At Harvard’s Safra Center, a student intern learns about ethics, and the evolving issues around them
I spent last summer in an office, but not like the ones in which many of my classmates found themselves. I worked as a research intern at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, a leading facility for research in practical ethics. Over the course of the past two semesters, the Safra Center has been celebrating its 30th anniversary, and it just closed the year in an appropriate fashion with 2½ days of festivities, including lectures, panels, and discussions on various issues with which it has been involved. A good deal of my work at the center, aside from my own research, factored into the center’s preparations for its birthday. For about four weeks, another intern and I delved into the center’s extensive archives. Together, we cataloged all the public lectures, conferences, symposia, and the like that the center has hosted and recorded. Once all this information was all neatly organized...