Spotlight on Ethics is a regular showcase of innovative ethics programming. Our most recent spotlight is highlighted on the right, and an archive of previous spotlights can be found below.
Ethics isn’t solely the purview of scholars. While most ethicists would agree with this claim, many struggle to engage the non-academic population in ethical discussion, even when that population lives in the zip code — the town-gown divide. Western Michigan University’s Center for the Study of Ethics in Society has geared their outreach to address this divide head on.
The Roger Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington and Lee University (W&L) is concerned with advancing dialogue, teaching, and research on ethical issues. While the Mudd Center implements curricula and hosts public events for each of the university’s schools, its unique contribution is the annual Undergraduate Ethics Conference–the only conference of its kind in the country dedicated to the academic study of ethical issues.
The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities maintains a strong commitment to addressing issues in clinical practice and biomedical research from the perspectives of ethics and law. Through a yearly Reproductive Ethics Conference, they have taken on the charge of championing reproductive rights.
The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology was founded in 1976 originally focusing on ethics in the professions. Recently, the Center launched a new project, Climate Change & Ethics, that questions our ethical assumptions around climate justice by bringing scholars and activists together to investigate the presuppositions in the current climate change debate.
Misinformation can acquire power through repetition, creating an illusion of truth. Such dangers lead the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics in their three-prong approach to spreading the truth this election season.
“People don’t always know how to talk about ethics,” said Piers Turner, the Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values (CEHV) at Ohio State University. “But there is a hankering for ethics once they look at it with something that interests them.”