Calendar

Is being loved as a child a human right? The fulfillment of children’s rights to be loved are made more complicated by poverty, unwanted pregnancies, the challenges often involved in adoption and the fact that each year, thousands of children leave foster care at age eighteen without ever finding a permanent loving family. This practical, philosophical and provocative discussion will explore the justification for a fundamental right of children to be loved and our societal obligations to provide such love for them.

Panelists:

Philip Alston, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

Elizabeth Bartholet, Faculty Director, Child Advocacy Program, Harvard Law School

S. Matthew Liao, author of The Right to Be Loved and Director of the NYU Center for Bioethics

Moderator: David Anthony, Chief of the Policy Advocacy Unit, UNICEF

Will same-sex marriage lead to more radical marriage reform? Should it? Conservatives warn of a slippery slope from same-sex marriage toward polygamy, adult incest, and the dissolution of marriage as we know it; many progressives embrace these changes. Professor Stephen Macedo argues that both sides are wrong: the same principles of democratic justice that demand marriage equality for same sex couples also lend support to monogamous marriage.

Professor Macedo will explore the meaning of contemporary marriage and the reasons for both its fragility and its enduring significance in a public lecture at the NYU Center for Bioethics. Professor Macedo is Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and the author of, Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton University Press, 2015).

Rage Against the Machine: Anger as a political emotion

The talk asks how we should respond to large scale social injustices like the pattern of police shootings to which the Black Lives Matter movement has called attention. The focus is on our moral and emotional responses: How should we feel when we take in this sort sprawling and uncoordinated pattern of injustice? Whom should we blame? How should we judge? The natural response to injustice recognized as such is anger (moral outrage). But anger is a form of blame. For deep reasons, it is hard to stay angry at someone when one is genuinely uncertain about whether he is morally responsible for what he did. Confronted with large scale social injustice, this is our predicament: it is often quite hard to say, given our uncertainty about the underlying facts, who if anyone is to blame, both for concrete episodes of injustice and for the pattern as a whole. Our emotional response thus tends to oscillate between blame focused on individuals — which ebbs as we lose confidence in their blameworthiness — and an abstract frustration that is qualitatively quite different from anger. The aim of the paper is to ask whether there is a stable form of political anger that does not depend on judgments of blameworthiness in this way.

New York Institute of Philosophy Event

Giden Rosen (Princeton University)

Friday, February 10, 2017, 4:00 p.m.

A reception will follow.

Prof. Vardit Ravitsky, Ph.D.

Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) is a new technology that allows genetic testing of a fetus with a simple maternal blood test, by isolating cell-free fetal DNA in the mother’s plasma. Introduced in 2011, it is now available globally, its cost is declining, and the number of conditions it can test for is increasing. Technically, this technology can be used to sequence the entire genome of a fetus early in the first trimester of pregnancy. Should this use of prenatal testing be banned? Limited? Offered? Encouraged? Covered by insurance? This talk will explore some ethical implications of this possibility. It will focus on reproductive autonomy and the transition from ‘knowledge is power’ to ‘knowledge is vulnerability’ in the context of informed choice.

Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Bioethics Programs within the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal. She is also Director of the Ethics and Health Branch of the CRE, an interuniversity research center in ethics. Prof. Ravitsky’s research focuses on reproductive ethics and the ethical aspects of genetic and genomics. Her research interests in bioethics also include health policy and cultural perspectives. She is particularly interested in the various ways in which cultural frameworks shape public debate and public policy in the area of bioethics. Her research projects are funded by CIHR, FRQSC, SSHRC, and Genome Canada. She published over 100 articles, book chapters and commentaries on bioethical issues, and is lead-editor of “The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics”.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Ravitsky brings international perspectives to her research and teaching. She holds a BA in philosophy from the Sorbonne University in Paris, an MA in philosophy (with a specialization in bioethics) from the University of New Mexico in the US, and a PhD in philosophy (with a specialization in bioethics) from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Bioethics of the NIH and at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

Ravitsky is an elected Board member and Treasurer of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB). She is a member of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (the ‘Canadian NIH’) Standing Committee on Ethics. She is also member of the University of Montreal’s Public Health Research Institute (IRSPUM), the Quebec Reproduction Network (RQR), and of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS). Previously, she was faculty at the Department of Medical Ethics, School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor at CIHR’s Ethics Office and a GE3LS consultant to Genome Canada.

“It is widely agreed that benevolence is not the whole of the moral life, but it is not as widely appreciated that benevolence is an irreducible part of that life. This paper argues that Kantian efforts to characterize benevolence, or something like it, in terms of reverence for rational agency fall short. Such reverence, while credibly an important part of the moral life, is no more the whole of it than benevolence.”

A roundtable based on Sharing Common Ground (Bloomsbury, 2017)

ROBERT HARVEY
Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Stony Brook University; author of Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics; Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras; De l’exception à la règle; Sharing Common Ground

with

EDWARD S. CASEY (Philosophy, Stony Brook University)

JEANNE ETELAIN (French Literature, Thought, and Culture, NYU)