Examining Ethics is an ethics podcast produced by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. It’s produced by Christiane Wisehart, the Assistant Director of Communications at the Prindle Institute, and Eleanor Price, a Graduate Fellow at the Institute and the editor of the Institute’s online ethics magazine The Prindle Post. The podcast has also included stellar work from now-independent producer Sandra Bertin.
Everybody wrestles with questions about ethics. Some questions of ethics are easy to figure out. Should I murder someone? No! But other questions are more difficult to answer. Examining Ethics doesn’t provide answers to ethical dilemmas, but instead leaves listeners with tools and ideas from some of the biggest names in moral philosophy and ethics. Academic philosophy and ethics can be difficult to understand, and our accessible, open-minded content bridges the gap between scholars and everyone else. We hope that our podcast serves both as an ethical primer and as an engaging way to consider scholarship — accessible to all.
We most often feature interviews with leading philosophers and scholars on a variety of topics: recently, we’ve touched on the value of our roles in society with philosopher Robin Zheng, intellectual property with scholar Adam Moore, and banned books with professor Emily J. Knox. Some of our episodes are discussion-based, and we bring in our resident ethics expert, Prindle Institute Director Andy Cullison, to help us parse issues from net neutrality to Dungeons and Dragons.
Examining Ethics works toward covering topics like injustice, racism, and oppression. This page serves as a resource for organizing the episodes that discuss these topics. We take deep dives into areas of ethical philosophy that may sound confusing, but rather end up being new and valuable ways of seeing the world. Some of our best work has come from close examinations of topics related to epistemology — the study of knowledge — and epistemic injustice — or the process of discounting someone’s voice because they aren’t respected as a knower.
Episode 34: Roles and Responsibilities with Robin Zheng — Scholar Robin Zheng shows us that despite the fact that societal problems feel insurmountably huge, we still have a role in improving the system. This theory comes to us through the lens of our roles in society, and how performing them better — more ideally — will help us to be more accountable to everyone.
Episode 33: Standpoint Epistemology with Briana Toole — Philosopher Briana Toole defends the idea that who you are matters when it comes to how you form beliefs. So, a person of color might know very different things about police brutality than, say, a white man. While ultimately a pretty intuitive concept, it has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about knowledge.
Episode 28: Philosophy and #MeToo with Emily McWilliams — The main topic of this episode is hermeneutical injustice, a form of epistemic injustice. Emily, in part quoting Miranda Fricker, frames sexual assault as an example of hermeneutical injustice; in other words, it’s often ignored because the people affected do not have access to (or an understanding of) the concept of the injustice that they’re undergoing. The shownotes also feature further information on Fricker, hermeneutics, and key points in the timeline of sexual assault and the #MeToo movement.
Episode 26: Forgiveness and Moral Exemplars with Myisha Cherry — Myisha’s research focuses on why people — especially marginalized people — should not be convinced to forgive those that have hurt them through the use of moral exemplars. Moral exemplars are people who are held up as particular examples of forgiveness, like Martin Luther King, Jr. Myisha discusses how moral exemplars are often used in cases of police brutality and state violence, and how forgiveness can be used as a tool for ignoring anger.
Episode 22: Gaslighting, PTSD, and Testimonial Injustice with Rachel McKinnon — In this episode, Rachel problematizes the term “allies,” because allies can gaslight the very people they claim to support. Gaslighting, she explains, is a particularly harmful form of epistemic injustice and can ultimately cause a type of post-traumatic stress disorder. The shownotes detail more information about PTSD and gaslighting, as well as some helpful advice for active bystander training.
Bonus Episode: White Talk — After the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies in August 2017, we re-released a segment of Episode 6: The “Burden” of Whiteness. This re-released segment focuses particularly on a common form of white oppression of people of color, a behavior known as “white talk.”
Episode 13: Distrusting the Narrative — The first women’s prison in the nation also exposes a site of major epistemic injustice — where women are not respected as knowers. The testimonies of incarcerated women were — and still are — often discounted and discredited. In this episode, we discuss Miranda Fricker’s ideas of epistemic injustice through the lens of incarcerated women.
Episode 6: The “Burden” of Whiteness — Beyond discussing white talk, Episode 6 features an interview with racial justice activist Peggy McIntosh, largely known for her role in the National SEED Project. Details can be found in the episode’s shownotes.
It’s well worth anyone’s time to consider issues like epistemic and hermeneutical injustice, and how we can all work toward undoing some of those structures.
But philosophy and ethics extend to the casual social realm as well. In some episodes, we address questions from pop culture and everyday life. In Episode 29: A Dungeon Crawl Through Moral Alignments, we discuss how roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder help us to think through morality — often before we even notice the work we’re doing. And Eleanor and Andy help Christiane find her true D&D character.
We also take the opportunity to poke some well-meaning fun at philosophers in Episode 25: What’s the Deal with Philosophers? Prindle Institute Director Andy Cullison and scholar Emily McWilliams answer philosophy’s most pressing questions, such as why latinate language is a must, and what the deal is with all the long beards in philosophy.
Examining Ethics exists to educate and entertain listeners of all philosophical persuasions. We hope that you enjoy. (And of course, subscribe!)
Eleanor Price
Eleanor Price is a Graduate Fellow at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, where she works to edit The Prindle Post and coproduce the Examining Ethics podcast. She graduated from DePauw University in 2017 as an Honor Scholar with majors in Flute Performance and English Literature.
