Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics seeks to advance teaching and research on ethical issues in public life. Widespread ethical lapses of leaders in government, business and other professions prompt demands for more and better moral education. More fundamentally, the increasing complexity of public life - the scale and range of problems and the variety of knowledge required to deal with them - make ethical issues more difficult, even for men and women of good moral character. Not only are the ethical issues we face more complex, but the people we face them with are more diverse, increasing the frequency and intensity of our ethical disagreements.

Given these changes in the United States and in societies around the globe, the Center seeks to help meet the growing need for teachers, scholars, and leaders who address questions of moral choice across many of the professions and in public life more generally, and promotes a perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. We explore the connection between the problems that professionals confront and the social and political structures in which they act. More generally, we address the ethical issues that all citizens face as they make the choices that profoundly affect the present and future of their societies in our increasingly interdependent world.

We began with a conviction and a problem. The conviction was that reflection on the moral assumptions and foundations of practical affairs is both intellectually worthwhile and socially valuable. Philosophy in this broad sense, we thought, could contribute to identifying and understanding the ethical issues in public life, including those in the professions. The problem was that few philosophers knew enough about professional life, and few professionals enough about philosophy, to teach and write effectively on ethical issues in professional and public life more generally. For more than two decades, under the leadership of Dennis F. Thompson, the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy, the Center made significant strides in breaking down these barriers through its rich offers of fellowships, public lectures, workshops and conferences.

In 2009, with a mandate to expand the scope of the Center's mission and work, current director Lawrence Lessig launched the Edmond J. Safra Research Lab, a major initiative designed to address fundamental problems of ethics in way that is of practical benefit to institutions of government and society around the world. In pursuit of this goal, and to strengthen and expand the mission generally, the Center welcomes scholars and researchers from a wide range of disciplines across academia, industry, and government.

The Center stands at the core of what is now a well-established movement at Harvard and throughout the world that is giving ethics a prominent place in the curriculum and on the agenda of research. The Center encourages the activities of the professional schools, and provides a forum for university-wide communication and collaboration. Each of the faculties has begun its own courses and centers, and has developed its own group of scholars specializing in ethics. More than twenty fellows of the Center have gone on to hold teaching appointments at Harvard.

The Center has also been actively involved in the growing ethics movement beyond Harvard, providing information and advice to many other centers at colleges and universities throughout the United States and in other countries. We supported the founding of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the first national organization to provide teachers and scholars of ethics in many different fields with a medium for discussing their common problems and for collaborating on curricular and research projects. Fellows from the Center have gone on to teach ethics at more than 80 colleges and universities in the United States and in many foreign countries, including Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, South Africa, and Switzerland. These successes would not have been possible without the financial support of many individuals and institutions.