The competition, which is organized by Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, was the first one held in person at Keating Hall on the Rose Hill campus. More than 50 volunteer judges and moderators also attended, most of whom were Fordham graduate and undergraduate students or alumni.

The event is one of a network of regional competitions across the country that are part of the National High School Ethics Bowl. Regis High School, which won the city competition at Fordham, also won the regional competition on Feb. 7 and will be heading to the National High School Ethics Bowl Championship in April in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Infectious Conversations

Monique Cauley, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior from Utah, was one of the volunteer judges. Cauley was part of the Fordham team that advanced to the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championships in December 2022, and found the experience to be so rewarding she happily gave up a Saturday to be a judge for her younger counterparts.

“This kind of ethics is infectious, and it was an experience I was very grateful to have as a college student,” said Cauley, an American studies major.

“It really pushes you to not only hone speaking skills but also reflect on some of the inner dynamics that might be happening in your brain, confront those biases, understand other people’s perspectives, and contribute to a team.”

Using Case Studies

One of her roles as a judge was to listen to teams from Xavier High School and Avenues The World School debate the merits of space exploration led by private-sector companies like Space X. She found real-world case studies to be especially convincing when she judged arguments.

“It shows a student can really connect any ethical issue to their life, and it gives a richer understanding of the topics,” she said.

Tackling Ethical Issues Old and New

Julian Bober, a senior at Regis High School, was on the team that bested Gregorio Luperón High School for Math & Science in the final round. His team’s topic was “Secession and the National Divorce.” It was his third time competing in an ethics bowl and his first in person at Rose Hill.

“It’s collaborative, and you’re also tackling a bunch of really important issues, whether it’s stuff that people have considered for centuries, like the morals of lying, or something brand new; we had a lot of fun discussing a case involving copyright and AI,” he said.

‘Not Just About Digging In Your Heels’

Steven Swartzer, Ph.D., associate director for academic programs and strategic initiatives at the Center for Ethics Education, said only students who’d previously competed in a college ethics bowl were eligible to be a judge.

“Given their experience in the ethics bowl, they understand the importance of making sure you’re seeing things from a lot of different perspectives,” he said.

“It’s not just about digging in your heels and pushing your own argument. It’s about understanding why someone might come to a different conclusion.”

This year’s team features Fordham College at Rose Hill juniors Erika Carmody and Frank Tarul, Fordham College at Rose Hill seniors Kerry Soropoulos and Shree Talluri, and Fordham College at Lincoln Center juniors Monique Cauley and Yeenon Yu.

Because they won all four rounds of the competition on Dec. 3, they have been invited to join the top 36 teams in the country at the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl National Championships, which will take place in March in Portland, Oregon. 

They’re the first Fordham team to do so, and Steven Swartzer, Ph.D., associate director for academic programs and strategic initiatives at Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, credited the work the students had done in Ethics in Action, a class he teaches that was created last year. The students were also singularly focused on parsing the possible scenarios that would be presented to them by a panel of three judges.

“Not only did we have our three-hour discussions in class, but I know that especially in the weeks leading up to the competition, they were having team meetings outside of those as well,” he said. 

“They were just a dedicated group of students who were really engaged and thoughtful, and everything just clicked at the right time.”

Although the students are given 15 cases to study when the semester begins, only eight are presented to them to discuss at the competition. This year’s cases included ones examining whether the government or oil companies should be held responsible for monitoring unused wells, what age young adults should be to make medical decisions without their parents’ consent, and whether the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is permissible when it might cause harm to animals.

Swartzer said that although the format of the ethics bowl is similar to debate, in that one team makes its case and the other team comments on that team’s analysis, the goal is actually to work together to address an issue, not just poke holes in the other team’s opinion. To do that, they need to show an empathetic understanding of other perspectives. 

“They really are encouraged in their presentations and their analysis to explain why somebody might come to a different conclusion, and then engage with that alternative understanding, to try to get those people on board, or to show why those alternatives don’t ultimately work,” he said.

“Ultimately, they’re not just supposed to do a caricature of those opposing views, or create a straw man, but get at why someone who is reasonable and thoughtful might come to a different opinion about this, and then share how we can address those different opinions.”

But if health authorities want to convince parents to vaccinate children in this age group against COVID, they’re going to have to acknowledge that this isn’t 2020 anymore, said Celia Fisher, Ph.D.

“One of the things we found was that the resistant and unsure parents are saying, ‘Look, the vaccine doesn’t work, because people who’ve been vaccinated are getting COVID. So why should I give it to my child?” said Fisher, the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education.

Just as the center did last fall, when the FDA authorized the use of vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds, Fisher, who collaborated with Fordham graduate students Elise Bragard, Rimah Jaber, and Alliyah Gray, conducted a national survey to try to illuminate the reasons for parental vaccine resistance and hesitancy.

