"Georgetown is taking its history and culture of ethics, its courage with hard conversations, as well as its storied innovation with pedagogy, to help found the field of digital ethics."
— Maggie Little, Director, Ethics Lab
Ethics Lab is built for delivering on Georgetown’s commitments — preparing students for moral leadership and serving the world through ethical guidance — given a context of rapidly changing and complex issues.
Increasingly, universities need new models for adjusting their curriculum in response to a rapidly changing landscape. Ethics Lab’s approach to building courses — with team design, faculty freed from departmental silos, and continual innovation — allows it to move quickly to respond to the most urgent priorities, and to focus on the skills and knowledge that will prepare students for what lies ahead.
A scalable model for integrating ethics across the campus
To scaffold students toward a socially responsible mindset, it is not enough for them to take an ethics class: ethics needs to be woven into the fabric of their majors. Ethics Lab’s unique approach to embedded ethics works with host faculty to co-design exercises and co-lead discussions across the arc of a major, to bring alive the moral stakes in their professions, provide tools to confront and fully engage with complexity, and model a commitment to ethical leadership.
A resource for ethics innovation
Profound changes in emerging technology and social capacities have moved faster than our ethical understandings. Progress requires not just consultation with established ethical frameworks, but help in building new ones. Our approach combines deep ethical expertise, strong knowledge of technical fields and real world contexts, and methods adapted from design to help industry leaders, government agencies, legislative bodies, and researchers find pathways of socially responsible choice.