Everyone wants ethical leaders. Just like everyone wants ethical friends and ethical coworkers. Sometimes, ethics is simple. Taking something from an convenience store wouldn’t cross your mind. The risk certainly outweighs the rewards. However, do you always stop your car at an intersection? Even when you’re running late and no one else is there?
Ethical decisions come big and small. The House of Representatives’s decision to reject a bill that would either “bailout” or “rescue” the U.S. financial system–depending on your perspective. We’ll need good and ethical leadership to overcome the crisis we face.
I talked with Matt Peterson, producer of Public Ethics Radio in Australia, about the new program and about ethics. Anyone in the world can listen by visiting Public Ethics Radio. My questions are in italic. Mr. Peterson’s replies are in bold. I thank Mr. Peterson for his time and assistance.
Would you tell me about your background? Have you worked in radio previously?
First of all, let us just say thanks for the opportunity to talk about Public Ethics Radio. We’re very excited about this new project, and we’re thrilled to share the details with you and your readers.
To answer your questions, neither of us had done much work in radio before we started this project. Christian’s training is in philosophy (he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York) and has worked mainly in academic and nonacademic research organizations. His introduction to radio was a stint as a regular guest on an Irish national talk radio show, where he appeared as the “moral philosopher.” Matt really had no experience. Both of us listen to quite a bit of public radio, though, mostly through podcasting.
Matt’s background is in philosophy and international affairs. After finishing a master’s degree in London a few years back, he found a job as an editor at the Carnegie Council in New York. That’s where the two of us met—working on the journal Ethics & International Affairs, of which Christian was the editor.
Since then both of us moved to Australia to work at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, which we describe below. Matt works there as a Research Assistant; Christian is a Senior Research Fellow and also teaches in the philosophy program at the Australian National University.
What is the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics?
The Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, or CAPPE, is our employer. It’s a multi-university academic center. It’s based at the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, and Charles Sturt University, and funded by the Australian government and various other sources. It employs a fairly large number of philosophers who work on so-called applied ethics. This includes some pretty big names in philosophy, including Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge (who was our first guest), and Larry May (another guest of ours). The thread connecting everyone is the notion of “applied philosophy.” Not everyone likes this term, but broadly the idea is to do work in areas of ethics and political philosophy that are directly relevant to questions of individual conduct, public policy, and institutional design. Pogge and Singer, for instance, are both very interested in how the rules governing the global economy affect the world’s poor, and they write about these issues in a way that is at once philosophical and practical and political (again, more on this in our first episode). Seumas Miller, who founded the Centre, has done extensive work with the state of Victoria’s police force on their professional ethics, and other colleagues of ours work on ethical issues related to infectious diseases, gender equity, and so on. It’s a big group.
Would you tell me about Public Ethics Radio? Why did you start the project?
Public Ethics Radio is a project that the two of us concocted one evening over Thai soup in Canberra. We are both very interested in advancing ideas in philosophy in a way that is accessible to nonphilosophers. We think that people in this field have a lot of really interesting things to say about political problems, but you don’t typically see philosophers interviewed in the media. The rare exception is someone like Peter Singer, who writes in an unusually accessible style, is prolific, and holds quite controversial views in a broad range of topics. Few philosophers are so controversial or as able to engage so easily with non-academics. But many of them have very helpful and original things to tell us about issues of practical political concern, such as what kinds of reasons we could give for justifying a pre-emptive war, or for who should bear the costs of mitigating climate change. In other words, most decisions about how to address political problems cannot be resolved without recourse to ethical principles, but these principles are rarely made explicit or thought through in a rigorous fashion.
To give another example, consider the current crisis in American financial institutions. A lot of people intuitively think it’s unfair that your average taxpayer should have to pay for the bad decisions made by investment banks. That is, the policy decision about how to proceed rests upon an ethical assessment of the situation. Now, we can’t personally speak with any authority to this particular issue, but it’s clear to us that there is a critical ethical question about what fairness demands in financial bailouts. (Indeed, even this term “bailout” seems morally freighted.) And it would be nice to hear media interviews with ethicists who’ve spent time thinking about these types of fairness questions, rather than just with the usual assortment of political pundits.
So that’s the motivation: we want to discuss real-world political questions with ethicists, in cases where we believe ethicists have something useful to add to the discussion. The result is the show that we’re putting out. This is a roughly thirty minute podcast, which you can get (for free) from our website, www.publicethicsradio.org, or through iTunes and various other places. The actual show consists of an introduction to the issue by Matt, followed by a discussion between Christian and the day’s guest.
I know a few people in Australia. How can they listen to PER?
They can visit our website: www.publicethicsradio.org. We’re working on getting the show on the actual radio, but in the meantime, we’ve put up a website/blog with our archives, and tons of links to the material that we discuss on the show.
I don’t live in Australia. Will I be able to listen to PER? What should I expect to hear on the program?
Yes, everyone can listen! You should expect to hear about issues of general interest, e.g. not specific to the Australian, American, or any other particular national context. We are based in Australia (for now—Matt is moving to New York in November), but we’re very mindful of not having the show be either too Australian or too American. Our primary focus is on global politics, since that is where each of our own research interests lie. Sometimes that requires a focus on the politics of a particular country or region, but often it doesn’t.
You should expect to hear discussions with ethicists about pressing political problems. The two shows we have released at the time of this interview feature the Yale University–based philosopher Thomas Pogge discussing the intersection between public health, poverty, and intellectual property, and a sharp young Australian scholar named Jessica Wolfendale, who has a very interesting line on why the sorts of interrogation practices—so-called torture lite practices—that the U.S. is using these days are actually quite harmful to the people and institutions that put them into place.
