Center for Ethics and Public Affairs

Established in 2001, The Center for Ethics and Public Affairs coordinates and supports research, teaching, and scholarly discussion of ethics and public affairs life across academic disciplines.

The Center for Ethics and Public Affairs is devoted to the social and ethical dimensions of public affairs with an emphasis on the scholarly discussions of ethics and moral and political philosophy across a wide range of disciplines, intellectual perspectives, and schools. At the Center for Ethics, faculty, students, and visitors broadly examine critical issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, citizenship and community, and the ethics of the professions.

To provide part of the advanced research infrastructure that attracts and rewards outstanding faculty and graduate students, the Center funds both a Visiting Faculty Fellowship program and a Graduate Fellowship program. The Center also hosts an annual Faculty Seminar, where the Center’s visiting Faculty Fellows, Graduate Fellows, and invited guests present papers and discuss research-in-progress.

The Center also sponsors a very popular public lecture series as well as other events devoted to ethics and public affairs.

In addition, the Center provides support for publications devoted the study of ethics and public affairs. In particular, the Center hosts an annual PPE Conference which generates articles for the academic journal PPE, and it hosts a biennial workshop, New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility, which will provide papers for a new Oxford University Press book series, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.

During its three-year start-up phase, the Center was funded partly with grant support from the bequest that Tulane University received from the estate of Lallage Feazel Wall. It is now fully funded by the Tulane Murphy Foundation.