The annual William James Mazzocco Lecture in Distributive Justice will take place on Wednesday, February 20, at 7:30 p.m., in Buckley Center room 163. Debra Satz (pictured left), the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University, will present “Should Everything Be For Sale?” The lecture is free and open to all. Satz will explore the controversies around diverse goods (human organs, votes, sex, credit derivatives, etc.) and whether they should be treated as marketable commodities. She will draw much of her argument from her 2010 book, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Other works by Satz include Toward A More Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (2009) and Occupy the Future (2013). Her areas of academic specialty include the place of equality in a just society and theories of rational choice, and she is currently leading a multi-year research project which aims to clarify plausible interpretations of equality of educational opportunity and their implications for public policy.
The William James Mazzocco Memorial Lecture in Distributive Justice was established in 2006; Mazzocco earned his economics degree on The Bluff in 1937. A lifelong world traveler, Mazzocco had a long, distinguished career which included military intelligence assignments during World War II, diplomatic posts in Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, and Abidjan, and significant contributions to the Marshall Plan. He credited his years at the University of Portland with giving him a solid moral foundation that would guide his life and work for the remainder of his 89 years, most notably his steadfast belief in distributive justice—the principles of equitable and fair distribution of wealth.
For more information contact Gary Malecha, political science, at 7452 or malecha@up.edu.