Sitting on the lap of former U.S.
Sen. Estes Kefauver
(D-Tenn.), little
Madison Powers made a prediction: Kefauver would win the 1956 Democratic nomination and, ultimately, the U.S. presidency.
“I’ve been wrong ever since,” says Powers, referring to the insurgent candidate’s primary loss against Adlai Stevenson, who would go on to lose his bid against Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower. “But I can be forgiven for two reasons. One is that everybody thought he was going to win. And two, because I was five years old, and Estes was this great friend of my father’s.”
Now a philosophy professor and Kennedy Institute of Ethics director, Powers grew up in a Tennessee family with deep political roots and a tradition of civic engagement. That grounding is what first led Powers into a career as an attorney in his home state.
During those years, he helped write legislation and worked to lobby for and litigate against legislation. He worked on antitrust cases in health care, and fought diligently for the passage of the federal Clean Water Act. He also made a name for himself working on civil rights and health care antitrust cases, often persuading judges to rule laws as unconstitutional.
While he felt his work had made a difference in the lives of many across the country, he says nine years in the courtroom began to push him in a new direction. He wanted to dig deeper into the process of evaluating laws to determine what made good legislation and what didn’t.
From the Courtroom to the Classroom
“I got interested in the relationship between law and morality,” Powers says, “and how judges decide tough questions.”
He traded in the courtroom for the classroom and eventually pursued doctoral work in political philosophy and philosophy of the law at Oxford University. He previously had received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and his law degree from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
As a philosopher, Powers engages in a theoretical debate about the role government should and should not play in pursuing the public interest, especially in the health care. A prolific scholar, Powers’ books and publications focus on issues including the moral foundations of health policy, gender and AIDS, justice and genetics, privacy issues and health care reform. And as a Georgetown professor for more than 20 years, he has built upon that work to help his students debate opposing ideas about the role and responsibilities of government.
For the last 20 years, Powers has aimed to help his students step back and examine policy questions through a range of philosophical theories -- both ancient and contemporary. The resulting debates are fueled far more by ideas than by the ideological squabbles that often plague modern political discourse.
“Before taking professor Powers’ class, I’d never really considered grounding my understanding of the limits of state power in a formal philosophical approach or a study of political morality,” says
Alisha Crovetto (C’10). “I’d read Aristotle, Mill and Locke in other classes, but never with a focus on the relationship between the individual and her government.”
By helping students understand a fuller range of arguments and ideas, Powers hopes to help them move past the ideological squabbles that often plague modern political discourse.
“In terms of solving practical problems, one should not be too tied down to a narrow ideological commitment,” Powers says. “These kinds of narrow ideological things are largely unhelpful and largely unreflective philosophical commitments.”
He asks students to think beyond where they stand on issues and pushes them to understand why they’ve selected viewpoints.
“Now, when I engage in discussion about whether the government is adopting a policy that is too paternalistic or is failing to take necessary steps to protect its citizens, I have respected philosophical arguments I can draw on to support my claims,” Crovetto says.
During the fall semester, Powers posed questions amid the backdrop of election season, when voters faced presidential candidates with vastly different ideas and proposals for moving the country out of two difficult wars and an economic crisis.
As the candidates spelled out proposals on taxes, health care, family issues and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Powers gave his students the philosophical tools to grapple with the real-life implications of these policy positions.
“I couldn't help noticing the total absence of discussions about global justice,” says
Yashar Saghai (G’12), one of Powers’ doctoral students, describing what he saw during the recent presidential election. “Even the justification for the fight against global warming didn’t focus on the harm that polluting countries (inflict on) the populations of developing countries. (The focus was) on the necessity to stop the addiction to foreign oil.”
A Step Beyond The Punditry
Beyond the classroom, Powers wields his political points in
CQ Politics, an online political magazine produced by Congressional Quarterly. As a columnist, he discusses issues including the financial bailout, gender and political campaigns, the future of the Republican Party, and the problems with cable news. In a recent column, he called President-elect Barack Obama “the kind of liberal that Burkean conservatives can love,” referring to adherents of the18th century conservative thinker Edmund Burke.
“I’m a political philosopher, with a direct background in political activity,” he says, describing his contributions to the political discourse that is saturated with professional punditry. “If anything, I bring the ability to step back a little bit… (to ask) ‘What’s the larger context? What’s the cultural meaning of this? What’s the long-term implication?’”
Bruce Drake, Powers’ editor at CQ Politics, says the professor brings a fresh perspective to the columns.
“He writes on many of the same political subjects as do the well-known columnists for newspapers and Web sites, but he doesn’t come from that circle which sometimes can be kind of a pundit echo chamber,” Drake says.
Since 2001, Powers has led Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Established in 1971 as a comprehensive bioethics resource center for researchers and those who make and influence policy, the institute is one of the oldest organizations of its kind. As the director and a senior scholar, Powers has worked on a number of important projects, most recently a groundbreaking book on social justice and access to health care co-authored with
Ruth Faden of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Robert Veatch, professor of medical ethics, describes his colleague as one of the great minds advancing the difficult debate on economics and social justice in health care.
“The Kennedy Institute of Ethics is deeply committed to the idea that great progress comes from interdisciplinary work on difficult medical issues that have social and political overtones,” Veatch says. He lauded his colleague for “taking a career as an attorney and supplementing it with the serious study of philosophy as it impinges on public policy.”
Powers is now working on a book-length project, “The Problem of Liberty,” in which he plans to examine historically and analytically the opposing viewpoints of law’s primary social function.
More than 50 years after his childhood presidential pick lost his bid for the White House, Powers is preparing to enter his third decade at Georgetown. In the coming year, he will watch another insurgent candidate -- this time a successful one -- take the oath of office along with an administration that promises new policy priorities and sweeping reforms. With the transition that lies ahead, Powers says he will enjoy the opportunity to analyze and debate the practical implications of forthcoming changes.
“More than any other,” says Powers, “one change I hope for in the next administration is the prospect that, finally, we will establish the institutional mechanisms guaranteeing universal health care in the United States.”
