A Woman...Of Ethics

AS moral philosophers go, Sissela Bok is on the cautious side. In her two ground breaking books, Lying and Secrets, she proceeds meticulously, developing each conclusion step by step. In person, she is equally wary of commenting on any ethical question she has not already carefully considered.

Asked, for example, about the ethical implications of last year's scandal at the Business School-in which students were discovered cheating in a computer-simulated marketing game-she responds. "I'll have to look that up, but I'm afraid I can't comment on that at all, as I don't know it...These things I have to think a little about before I comment."

Cautious and reserved as she may be, the wife of Harvard's president and the daughter of two Noble Prize winners is an important voice in modern moral philosophy. Lying, published in 1978, received praise for bringing centuries of philosophy to bear on the practical problems of truthfulness and deception in modern life. And the work which she, her colleague Danie Callahan, and others have done at New York's Hasting Center, Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences has led the way in trying to solve increasingly urgent problems of medical and professional ethics in the modern world.

Rather, she feels ethics have been rediscovered, partly because of the interest in rights that accompanied the late 1960's. "There's a great deal of interest among students, both graduate and undergraduate, in courses in applied ethics," she says, "namely courses which deal with practical moral problems which they may run into, either in personal life, or later on in whatever work they take up."

New work will have to be done, she believes, to meet this demand "In medical ethics, we have quite a tradition by now of people who've written about problems such as heart transplants and the distribution of medical care. We have much less in the ethics of journalism, for instance. But it's going to come...the interest is certainly there."

The problem, at least for a time, may be a shortage of qualified instructors. "There's no place in the country right now that teaches the teaching of professional and appalled ethics. So most people who are interested in this have had to do what I've done, namely put it together from various directions. I've worked in philosophy, I've worked in hospitals, and I've worked with people teaching in other areas."

Many Harvard students will know of Bok's academic work primarily through the course she is teaching this term. Moral Reasoning 24, "Moral Choice and Personal Responsibility" To concentrate on this course, she has stopped writing for now and is doing little lecturing or travelling. The course is geared towards dealing with the "practical problems of moral reasoning," which Bok sees as an important but largely neglected approach.

"When I was studying philosophy, "she says, "we did not get that I think it was assumed that we should know these things such as what a circular argument or an ad hominem argument was, but I never felt we went into that with sufficient care."

Though Bok says she is excited about the course, she is not a new comer to teaching. From 1975 until last year, she lectured on medical ethics at Harvard Medical School and on ethical issues in government at the Kennedy School, and she has taught seminars at the Radcliffe Institute. Outside Harvard, her roster of accomplishments is extensive; she was a member of the Ethics Advisory Board of the (then) Department of Health, Education, and Welfare during the late 1970's, and has directed two projects concerning ethics at the Carnegie Corporation.

Though she says she has stopped writing to teacher her course, Bok seems to have wasted little time before planning future projects. Secrets contained a chapter on the ethics of religious confessions, and this subject has attracted Bok further. Her next book, she says, will be about "literary confessions," and will analyze literary works of autobiography and confession, looking not only at questions of openness and secrecy, but also questions of lying and truthfulness. "So in a way," she says, "my two interests will come together in the next one."