For the study COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Parents of Children Under Five Years in the United States, Fisher, and her team collected data in April and May 2022, a month prior to the vaccine approval. They partnered with the survey aggregator Qualtics XM, and after receiving 1,337 responses to a call to participate, they settled on 411 English-speaking self-identified Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian, Black, and white female guardians who were 21 or older and had children 1 to 4 years old. The results were published this month in the journal Vaccines.

They found that 31.3% of parents intended to vaccinate their child, 22.6% were unsure, and 46.2% intended not to vaccinate.

Their reasons were revealed in an open-ended section of questioning, where participants could go into greater depth about their concerns. One was the fact that the COVID BA.5 Omicron subvariant, which has become the dominant strain of the virus, is much more capable of infecting healthy people who have been vaccinated and boosted. That meant that some of the respondents had already had experience with infections, and those experiences did not lead them to automatically accept the need for vaccinations.

One mother, whose answer was classified in the study as “unsure,” wrote the following:
“The children had it, including my three-year-old, and the symptoms for him were very minor
to none. We actually had it twice and both times his symptoms were pretty minor. I also feel
like they should have some immunity against the virus now and getting shots every few months, without enough years gone by to see the side effects of the shot, just isn’t an option for us.”

Another, who was classified as “accepting,” still had safety concerns:
“I’m afraid because the words “emergency approval” kind of scares me especially when it comes to my children. I have a 3-year-old and an 8-month-old. Emergency makes it seem like it wasn’t tested as long as it needs to show proper results. However, most likely I will vaccinate my children”

Another concern that many parents also cited is the speed at which the vaccine was developed and approved. Relatedly, Fisher said it’s fair for parents to ask how many children have severe reactions to the vaccines, and in fact, the answer would allay their concerns.

“I read the data, and the data says that in fact, the vaccine has fewer side effects for young children than it does for adults. But you know, how many parents are going to read the research? The problem is that what’s effective about the vaccine is that those of us who are vaccinated are not hospitalized, and we don’t die when we get COVID. But that doesn’t necessarily get through to all parents,” Fisher said.

“Another thing is that a lot more parents have been vaccinated themselves, and have had these horrible, severe flu-like reactions [after vaccination]. They don’t want their young child to experience that.”

Compounding the problem is the fact that parents are not hearing these kinds of concerns addressed by authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control, Fisher said.

“You don’t hear on the ads that are going around that if you take the vaccine, you may get the new variant of COVID, but you won’t be hospitalized, and you won’t die,” she said.

“Nobody is addressing parents’ real concerns. They’re just saying, ‘Take the vaccine.’ And then parents are seeing that people who take the vaccine are getting COVID anyway.”

The need to recalibrate messaging on vaccines is taking on more importance, as recent statistics indicate that a year after vaccines became available to children between 5 and 11, fewer than 40 percent of that population has received two shots of the COVID vaccine, she said.

Research has found that children in that age range are more likely to suffer long-term side effects from COVID than from vaccines, and even though children who are infected generally suffer less severe symptoms than adults, they’re not immune. In rare instances, their symptoms can be very severe, and that shouldn’t be discounted by a parent who’s trying to decide whether to vaccinate or not.

But that can only be done if parents’ concerns are addressed, Fisher said.

“There is this very small percentage of parents that are resistant for resistance’s sake, whereas there are others who are just either misinformed or are highly concerned,” she said.

“What I’m hoping is that, because we did these narratives that allowed parents to speak in their own voice, it will alert pediatricians who are talking to parents to ask them what their concerns are, rather than just tell them, ‘The vaccine’s safe, your child should take it.’ That’s not going to work.”

“One of the greatest aspects of this experience for students is that they are required to take both sides of an issue. It teaches them how to not only defend a particular position that they have, but also to modify it and take the perspective of those who may have a very different understanding of the issue,” said Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, psychology professor, and director of several Fordham organizations. “It also moves us toward a more inclusive form of citizenship, which we need right now in this time of polarization.” 

Navigating ‘Thorny Ethical Issues’

For more than two decades, college students across the U.S. have competed in the national bowl and debated moral dilemmas. 

“It’s really important to get people together to talk through these sorts of conflicts,” said Steven Swartzer, Ph.D., coach and advisor for Fordham’s team and associate director for academic programs and strategic initiatives at Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education. “If you have people come together who are willing to try to figure out how to listen empathetically and see what’s driving the ideas of the other person, I think we can make a lot of progress when it comes to thorny ethical issues.” 

This semester, Swartzer formed a team of six students from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and the Gabelli School of Business. They met weekly on Zoom and studied 15 case studies that were provided in advance of the competition. Among the debate topics were the moral justification behind acts of political violence, including this past summer’s protests over the murder of George Floyd, and whether or not Harry Potter fans who have rejected J.K. Rowling’s controversial tweets about the transgender community should also reject her work. 

