Current Activities
Call for Papers
10th International Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum
Hosted by Towson University
at the Baltimore Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel
Baltimore, Maryland
November 14-16, 2008
The Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum (SEAC) picks conference themes to encourage faculty from the relevant areas to submit papers, panels, or other standard forms of presentation, but submissions may speak to any issue regarding ethics across the curriculum. Questions about possible submissions should be sent to the directors.
Conference Theme: The Ethics of the Family
What is a family? What are "family values"? Is marriage a civil contract or something more? Should persons of the same sex be allowed to marry or raise children? Is there a natural right to have children? Is there a right to have as many children as one chooses? What is child abuse? Should we license parents? What are the rights and responsibilities of children (if any)? Is adultery always wrong? Is voluntary no-fault divorce always justified? How do family relationships differ between cultures or across times? These and other questions prompt The Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum to invite paper submissions from scholars and practitioners in Philosophy, Family Studies, Public Policy & Law, Sociology, Psychology, Social Work, History, and other related fields dealing with ethical issues connected to the definition of a family, the rights and responsibilities of parents and children, the ethical and/or legal relationship between the family and the state, intergenerational justice, gay marriage, adultery, divorce, family violence, etc.
Submissions (either papers or abstracts) should be formatted for blind review and sent by September 1st, 2008 to the Secretary-Treasurer of the Society, Donna Werner, DWerner@stlcc.edu or by hard copy to Dr. Donna Werner, Philosophy Department (HE 103), St. Louis Community College, Meramec, 11333 Big Bend Boulevard, St. Louis MO 63122-5799. Phone: 314.984.7934.
We will make decisions about papers as soon as we can after they arrive. So the sooner you submit your abstract or paper or panel suggestion, the sooner you will hear from us regarding its suitability for the conference.
The Society publishes Teaching Ethics, and papers for conferences may be considered for publication either in that journal or in a possible anthology on the ethics of family life.
February 22, 2008 Dr. Vivian Weil, Director of CSEP, lead a pannel discussion, entitled “Is Nanoethics Anything in Particular?” at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Seventeenth Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. CSEP fellows Robert Ladenson was also a panelist in the panel, “Engaging Ethics in American Archaeology, and Michael Davis in the discussion, “Ethics Education for Graduate Programs in Geographic Information Science and Technology.”
February 21, 2008 - thirty-two teams, representing different colleges and universities, participated in the IEB National Championship Competition, which took place in San Antonio, in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). The team from Clemson University (SC) emerged as the winner in a superb final match with the runner-up team from Wright State University (OH).
Past Projects and Events
December 1, 2007 - The IIT Ethics Bowl Team placed second in the Upper Midwest Region Ethics Bowl. Team members Elena Davis, Linda Goldstein, Tim Nuccio and Julia Rybakova will be continuing to the National Competition on February 21, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas. For more information, see the IIT Today announcement.
October 4, 2007 - Michael Davis began the Western Michigan University's Center for the Study of Ethics in Society's fall lecture series with the talk, "Of All Professions Begging is the Best: Some Problems in the Study of Professions." For information on this talk and others in the series, see the article, "Fall Ethics Lecture Address Wide Range of Issues" that appeared in WMU News.
August 9, 2007 - President Bush signed the America Creating Opportunties for Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science (COMPETES) Act. This act requires institutions recieving awards from the National Scienc Foundation to provide training in the responsible conduct of research and research ethics to undergraduates, graduate and postdoctoral students. For more information, see the U.S. Office of Research Integrity's September 2007 newsletter.
August 2007 - Articles describing the NanoEthicsBank and the IEEE/ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics archive appeared in the Summer 2007 edition of the Professional Ethics Report.
July 2007 - Vivian Weil's presentation, "Public Engagement and Public Trust" presented on February 6, 2006, was included as further reading in the major report, EPA and Nanotechnology: Oversight for the 21st Century by J. Clarence Davies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar's Project on Emerging Technologies. Click here to see the report.
