Institutions: Understanding and Evaluating Them
Friday 2 June, 3.00 – 4.30 pm:
Prof. Seumas Miller will speak on “Institutional Corruption and Corrosion”
[This session is hosted jointly with the Campion Seminar]
Seumas Miller is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. He also has research appointments at TU Delft (The Hague) and Charles Sturt University (Canberra).
His publications include:
- Social Action: A Teleological Account. Cambridge: CUP, 2001.
- The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions: A Philosophical Analysis. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. [online via Solo]
- Institutional Corruption: A Study in Applied Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP, 2017. [available online via SOLO]: Introduction pp. 1-16; Chap. 3, Defining Corruption pp. 64-88.
- Dual Use Science and Technology, Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction. Springer, 2018.
Friday 2 June, 5.00 - 6.30 pm:
Prof. Clemens Sedmak will speak on “What are Decent Institutions?”
Abstract: Decent Institutions protect and enable individual and collective integrity. Integrity emerges at the intersection of dignity and respect. Integrity can be a scarce good in institutional contexts which will be exemplified with jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. There are specific institutional traps that undermine or threaten integrity such as standardization or instrumentalization. In order to protect integrity central moral goods have to be secured. This list of central moral goods will be developed in conversation with Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are both ethical and epistemological questions at stake: which goods are crucial, whose perspectives and experiences should count? Responses to these questions will lead to a sense of dignity-affirming institutions which will be shown in both positive and negative examples.
Clemens Sedmak is Director and Professor of Social Ethics, Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
His publications include:
- The Capacity to Be Displaced: Resilience, Mission, and Inner Strength. Brill, 2017.
- Enacting Catholic Social Tradition: The Deep Practice of Human Dignity. Orbis, 2022
- Enacting Integral Human Development. [forthcoming] Orbis, 2023
- Anständige Institutionen: Ethik für Organisationen und Unternehmen. [forthcoming] 2024
Registration
For further information and to register, please contact patrick.riordan@campion.ox.ac.uk