The team prepared with mock presentations, commentaries, and Q&A sessions, with Swartzer acting as judge. On game day, they wore Fordham maroon to the competition. 

In addition to the normal challenges of working remotely as a team, the group had to overcome some unique obstacles.

Victoria Munoz, a senior accounting major at the Gabelli School of Business and a student in the Accelerated BA/MA in Ethics and Society program, competed two hours ahead of her teammates. She logged in from El Paso, Texas, where the competition start time was 6 a.m., while her three teammates on the East Coast settled in at their computers at 8 a.m. Every time she entered or left a Zoom breakout room, there was also a slight time delay due to technical glitches on Munoz’s end. 

“We only had three minutes to prepare [our statement]. So instead of three minutes, I had two minutes and 30 seconds,” Munoz said. “And for the Q&A section, you only got a 30-second conference period, but our team wouldn’t even take it because by the time I’d get in, we’d have to come out. That was a disadvantage for sure.” 

Debating Dementia and Housing Evictions Amid COVID-19

In their first round against Yale, Munoz and her teammates debated the ethics behind concealing medication in food for dementia patients who were no longer lucid. They argued it was unethical, and won their case. 

“Upholding a patient’s dignity is sometimes put on the back-burner with our healthcare system, because everyone’s so overworked and rushing. So we said that it was understandable that a healthcare worker would want to conceal the medication, but ultimately, that wasn’t the most ethical thing to do,” Munoz said. 

“If we want to be completely ethical, we would have to devote time into restructuring our healthcare system to allow for each patient to have the time needed.” 

Another case considered the morality of housing evictions in a pandemic. Jada Heredia, a junior political science and philosophy major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, argued that evictions shouldn’t occur during a pandemic because they would increase the danger of viral transmission to the local community. There were other factors to consider as well: What about landlords losing income? Is the relationship between landlords and tenants fundamentally exploitative? Should people have to pay for shelter? How can society reorganize the housing system to make it non-exploitative, yet meet everyone’s basic human needs? 

“There is no such thing as a solitary issue,” said Heredia, who plans to work in the legal profession. “Every case where there’s an ethical dilemma always relates to a greater system; set of values; institution; or network of causes, effects, and impacts on people that requires consideration as well.”

The team placed 13th out of 20 teams, winning against one of two teams from Yale University, losing to the United States Military Academy at West Point and Boston College, and tying with University of Maryland, College Park. 

“This competition made me realize that every single industry will [relate to]ethics,” said Munoz, who plans on becoming a certified accountant and will advise companies on how their accounting processes can be more ethical as an intern at Deloitte next summer. 

“It’s always been true, and it’s growing to be even more true now.”

Celia Fisher, Ph.D., knew she was onto something in 1997 when she asked Joseph M. McShane S.J., president of Fordham who was then dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, to fund a series of faculty seminars around the topic of ethics. In 1999, the success of those seminars led to the creation of the Center for Ethics Education.

Twenty years later, Fisher, the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, says she’s still amazed at what the center has accomplished. The center, which received initial funding from the National Institute of Health and Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, currently oversees educational programs on the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate level. It has produced over 200 publications and has received a total of $11 million to conduct research supporting the rights and welfare of vulnerable populations. For the past eight years, it has also administered the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute.

Interdisciplinary From the Start

Fisher said one of the center’s greatest points of pride has been its interdisciplinary focus.

“The center’s success was built on the support, encouragement, and involvement of faculty of all the different schools and programs at Fordham,” she said.

“To be able to put all that together with the support of an interdisciplinary faculty, advisers, and teachers has been an incredibly wonderful experience.”

From the very beginning, Fisher, whose background is in psychology, has had two associate directors hailing from the theology and philosophy departments. Curran Center for Catholic Studies Director Christina Firer Hinze, Ph.D., represented theology when the Center for Ethics Education started and was followed by Barbara Andolsen. Currently, the position is held by theology professor Thomas Massaro, S.J.

Michael Baur, Ph.D., an associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of law, joined in 1999 as associate director and never left. It helps, he said, that he is “constitutionally built” to be interdisciplinary.

“For those who are predisposed to think beyond boundaries, the center provides a huge playground of full opportunities to think creatively about different disciplines,” he said.

“The center has made it really easy for me to start conversations with people I never would have spoken with about economics, psychology, biology, and neurosciences.”

In 1999, Baur recalled, the goal of the center was to create a space for crossing boundaries to address ethics and being open to whatever came along as a result. The interdisciplinary minor in bioethics, which was first offered to undergraduates in 2013, is an example of how the center has evolved to meet the needs of students.

“We already had the goodwill and the communications among different faculty. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Debating Issues of the Times

When it comes to public programming, the center, which kicked off its 20th-anniversary celebration with a March 7 lecture titled “Ethics and the Digital Life,” has hosted events dedicated to nearly every thorny issue debated in the United States today.

