Podcasts by Ethics in Action Podcast

The Case for a UBI: A Conversation with Scott Santens from 2023-11-14T12:35:54

In our final episode in our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by universal basic income (UBI) advocate and writer Scott Santens. Scott is the founder and president of the  Listen

Breaking Things at Work: A Conversation with Gavin Mueller from 2023-11-02T12:02:04

Our fourth episode of our mini-series on the future of work features Gavin Mueller, Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and the author of  Listen

Meaningful Work: A Conversation with Andrea Veltman from 2023-09-24T17:56:47

In our second episode of our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by Andrea Veltman, Professor of Philosophy at James Madison University. We speak with Andrea about what it takes for...

Making Light Work - A Conversation with David Spencer from 2023-09-17T17:18:27

In the first episode of our mini-series on the future of work, we are joined by University of Leeds economist David Spencer. We discuss the experience of alienated labor under contemporary capit...

Breaking up the United States: A Conversation with Chris Zurn from 2023-06-20T15:42:16

Political philosopher Chris Zurn has just published IEET and the UMB Applied Ethics Center recently released a White Paper on the political, moral and psychological questions involved in regulating the metavers...

Report from Kyiv: A Conversation with Journalist Alisa Sopova from 2022-06-07T18:10:04

We continue our series on the war in Ukraine. In this episode Vlado and I talk to journalist and anthropologist Alisa Sopova about what everyday life feels  like in Ukraine as the war passes the...

Reading Between The Lines in Russia and Ukraine: A Conversation with Ambassador Vesko Garcevic from 2022-05-11T23:14:35

We continue our series on the war in Ukraine.  Our guest is Vesko Garcevic, former ambassador of Montenegro to NATO, OSCE, A...

Making Russia Great Again? from 2022-04-17T15:29:26

Vladimir Putin wants to put Russia back on the map as a great power. But what does it even mean to be a great power in the nuclear age? Is that idea still coherent? If it is, can Russia be such ...

Empires Strike Back - Did the “Balance of Power” Just Make a Comeback?: A Conversation with Vladimir Petrovic from 2022-04-01T10:46

For a while, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we could tell ourselves that the American-led liberal internationalist order was on the rise. That story had some big holes in it, but if we squ...

School Integrations and Equal Education: A Conversation with Larry Blum from 2021-09-17T17:59:27

How should we understand efforts at school integration? And how are they related to the idea of equal education? Larry and I consider different historical understandings of integration and the p...

Harvard‘s Galileo Project: A Conversation with Avi Loeb from 2021-09-01T14:12

The New York Times 2017 front page story about UAP's (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) spotted by N...

Institutional Corruption and Psychiatric Drugs: A Conversation with Lisa Cosgrove from 2021-05-27T13:23:21

What happens when the ties between the people who study psychiatric drugs and the companies who make them become too cozy? A discussion with UMass Boston psychology professor Lisa Cosgrove. 

My Favorite Passage: A conversation with Adam Beresford about Iliad, Book 24 from 2021-04-08T12:41:04

Adam and I discuss the famous, moving passage at the end of the Iliad describing the meeting between Achilles and Priam. We talk quite a bit about Achilles' curious account of how Zeus ...

A Three-Way Peace Deal in the Middle East: A Conversation with Ehud Eiran from 2020-09-29T23:47:34

Israel has signed normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain. These are the first Middle East peace agreements in two and a half decades. Why now? What does each of the main actors in thi...

Civic Dialogue in a Polarized Society: A Conversation With Lauren Barthold from 2020-09-11T15:44:56

The US seems more polarized than it's been in decades. Can we communicate across ideological and political chasms? What does it mean to have a dialogue with someone we profoundly, even vehementl...

Monuments, Racism and The Ethics of Public Memory: A Conversation with Dana Miranda from 2020-08-10T22:22:54

In the last few months, in the wake of recent protests against systemic racism, Confederate and other monuments have been torn down and defaced. What are these monuments supposed to convey?  Wha...

The Rise of Robot Overlords? A Conversation with Dan Feldman from 2020-05-20T10:18:10

Before Covid 19 turned the world upside down we worried about Artificial General Intelligence and, ultimately, Super-intelligence - the moment when our machines, powered by sophisticated AI, cat...

Thucydides and the Plague: A Conversation with Greg Fried from 2020-04-16T21:46:25

In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides provides a vivid description of the physical and social toll that a terrible plague took on Athens, a year or so into its war with Sparta. Wha...

Setting Priorities in a Pandemic: Who Gets Care? When do We Open the Economy? A conversation with J Hughes from 2020-04-09T22:03:06

What are the moral criteria for triaging patients when the healthcare system is overwhelmed? How is Massachusetts thinking about this? And, more broadly, what is the appropriate balance between ...

What is Social Democracy? A Conversation with Jeppe von Platz from 2019-12-17T15:34:13

Jeppe von Platz teaches philosophy at the University of Richmond. His research focuses on political philosophy, political economy, and the history of philosophy. He has published on questions of...

Philosophy and Our Understanding of Mental Disorders: A Conversation with Jennifer Radden from 2019-06-12T09:58:57

UMass Boston's Jennifer Radden has made numerous seminal contributions to the philosophy of psychiatry. She has just published an entry on Mental Disorders in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos...

AI, Algorithms and the Post Human Future of Governance: A Conversation with J Hughes from 2019-01-28T20:32:24

How will the rise of AI change state and federal bureaucracies? Are AI mediated politics more democratic? More fair? What does post human governance look like?

James Hughes is a senior re...

Should we rename Faneuil Hall? A Conversation with Dana Miranda from 2018-08-25T23:30:17

Faneuil Hall, one of Boston's most celebrated public spaces and tourist attractions, is named after Peter Faneuil - an 18th century merchant and slave trader. Nir Eisikovits and UConn's Dana Mir...

Kant’s Liberal International Order: A Conversation with Claudio Corradetti from 2018-03-01T22:07:02

Eisikovits and Corradetti discuss the relevance of Kant's celebrated essay "Towards Perpetual Peace"

Is peace a process ...

No Ethics on Campus: A Conversation with James Keenan from 2018-02-28T15:15:15

Eisikovits and Keenan discuss the need to create a culture of ethics on college campuses.

How is it that the university - one of the few institutions that teaches ethics - does not give m...

Hate anger and Resentment: A conversation with Thomas Brudholm from 2018-01-29T23:09:28

Nir Eisikovits hosts Thomas Brudholm of the University of Copenhagen for a discussion about the philosophy of hate, anger, and resentment. The two discuss whether there are more and less legitim...

The Confederate Monuments Debate: A Conversation With Glenn Loury from 2018-01-29T22:49:33

Debating Confederate monuments and Civil War memorials in light of the violence in Charlottesville. 

Honor, Slavery, and Social Death: A Conversation with Historian Ken Greenberg from 2018-01-24T14:41:26

Nir Eisikovits and Ken Greenberg talk about the prominent role of honor in the antebellum south and its relationship to the institution of slavery. They also discuss Greenberg’s recent work on N...