"Learning from Ramsey"

One of my all-around favorite thinkers and writers, Gilbert Meilaender, is the 2009 recipient of the Paul Ramsey Award.  Here are his remarks.  A bit:

All of us, Ramsey would have said, whatever our particular vocations, are part of this community of discourse. All of us are called to think, as carefully and as thoroughly as we can, about these urgent human problems. And from all – those who disagree, those who work not in the realm of ethics but in the day-to-day struggles of both research and clinical medicine – from all of them the ethicist seeks to learn. But not only to listen and learn. Also to interrogate – and no one ever interrogated the way Paul Ramsey did.