What is a good life and how should it be lived? How does our identity shape our morality? What does ethics mean in the face of power, violence, and cruelty?

They’re big questions, among life’s most important. Duke University’s Ethics Certificate Program offers you an opportunity to examine these issues in depth—to test your convictions, deepen your knowledge, and explore your ambitions. The curriculum offers a robust examination of ethics in moral traditions, art, literary imagination and everyday life that reflect localized knowledge and experience across cultures as well as the influence of a globalized world.  It’s a rigorous course of study designed to prepare you for life—both personally and professionally.

Begin with our signature Gateway Course, The Challenges of Living an Ethical Life, which draws on ancient and modern texts including dramas, autobiographies, and political commentaries to explore fundamental ethical questions. Then, choose six courses from a wide range of selections in philosophical, religious, and practical ethics, and in ethics in historical and cultural context, to build the program that best complements your chosen field of study. Finish with the Capstone Course, a research seminar where you will complete a research paper that integrates your special concerns into the broader issues of living an ethical life.

As you advance through the program’s multidisciplinary coursework, you’ll learn how ethical issues have been framed across history and cultures, and how ethical challenges are being negotiated in practice by policymakers, researchers, doctors, journalists, and others. You’ll develop the knowledge and critical-thinking skills to fully engage in ethical debates. You’ll become part of a diverse intellectual community of peers, graduate students, and faculty scholars. And you will build a clear commitment to ethical thought and action that will serve you well throughout your life and career.

“The Ethics Certificate Program helps students to analyze the ethical challenges of everyday life, to see the world from an ethical perspective different than their own, and to engage the Gateway Course authors—Sartre, Job, Plato, James Baldwin, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Sophocles, Arendt, and Melville—in a moral dialogue that will continue throughout their lives.” – Professor Peter Euben

Download the Handbook for the Ethics Certificate Program

Download a one-page flier on the Ethics Certificate Program