Its first public event was an April 2000 workshop titled “The Ethics of Mentoring: Faculty and Student Obligations.” In a lecture four years later, Christian ethics professor Margaret Farley, Ph.D. weighed in on the use of human embryonic stem cells in research. The drug industry was the focus of a 2005 forum, “Bio-Pharmaceuticals and Public Trust,” and in 2012, the center co-sponsored “Money, Media and the Battle for Democracy’s Soul,” where former Senator Russ Feingold issued an ominous warning about the role of money in politics.

In 2013, a conference tackled the uncomfortable reality that the United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population, but is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population. Four years later, the center’s decision to co-sponsor “In Good Conscience: Human Rights in an Age of Terrorism, Violence and Limited Resources,” proved prescient, with the actual lecture coming two weeks after terrorist attacks in Brussels.

For Fisher, one of the most emotional events was “Moral Outrage and Moral Repair: Reflections on 9/11 and Its Afterlife,” a daylong conference co-organized with Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture in April 2011.

“It was so moving. We had clerics from all different religions, we had philosophers talking about forgiveness, all sides of it. We had survivors and families of survivors. It was such an emotional experience,” she said.

A Flexible Master’s Program

The center’s efforts are not confined to lectures and panels. In 2009, at the suggestion of former Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Nancy Busch Rossnagel, Ph.D., the center began offering a Master of Arts in ethics and society under the direction of Adam Fried, Ph.D, GSAS’ 13, 17. It is now overseen by Rimah Jaber, GSAS’ 16.

Yohan Garcia, GSAS ’18, one of the program’s 57 alumni, recently accepted a position as national formation coordinator for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Pastoral Migratoria (Migration Ministry) program.

A native of Mexico who moved to the Belmont neighborhood in 2003, Garcia earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Hunter College in 2015. In 2013, he attended a spiritual retreat and realized he wanted to incorporate his faith into his studies. As a Fordham master’s student, he took classes such as Natural Law (at the Law School); Race, Gender and the Media; and Introduction to Thomas Aquinas. Today, he’s able to apply what he learned in each of those courses to his work around immigration.

Although he’s only just started his job in Chicago, he’s already considering applying to Ph.D. programs.

“When it comes to issues like immigration, there’s no easy solution,” he said.

“We all have a different idea of the common good, but at the end of the day, as a society, we have to work toward a common goal that will benefit all of us. Listening is a great skill and a gift to have when it comes to this issue.”

HIV Research Training

Faith Fletcher, Ph.D., an assistant professor of health behavior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, completed training with the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute (RETI) in 2016. The institute, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has to date provided over 42 early career professionals in the social, behavioral, medical, and public health fields with an opportunity to gain research ethics training.

A native of Thibodaux, Louisiana, who was one of the first students to pursue a bioethics minor as an undergraduate at Tuskegee University, she has focused on the ethics of engagement with African American women living with HIV.

“Before coming to the research ethics training institute, I had training in both bioethics and public health, but I really struggled with finding the academic spaces, and even the language to combine these disciplinary areas,” Fletcher said.

“The institute is definitely the highlight of my academic career.”

Because she works with marginalized populations, Fletcher said her biggest challenge is avoiding situations that jeopardize the safety of them or researchers. It’s a real issue, as researchers engaged in qualitative research sometimes conduct interviews in vehicles, bars, and other unorthodox places to make sure the people they are interviewing are not further stigmatized.

“What I’ve learned from the training is we have to rely on research participants as research ethics experts, because they have these daily experiences with stigma, and are skilled at navigating and circumventing stigma. These are the individuals we have to go to as we’re designing our research ethics protocols,” she said.

It’s humbling work, and Fletcher said the women she’s interviewed have taught her much about resiliency.

“I’ve learned so much about the way that they’re able to navigate through society despite high levels of stigma and stress, and the way they’ve coped with it, risen above it, and not allowed it to define them,” she said.

“I’m thankful for them allowing me into their spaces, because not only does it enhance my research, but I’ve grown personally from their stories.”

Protecting the rights and welfare of vulnerable populations has been a common theme running through the centers’ NIH-sponsored research. For instance, Fisher was the principal investigator on a 4-year series of studies designed to reduce the burden of HIV among young sexual and gender minority youth.  The results of one of these studies were published in the journal AIDS and Behavior.

In 2014, based on a project supported by the Fordham’s HIV, Research Ethics Institute, Cynthia Pearson, Ph.D., was awarded a grant, along with Fisher, to adapt a culturally specific ethics training course for American Indian and Alaska Natives populations. Fisher also led a study in 2006 to assess and develop procedures to enhance the capacity of adults with mild and moderate mental retardation to provide informed consent for therapeutic research; the results were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

A Shared Dedication to Social Justice

Going forward, Fisher said she wants to expand the involvement of the faculty and alumni in center programming, recruit more international students, and establish a research center on health disparities among marginalized populations.

