ethics news & views

Ten years of health care ethics leadership across Georgia: Celebrating the Health Care Ethics Consortium of Georgia

2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the Health Care Ethics Consortium of Georgia. The Consortium is an active partnership of organizations throughout the state, committed to addressing ethical issues that arise in providing health care for patients and families. The Consortium currently includes 74 member organizations – including hospitals, health systems, hospices, long term care communities, home health, rehabilitation centers, and insurers. The Center for Ethics supports the Consortium through office space, partial staff support, and access to ethics resources.

Religion and globalization series resumes

The Center for Ethics' lecture series on religion, ethics and globalization continues into the spring semester. Fall lectures are available for viewing on the Center's website. All lectures are free and open to the public. No RSVPs are necessary.

Servant Leadership Summer accepting intern applications until March 3

The D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership is now taking applications for its Servant Leadership Summer internships.

Servant Leadership Summer is an eight-week funded internship program designed to enable students to deepen and integrate the practical, vocational, and intellectual components of their lives. Students will spend their time working in a non-profit or socially responsible business in the Atlanta area, developing management and leadership skills and learning from ongoing interaction with practicing servant-leaders.

End-of-life decision making for children: Supporting the needs of parents

When a child is diagnosed with a life limiting illness or condition, his/her parents are thrown into one of the most painful and confusing times a family can face. Not only must they quickly learn about complex diagnoses and confusing treatment options, but they must also deal with the potential death of their child. Unfortunately, there are few resources to which a parent of a child diagnosed with a life limiting illness can turn.

BASE: Integrating residential life, ethics, and academics at Emory's Clairmont Campus

I’ve been living with my wife and two sons on Clairmont Campus this year on the same hall with 28 undergraduate students. This is a program called BASE, Bridging Academics, Service, and Ethics, a collaborative effort developed by folks at the Center for Ethics, the Program in Science & Society, and the Emory Scholars Program, with significant support from Campus Life. Our evolving concept is to create a residential college type atmosphere in which students and faculty talk and live learning.

EASL Forum Service Projects Spring 2004

Each spring semester EASL Forum students collaborate on service projects. Projects focus on one of four areas:

1. Campus change. For example, in 2001 students worked on a Living Wage campaign.
2. Community immersion. Students work together with a specific community-based organization on a joint project.
3. Civic engagement. Students design and implement program to increase civic education and participation.
4. Communication of servant leadership and/or ethics.

EASL Forum accepting spring round of student applications

In order to broaden the opportunities available to students to apply, the D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership will conduct its first round of selections for the 2004-2005 Ethics and Servant Leadership Forum this spring.

Message from the Director:
The ethics factor for our next president

What kind of role should ethics play in the choice Americans will make in the upcoming presidential election? Here I will draw on several classic approaches to ethics to suggest how those resources could serve a president and administration committed to employ moral practices and judgment in the processes of governance. Each of these ethics approaches can contribute to illumine moral dimensions of presidential policies and decisions. Taken together, perhaps they can provide useful ethical criteria for discernment and choice as we participate in the debates and the choosing of our president for 2005-2008.

I hope that our next president will have and work from an ethical grounding, and that he will choose a vice president, advisors and cabinet members who share his/her ethical commitments. It is vital that our leaders recognize that law and public policy, in the long run, must be kept accountable to fairness, justice, and compassion. How do we test candidates for an ethical compass? How do we define or identify the qualities of thought and leadership that would reflect both ethical commitment and ethical competence? What qualities and approaches should we expect from a president and administration steered by an ethical compass? I suggest the following:

Sustainable success: Interface CEO Ray Anderson on business and the environment

Ray Anderson founded Atlanta-based Interface, Inc. in 1973 to provide modular, self-adhesive carpeting to business customers. Interface is now the global leader in commercial floor coverings and related interior products.

As recounted in Anderson's book Mid-Course Corrections, in 1994 customers began to ask what Interface was doing for the environment. A global task force was organized to research and promote Interface's environmental position to its customers. The task force asked Anderson to make the keynote speech at its inaugural meeting. He had no idea what to say.

Choosing vocation: An open letter from the Dominican Republic

My dear students,

Our conversations of this past semester, across cups of coffee and tired burnt-orange chair pillows have been on my mind this holiday break. The country I am visiting this season keeps a pace that allows time for reflection and silence, two things lacking in the modern North American life, and issues of ethics and vocation have been able to take root and nest in me deeply.

Moral education: Evaluating Emory's efforts alongside peer institutions

Educators miss a critical opportunity if they assume that students are fully formed moral beings by the time they enter college or university, according to the research team from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The college years are perhaps the most crucial period for a solid grounding in moral and civic education, but most educational institutions have pushed these concerns from the center of campus life to the margins and have segregated them to the extracurricular realm.

Transparent democracy: Discerning the shape of emerging global governance

A growing corporate “transparency movement” and growing global civil society—both enabled by information technology—will pull globalization into the side of the good. So says Ann Florini in The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World.

New Emory Mini-Ethics School:
Monday evenings from February 16 to March 22

What is the good life and how do you live it? Is there such a thing as evil, and if so what is its nature? How does ethics relate to vocation and professionalism? What are the ethical implications of new biomedical research like genetics and business scandals like Enron? What does ethics have to say about the state of civil society in America?

Taught by the faculty and staff of the Center for Ethics, the Mini-Ethics School is offered through the Emory Center for Lifelong Learning (formerly Evening at Emory). The short course is intended for interested adult learners who wish to expand their understanding of ethical issues.

Cost for the six sessions is $90, and enrollment arrangements can be made through the Emory Center for Lifelong Learning at (404) 727-6000.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

February 16: What is ethics? How do we do ethics?
February 23: What is the good life? How do we determine our vocation?
March 1: Evil, genocide, and terrorism.
March 8: Health care ethics, bioethics, genetics, and medical error.
March 15: Ethics and the professions. Business and legal ethics.
March 22: To be determined from student input.

EASL summer intern to receive Emory Humanitarian Award

Lynn McBrien will be awarded this year's Emory Humanitarian Award on January 28, in part because of her participation in the 2003 Servant Leadership Summer program, sponsored by the D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership.

McBrien served as a summer camp counselor, wrote curriculum, and led field trips for the children's program at Refugee Family Services in Clarkston. She hopes to complete her PhD in Educational Studies at Emory in spring 2005. She is currently an adjunct instructor in educational psychology at the University of Georgia.

The Humanitarian Award is given each year to Emory students for outstanding contributions to the Emory and Atlanta communities.