ABSTRACT
The book originated in an extended conversation which, in turn, arose after a visit by Professor Arrow to the University of California, Irvine Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality (hereafter Ethics Center). Founded by scholars dedicated to using scientific tools to examine issues that engage with ethical ques - tions, the Ethics Center’s regular program entailed the publishing of occasional talks. Arrow’s talk was to be included in a volume with other scholars who had visited the Center.2 For this particular volume, we thought it would be interesting to conduct short interviews with each of the contributors, asking them to tell us about the origin of their inter - est in the specific research topic for their chapter and in ethical issues more generally. Our interest in doing this was to flesh out the more personal route to intellectual work and to suggest what enables people to find original takes on topics that are both perennial and important.