Since its beginnings, the Center has been grounded in Fordham University’s commitment to intellectual excellence, human dignity, and the common good. The success of the center, she said, is due in no small part to the breadth and depth of Fordham’s faculty dedication to these ideals.

“Faculty, students, and administrators share this dedication to social justice and helping others that just implicitly supports what we’re doing. So, when we reach out to faculty, they are already providing students with the tools for critical and compassionate engagement in creating a just world,” she said.

“They may not do work in ethics per se, but the way they think, because they’re at Fordham, they are committed to caring for the least among us.”

“Identifying and doing what is ethical in a digital society will require deep, honest, selfless thinking,” Allen said in an appearance at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on March 7.

“We are drawn to technology like moths to a flame. We risk hurting ourselves. We also empower ourselves to hurt others.”

Allen, the Henry R. Silverman professor of law, professor of philosophy, and vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered her lecture, “Ethics and Digital Life,” as part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Gannon lecture series.

The lecture, which focused on the ethical implications of data mining and social media on people, was also part of a series of events celebrating the 20th anniversary of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, which co-sponsored the evening.

A Crisis of Confidence in Big Tech

In her talk, Allen noted that the public mistrust in organizations that harvest and store our data has reached crisis levels. American lawmakers have been slow to recognize this, but the European Union has not, Allen said, as evidenced by the fact that it invited her to speak in October at its annual conference on data privacy, the same day as Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“I really applaud the E.U. for its effort to bring ethics to the fore,” she said. “As a global community, we cannot afford to go mindlessly wherever technology innovators and adaptors may choose to drag us.”

Although it was written over 2,000 years ago, Plato’s story Ring of Gyges is worth considering as we contemplate these issues, Allen said. In the story, a shepherd named Gyges discovers a ring that grants him invisibility. He uses it to seduce a king’s wife, have the king killed, and finally take the place of the king himself.

“I think about the myth of Gyges a lot, because I actually believe that when we put technology in the hands of human beings, we presume that they will use that technology for good,” she said.

“We should presume there will be an awful lot of not-good uses, as well as a lot of accidental problems like data breaches or data leaks that no one intended.”

Our Own Ethical Responsibilities

Although it is impossible for us to control every aspect of our digital lives, she suggested that we all have five ethical responsibilities: In addition to supporting ethical, effective laws regarding data privacy, she said, we should also support corporate digital ethics and accountability, stand behind technology and ethics education at all levels, and work to advance nonprofit and civil society organizations that champion data security and ethics.

And perhaps most importantly, we should mind our own behaviors to make sure we’re respecting our own privacy as well as that of others.

“To me, privacy is a very important good that has a relationship to respect and self-respect,” she said.

“Individuals of moral character will moderate their sharing, and will be mindful about the extent to which their virtues like reserve and prudence might be at stake when they engage in digital life, whether it’s using social media, using credit cards, using or not using passwords, encryption, security software, and so forth.”

There are some reasons for hope, she said. In a landmark 2017 court case, for instance, the Supreme Court in India ruled for the first time that citizens there had a fundamental right to privacy. The decision, which came in response to a lawsuit related to the country’s biometric national ID—known as the Aadhar card—cited Allen and several American colleagues in its written opinion. This led in turn to a unanimous decision of the country’s top court last year to overturn a colonial-era ban on consensual gay sex.

Allen also praised the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was passed last year, for codifying a “right to be forgotten” that people can use to petition search engines to expunge embarrassing information about themselves from search results. In the United States, privacy laws exist to protect health data (HIPA) and education data (FERPA), so it stands to reason that other forms of personal information should be protected, she said.

“It’s not that America doesn’t have a lot of privacy laws. The problem is a lot of our privacy laws are out of date and narrow,” she said, noting that the last major overhaul to U.S. telecommunications law was in 1996.

Think of the Future

Ultimately, she said, it’s up to us to embrace what she called a “quotidian practice” of a commitment to privacy values, which are important because they’re linked to ideals of freedom and dignity and they’re important for forming independent, self-respecting individuals.

“If we just completely give up on the idea of privacy now, we might wake up and discover in 20 years from now that we wish we hadn’t,” she said.

“I’m not saying to anybody, you shouldn’t do 23andMe and you shouldn’t have an Alexa. What I’m saying, is, if you have 23andMe and Alexa and you live your life on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and you have one of those 24-hour web cameras in your house where you’re on YouTube all day long—if you’re living in the panopticon, then you’ll have a problem.”

Rather, the country’s swollen prison populations stem from a whole host of social causes—class, poverty, race, family breakdown, mental illness—combined with “an overly punitive criminal justice apparatus,” said Anthony Bradley, Ph.D., GSAS ’13, in a recent appearance at the Rose Hill campus.

