Marvin & Sybil Weiner Undergraduate Essay Prize
in the Humanities

2006–2007 Penn Humanities Forum on Travel

"What Are the Ethics of Humanitarianism in a
Globalized World?"
Cosponsored by the Marvin & Sybil Weiner Fund of
the Penn Library and the Penn Humanities Forum


Robert Strain, First Prize
"The Pharmaceutical Paradox
Helping and Harming the Developing World"

College, Political Science
Class of 2008

Rob Strain is a junior from Poolesville, MD. As a Political Science major, he has a particular interest in human rights and the developing world. He spent the spring 2006 semester in Argentina and that fall studying in Washington, DC while working at the American Enterprise Institute as a research intern for global health policy. Hhe hopes to pursue his interest in public policy and international health after graduation.

Click here to view PDF of Robert Strain's essay.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Honorable Mention
"In What Sense, If Any, Are Human Rights Universal?

Engineering/College, Class of 2009
Philadelphia, PA

If I may suggest a solid and staggering heresy, I don't believe man has a right to anything at all. How can he? How can he have a right to life or a right to experience when he doesn't even have a right to the frailest flower that grows in the garden? And to that flower he certainly has no right. He has neither created the flower nor the mechanism by which he sees it, for he has fashioned neither the iris in the garden nor the iris in his head. He has simply been born. Lucky guy.

Yet it is just this feeling of luck and gratitude that is chiefly wanting in the modern world. The UN has declared we must live by a Doctrine of Human Rights; it's always been my goal to live more according to a Doctrine of Human Gratitude. And nothing hampers one's gratitude and appreciation for life so much as the sense that one has a right to it. It is this right to life that I question each morning. I question my right to irises, good health and good caviar. I question the swagger in modern man's step.

A great thanks to my Father for his constant support. At an early age I received an exceptional training in all things ethical and moral from my Mother. When the Humanities Forum requested essays of an ethical bent, I responded in the merit of my principal and principled teacher. I sat down and wrote this essay, but my Mother inspired it--as usual--to the very last drop.

Nikhil Nirmel, Honorable Mention
"On Inaction"

Wharton School, Operations & Information Management,
Managing Electronic Commerce, Class of 2008
Pleasanton, California 

As a business student, I am taught principles that dictate how things are to be done, how things are to be measured, how to maximize, how to optimize. Solid frameworks give solid results. I believe in proposing new ways to do old things. I have been playing drums for over a decade, for example, and I have musical aspirations to change the way sound sounds. Further, I am working night and sometimes day on developing a business venture, which I call Snoeball. I transferred to Penn from NYU and one time, I lived in British Columbia for eight years. I have a messy room.

This essay gave me a chance to put on paper for the first time the issues that I truly believe in. My goal in writing this has been to offer readers an atypical ethical framework that goes beyond (and indeed may conflict with) commonly applied intuitive ethics. In the best case, these ideas would be the basis for real debate - for and against - which would make a lasting change in the way every person, organization and government views its ethical relationship to the rest of the world.

Click here to view PDF of Nikhil Nirmel's essay.