Our Distinguished Panelists

Jonathan Haidt

Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business

Jonathan Haidt joined New York University Stern School of Business in July 2011. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, based in the Business and Society Program.

Professor Haidt is a social psychologist whose research examines the intuitive foundations of morality. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. In that book Haidt offers an account of the origins of the human moral sense, and he shows how variations in moral intuitions can help explain the polarization and dysfunction of American politics. At Stern he is applying his research on moral psychology to rethink the way business ethics is studied and is integrated into the curriculum. His goal is to draw on the best behavioral science research to create organizations that function as ethical systems, with only minimal need for directly training people to behave ethically. He co-founded the research collaboration at EthicalSystems.org. His next book will be titled Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life .

Before coming to Stern, Professor Haidt taught for 16 years at the University of Virginia. His first book was The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. His writings appear frequently in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and he has given four TED talks. He was named one of the top global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine and also by Prospect magazine.

Professor Haidt received a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Robert P. George

McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University; Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is also the Herbert W. Vaughan Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, and has on several occasions been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. In August of 2017, Baylor University launched the Robert P. George Initiative on Faith, Ethics & Public Policy, and Professor George was appointed as a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion.

In addition to his academic service, Professor George has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He previously served on the President’s Council on Bioethics (2002-2009), and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1993-1998). He has also been the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology.

He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

Professor George is author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993), In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), The Clash of Orthodoxies (ISI, 2001) and Conscience and Its Enemies (ISI, 2013). He is co-author of Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (2nd edition, Doubleday, 2011), Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and What is Marriage? (Encounter, 2012). He is editor of several volumes, including Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays (Oxford University Press, 1992), The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism (Oxford University Press, 1996), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1996), and Great Cases in Constitutional Law (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Professor George's articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Review of Politics, the Review of Metaphysics, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence. He has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, First Things, the Boston Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, Professor George holds degrees in law and theology from Harvard and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., and D.C.L. from Oxford University. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore and received a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard for graduate study in law and philosophy at Oxford. He holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, ethics, science, divinity, humane letters, law and moral values, civil law, and juridical science.

Among his awards are the United States Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Paul Bator Award of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy, a Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association, the Charles Fried Award of the Harvard Law School Federalist Society, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

He has given the John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard, the Guido Calabresi Lecture at Yale, the Sir Malcolm Knox Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the Frank Irvine Lecturer in Law at Cornell.

Professor George is general editor of New Forum Books, a Princeton University Press series of interdisciplinary works in law, culture, and politics. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.

Allison Stanger

Russell J. Leng '60 Professor of International Politics and Economics, Middlebury College

Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy and Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump, both with Yale University Press. She is working on a new book tentatively titled Consumers vs. Citizens: Justice and Democracy’s Public Square in a Big Data World.

Stanger's writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and the Washington Post, and she has testified before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was also a contributor to the Booz Allen Hamilton project on the World's Most Enduring Institutions, the Woodrow Wilson School Task Force on the Changing Nature of Government Service, and the Princeton Project on National Security.  Stanger has served as an advisor to the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, US Department of State and was on the writing team that produced the State Department’s December 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR).

Stanger received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. She also holds an AM in Regional Studies-Soviet Union (Harvard), a graduate diploma in Economics (London School of Economics), and a BS in Actuarial Science/Mathematics (Ball State University). She has studied foreign languages and literature at Charles University (Prague), the Sorbonne (Paris), and the Pushkin Institute (Moscow).

Professor Stanger is also the co-editor and co-translator (with Michael Kraus) of Irreconcilable Differences? Explaining Czechoslovakia's Dissolution (foreword by Václav Havel) and the author of numerous articles and essays. Her research has been funded by the International Relations and Exchanges Board, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the MacArthur Foundation. She has been a research fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (Harvard University), Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (Prague), the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada (Moscow), New America (Washington, DC), the Brookings Institution (Washington, DC), and the Center for Science and International Affairs (Harvard University).  She has also served as visiting professor of Government at Harvard University.