In his book, Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration: Hope from Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2018), he argues that the prison problem in America won’t be solved by policy changes alone. It also requires a comprehensive, long-term approach to safeguarding the well-being of people who are at a higher risk of getting in trouble with the law—and we can all play a part, he said.

“This is largely an issue about who we decide has human dignity and who does not,” said Bradley, professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing at the King’s College in Manhattan.

Causes of Mass Incarceration

The book had its beginnings in a class he took while earning a master’s degree in ethics and society at Fordham. He was “blown away,” he said, after learning about the links between young children developing post-traumatic stress disorder and ending up in the juvenile justice system later on.

“I realized that we’re not just locking up bad kids, we’re locking up hurt kids. It completely changed the course of my career,” he said during his Nov. 7 visit to Fordham, where he addressed students–including many in the ethics and society master’s program–during a talk sponsored by the Center for Ethics Education.

He got another push in this new research direction when he heard the argument that the war on drugs was driving mass incarceration in the U.S. “My research methods antennae popped up,” he said.

Digging into the data, he found that about 90 percent of all inmates are in state prisons, and of those, only 17 percent are drug offenders. In part because of a focus on federal prison data, “we get the story wrong,” he said. “If we don’t get the story right, we’ll get the solutions and interventions wrong.”

Part of that story, he said, is society’s views toward the poor. “Here’s a tough social fact in this country: We resent poor people in America regardless of their race,” he said. “We’ve used the criminal justice system to remove them, the poor, from civil society.”

“Mass incarceration is largely an anthropological problem rather than simply a political problem,” he said.

The label of criminal “rabble” has fallen on various groups throughout U.S. history—on Western European immigrants at first, then on black men in the latter 20th century, he said.

Today, imprisonment rates for African-American men in urban areas is declining. But “there’s a dramatic spike in the incarceration of women, and scholars are not quite sure exactly why that is,” he said.

And rural imprisonment rates are also on the rise. “Some scholars argue that the new ‘rabble’ are lower-class white people,” Bradley said.

Everyone breaks laws, but poor people are unfairly targeted by the justice system because they can’t afford a quality defense, and instead have to rely on public defenders who have excessive caseloads and inadequate resources, he said. “People who enter the criminal justice system are overwhelmingly poor,” and their poverty is compounded when their prison records create a barrier to employment, he said.

Caring for the Whole Person

The federal government enacted the First Step Act in December to reform criminal justice and reduce prison crowding, following on many state governments’ legislative efforts over the past decade. In his talk, however, Bradley highlighted changes that are needed beyond the policy realm.

Emphasizing offenders’ traumas and mental health concerns, he called for “upstream” efforts to help children before they wind up in trouble with police and the courts.

“The problem is we have hurting children, and as long as we have hurting children we’re going to have violent children,” he said. “We need to invite more players to the table. Yes, we need lawyers; yes, we need judges. … We also need coaches and teachers and business owners and cousins and aunts and uncles and community nonprofit leaders to offer the sorts of interventions that address the whole person.”

“This is about caring about people—real people with stories and histories and past and futures, and relationships, and families and friends,” he said, calling for solutions that touch on the emotional, social, psychological, and moral realms.

“Policy changes are not going to be enough,” he said. “We have to think about interventions that impact the totality of what it means to be truly human. It requires a holistic approach that invites multiple disciplines to the table. Whatever your major is, whatever discipline you’re studying … you too can have a role to play in reducing these numbers of men and women who are incarcerated.”

He said he learned the importance of combining disciplines at Fordham, in the master’s program in ethics and society, which mixes ethics, philosophy, and theology courses with courses in social and natural sciences, law, social service, and other fields.

“I’d like to invite you all to think about the ways in which your particular area, whatever that is … might fit into the narrative of addressing the needs of the whole person to bring a solution to a problem that I believe your generation can actually solve,” he said to the students.

He said the students may want to consider interning with Community Connections for Youth, a Bronx agency that provides alternatives to incarceration for at-risk young people. “What do they need? They need people to care for them,” he said. “They need people to be there. They need people to help them navigate the legal system.”

He emphasized the benefits of simply getting involved in a struggling person’s life, giving the example of his mother, who spent 30 years working in public schools in inner-city Atlanta. She’s now in her 70s, but her former elementary school students—who are in their early 50s—still come by her house.

“She’s still involved in helping one of them who has severe learning disabilities pay his bills, take care of his apartment, and things like that,” Bradley said. “That’s because she personally got involved in his story. Not on a six-month, one-year basis, but sort of a lifetime thing.

“His life has been changed because one teacher got involved in it,” he said. “I wonder what would happen if we all got involved with one person.”

That was the message of “Conscience Matters: Tensions between Religious Rights and Civil Rights,” a panel discussion hosted on April 19 by Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education.

The panel, which was held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured Linda Greenhouse, the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law and Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School, and Nancy Berlinger, Ph.D., a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.

