The Center for Ethics and Public Affairs

Our Mission

The Center for Ethics and Public Affairs provides coordination and support for research, teaching and scholarly discussion of ethics, moral and political philosophy, and the ethical dimensions of public and professional life across academic disciplines and professional schools.

The idea driving the Center is to provide Tulane faculty, students, visiting scholars, and public figures a place to examine critical issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, citizenship and community, the ethical management of organizations, and the ethics of the professions. Because questions of ethical understanding elude disciplinary specialization, the work of the Center will be carried on as a collaboration of faculty from Tulane’s several professional schools and colleges.

By fashioning a bottom-up alliance among multiple schools, colleges, and disciplines, the Center intends to foster greater interaction between faculty with competence in moral and political thought and those with competence in professional education. Its programs include faculty seminars, conferences, and lectures. Some of these are designed to bring distinguished visitors to the University, others for internal, university-wide exchange of ideas among Tulane faculty and students on topics of more than disciplinary interest.

Excellence

To provide part of the advanced research infrastructure that attracts and rewards out-standing faculty and students, the Center supports both Faculty Fellowships and Graduate Fellowships in Ethics and Public Affairs.

Funding

The Center also represents part of a strategy for spreading the intellectual and financial resources of the Murphy Institute more broadly across the university. In coordinating and helping to fund the establishment of the Center, the Murphy Institute has broadened its mission to include moral and political questions that not only are basic to the study of political economy, but are — and must remain — at the heart of Tulane’s academic mission.