About Us
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The Ethics Project aims to build a foundation for an ethics center for research, education, and outreach in practical ethics at The University of Texas at Austin.
The purpose of our project is to bring ethics faculty together, facilitate conversations among faculty and students across the university on topics in practical ethics, and to make an impact in the community by taking collective action with focused initiatives.
The Ethics Project holds regular monthly meetings, which bring in speakers from outside of the university to lead and generate discussion with UT faculty and students on topics in applied ethics.
We welcome anyone and everyone to join the conversation and to join our project of developing a center here at UT.
Photo by Alicia Armijo Photography
Why we need a center: The Ethics Center at The University of Texas at Austin will be transformative for the university and for the wider community.
Practical ethics will continue to languish at UT until we have a center with significant funding. UT Austin has many faculty interested in practical ethics, but very few who make it their main area of study and teaching. As a result, we are short-changing our students and the larger community. Notably, all of our undergraduate students now take at least one course with the Ethics and Leadership flag. However, the School of Undergraduate Studies only brings together faculty members who teach the courses for occasional meetings and lacks the funding to provide more robust support. Moreover, UT Austin is the home of a superb program called "Ethics Unwrapped," founded by the McCombs School of Business. Even so, the university has limited resources for expanding it and for using it in outreach programs.
Every academic field, from the arts to computer science, confronts ethical issues.