July 2007 - CSEP has made the full text of the Module Series in Applied Ethics available for interested students, scholars, and instructors. The series was produced by the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions in under a grant from the Exxon Education Foundation. This series is intended for use in a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education programs in such areas as science and/or technology public policy, and professional ethics courses in engineering, business, and computer science.
Call for Papers 2007 Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering
On October 19, 2006 a working group on Philosophy and Engineering was convened at MIT to discuss the need for greater interaction between philosophers and engineers. The result was an agreement to move forward with a workshop to encourage reflection on engineering, engineers, and technology by philosophers and engineers.
The first Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering (WPE-2007) will be held in the Department of Philosophy, TUDelft, 29-31 October 2007 (Monday-Wednesday). Sessions will include talks by invited and selected speakers as well as a number of special sessions.
Extended abstracts (1-2 pages) are invited for submission in one of three tracks or demes:
•Philosophy (Deme chair: Carl Mitcham)
•Philosophical Reflections of Practitioners (Deme chair: Billy V. Koen)
•Ethics (Deme co-chairs: Michael Davis & P. Aarne Vesilind)
Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop committee. Those accepted for presentation at the workshop will be scheduled for 30-minutes talks (inclusive of Q&A) at the workshop. All accepted abstracts will published online on the workshop web site (http://www-illigal.ge.uiuc.edu/wpe), and a printed volume will be assembled following the workshop in conjunction with a major publisher.
Extended abstracts should be submitted (in doc or pdf format) by 17
August 2007 to deg@uiuc.edu. Notification of acceptance
will be sent by 17 September 2007. For more information visit the WPE web
site.
May 1, 2007: Launch of the NanoEthicsBank: CSEP has recently launched the NanoEthicsBank, a resource for researchers, scholars, students, and the general public who are interested in the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology. See Poster for Event
March 2007: The CSEP web site was mentioned in an article entitled "Smart Stops on the Web" in the March 2007 issues of the Journal of Accountancy as a source for finding codes of ethics for various professions, learning how to write a code of ethics, and for sample business ethics cases. (p.25)
February 28, 2007: The Ethics Center Library has created an account with del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that allows users to store and share their latest discoveries on the web, and citeulike.org, a social bookmarking service for academics and scholars that also captures bibliographic information. These accounts will be updated regularly by the librarian to share bookmarks on professional ethics, nanotechnology and ethics, and other links related to CSEP's goal to promote research and teaching on practical moral problems in the professions. Add CSEP to your network if you already have a del.icio.us or citeulike.org account, or create your own free account through these tagging services.
February 23, 2007 - Director Vivian Weil will moderate a panel discussion entitled "Is NanoEthics Anything in Particular?" at the annual meeting for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in San Antonio Texas at 10 a.m. For more information about the meeting, please see the preliminary program.
February 22, 2007: The IEB National Championship Competition took in Cincinnati, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). The team from the University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL) emerged as the winner in a friendly but intense competition of the top thirty two teams from eight regional ethics bowls that took place throughout the United States in the fall of 2006.
February 15, 2007: Director Vivian Weil has received an invitation from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). As a previous member of the technical advisory group (TAG) appointed to inform PCAST in its review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2005, she has been invited to continue service as an expert resource in preparation for the 2007 review of the NNI. The new nanotechnology technical advisory group being assembled is known as nTAG, and consists of experts representing a range of disciplines, such as bionanotechnology, drug delivery, biosensors, MEMS, sensing, chemistry, physics, business, commercial and government.
February 8, 2007 : CSEP celebrated its 30th anniversary with members of the IIT community. John Rowe, Chairman of the IIT Board of Trustees; and Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Exelon spoke on his experiences as a participant in public controversy over energy and environmental policies. The lecture was followed by a short demonstration of Ethics Bowl, an intercollegiate tournament invented at CSEP by Robert Ladenson. Thanks to the many people who attended this event!
