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Alida Liberman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy

Are Vaccine Mandates a Matter of Conscience?

Dr. Liberman's lecture addressed whether exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates (e.g., from an employer or university) should be accommodated as conscientious objections, understood as penalty-free exemptions to a law or policy based on moral or religious disagreement with the policy. Liberman developed a framework for assessing the legitimacy of conscientious objection claims by determining whether they violate the basic competencies needed to be a minimally decent member of a profession or community. In the case of vaccine mandates, these include epistemic competencies (such as avoiding relying on factual misunderstandings when making community-impacting decisions), relational competencies (such as avoiding free-riding and refraining from harming others in the exercise of your liberties), and normative competencies (which require having an accurate understanding of what you are responsible for and how your actions affect others). Liberman argued many vaccine refusals violate one or more of these competencies, and accordingly should not be permitted as a matter of conscientious objection.

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Meredith Richards, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Education Policy and Leadership

Great Equalizer: Education Policy, Geography and Equality of Opportunity

Theo Walker, Jr., Associate Professor of Ethics and Society

Don’t Call King a ‘Civil Rights’ Leader: Toward Abolishing Poverty and War by Correcting our Fatally Inadequate Remembering of MLK Jr.

Stephen Long, Maguire Chair of Ethics

Will the Truth Set You Free in a Post-Truth Political World?

Veritas liberabit vos – “the truth will set you free.” Southern Methodist University’s motto relates freedom to truth. If you want to be free, truth is one of its conditions. Is that assumption warranted? Not only recent political events that speak of “alternative facts” question it, but ancient and modern philosophers, rulers and poets were likewise suspicious. “What is truth?” said Pilate, and Francis Bacon reminds us, “he would not stay for an answer.” Is truth a source of political and ethical freedom, or is it freedom’s enemy?

This lecture will argue that speaking the truth is the most urgent political and ethical task in late modernity if we are to have a politics that is something other than a contest of wills. Achieving such a politics requires shifting the formation and education of moral agency away from preparation primarily for state and market life to virtuous communities and/or communities of care.

 
Tom Mayo, Professor of Law and Medical Ethicist

The Irrelevance of Death

"Medical scholars and practitioners agree that “death” is real: it happens. Increasingly, however, there is disagreement over when death occurs and whether the two prevailing standards for the determination of death (cardio-pulmonary and neurological criteria) provide meaningful guidance. At the same time, developments in the field of organ transplantation have led some medical ethicists to call for the abandonment of the “Dead Donor Rule” as a useless relic of a bygone era. This lecture will explore whether we are approaching a time when it may be legal and ethical to kill patients for their organs (and whether we have been at that point for decades without realizing it)." 

Robert Howell, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy

Google Morals

If I lose my way when going from 91³Ô¹ÏÍø to the Meyerson, I'm not terribly worried.  I simply pull out my phone and use Google Maps.  Wondrous technology aside, no one thinks that is a particularly strange way to come to know locations and distances.  Suppose, though, that I found myself in doubt about whether or not abortion was wrong, or whether eating meat was permissible.  Well, I can just pull out my phone and use Google Morals!  It will tell me the truth about the issues, and then I can go about my merry way voting and eating in accordance with my new beliefs.

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 Ryszard Stroynowski, Ph.D., Professor of Physics

The Evolution of the Universe - Higgs and Beyond

"We teach students about science as an unchanging set of basic rules that govern our physical world as we see it today.  We justify them by quoting selected historical developments of our understanding creating an impression that science changes in a logical, linear fashion.  Such a picture is not quite right.  In our lifetime, many fields of science have undergone major revolutions of thought and paradigm changes." 

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 Dennis Simon, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science 
 Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor 

The Politics of Memory and the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement

“We are in the midst of a 50th Anniversary Season in which we commemorate a number of landmark events in the Civil Rights Movement. This talk will examine those events, highlight the major legacies of the civil rights movement, and consider the role of race and the memory of the movement in contemporary American Politics.”

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 William Abraham, Ph.D. 
 Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies 

Haunted Memories and Complex Loyalties

"All of us have our own memories of the events of 9/11. My own are haunted by memories of terrorism in Ireland. Yet there are crucial general issues raised by the arrival of international terrorism that cry out for attention. What exactly is terrorism and why do we think terrorism is intrinsically evil? Is there a real connection to religion or is this a smokescreen for other causal agents? What changes in our research programs about our history, our religion and culture are mandated by terrorism? This lecture will identify such issues and provide initial suggestions on how to proceed (and not to proceed) in answering them."

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Cal Jillson, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science 

Lone Star Tarnished: A Critique of Texas Public Policy

As California goes in eclipse, Texas is widely  touted as the ascendant model for the nation of limited government, economic growth, and personal freedom. While there is some merit to this view, it is at best a partial picture. The Texas model works well for the haves, but it leaves many public services – including education, health care, food security, transportation, the environment, and more – at best only partially addressed. Today’s have-nots, or have-lesses, depend on the delivery of high quality public services, most prominently public education, for their future prospects. Today, those prospects seem bleak. In this lecture, entitled "Lone Star Tarnished: Texas Public Policy and Its Deficiencies," we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Texas model, look ahead to ask whether current problems are likely to shrink or grow, and we close by asking whether alternative pathways into the future are available to us.

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Mark McPhail: “Confessions of an Expert Witness: Rhetoric, Politics, and Ethics at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda"  (view the video)

Barbara Hill Moore: “True to My Own Voice: Ethical Challenges in Transmitting Talent”

Marshall Terry: "The Founding and Defining of a University" ()

Linda Eads: “The Law and Corporate Ethics”

Matthew Wilson: "Religion and Politics in America"

William May: "The Media: The Unordained Teaching Authority in the West"

Peter Winship: "Legislating Morals: Legal Prescriptions of Proper Business Behavior"

Steven Sverdlik: "Compassion and Sympathy as Moral Motivation"

Bonnie Wheeler: "Pilgrimage and the Desire for Meaning"