The United States has faced an uphill battle this summer in its attempts to impose international sanctions on Iran and North Korea. In this episode of Public Ethics Radio, we consider why it might not be such a bad thing that sanctions are difficult to impose. Our guest is Joy Gordon, whose new book on [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘Episodes’
May 28, 2010
Episode 13. Sarah Holcombe on Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights
Western pharmaceutical and agricultural businesses have long recognized that there is money to be made from the traditional knowledge of local, indigenous communities. Sociologists and anthropologists also seek to gain—intellectually and academically—from conducting research on and with these communities. What rules should govern the interaction with so-called traditional knowledge? How can intellectual property rights be [...]
April 28, 2010
Episode 12. Anne Phillips on Ownership and the Body
Is the human body a piece of property? We certainly object to the sale of whole human beings, but what about cases where a person merely wants to sell a part of her body? If I am free to donate my organs, why am I not free to to sell them as well? For Professor [...]
November 1, 2009
Episode 11. Christopher Heath Wellman on Immigration
There is no denying that international borders—coercively upheld and protected—are a huge factor in determining the distribution of wealth and opportunities throughout the world. From education and health care, to access to credit and the rule of law, a host of factors that influence quality of life depend simply on which side of a border [...]
September 25, 2009
Episode 10. Hilary Charlesworth on Bills of Rights
The widespread agreement on the importance of human rights in liberal democracies masks sharp differences between governments’ methods of protecting these rights. What does a country gain by enacting a bill of rights? Do countries that lack bills of rights, like Australia, protect human rights as well as those, like the United States and Canada, [...]
January 26, 2009
Episode 7. Jeff McMahan on Proportionality
Out of some 1,300 Palestinians killed in Gaza, Israel claims that it can name more than 700 of the dead who were Hamas fighters. Claiming precise knowledge of their targets, Israeli officials insist that their attacks were judiciously planned so as to minimize harm to civilians. No matter how cautious Israel is, though, any attack [...]
December 18, 2008
Episode 6. Bob Goodin and Lina Eriksson on Public Ethics Radio.
What does it mean to live well? The U.S. Census Bureau informs us that an individual American with an income of less than $10,590 lives below the poverty line and is eligible for federal assistance. Add children and the number rises slowly: a father and two young children, say, is poor when their income is [...]
October 27, 2008
Episode 4. Larry May on Habeas Corpus
Are habeas corpus petitions, as Barack Obama put it, “the foundation of Anglo-American law”? Or are they just nuisance lawsuits, “whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material,” that will just slow down the legal system and leave us “bollixed up,” as John McCain claims? On this episode of Public [...]
October 7, 2008
Episode 3. Leif Wenar on the Resource Curse
When we talk about theft in international trade, we usually mean piracy, smuggling, or copyright infringement. Professor Leif Wenar, of King’s College London, thinks that we might be missing the forest for the trees. Illegal transactions across borders are going on every day on an enourmous scale. Consumers cannot help buying stolen goods when they [...]
September 15, 2008
Episode 2. Jessica Wolfendale on Torture Lite
It’s been three years since George Bush announced that the United States does not engage in torture. Since then, a continuous stream of information has indicated that, although Jack Bauer–style brutality is officially prohibited, the U.S. officially sanctions and regularly employs interrogation tactics that push legal and moral boundaries. In today’s episode, Jessica Wolfendale sits [...]
