Ethics Archives - Public Seminar

Psyche

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

On self-identity and the philosophy of addiction

February 10, 2026 • by Hanna Pickard

Reader, I do not know who you are. In particular, I do not know whether you use drugs, whether you are addicted to drugs, or whether, in addition to being addicted to drugs, you identify as an addict. If you do identify as an addict, I hope to speak to ...

What Would You Do Alone in a Cage With Nothing but Cocaine?

Politics

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

If constitutional constraints are real limits on government power, their violation must sometimes justify the same defensive responses that other rights violations justify

January 22, 2026 • by Michael Gregory

If you saw an armed stranger in body armor forcing his way into your neighbor's home at dawn, dragging a screaming mother away from her children while pointing a rifle at the family, would you have the right to stop him? By any means necessary? Now the forbidden version: What if ...

The Moral Right to Defend Yourself Against ICE

Kinships

Traumatized Heroes

Living with wrongdoing

February 21, 2024 • by Helga Varden

Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....

Corporations

An Ethics of Refusal

Beyond “The Great Resignation”

November 14, 2022 • by Benjamin P. Davis

In the United States, we live in a country where someone who works for a law firm that services Big Oil is by and large considered intelligent and successful, maybe even ethical due to their pro bono representation, no matter that such a firm, for instance, did not represent foreclosure ...

Uncategorized

How “White Privilege” Obscures Black Vulnerability

There is a crucial distinction between the laborer and the capitalist, but the psychological security that a white person gains from the objectification of the Black Other is of a different sort.

March 11, 2021 • by Mukasa Mubirumusoke

_____ The idea of white privilege has become indispensable in both academic and public conversations about race. It is the ultimate trump card to play when one wants to concisely and incisively describe the often unseen roadblocks that white people erect, which can thwart the thriving of non-white people. Undoubtedly you’ve ...

How “White Privilege” Obscures Black Vulnerability

Activism

A Public Service

Whistleblowing, Disclosure and Anonymity

December 12, 2019 • by Tim Schwartz

In 1965, 28-year-old Peter Buxtun was hired by the U.S. Public Health Service in San Francisco as a venereal disease investigator. Shortly after starting his job, Buxtun began hearing about a little-known, ongoing study on African-American males with syphilis. To Buxtun’s ears, this didn’t sound right -- by the late ...

Feature

The Kinds of Selves We Are

Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness reveals the injustice of not being heard

November 8, 2018 • by Jill Stauffer

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony ...

Feature

In Search of an Ethics for the Age of Animation

An Excerpt from Media Historian and Theorist Deborah Levitt’s Latest Book

October 25, 2018 • by Deborah Levitt

In her recently published book The Animatic Apparatus. Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image media historian and theorist Deborah Levitt claims that animation is the dominant medium of our time and proposes the concept of the animatic apparatus as an organizing mechanics for contemporary culture. In the following excerpt from ...

In Search of an Ethics for the Age of Animation

Feature

How To Do Things Without Words

Silence as the power of accountability

June 28, 2018 • by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

A jarring phenomenon of the Trump presidency is that words are cheaper than they’ve ever been in my half-century-long life. Yet behind this cheapness, silences appear, difficult and important to feel. There is the silence of an estimated 4,645 deaths in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria. There’s the ...

Feature

The Death of the Author

Historians and Citation

May 17, 2018 • by Brian Connolly

Why should journalists, or anyone else, cite historians explicitly? “Many historians,” Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz writes in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “have become familiar with the feeling of anonymity as their work gains attention from the news media.” The historians at the center of the article – Danielle McGuire, Heather Ann Thompson, and James ...

Feature

Making Knowledge Available

The media of generous scholarship

March 22, 2018 • by Shannon Mattern

A few weeks ago, shortly after reading that Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, had made over €1 billion in profit in 2017, I received notice of a new journal issue on decolonization and media.* “Decolonization” denotes the dismantling of imperialism, the overturning of systems of domination, and the founding ...

Feature

What Makes for Ethical Sex?

The status of the ‘other’ in hetero-sex

January 31, 2018 • by Ali Shames-Dawson

On February 8, 2018, The New School will host an event entitled "Sexual Harassment and Assault: Eros, Power, Violation, and Consent." Psychologist Jeremy Safran will moderate a panel featuring Lew Aron and Adrienne Harris from NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Katie Gentile from John Jay College of Criminal ...