David D. Corey

Professor of Political Science in the Honors Program & Assistant Director of Baylor in Washington, Baylor University

David Corey spent his undergraduate years at Oberlin, where he earned a B.A. in Classics from the College and a B.Mus. in music from the Conservatory.  He studied law and jurisprudence at Old College, Edinburgh before taking up graduate work in political philosophy.  His M.A. and Ph.D. are from Louisiana State University, home of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies, where he worked closely with Cecil Eubanks, Ellis Sandoz and Jim Stoner. 

While in graduate school, he won a Richard M. Weaver Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship (DAAD) for Research in Germany.  He spent the 2000-2001 academic year at the Universität Heidelberg, studying German and writing a dissertation on the Greek Sophists.

Dr. Corey joined the Baylor faculty in 2002 and has won multiple teaching awards. In 2010 he held the Bell Distinguished Visiting Professor Chair at the University of Tulsa, where he delivered the annual Bell Lecture on the western just war tradition.

He is the author of two books, The Just War Tradition (2012) and The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (2015).  He has written more than a dozen articles in such venues as the Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Modern Age, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought. 

His current projects, Rethinking American Politics, and Liberalism & The Nine Waves of Modernity,  examine the loss of healthy political association in the United States and offer strategies for reform. 

Dr. Corey is closely affiliated with a number of institutes and foundations.  He is a Faculty Associate at the John Jay Institute, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion, and a Peer Reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

Candace Vogler

David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago

Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, and Principal Investigator on "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life," a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation.  She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002), and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas.  Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.

Chad C. Pecknold

Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, The Catholic University of America

Chad Pecknold received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) and since 2008 he has been a Professor of Historical & Systematic Theology in the School of Theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He teaches in the areas of fundamental theology, Christian anthropology, and political theology. Pecknold is the author of a number scholarly articles and books including most recently, Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History (Cascade 2010) and The T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology (Bloomsbury, 2014). Dr. Pecknold is also a frequent contributor to debates in the public square, writing regular columns for First Things and National Review on a range of topics related to the importance and impact of Church teaching on social and political questions.

Professor Pecknold is frequently sought after for his opinion on current events, and has been quoted in hundreds of news outlets around the world such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He has appeared as an invited guest on radio and television shows such as NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Vatican Radio, Al Jazeera America, BBC World News, ABC News, FOX News, CNBC Squawk Box, and he is a regular contributor on EWTN News Nightly offering his clear analysis and expert opinion on the Catholic Church, the papacy, and the relationship between the Church and politics in American culture.

A self-described "Augustinian-Thomist," Pecknold is an Associate Editor for the English Edition of the international Thomistic journal of theology, Nova et Vetera, and co-edits with Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., the new Sacra Doctrina series at Catholic University of America Press. Dr Pecknold is currently writing a book on Augustine’s City of God.

Professor Pecknold resides in Alexandria, VA with his wife, Dr. Sara Pecknold (who teaches Music history at CUA) and their three kids Will, Cate and Jack.

Moderators

Joseph Capizzi

Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics & Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, The Catholic University of America; Executive Director, The Institute for Human Ecology

Joseph E. Capizzi is Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism.

Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

Thomas S. Hibbs

Dean of the Honors College & Director of Baylor in Washington, Baylor University

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, where he oversees a number of interdisciplinary programs, including the Honors Program, Great Texts, University Scholars and the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. His areas of expertise include film and popular culture and contemporary virtue ethics.

Hibbs has made more than 100 appearances on local, regional and national radio and television to provide commentary on film and culture and regularly reviews films for National Review Online and The Weekly Standard. He also has written about film, culture, books and higher education for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things and The Catholic World Report.

Hibbs' books include Shows About Nothing (Baylor University Press, 2012), which analyzes the 'something about nothing' in films, and TV shows from Harry Potter and Avatar to Mad Men and Seinfeld; Arts of Darkness: American Noir and The Lost Code of Redemption (Spence Publications, 2007), in which Hibbs looks at the philosophy and theology of these dark films to reveal a subtle but profound insistence on the reality of redemption; and Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good (Fordham University Press, 2001), a take on the recovery of the ethics of virtue.

Hibbs received his bachelor's and master's degrees in literature and philosophy from the University of Dallas and master’s and doctoral degrees in medieval studies from the University of Notre Dame.