Faculty Fellows in Ethics Selected for 1998 Academic Year

The Program in Ethics and the Professions has selected the Faculty Fellows in Ethics for the 1998-99 academic year.

Six scholars studying ethical problems in law, medicine, clinical psychology, government, and public policy were chosen from a group of applicants from colleges, universities, and professional institutions throughout the United States and 18 other countries.

In addition, six Harvard graduate students have been named Graduate Fellows in Ethics; two of them have been awarded the Eugene P. Beard Graduate Fellowship in Ethics. The Graduate Fellows will explore issues of moral motivation and topics in law and government. The Fellows will be in residence beginning this month to conduct research on issues related to ethics within their respective fields and to participate in seminars on ethical issues that arise in public and professional life. They will also participate in a wide range of activities throughout the University, including faculty and graduate student seminars, curricular development, collaborative research, study groups, casewriting workshops, and clinical programs.

The new Fellows are as follows:

Faculty Fellows in Ethics

Stephen H. Behnke is an instructor in psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical School. He is also chief psychologist on the Day Hospital Unit of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Behnke has published on the criminal responsibility of individuals with multiple personality disorder, and has been chosen by W.W. Norton as the editor of a multi-volume series on state mental health laws. Behnke's current research interests include the legal and ethical dimensions of working with individuals who suffer from severe psychiatric disturbances. His plans for the fellowship year include writing about how the law views the autonomy interests of these individuals and how mental health professionals address ethical dilemmas they encounter in their day-to-day practice.

Leora Y. Bilsky is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute of Research, Jerusalem. Her main areas of interest are procedural law, feminist legal theory, child law, and narrative and rhetoric in law. After receiving her LL.B. from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, she clerked for Justice Aharon Barak at the Israel Supreme Court. As a Fulbright Scholar, she attended Yale University Law School, completing her J.S.D. in 1995. In recent articles, she has revisited two trials pivotal to the understanding of the history of Israeli law and the legacy of the Holocaust: those of Kastner and Eichmann. In this context and others she has studied the work of Hannah Arendt. During the fellowship year, she will further pursue these directions in a book tentatively titled, The Ethics of Memory: The Struggle for Israeli Collective Identity in the Trials of the Holocaust.

Annabelle P. F. Lever is assistant professor in political science at the University of Rochester. She specializes in political philosophy and social theory, teaching courses on justice, theories of rights, feminist theory, the right to privacy, and social theory. She is currently completing a book for Oxford University Press, tentatively titled, A Democratic Conception of Privacy, is revising an article on privacy, sex-equality, and the public/private distinction, and has completed an article entitled "Must Privacy and Sexual Equality Conflict?" During her fellowship year, she will continue work on Privacy, Property and Democracy, a book that examines the philosophical relationship between privacy rights and property rights and its implications for current debates on the patenting of genetic materials. Lever has a B.A. in modern history from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Walter M. Robinson, a faculty associate of the Program, is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children's Hospital and director of Fellowships in Medical Ethics in the Division of Medical Ethics at the Medical School. He received his B.A. in philosophy at Princeton University, his M.D. from Emory University, and his M.P.H. at the Harvard School of Public Health. Robinson is involved in clinical case consultation and policy formation at Children's Hospital, where he serves as associate ethicist in the Office of Ethics and ethicist for the institutional review board. He is associate director of the Pediatric Lung Transplantation Program as well as associate director of the General Clinical Research Center. He is a Faculty Scholar in the Project on Death in America. Robinson's academic interests focus on the ethical dilemmas that arise in chronic illness, organ transplantation, and clinical research. His articles on chronic pain and terminal care in cystic fibrosis appeared in the Journal of Pediatrics.

Walter P. Sinnott-Armstrong is professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on ethics, philosophy of law, informal logic, and epistemology. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. His books include Moral Dilemmas, Understanding Arguments (with Robert Fogelin), Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation (with Susan Brison), The Philosophy of Law (with Frederick Schauer), and Moral Knowledge? (with Mark Timmons). He has published numerous articles in moral theory and applied ethics, including works on abortion, the insanity defense, and nuclear deterrence. During his fellowship year, he plans to finish a book defending limited moral skepticism and to explore its practical implications.

John O. Tomasi is assistant professor of political science at Brown University. He earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Oxford University, where he worked under the supervision of Bernard Williams. Tomasi has held both teaching and research positions at Stanford University, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio. His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Ethics and The Journal of Philosophy, on topics as diverse as abortion, anarcho-capitalism, and Plato as a writer of fiction. During his fellowship year, Tomasi will complete a book on citizenship, Liberalism Beyond Justice, which examines the role of the concept "justice" within the scope of contemporary liberal theory.

