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My name is Kristen Renwick Monroe and I am the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine and founding Director of the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. I attended Smith College and took my junior year in Geneva, a wonderful experience that taught me how many amazingly interesting places and people there are in the world. I intended to go to law school and make the world safe for world peace by working at the UN but my honors thesis on the Southwest African mandate question revealed how little power international organizations actually have.  That experience led me to postpone law school and instead take a MA in international relations. I ended -- by chance -- at the University of Chicago, a delightfully quirky place where I discovered and fell in love with social science. I stayed in grad school, got a Ph.D. in political science, and did post-doctoral work in econometrics and political economy at the University of British Columbia before teaching at SUNY Stony Brook, NYU, Princeton, and UCI, where I’ve taught since 1984, with occasional visits to Princeton and Harvard.

           

Political economy.

 

After publishing my dissertation – one of the world’s best cures for insomnia; my mother kept it by her bed and read it whenever she could not sleep. I kid you not! -- I stepped back to reassess the general theory that underpinned my empirical work: rational choice theory. I thus stumbled into a project on altruism and what that reveals about the limits of rational choice theory, a theory that assumes self-interest is the driving force in human behavior and which serves as the foundation for much of social science, evolutionary biology, public policy, and business. I found that rational choice theory – which essentially posits that people do what is best for them, subject to information and opportunity costs – is so powerful that it can blind us to all those times when it does not work. Altruism and public/collective goods are perhaps the two main examples.

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Award-winning trilogy on altruism and moral choice.

 

This research resulted in three books examining moral choice. The first was The Heart of Altruism (1996), which analyzed entrepreneurs, philanthropists, Carnegie Hero Commission Award recipients, and people who risked their lives to save Jews during the  Holocaust. Essentially, everything I had read about altruism turned out basically to be  wrong. I thus had to step way out of my comfort zone to formulate my own theory about what drove altruism. I located the drive for much of human behavior in our sense of who we are and concluded that how we see ourselves in relation to others shapes and delineates how we treat them.

 

Next came The Hand of Compassion (2004), which focused on the rescuers of Jews to understand the moral dimensions of their moral choice. To my surprise, I found altruists seldom see a choice. Their sense of who they are is so strong that it sets and delineates the choice options they find available, not just morally but cognitively. Certain options are simply not available to them, much as sushi is not on the menu in an Italian restaurant or pizza not available in an ice cream parlor. To my surprise, even life-and-death acts were spontaneous, not conscious, evolving instinctively out of the actor’s sense of who they are.  As one Czech rescuer told me, “The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason.”

 

In Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide (2012), I asked if everyone has this same ethical perspective, with altruists simply located at one end of a kind of moral yardstick. In this book, I contrasted a Dutch rescuer with his bystander cousin, a Nazi sympathizer, and two Nazis, one totally unrepentant. (Interviewing Nazis was another new, challenging  and somewhat surreal experience.) I found everyone was constrained by their identities, by how they saw themselves in relation to others.

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Empirical examinations of the moral life.

 

I continued the empirical examination of how real people address moral issues in their own lives – not in the social psychologist’s laboratory or the philosopher’s armchair --  in A Darkling Plain: Stories of Conflict and Humanity during War (2016). This book arose from a class project in which students interviewed someone who had lived through a war, asking how they kept their humanity despite the barbarity around them. These incredible interviews included a 100-year-old great-grandmother who survived the Armenian genocide and people who lived through wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and World War II, and revolutions in Iran, Guatemala, Lebanon, and Nicaragua. I suggested we work together to pull the stories into a book, and that is exactly what several students and I did, reaffirming my delight in teaching such remarkable young people.

 

While I retain my interest in political economy and methodology, most of my recent work locates at the intersection of ethics, political psychology, and international relations. I had the privilege to work (On Ethics and Economics) with Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow on his intellectual autobiography, on a project (The Evils of Polygyny, with Rose McDermott) on polygyny, and I have just published a book of essays on ethics and identity (The Unspoken Morality of Childhood: Family, Friendship, Self-Esteem and the Wisdom of the Everyday). This is my first non-scholarly book and draws on little stories of things that happen to every parent – a child going off to school for the first time or losing a best friend – and what moral lessons being a parent taught me.

 

A trilogy on moral courage.

 

I am still doing scholarly work, including completing To Say No to Death: Portraits of Moral Courage and Compassion during the Holocaust, which attempts to explain the kind of hate driving genocide, ethnic cleansing, and all the ugly violence that seems to fuel too much of politics today. It is one of several books in what is becoming a trilogy or a quartet concerning moral courage. When Conscience Calls: Moral Courage in a Time of Confusion and Despair (U of Chicago Press)  is due out next June and addresses a central question in social science: Do we find behavior regular enough, across geography, time and culture that we can speak meaningfully of laws of social life. (Are the laws of economics comparable to laws of physics?) When Conscience Calls examines moral courage in liberal democracies.  Moral Courage in Liberal Democracies, Tudor England, Reformation Europe, and the Third Reich (tentative title) begins my examination of culture’s impact on moral courage. It considers moral relativism to ask if we can find moral courage in societies whose values we might not fully share (Tudor England, Reformation Germany) or values we even find morally repugnant (Nazi  Germany). The double-edged sword aspect of moral courage – in which every act of moral courage is also an act of betrayal – is addressed in Whistleblowers, Spies, Traitors or Patriots: Rogue Republicans in the Age of Trump.

 

Personal life.

 

I have three fabulous children I love beyond reason. Alex (42) works on eco-friendly energy. Nik (39) is a lawyer in Santa Monica. Chloe (30) is in grad school in public health in Washington DC. I am divorced but -- after 14 years – have fallen madly in love with my ex-husband. We are now planning to get remarried. I love teaching and run a free summer mentoring program each year at UCI for high school and college students interested in doing scholarly work in ethics (www.ethicscenter.uci.edu).