January 19, 2007: Robert Ladenson, Faculty Associate of CSEP and founder of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, was selected by the American Philosophical Society and the Philosophy Documentation Center as the winner of the APA/PDC 2006 prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs. The thirteenth annual Ethics Bowl national competition will be held at the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in Cincinnati on Thursday February 22, 2007. Please see the Ethics Bowl homepage for more information.
December 2, 2006: IIT Ethics Bowl Team placed second in Midwest regional competition of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, and will be going to the national level competition in February of 2007. The IIT Ethics Bowl team members are: Vaibhav Agrawal, Waseem Ahmed, Robert Brozyna, and Elena Davis. The team sponsor is IIT Philosophy Professor Robert Ladenson For more information, see the article in the December 7th edition of IIT Today.
August 2006: A 3-year National
Science Foundation grant
for $238,663 has been awarded to IIT with PI Michael
Davis (CSEP/Humanities), and co-PIs Vivian Weil (CSEP/Humanities)
and Kathryn
Riley (Chair,
Humanities). The grant will be administered by CSEP. "Ethics
in the Details" will involve collaboration with engineering faculty
and graduate students at IIT, UIC, and Howard.
The grant will fund workshops that teach faculty and students to develop "micro-insertions"--small
ways to add ethical issues to problems in the graduate engineering
curricula. The grant team will also assess this method in graduate
courses and a nanotechnology research lab. In addition, the grant will
support development of a Web-based "Ethics In-Basket" to
disseminate ethics problems to engineering faculty worldwide.
June 2006: As part of the NSF funded project, NanoConnection to Society, CSEP released a pilot version of the NanoEthicsBank, an electronically accessible database containing codes, policies, reports, and scholarly work relating to ethics and nanotechnology. Please visit the test version of the NanoEthicsBank and give us your feedback.
May 2006: CSEP Director Vivian Weil was interviewed in IIT Magazine's Spring 2006 issue cover story "A Matter of Scale" on the possible social, ethical, and legal impacts of nanotechnology research and development. The full article can be read by clicking here.
6 March 2006: Forty colleges and universities from across the United States participated in the Twelfth Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl that took place in Jacksonville Florida in conjunction with the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics annual meeting. The Ethics Bowl was started by Professor Robert Ladenson in 1997. Teams for the 2007 national competition will be selected through a series of regional competitions.
3 March 2006: CSEP's Codes of Ethics Online collection was mentioned in a Colorado Springs Gazette story about web sites that include information on business ethics.
23 January 2006: CSEP Director Vivian Weil was invited to be on the Nanoethics Group Advisory Board, a network of notable experts who seek to study the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology.
Winter 2005-Summer 2006: CSEP begins building the NanoEthicsBank, an electronically accessible database containing codes, policies, reports, and scholarly work relating to ethics and nanotechnology. The NanoEthicsBank is part of the larger Harvard-based database NanoConnection to Society which, when completed, will be an important resource for researchers, scholars and the general public on current and potential effects of nanotechnology on society. The NanoConnection to Society database is part of the Nanotechnology in Society Project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Nanotechnology Initiative.
Fall, 2004: CSEP announced the launch of a new portion of our web site dedicated to the examination of ethical issues in emerging technologies. The section includes a bibliography on ethics in biomedical engineering, specifically regarding the development of a neural visual prosthesis. It also includes a section on print and online resources that examine ethical issues in nanotechnology.
From 1997-2003: IIT hosted colleagues in institutions across the country, and even internationally, for the Ethics Across Curriculum summer workshops, which were generously funded by the National Science Foundation.
2001: CSEP's librarian, Elizabeth, received a grant from the Chicago Library System to hold two workshops for the newly formed Chicago Area Solo Librarians(CASL) group. Please visit our site!
June 1996: CSEP received a grant from National Science Foundation to put our collection of over 850 codes of ethics on the World-Wide Web. Please visit the Codes of Ethics Online collection. .
CSEP also helps to support the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl which is held every year to entertain and challenge students from IIT and other campuses.
Click here to see pictures of some of our events!
