BANGOR, Maine — The 2010 Husson Symposium on Ethics and the Sacred will address two topics Americans hold dear — choice and morality.
The third annual symposium will be held at 7 p.m. today at the Dyke Center for Family Business at Husson University.
It will be divided into two sections. “The Myth of Choice” will discuss the nation’s love affair with choosing everything and the reasons Americans’ choices are less free than they believe, according to a Husson press release. “The Myth of Morality” will focus on why individuals think they are better people than they really are and how their religion probably isn’t helping them be better people, the press release said.
“This is the cutting edge of where ethics is right now,” Cliff Guthrie, the Husson Circle Professor of Religion, who organized the event, said Tuesday.
He and Kent Greenfield, professor of law and law fund research scholar at Boston Law School, will speak at the symposium.
New research, according to Guthrie, demonstrates that when it comes to moral reasoning, “people act first, usually without thinking, then explain why they did what they did, backing it up with reasons.”
“In the health care debate over the past week,” he said Tuesday, “we saw people [in] camps firmly established offering self-justifying reasons for their positions. We just don’t see reasonable people sitting down and saying to someone with whom they don’t agree, ‘You have a point there, but. …’ We tend to grab a position based on our own context, including where and when we were raised, our age, our education, etc.”
Law professor Greenfield, according to Guthrie, wrote the first book on the moral responsibility of corporations to look beyond making a profit. “The Failure of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities” was published in 2006. By writing the book, Greenfield wanted to spark a discussion about the return of corporate law to a system in which the public has a greater say in how firms are governed, according to information on the Boston College Law School Web site.
Greenfield maintained that the laws controlling firms should be much more protective of the public interest and of a corporation’s stakeholders, such as employees. Until the beginning of the 20th century, according to information on the Boston College Web site, public corporations were deemed to have important civic responsibilities.
Only when the law of corporations is evaluated as a branch of public law, in the way that constitutional or environmental law is, will it be clear what types of changes could be made in corporate governance to improve the common good, the law professor argued in the book. In his book, Greenfield also proposed changes in corporate governance that would enable corporations to meet the progressive goal of creating wealth for society as a whole rather than merely for shareholders and executives.
Guthrie said Tuesday that Greenfield would discuss at the symposium some of the ideas outlined in his book.
For information about the symposium, call Guthrie at 941-7769.