Twitter: @UMBEthics (followed by 90 philosophers)
Site: ethics.podbean.com
23 episodes
2018 to 2022
Average episode: 53 minutes
Open in Apple Podcasts • RSS
Categories: Ethics • Interview-Style
Podcaster's summary: Part of UMass Boston’s Philosophy Department, the Applied Ethics Center promotes research, teaching, and awareness of public life. In this podcast, Applied Ethics Center Director Nir Eisikovits hosts conversations on the intersection of ethics, politics, and technology.
| Episodes |
| 2022-Jun-07 • 76 minutes Report from Kyiv: A Conversation with Journalist Alisa Sopova We continue our series on the war in Ukraine. In this episode Vlado and I talk to journalist and anthropologist Alisa Sopova about what everyday life feels like in Ukraine as the war passes the 100 day mark. We discuss the regional differences in how the conflict is perceived, we ask whether Ukrainians have different views about Russian politicians and ordinary Russians, and we also talk about how Ukrainians perceive assistance from the west. Alisa Sopova is an independent journalist from Donetsk in east... |
| 2022-May-11 • 51 minutes Reading Between The Lines in Russia and Ukraine: A Conversation with Ambassador Vesko Garcevic We continue our series on the war in Ukraine. Our guest is Vesko Garcevic, former ambassador of Montenegro to NATO, OSCE, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Vesko is currently Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. We talk about what it means to diplomatically engage with Russia and whether it makes sense to think of it as a pariah state. We also take up some misconceptions about the role of NATO expansion in precipit... |
| 2022-Apr-17 • 60 minutes Making Russia Great Again? Vladimir Putin wants to put Russia back on the map as a great power. But what does it even mean to be a great power in the nuclear age? Is that idea still coherent? If it is, can Russia be such a power? And how is Putin using history to frame this quest? What does his framing reveal about him and about contemporary Russia? The second in a series of conversations with historian Vladimir Petrovic about the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Resources: Putin's February 21st Speech, preceding Russ... |
| 2022-Apr-01 • 66 minutes Empires Strike Back - Did the “Balance of Power” Just Make a Comeback?: A Conversation with Vladimir Petrovic For a while, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we could tell ourselves that the American-led liberal internationalist order was on the rise. That story had some big holes in it, but if we squinted a bit it was almost believable. Not "the end of history", but maybe a long vacation from it. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its insistence on declaring a “sphere of influence” free from western intervention, and its alliance with China change everything. Within a few weeks an older picture of internatio... |
| 2021-Sep-17 • 57 minutes School Integrations and Equal Education: A Conversation with Larry Blum How should we understand efforts at school integration? And how are they related to the idea of equal education? Larry and I consider different historical understandings of integration and the problematic idea of integration as a vehicle for gaining social capital. Larry and Zoë Burkholder just published Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public Education. Larry is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University ... |
| 2021-Sep-01 • 50 minutes Harvard‘s Galileo Project: A Conversation with Avi Loeb The New York Times 2017 front page story about UAP's (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) spotted by Navy pilots, and the recent report to Congress by The Office of the Director of National Intelligence have generated tremendous public interest. I talk to Professor Avi Loeb about Harvard's new Galileo Project. We discuss what it means to explore UAP's scientifically, his reasons for pursuing this work, and about the academic community's reluctance to engage with these questions. Avi Loeb, an Astrophysicist, is t... |
| 2021-May-27 • 47 minutes Institutional Corruption and Psychiatric Drugs: A Conversation with Lisa Cosgrove What happens when the ties between the people who study psychiatric drugs and the companies who make them become too cozy? A discussion with UMass Boston psychology professor Lisa Cosgrove. Lisa Cosgrove, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston where she teaches courses on psychiatric diagnosis and psychopharmacology. She was a Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University (2010-2015) and served as a consultant to the United N... |
| 2021-Apr-08 • 61 minutes My Favorite Passage: A conversation with Adam Beresford about Iliad, Book 24 Adam and I discuss the famous, moving passage at the end of the Iliad describing the meeting between Achilles and Priam. We talk quite a bit about Achilles' curious account of how Zeus determines humans' fate by doling out happenings from jars of joy and misfortune. Adam Beresford teaches philosophy and classics at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He has just published a translation of Aristotle's Ethics which you can (and should!) buy here and you can learn more about Adam's work here. Here is... |
| 2020-Sep-29 • 44 minutes A Three-Way Peace Deal in the Middle East: A Conversation with Ehud Eiran Israel has signed normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain. These are the first Middle East peace agreements in two and a half decades. Why now? What does each of the main actors in this drama stand to gain from these accords? Can Middle East diplomacy really bypass the Israeli Palestinian conflict as these agreements attempt to do? And does the deal signal a new alignment of power in the region? Dr. Ehud (Udi) Eiran is a Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor) of International Relations, Univer... |
| 2020-Sep-11 • 35 minutes Civic Dialogue in a Polarized Society: A Conversation With Lauren Barthold The US seems more polarized than it's been in decades. Can we communicate across ideological and political chasms? What does it mean to have a dialogue with someone we profoundly, even vehemently disagree with? If we do have such a dialogue, does it make us any less polarized? Do the effects last? We talk with Professor Barthold about her new book: Overcoming Polarization in the Public Square: Civic Dialogue Lauren Swayne Barthold (PhD, Philosophy) teaches Ethics at Emerson College and is also co-founder a... |
