Does the character of a Presidential candidate matter?
The Ethics Institute will host a day-long conference devoted to this question on October 30th. John Burns (NYTimes), Madeleine Kunin (former Governor of Vermont) and Dean Lacy (Dartmouth College, Government Dept.) will participate in a panel discussion at noon followed by a public lecture at 4:30pm by award winning author Michael Beschloss.
The Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics was established in 1982 by a group of faculty who recognized the primacy of ethics in a liberal arts education. One of the founders, John Hennessey of the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, wrote:
“Morality must be a persistent concern of all professions and all professional schools. Indeed by definition one of the essential ingredients of a profession is the creation and use of an explicit set of ethics governing individual and collective behavior of the professionals in that field.”
Those words, written in 1974, take on even greater significance in 2008. Considerations of ethics have existed within specific professions and within the curriculum of professional schools from their inception, but in recent years the complexity of this consideration has grown dramatically. Where the term “professional ethics” once signified little more than questions of personal etiquette, it has more recently come to involve pressing new questions of individual and group responsibility. The rapid pace of technological and social change in the fields of medicine, engineering, education, business and law have generated new social choices and responsibilities.
The Ethics Institute exists to serve the needs of the Dartmouth community as well as the larger academic community, through research and dialogue on emerging ethical issues.