Greenhouse and Berlinger tackled the thorny issue of conscience-based refusals from the perspective of the law and the medical establishment, respectfully. Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for three decades, spoke at length about one case that the high court ruled on in 2014, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and another, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which was argued in December and is still pending.

A Threat to Civic Society

Greenhouse was unsparing in her criticism of the courts’ willingness to grant exceptions based on “deeply held religious beliefs,” saying they undermine civic society and are granted with little consideration for the adverse effects they may have on others.

Sometimes the court grants exceptions even when it’s not clear that a person’s rationale is based on sound theology, she said. In the 2015 case Holt v. Hobbs, for instance, the court ruled unanimously that a prison’s rules against beards violated the rights of a prisoner who said it comported with his Muslim faith. Greenhouse noted that nowhere in the Quran does it explicitly stipulate men maintain facial hair.

The Hobby Lobby case, in which the court ruled in favor of a private business that defied a government rule that employers must provide birth control under the health plans they offer, is even more egregious, she said. The Hobby Lobby CEO tied his decision to his Christian faith, but he’d abided by the government rule previously. Greenhouse dryly noted that the owner also had no problem with the violation of Christian strictures when his employees used their salaries to purchase birth control themselves.

In a way, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which a baker says his Christian faith prevents him from baking a wedding cake for a gay couple, is even more ludicrous, she said. That’s because the case has hinged on whether his First Amendment rights will be infringed upon if he’s forced to bake a cake for them. She noted that cake is a poor vehicle for arguments about freedom of expression.

“Once it gets to the party, it’s just a cake. It’s not like he signed the cake. It’s not like a Van Gogh with the signature on it,” she said. “He doesn’t have to associate with or attend the [wedding]  party.”

Step Away, Don’t Step Between

Berlinger said that when it comes to medical treatment, there are actually very few cases in which medical personnel refuse to provide care. There may be instances when patients who are Jehovah’s Witnesses object to blood transfusions, and Orthodox Jews may dispute a doctor’s judgement of brain death.

But a bigger threat, she said, are structural issues, such as medical residents who simply opt not to get training for controversial procedures like abortion, and those who stall when faced with patients who inquire about physician-assisted suicide.

She said a conscience clause that the Hastings Center advocates says that even health professionals who feel more than the usual sense of “moral distress” that comes with working in the medical field must fulfill their duty of care. There’s no option to abandon a patient if their needs conflict with doctor’s conscience.

“You also cannot interfere with your patients’ access to care by others,” she said. “Sometimes the way this is explained is, ‘You can step away, but you can’t step between.”

She quoted British ethicist Alan Cribb, Ph.D., professor of bioethics and education at King’s College London, as having summarized it perfectly:

“We may exercise conscience objection to involvement in certain activities, but surely we cannot float entirely above the network of obligations in which we have emerged ourselves.”

Fisher was the principle investigator on a recently completed quantitative study that resulted in a paper published in the journal AIDS and Behavior titled “Patient-Provider Communication Barriers and Facilitators to HIV and STI Preventive Services for Adolescent MSM.” In the study, Fisher found that young males who have sex with males were reticent to discuss sex with their doctors. But when doctors initiated the conversation, they were more forthcoming with vital information that could affect their health.

The nationwide study was conducted anonymously via a  questionnaire linked to from a trusted website frequented by gay teens. It surveyed 198 adolescent gay males. Several participants said they completed the survey because they wanted to help their community.

“This is the first study to ask kids about their attitudes on getting sexual health care,” said Fisher, who directs Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education. “Pediatricians and general practitioners are the gateway of youth experiences with health care, but [these patients]only go once a year, so this is an ideal time to ask [about their sexual activity].”

Fisher said there are several studies that have found that most doctors are not trained to ask questions relevant to sexual minorities, and many doctors assume the youth they treat are straight. Furthermore, the language of sexuality has evolved for young people.

“The other issue is that doctors should not use terms like ‘gay,’ or ‘LGBT,’ because for many young people the terminology is in flux,” said Fisher. “Youth no longer identify with these traditional behaviors; the question should be ‘Who are you attracted to sexually?’”

But most importantly, Fisher said, the conversation needs to be initiated by the doctors, even though doctors often have the “misperception that the kid would be uncomfortable.”

“Physicians need to be well versed in safety advice and should be able to communicate to all,” she said. “The kids don’t bring it up because they think the doctor will be prejudiced.”

Another concern among the young men was that the doctors might tell their parents, but Fisher said most states allow doctors to provide information to teens on sexual health, including HIV prevention, without parental consent. Some states, like New York, even allow doctors to prescribe PrEP, the pill that protects against HIV, to minors without getting parents involved.

“The grey area is if the child is having sex with an adult that might be considered sexual abuse and that needs to be reported,” said Fisher.

