Teaching Ethics

published on March 15, 2022

The Mission before the Mission: Toward an Ethics of Ethics Centers

The goal of this article is to offer a three-step approach for a systematic discussion on the procedures, roles, and responsibilities of ethics centers. First, we identify three levels of responsibility: scientific, organizational/institutional, societal/global. Second, we propose that justice (as outlined in the concept of Sustainable Development), contextual pluralism, and a process orientation serve as normative foundations for developing ethics centers’ mission. Third, we outline and emphasize the crucial role that teaching plays in the work of ethics centers, as well as in other academic (and non-academic) institutions. As an overarching perspective, we suggest two complementary kinds of approaches for the role of ethics especially in scientific research: i) ethics becoming a constitutional part of any research (and teaching) project. ii) specific in-depth interdisciplinary projects with ethics being the research (and teaching) topic.