Center for Ethics chooses fellows

The University Center for Ethics and the Professions has selected six Faculty Fellows in Ethics and a Visiting Scholar in Ethics for the 2002-03 academic year. They include the first Edmond J. Safra Faculty Fellow in Ethics and the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow in Ethics. The fellows, who study ethical problems in business, government, law, medicine, and public policy, were chosen from a pool of applicants from colleges, universities, and professional institutions throughout the United States and many other countries. They will be joined by visiting professors Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, and Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics, Princeton University.

The Faculty Fellows will be in residence 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 participate in a wide range of activities throughout the University, including the center’s seminars, curricular development, collaborative research, study groups, case-writing workshops, and clinical programs.

The Faculty Fellows

• Ockert C. Dupper, an associate professor of law at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, teaches and writes about labor law and employment discrimination law. He received his B.A. from the University of Stellenbosch, his LL.B. from the University of Cape Town, and his LL.M. and SJ.D from Harvard Law School (HLS), where he was a Fulbright scholar. Dupper spent a year at HLS as a visiting researcher and as a member of the Human Rights Program Group Research Project on Violence against Women. In 1996 he was named senior lecturer of law in the University of Stellenbosch, being promoted to associate professor in 2000. He is co-director of the Center for International and Comparative Labor and Social Security Law (CICLASS). During the fellowship year, Dupper will research the issue of justification in South African employment discrimination law, and explore the parameters of a “general fairness defense” to a claim of unfair discrimination. He has been named the Edmond J. Safra Faculty Fellow in Ethics. 
• Alon Harel, a professor in the law faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has also been a visiting professor at Columbia Law School and at the University of Toronto Law School. His areas of research include moral and political philosophy, criminal law, law and economics, and human rights. He received his D.Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford. He has written about hate crimes legislation, the philosophical foundations of rights, efficiency-based rationales of criminal law, and the right to free speech. Recent publications include “On Hate and Equality” (Yale Law Journal); “Crime Rates and Expected Sanctions: The Economics of Deterrence Revisited” (Journal of Legal Studies); and “Revisionist Theories of Rights: An Unwelcome Defense” (Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence). During the fellowship year, Harel plans to complete a book on the relationship between rights and values. 
• James W. Lenman is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in 1995 and lectured at Lancaster University for three years before moving to Glasgow. Recent and forthcoming publications include “Consequentialism and Cluelessness” (Philosophy and Public Affairs); “Disciplined Syntacticism and Moral Expressivism” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research); and “On Becoming Extinct” (Pacific Philosophy Quarterly). Lenman’s primary research interests are in metaethics and normative ethics. His current work is centrally concerned with expressivism and constructivism in metaethics, with contractualism in normative ethics, with moral responsibility and rationality, and with how these ideas relate to one another. 
• Michelle N. Mason is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, where her main research and teaching interests include ethics, moral psychology, and theories of practical reason. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001, where she held a Charlotte Newcomb Fellowship for completion of her dissertation, “Moral Virtue and Reasons for Action.” Recent writings include “Contempt as a Moral Attitude,” forthcoming in Ethics. Mason plans to devote the fellowship year to investigating questions about the moral responsibility of those who are deficient in moral education and experience, and so for whom the reasons and affections that guide the actions of virtuous agents might not be available. 
• Lionel K. McPherson is an assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University. His active research interests are in moral and political philosophy, as well as social philosophy, philosophy of action, and aesthetics. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1999, and his A.B. from Princeton University. Prior to entering graduate school, he worked as an arts and media critic and at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is completing a book on the morality of special concern, and will use the fellowship year to develop a book that re-examines central aspects of just war theory. 
• Eric W. Orts is a professor of legal studies and management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also directs Wharton’s Environmental Management Program. Orts received his B.A. from Oberlin College. He holds an M.A. in political science from the New School for Social Research, a J.D. from the University of Michigan, and a J.S.D. from Columbia Law School. His primary research interests are in the law of corporate governance and environmental policy. During the fellowship year, he plans to work on a social theory of business organization, as well as a philosophical extension of his work – “Environmental Contracts: Comparative Approaches to Environmental Regulation” (edited with Kurt Deketelaere). Orts has been named the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow in Ethics. 
• Katie McShane, who will be the center’s Visiting Scholar in Ethics, is assistant professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002, where she was the recipient of a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship for the completion of her dissertation, “The Nature of Value: Environmentalist Challenges to Moral Theory.” McShane’s B.A. is from Northwestern University. Her main research interests are in the areas of environmental ethics and ethical theory. She is currently working on bringing contemporary neosentimentalist theories of value to bear on questions concerning the value of the natural environment. McShane will be a member of the center’s faculty seminar in 2002-03. 

The Faculty Fellows are selected by a University committee with representatives from several of Harvard’s professional schools and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The committee’s members include Joseph Badaracco (Business School), Martha Minow (Law School), Lynn Peterson (Medical School), Michael Sandel (government), Tim Scanlon (philosophy), and Dennis Thompson, director, University Center for 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 fellowships, the center sponsors a public lecture series on applied and professional ethics, and co-sponsors, with the President’s Office, the University-wide Tanner Lectures on Human Values.