But such cases only reinforce the need for doctors need to be proactive in their conversations with youth, she said. Even if the relationship is legal and consensual, some youth lack assertiveness skills to demand a condom from an older or aggressive peer partner, she said.

“They need advice specific to males having sex with males,” said Fisher. “Giving gay males advice on sex with females is useless, but when they’re aware of those specifics they’ll be safer and healthier.”

That was the conclusion of Helena B. Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and anthropology at New York University, in a March 8 lecture, “White Opioids: Pharmaceuticals, Race, and the War on Drugs That Wasn’t,” at the Rose Hill campus.

Dr. Hansen, whose visit was sponsored by the Center for Ethics Education, argued that the current crisis is partly the result of a stark racial divide: When white Americans become addicted, it’s seen as proof of a breakdown of society, but when minorities become addicted, it’s viewed as evidence of an individual’s moral failing.

This outlook was reflected in the 1980s when penalties for possession of crack were higher than for possession of cocaine, she said. It has continued with the creation, marketing, and distribution of buprenorphine, which is commonly sold under the name Suboxone, a pain killer geared specifically to white, middle class Americans. Dr. Hansen compared it (and its predecessor, Oxycodone) to Methadone, which is distributed in troubled inner-city neighborhoods.

“The current generation of opioids were designed to have white racial identities, and in our stratified health care and justice systems, the biotechnologies and social technologies shaping opioid consumption reinforce racial inequalities, while at the same time harming whites,” she said.

Suboxone has never been explicitly promoted as a white person’s drug, but Dr. Hansen described four “technologies of whiteness”-addiction neuroscience, new biotechnologies, regulatory structures, and marketing-that showed how it was inexorably linked to race.

When it comes to regulatory structures, for instance, she recounted that Congress passed the Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) in 2000, thus enabling physicians to prescribe Suboxone in their offices. The debates leading up to passage focused on a “new kind of drug user,” one that is young, suburban and “not hardcore”: implicitly, white.

“Alan Leshner, then director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, testified that [Suboxone] is uniquely appropriate for a new kind of opioid user, as opposed to Methadone- ‘which tends to be concentrated in urban areas, and is a poor fit for the suburban spread of narcotic addiction,'” she said.

The solution to keeping [Suboxone] out of illicit markets-an eight-hour certification course that doctors are required to take in order to prescribe it-has further made it scarce for minorities.

“Public-sector doctors tell me that the certification requirement is a major barrier to making [Suboxone] available to low income people, as public clinics do not provide time or incentives to pursue certification,” she said, “while prescribers in the private sector can charge fees of up to $1,000 for an initial visit for [Suboxone] induction,” she said.

This sort of racial targeting has actually hurt whites as much as it has hurt minorities, she said. It has led to implicit assumptions that whites are not as susceptible to addiction-even as Oxycontin addiction rates among whites have climbed, due to a ten-fold increase in prescription opioids nationally, “with the disproportionate uptake by prescribers in white suburban and rural areas.”

In the long run, Dr. Hansen expressed hope that this current moment of despair over white deaths will spur efforts to transform America’s health care system into one that’s less market driven and more equitable.

“Our predominant frame for addiction in this country has-until recently-been that it’s an individual, moral character problem . . . [that]people are making bad choices, they’re just not strong enough, or perhaps they come from bad families with bad values,” she said.

“Americans are beginning to realize that maybe addiction is related to our economic system and the social networks that people don’t now have.”

Editors note: On July 25, the American Psychoanalytic Association announced it no longer expected its members to abide by the so-called “Goldwater Rule, a code of ethics prohibiting most psychiatrists from giving opinions about the mental state of anyone they have not evaluated.” Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, professor of psychology, and director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, discussed the rationale for the rule in February. 

Below, she explains why the July 25 decision is an unfortunate one that elevated political and economic considerations above ethical principles.

“Revising ethical standards to address a particularly problematic political figure or to condone the publication of a book does not reflect well on the association.  The public should be aware that the American Psychoanalytic Association organization does not represent the field of psychiatry per se, but a group of professionals who practice a particular therapeutic orientation within the mental health profession known as psychoanalysis,” she said.

“Responsible diagnosis in psychoanalysis, as in other mental health fields, relies on assessment techniques that are characterized by interactions with and analysis of patient responses to specific established questions. A professionally and ethically responsible diagnosis cannot be determined in the absence of such interactions or assessments. For example, although the American Psychological Association has not adopted a “Goldwater Rule”, the importance of appropriate assessments are intrinsic in its ethics code, which forbids psychologists from providing opinions of the psychological characteristics of individuals if they have not “conducted an examination of the individuals adequate to support their statements or conclusions”. To be sure, the mental health profession can and should share their knowledge with the public, but irresponsible “diagnosis” diminishes the profession and does not serve the public it seeks to inform.”

Stream the February interview with Fisher on this topic below.