Lectures

Each year the Dean of Yale College appoints a Castle Lecturer in Ethics, Politics and Economics to deliver a series of lectures to promote awareness of and sensitivity to ethical issues facing individuals in complex modern societies. Intended to foster interdisciplinary reflection on the moral foundations of society and government, the lectures were endowed by Mr. John K. Castle to honor his ancestor the Reverend James Pierpont, one of the University’s original founders.  Yale University Press co-sponsors the lectures and publishes each set of lectures as a book.

Past Castle Lecturers include

• Ben Wizner - “Above the Law, or Beneath It”
• Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuellar - “The Toxic Flower of a Fertile Seed:  Civilzation and Social Choice in a World of Climate Change, Nuclear Risk, and Artificial Intelligence”
• Rogers Smith - “That Is Not Who We Are!  Populism and Stories of Peoplehood”
• Kathryn Sikkink - “Rediscovering Individual Responsibilities in the Age of Rights”
• Donald L. Horowitz - “Constitutional Design for Severely Divided Societies: Many Architects, Few Buildings”
• David Laitin - “Africa: The Last Frontier for Development”
• Paul Sniderman - “The Democratic Faith”
• Peter Singer - “Effective Altruism”
• Michael Doyle - “Non Intervention and Intervention”
• Samuel Bowles - “Machiavelli’s Mistake - Why good incentives are no substitute for good citizens”
• Juergen Habermas - “The Resurence of Religion: A Challenge to the Secular Self-Interpretation of Modernity”
• Robert Pippin - “Political Psychology and American Myth: Violence and Order in Hollywood Westerns”
• Robert Keohane - “Institutional Design and Power”
• Christopher Jencks - “Inequality: How Much is too Much?”
• Francis Fukuyama - “The NeoConservative Crossroad”
• Richard Sennett - “The Culture of New Capitalism”
• Onora O’Neill - “How Not to do Things With Words”
• David Gergen - “The Leader’s Journey: Some Thoughts for the Next Generation”
• Robert Dahl - “A Democratic Critique of the American Constitution”
• Justice Richard Goldstone - “Punishment of War Crimes: A National or International Question?”
• Martha Nussbaum - “The Cosmopolitan Tradition”
• Lester C. Thurow - “The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World”
• Sissela Bok - “On Practical Ethics: A Century’s Perspective”
• Abba Eban - “Diplomacy for the Next Century”
• Michael Walzer - “On Toleration”
• Senator Paul Tsongas - “Three Challenges to the Next Generation”

The Robert H. Litowitz Lectures

The Litowitz Fund sponsors teaching in the major as well as the Litowitz Lecturer, who is appointed each year to speak to EP&E faculty and students on ethical and religious dimensions of social policy.

Past Litowitz Lecturers include

• Mariko Hirose - “Our Moral and Legal Obligations to Displaced People”
• William Mazzarella - “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!”
• Wayne Hsiung  - “Reversing Extinction:  Why Climate Justice Needs Animal Rights”
• David Auerbach  - “Building Clean Cities for Everyone, Everywhere”
• Nathaniel Keohane  - “Turning the Corner to Climate Safety:  The Economics - and Politcs - of Solving the Climate Crisis”
• Ben Wizner  - “The Peculiar Politics of National Security”
• Branko Milanovic - “Recent Trends in Global Income Distribution and their Political Implications”
• Lisa Guenther - “Lethal Injection and its Discontents”
• Nathan Brown - “Popular Sovereignty and Religious Peoples in the Arab World”
• Joost Hiltermann - “From Sunni-Shia Coexistence to a Mideast Sectarian War?”
• Christopher Caldwell - “Money, Migration, and the European Crisis”
• Litowitz Roundtable - Islamic Law and Political Reform in Iran
•     Abdolkarim Soroush, Mehrangiz Kar, Abbas Amanat, Andrew March
• Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im - “ ‘Islam and the Secular State’ is a Framework for Constant Contestation, Not a Claim of  Categorical Resolution”
• John DiIulio - “Obama’s Faith-Based Initiative: Is it Needed and Will it Survive?”
• Benjamin Barber - “Can Islam Accommodate Democracy? Can Democracy Accommodate Islam?”
• Richard Bernstein - “Democratic Hope”
• Norman Birnbaum - “Apocalypse and the Modern American Imagination”
• Avishai Margalit - “Human Dignity: Between Kitsch and Deification”
• Elaine Pagels - “Revisioning Christianity: The Discovery of the Secret Gospel of Thomas”
• Bhikhu Parekh - “Can We Reason with Fundamentalists?”
• Rev. William Sloane Coffin - “God and the World’s Disorders”
• David Tracy - “God, The Open and the Void: Ethical and Political Implications”
• Kent Greenawalt - “Religious Convictions and Political Discourse”
• George Fletcher - “In God’s Image: The Religious Roots of Equality Under Law”
• Michael Perry - “Liberal Democracy and Religious Morality”
• Judge John T. Noonan - “Crusades: The American Experience of Religious Freedom”