Confessions of a {Pre-Med} Pre-Law Major
Until I came to college I was socially and educationally engineered by my parents. Throughout high school, I was a pure automaton, directly programmed to take the maximum number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses. My parents felt they had figured out the exact calculus for getting me into a top-tier college and then into a great medical school. Being totally apathetic to anything beyond my weekend curfew, even to my possible future career, I played along. I never questioned why I had to take certain courses and only did community service work at the hospital because my parents made me. Did I do these things because of an excessive trust in my parents? A concession to futility? Complete arrogance? Who knows?
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Director’s Note: Summer 2009
From its inception, the Kenan institute for Ethics has sought to combine experience and analysis so that each informs the other and both provide opportunities for intellectual and moral growth. This combination requires a diverse community of faculty, students, and practitioners who encounter each other in and out of the classroom. Read more »
In Search of Goodness
What is “goodness?” Webster’s Dictionary defines it as a state of “moral excellence” or “virtue,” but fails to capture the elusive quality of the word. Is something that’s good always good? Can something or someone be mostly but not completely good? Can bad things become good? In the end, it seems that while we can’t say exactly what goodness is, we believe we know it when we see it, and Professor Ruth Grant wants to know exactly why that is. Read more »
Doing Ethics: Kieran Healy
Kieran Healy will join Duke in fall 2009 as associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Kenan institute for Ethics. He is the author of Last Best Gifts (2006), a book about the social organization of blood and organ donation in the United States and Europe. Other published work has focused on the relationship between information technology and cultural policy, wage growth, and unemployment in labor markets; debates about structure and agency in social theory; and the moral order of market society. Ethics in Action editor Aimee Rodriguez talked with Healy from his current home in California. Read more »
Moral Development: What, How, and Why?
Character education programs—those seeking to influence students’ ethical sensibilities—are typically seen as a positive component of any K-12 curriculum. They look to promote honesty, integrity, ethical thought, reflection, and a host of other attributes that fall under the category of moral development. But what constitutes “character education,” and how do we know if such programs are successful?
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In Brief
“We’ve had a tsunami of excuses, now we need a tsunami of honest.” — William Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, at a discussion with Duke students, faculty, and staff about the culture of greed and excess on Wall Street that contributed significantly to the financial crisis Read more »
Ethics in Action is published twice a year by the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Download the current issue [PDF]. We invite your feedback and suggestions. Click on the individual articles above to comment, or email us at kie@duke.edu. You can also join the Ethics in Action mailing list and see the archives of previous newsletters.
