Samuel Gorovitz, a pioneer in the field of medical ethics and an expert on philosophy and public policy, delivers the fourth annual Anbar Family Lecture at Temple Adath Yeshurun (450 Kimber Rd., Syracuse), in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Gorovitz’s lecture, “Values, Causation and the Moral Community,” takes place on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 7:30 p.m., and is free and open to the public. For more information, call 315-445-0002, or visit http://adath.org.
The lecture is presented in collaboration with Syracuse University, where Gorovitz, a professor of philosophy, is a former dean of The College of Arts and Sciences.
“I welcome this opportunity to discuss how my own encounters with fundamentalist perspectives can help illuminate moral challenges we all face. It seems like a fitting way to reflect on the horrors of 9/11,” says Gorovitz, who until recently was founding director of SU’s Renée Crown University Honors Program.
Rabbi Charles S. Sherman—leader of Temple Adath, the largest Conservative synagogue in Central New York—calls Gorovitz a “master teacher.” “He is engaging, passionate, and digs deep in helping us understand some of life’s contradictions,” says Sherman of Gorovitz. “His message is a thoughtful and wonderful introduction to our Days of Awe.”
An accomplished teacher and scholar, Gorovitz has delivered more than 200 invited lectures on five continents, and has served as a consultant to PBS, the World Health Organization, and many federal agencies. He has been interviewed on programs such as “All Things Considered,” “Larry King Live,” and “The Studs Terkel Program,” and has been quoted in magazines ranging from Ladies Home Journal to The New Yorker. His publications include more than 130 articles, reviews, and editorials in philosophical journals, medical journals, public policy journals, and newspapers.
Since 1988 Gorovitz has served, by gubernatorial appointment, on the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. In 2007 he was appointed by New York’s governor to the new Empire State Stem Cell Board, which oversees a $600 million commitment to stem cell research in New York state.
Sherman anticipates that this year’s Anbar Lecture will encourage people to remember a time in which they “lost [their] innocence and certain assumptions about life.” “We know politically and economically what it meant,” he says, referring to 9/11. “But on a much deeper existential level, it’s about the moral compass, the ethical foundations of life itself. … Ten years later, just the words ‘9/11’ still resonate with an observation of where we were and what we were doing at that moment in time.”
