While research offers us the chance to generate new ethics-related knowledge in particular topic areas and education allows us to promote ethical reflection, deliberation, and commitment in formal settings through courses, curricular and co-curricular programs, and workshops, “practice” is what enables us to engage with on-the-ground ethical issues in order to serve society’s needs.

We embrace the opportunity to bring the core competencies of a university-based ethics institute to bear on ethical issues in order to learn more about, to inform, and to shape the choices we make every day – as students, parents, voters, business leaders, and policy makers.

Our practice can take a variety of forms. At Duke, we engage students in practice through extracurricular activities such as dinners and discussions at faculty members’ homes, public discussions and debate ontopics such as torture or the effectiveness of humanitarian efforts, and study abroad experiences that allow them to enhance their cultural, political, and ethical understanding of globalization and migration. Practice can also take the form of curricular innovations to best convey information through formal educational settings.

Beyond Duke, we partner with businesses, think tanks, non-profits, and policy-makers on a local, national, and international level. For instance, we engage business leaders on issues of corporate citizenship conflict of interest, and institutional governance. We engage think tanks and non-profits on environmental ethics and immigration policy solutions. In this more externally focused work, we seek to play the role of honest broker and agenda-setter in partnership with organizations that are better suited to implement policy and practices (i.e., universities abroad, NGOs, think tanks, and professional associations).