Graduate Fellows in Ethics

Sujit Choudhry received the LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School in June 1998. He graduated from McGill University with a B.Sci. in biology, and holds law degrees from Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Choudhry was a Rhodes Scholar, and currently holds a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard, and the William E. Taylor Memorial Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Prior to coming to Harvard, he served as law clerk to Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada, and was involved in constitutional litigation both in Canada and South Africa. He has authored or co-authored articles on health law and bioethics that have appeared in Social Science and Medicine, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, McGill Law Journal, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, and Canadian Medical Association Journal. During his fellowship year, he will examine the relationship between ways of conceptualizing problems of justice -- the paradigms of recognition and distribution -- in the context of the interpretation and application of anti-discrimination legislation.

Mary Clayton Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy. In her dissertation, she explores the relationship between reason and motivation and is developing an account of how having a good reason to act can motivate one to act. Her account draws heavily on Daniel Dennett's theory of propositional attitudes and has much in common with Kant's moral philosophy. Coleman received a B.A. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1991 and an M.A. in philosophy from Tufts University in 1993. She has assisted in several philosophy courses (primarily in ethics) at Tufts and at Harvard and was twice awarded a Certificate of Distinction in teaching from Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. She has been awarded an Eliot Fellowship for Dissertation Completion.

Pamela D. Hieronymi has been named a Eugene P. Beard Graduate Fellow in Ethics. A Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, she is exploring issues of moral motivation. Her attention has been captured by the possibility of "imitation virtue" and its implications not only for moral theory but also for moral life and practice. In the two-year period between graduating summa cum laude from Princeton in 1992 and coming to Harvard as a Javits Fellow, she worked in Washington, D.C., at the Ethics Resource Center, a public interest organization which conducts corporate consulting in business ethics and develops a video-based curriculum for character education.

Richard B. Katskee has been named a Eugene P. Beard Graduate Fellow in Ethics. He is a Ph.D. candidate in government and is exploring the relationship between education and liberal citizenship. His degrees include an A.B. in political science from the University of Michigan, an A.M. in political science from Harvard, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. While at Harvard, Katskee was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and taught courses in ethics, political theory, and American government. He has also served as judicial law clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Nancy Kokaz is a Ph.D. candidate in government studying political theory and international relations. In her dissertation, she explores alternative conceptions of sovereignty that would be compatible with the ethical understanding of foreign policy and international politics. Focusing on the works of Thucydides, Locke, and Rawls, she aims to conceptualize global legitimacy as it concerns inter-state interactions as well as relations involving non-sovereign actors. Kokaz earned a B.A. in management and political science from Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, and an M.A. in international relations from Yale University. At Yale and Harvard, she has been a teaching fellow for courses in political philosophy, international relations, and ethics and international relations. During her fellowship year, she hopes to further explore the practical implications of the theories of sovereignty and legitimacy for concrete problems in international relations, as well as the teaching of political philosophy as it relates to contemporary political debates.

Nicholas Papaspyrou is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. He is exploring the normative foundations of the allocation of interpretive authority in American public law, including examining the accountability of institutional theory to political conceptions of justice and its implications to judicial review of legislative acts and administrative rules. Papaspyrou has an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, an M.Iur. from Balliol College, Oxford, an LL.B. from the University of Athens, and has been an Erasmus Scholar at the University of Copenhagen. As a graduate student, he received a British Academy studentship, and scholarships from the Aristotle Onassis Foundation and the Basil & Elise Goulandris Museum of Modern Art. He has done legislative research for members of the Greek Parliament and was associated with Healy and Bailie, LL.P., New York. His articles have appeared in Greek law reviews and in the Journal of International Banking Law.

The Faculty Fellows in Ethics are selected by a University committee with representatives from several of the Harvard professional schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences: Mark Moore, Kennedy School of Government; Martha Minow, Law School; Tim Scanlon, Philosophy; Lynn Peterson, Medical School; Michael Sandel, Government Department; Joseph Badaracco, Business School; and Dennis Thompson, Director, Program in Ethics and the Professions and Committee Chair. The Fellows join a growing community of teachers and scholars dedicated to the study of ethics. In addition to the Faculty Fellowships in Ethics, the Program's Graduate Fellowships in Ethics support graduate students who are teaching and writing in the field of practical ethics. The Program also sponsors a public lecture series on applied and professional ethics.

The Program, established in 1986, is one of the University's Interfaculty Initiatives under the auspices of the Provost's Office. It encourages teaching and research about ethical issues in public and professional life and aims to help meet the growing need for teachers and scholars who address questions of moral choice in schools of business, education, government, law, and medicine. The Program draws on the intellectual resources of the entire University, including the schools of business, design, divinity, education, government, law, medicine and public health. Leading faculty in moral and political philosophy and social and political theory, as well as those from each of the professional schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, provide counsel to the participants in the Program.

Also contributing to the Program are many of the activities of the professional schools, including the Program on the Legal Profession, Law School; the Charles Francis Adams Distinguished Fellows, Business School; the Fellowships in Medical Ethics, Division of Medical Ethics at the Medical School; the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, School of Public Health; and the Center for Values in Public Life, Divinity School.