This seminar with Professor Michael Boylan of the Marymount College will focus on gun control in the US and internationally. The seminar is initiated by the PRIO Ethics, Norm and Identities Pogramme (ENI), and will be chaired by Henrik Syse. Please register with seminar@prio.no if you want to take part in this seminar!
This talk will explore the way we should think about the ethical and public health implications of gun control in the United States of America today (and by extension to other countries and the international gun-control debate). The generating pedagogy will be: 1. An explication of Worldview perspectives - both personal and community as per the author’s recently published writings. 2. A discussion of the worldviews of both sides of the gun control debate. 3. A critical appraisal of the positions of each side. 4. Some suggestions about a future that is without ordinary citizen ownership of guns. This future would deny ordinary citizens their right to bear arms because this right is superceded by a more fundamental right that is connected to the public health of the United States. Michael Boylan (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is professor of philosophy and philosophy department chair at Marymount University. His most recent book, A Just Society (August, 2004), is his manifesto on ethics and social/political philosophy (and the most complete depiction of his normative worldview theory). He is also the author of Basic Ethics (2000) an essay on normative and applied ethics, Genetic Engineering: Science and Ethics on the New Frontier (2002, with Kevin E. Brown), Ethics Across the Curriculum: A Practice-Based Approach (2003, with James A. Donahue), and Public Health Policy and Ethics, (ed. 2004) along with 13 other books in philosophy and literature and over seventy articles. He is the general editor of a series of trade books on public philosophy with Basil Blackwell Publishers and another series of books with Prentice Hall as well as the co-editor in ethics for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
