of Government, over lunch, a group of 10 people debates ethical questions that, in one form or another, have fascinated, puzzled, and plagued humanity for millennia. One Tuesday in March, for example, the conversation bounced from the “Scooter” Libby verdict to a New York Times series on approaches to rehabilitating sex offenders, and then on to pornography, journalistic ethics, and the propriety (or impropriety) of maintaining a friendship with someone whose values don’t match one’s own.

The group’s membership changes each year, but typically includes doctors, lawyers, and political scientists (who bring a pragmatic perspective) and philosophers (who contribute a more open-ended theoretical approach). All are beneficiaries of a yearlong fellowship that allows them to interact, learn from one another, and integrate the practical and the theoretical—just one of many programs sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this spring.

The fellows’ mission mirrors the center’s fundamental goal: providing a forum for articulating universal principles of ethics, and for creating a framework to apply them in specific professional contexts. Besides providing a training ground for ethics educators, the center supports curriculum development for ethics education in all the University’s schools and programs. It sponsors a lecture series. A grant program for undergraduate thesis research on ethics-related topics began this year. All this takes place in 1,100 square feet of leased space in the Taubman Center that holds little besides a conference room and offices for the fellows and the small staff. “People say, ‘Is this it?’” notes Jean McVeigh, who has been the center’s administrative director since its inception. In a way, she adds, the limited space is a blessing. “The hope is that the smallness”—and the intimacy it creates—“will allow the fellows to feel like they can just bring any idea, no matter how crazy, to the table.”

But the center’s reach spans far beyond its four walls. Over the years, more than 200 fellows—graduate students from within the University, and professors from elsewhere—have passed through. Those fellows return to their respective institutions and share what they’ve learned: the questions they’ve asked, and the conclusions they’ve reached. “It’s almost like spreading the gospel,” McVeigh says. There are former fellows in South Africa, Israel, Canada, England, Australia, and India. (One is now the Israeli minister of education.) The center has spawned ethics-education programs nationwide, including centers founded by alumni of Harvard’s program at Duke, Princeton, the University of Toronto, and the National Institutes of Health. The fellows keep in touch with one another and with center staff, and many will return for the anniversary festivities on May 18 and 19 (see “An Anniversary Celebration,” page 60). “Nobody ever goes away,” McVeigh says. “It’s like a family.”

The celebration is bittersweet: the center’s founding director, Whitehead professor of political philosophy and professor of public policy Dennis F. Thompson, retires this year. Then-University president Derek Bok appointed him to the post in 1986.

Photograph by Stu Rosner

Dennis F. Thompson

Bok had seen the need for a systematic focus on ethics as early as 1976, when he published an article in Change magazine decrying the topic’s absence from the curricula of most professional schools. One could study business or one could study philosophy, but essentially, the twain never met. Bok had a vision for bringing them together. “I didn’t know of any place in the U.S. that did that,” he says. “So we created it here.”

But bringing Thompson to Harvard took seven years and considerable persuasion on Bok’s part. Bok believed that Thompson embodied a rare combination: an eminent scholar in an established discipline who also had a strong interest in ethics education, a topic that many in the academic world still regarded with skepticism and suspicion. At the time, however, Thompson chaired the politics department at Princeton and was developing a political ethics course that applied political theory to public-policy problems. (His books include Just Elections; Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business, and Healthcare; Political Ethics and Public Office; and Ethics in Congress.) Nothing against Harvard, but “I was quite happy at Princeton,” Thompson remembers. Bok persisted, and finally Thompson relented.

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