Research from Prindle Institute for Ethics staff appeared across four peer-reviewed journals this year, with Associate Director Jamie Herman and Visiting Scholar Dave Holiday contributing to conversations in philosophy of education, the ethics of competition, and the moral dimensions of historical memory.

Jamie Herman’s work in Educational Theory, co-authored with Kyle Williams and Bryan R. Warnick, reframes the campus debate over free speech and safe spaces. Rather than treating universities as single, unified entities, the article proposes thinking of them as collections of distinct spaces, each with its own purposes and norms, and argues that the right balance between safety and expression depends on which kind of space you’re in. A separate piece in Theory and Research in Education takes on a harder question: why does exploitation in higher education persist despite widespread recognition and protest? Herman’s answer lies not with individual bad actors but with the structural dynamics of hierarchical systems, where those with less power face greater costs for pushing back, making the norms that enable exploitation self-reinforcing.

Dave Holiday’s contributions cover different ground. His article in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy mounts a Kantian case against the idea that winning is what competition is ultimately about, arguing that treating victory as the highest end is not just poor sportsmanship but philosophically incoherent, producing a self-contradiction in motivation and a failure of respect toward opponents. In Holocaust Studies, Holiday brings Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry into dialogue on forgiveness and revenge: two thinkers who disagree sharply about how to respond to the Holocaust but share, Holiday argues, the insight that grave wrongs destroy a moral community between victim and perpetrator. On that shared ground, Améry’s call for revenge emerges not as mere retaliation but as an attempt, like forgiveness, to recover what was lost.