| 2020-Aug-10 • 55 minutes Monuments, Racism and The Ethics of Public Memory: A Conversation with Dana Miranda In the last few months, in the wake of recent protests against systemic racism, Confederate and other monuments have been torn down and defaced. What are these monuments supposed to convey? What's the argument for taking them down? Dana and I revisit our conversation about the ethics and politics of monument removal in light of recent events. Take a look at Dana's recent essay on the Politics of Monuments over at the APA's Black Issues in Philosophy Blog This is a good background piece from the Guardian ... |
| 2020-May-20 • 48 minutes The Rise of Robot Overlords? A Conversation with Dan Feldman Before Covid 19 turned the world upside down we worried about Artificial General Intelligence and, ultimately, Super-intelligence - the moment when our machines, powered by sophisticated AI, catch up with us and, ultimately, out-perform us. But how coherent, how pressing, are these concerns, really? Dan Feldman is a senior research fellow at the UMB Applied Ethics Center. He is a software engineering executive and advisor to startups. He has more than 40 years of experience developing leading edge computin... |
| 2020-Apr-16 • 55 minutes Thucydides and the Plague: A Conversation with Greg Fried In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides provides a vivid description of the physical and social toll that a terrible plague took on Athens, a year or so into its war with Sparta. What explains the staying power of Thucydides' account? And what can we learn from it as we grapple with our own (albeit far less deadly) Covid 19 crisis? Greg Fried is Professor of philosophy at Boston College. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Boston University, California State University Los Angeles, and ... |
| 2020-Apr-09 • 47 minutes Setting Priorities in a Pandemic: Who Gets Care? When do We Open the Economy? A conversation with J Hughes What are the moral criteria for triaging patients when the healthcare system is overwhelmed? How is Massachusetts thinking about this? And, more broadly, what is the appropriate balance between preserving public health and limiting an economic meltdown? Please note: the last 3 minutes of this conversation are missing due to a Zoom malfunction. So it ends a bit abruptly. But the important stuff is all there! James Hughes is a senior research fellow at the UMass Boston Applied Ethics Center. He is a bioeth... |
| 2019-Dec-17 • 68 minutes What is Social Democracy? A Conversation with Jeppe von Platz Jeppe von Platz teaches philosophy at the University of Richmond. His research focuses on political philosophy, political economy, and the history of philosophy. He has published on questions of distributive justice, the status of economic rights, just war theory, how we should respond to systemic injustices, and Kant’s practical philosophy. Jeppe's book Theories of Distributive Justice: Who Gets What and Why will be coming out with Routledge this spring. In this episode we discuss his new project - on the ... |
| 2019-Jun-12 • 49 minutes Philosophy and Our Understanding of Mental Disorders: A Conversation with Jennifer Radden UMass Boston's Jennifer Radden has made numerous seminal contributions to the philosophy of psychiatry. She has just published an entry on Mental Disorders in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We talk about how philosophy can help us think about mental health and disorders. |
| 2019-Jan-28 • 48 minutes AI, Algorithms and the Post Human Future of Governance: A Conversation with J Hughes How will the rise of AI change state and federal bureaucracies? Are AI mediated politics more democratic? More fair? What does post human governance look like? James Hughes is a senior research fellow at the Applied Ethics Center at Mass Boston. He is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the associate provost for institutional research, assessment, and planning at UMass Boston. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago where he taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinica... |
| 2018-Aug-25 • 59 minutes Should we rename Faneuil Hall? A Conversation with Dana Miranda Faneuil Hall, one of Boston's most celebrated public spaces and tourist attractions, is named after Peter Faneuil - an 18th century merchant and slave trader. Nir Eisikovits and UConn's Dana Miranda discuss the debate around renaming Faneuil Hall and place it in the context of the national debate around problematic monuments and memorials - from Charlottesville to Yawkey Way. Dana Francisco Miranda is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and a Research Fell... |
| 2018-Mar-01 • 55 minutes Kant’s Liberal International Order: A Conversation with Claudio Corradetti Eisikovits and Corradetti discuss the relevance of Kant's celebrated essay "Towards Perpetual Peace" Is peace a process to be constantly managed or an outcome? Why does Kant think that republicanism is conducive to peace? What's the best way to understand his call for creating a world state? Is that a concrete political proposal? A tool for assessing our own political behavior? In what ways is Kant a realist? Claudio Corradetti is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome, Tor Ve... |
| 2018-Feb-28 • 31 minutes No Ethics on Campus: A Conversation with James Keenan Eisikovits and Keenan discuss the need to create a culture of ethics on college campuses. How is it that the university - one of the few institutions that teaches ethics - does not give much thought to what it means for it to create an ethical climate on campus? How are the prevalence of sexual assault, the mistreatment of adjunct faculty and racial tensions on campuses related to this failure? James Keenan is the Canisius Professor and Director of the Jesuit Institute at Boston College. His Book University... |
| 2018-Jan-29 • 52 minutes Hate anger and Resentment: A conversation with Thomas Brudholm Nir Eisikovits hosts Thomas Brudholm of the University of Copenhagen for a discussion about the philosophy of hate, anger, and resentment. The two discuss whether there are more and less legitimate forms of hate, whether it should be understood as an emotion or as an attitude, and whether a philosophical understanding of hate can help us make better sense of these very tense political times. Resources for Further Reading:‘’Hatred Beyond Bigotry," in Hate, Politics, Law: Critical Perspectives on Combating Ha... |
| 2018-Jan-29 • 50 minutes The Confederate Monuments Debate: A Conversation With Glenn Loury Debating Confederate monuments and Civil War memorials in light of the violence in Charlottesville. |
| 2018-Jan-24 • 53 minutes Honor, Slavery, and Social Death: A Conversation with Historian Ken Greenberg Nir Eisikovits and Ken Greenberg talk about the prominent role of honor in the antebellum south and its relationship to the institution of slavery. They also discuss Greenberg’s recent work on Nat Turner’s rebellion and the challenges of creating a historical account from necessarily incomplete evidence and records. |