We’re releasing new shows every few weeks for now, and we will be releasing shows more frequently soon. Our roster for the next few weeks includes Professor Leif Wenar of Kings College London, who has a great proposal for preventing the vicious rulers of countries like Sudan and Equatorial Guinea from selling off their people’s natural resources to fund oppression. We’ve just recorded a show on habeas corpus with the very thoughtful philosopher (and trained lawyer) Larry May, who discusses in detail what’s at stake in the battle over legal rights at Guantanamo. That one will hit the web shortly before the U.S. election.
PER is a new venture. What did launching the show entail?
A ton of work! We’ve spent most of the past year gearing up for the show. Like we said, neither of us had any real audio experience at the outset. So Matt has put a lot of time into learning how to use Pro Tools and how to produce audio in general. We also put a great deal of thought into who our first few guests should be. We’re both serious perfectionists, so it took a lot of nail-biting to actually put this material in the public eye.
Would people rather have ethical but ineffective leaders or flawed officials who solved problems?
You’ll have to ask the people. The two of us come from a philosophical school that’s quite interested in institutions and in incentives. So maybe the very abstract answer we’ll give is to say that we’d rather have governmental structures that encourage leaders to think about the public rather than personal interest.
I think most people want their government to help them in times of need but otherwise want to be left alone. Does having ethics require being connected with others?
Not at all. Although we’ve put the word “ethics” in the title of the show, most of what we talk about probably is better described by the term “justice.” The distinction here, made popular by the great philosopher John Rawls, is between ethical theory that focuses on what individuals may directly do to each other—ethics—and on what institutions we should have—justice. Justice questions, then, tend not to deal with individuals directly, but how they’re settled will still have great significance for individuals. An example would be health care institutions. What obligations does a society have to provide health care to its members? How should such care be financed and distributed? Both of us would probably agree that the United States at present isn’t providing adequate health care for its most vulnerable citizens, or allocating fairly the cost of health care. In this way we could call this aspect of the society unjust, without making any kind of claims about its members. (Except perhaps to say U.S. citizens may have an obligation to their compatriots to help enact a better health care system and stop blocking efforts to reform it.)
Not everyone with power is ethical, at least as we might define the term. Isn’t being ethical when faced with unethical opponents creating a disadvantage?
It depends a lot on the set of incentives you face. Leif Wenar, in his shortly forthcoming episode, discusses how Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, is able to sell off Sudan’s natural resources (oil) to China in order to fund his genocidal army. Clearly being unethical for him is a great advantage, and being ethical would likely lead to his overthrow. And if, hypothetically, someone overthrew him, that successor would face great pressure from the other beneficiaries of that oil money to follow Bashir’s path.
But he’s greatly aided by the structure of the global economy, which allows him to sell these resources as if he owned them personally. That is, there are no incentives for such leaders to be ethical, and many incentives for them to be unethical. A U.S. president would have a much harder time selling off the oil in Texas to fund his election campaign. For one, the free press in the U.S. would quite possibly expose and excoriate such theft. To make it more concrete, our current U.S. president has faced quite a few setbacks from the media. The NSA’s warrantless spying program, the CIA’s black sites, the torture program, and so many others have been exposed to public scrutiny almost exclusively through investigative journalism. So this institution of the free press has quite considerably constrained the ability of some American politicians to use unethical means to achieve their ends. But, as you remind us, it’s not clear whether these constraints are quite so effective in preventing these sorts of people from winning elections.
Does Australia have ethical leaders?
Neither of us are really experts in Australian politics—we’ve lived here for only a couple of years. But certainly Kevin Rudd’s new Labor government has taken some actions to distinguish itself from the past administration. One big one is the recent apology on behalf of the government to the so-called Stolen Generation. This is a group of aboriginal Australians who were forcibly separated from their families by the government during the first several decades of the 20th century. Acknowledging the government’s culpability was an important step—even if symbolic—in addressing this and many other brutal injustices perpetrated against aboriginal Australians. But at the same time, Rudd has insisted that no monetary reparations are forthcoming; the symbolic move on the part of the apology is important, but possibly not sufficient. And Rudd has made some promising indications of his policies on climate change—Australia of course having the highest per capita carbon dioxide–equivalent emissions in the world.
*What are your thoughts on the upcoming U.S. presidential election?
This is a tough question for us to answer. We see our role as providing commentary about the values that the candidates are competing over rather than commenting directly on the candidates themselves. Our show on habeas corpus, to be released at the end of this month, is an attempt at that. On this issue, the Bush administration and the McCain campaign have often pointed to the supposed viciousness of the prisoners at Guantanamo as a reason for denying them the right to appear in normal courts. (McCain: “There are some bad people down there [in Guantanamo]”.) But as Larry May explains in the episode, the right of habeas corpus—at a basic level, the right to appear in court and have the charges read aloud—is meant to apply regardless of the vices or virtues of any particular prisoner. The right to habeas corpus does not so much extend protections to prisoners, who may only briefly be let out of prison, as much as it restrains the power of rulers, who cannot simply execute or otherwise disappear individuals. So our way of engaging with the election is to attempt to cut through some of the rhetoric and exposing what values are really at stake. Maybe we’ll be big enough to cover a few more of those issues by the time the next election rolls around.
What else should I know about Public Ethics Radio?
We’ve got a lot of exciting plans in the works. The one that’s probably the most interesting to your readers is that we’re working on producing some longer, documentary-style shows. These will take a single issue, like the fairness of the international trading system, and examine it with multiple guests. We’ll produce several of these in the next year or so on top of our regular shows. Check out www.publicethicsradio.org for details.
