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Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics meeting in a room with a whiteboard behind them.

Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics

The Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics can take you on a starship to explore and colonize other planets; enhance you so that what you thought was essential to your humanity is replaced with technologically engineered elements; engage you in war games fought with drone and cyber attacks that violate the traditions of just warfare. Why? So that you confront in real time and in realistic settings and in provocative thought experiments the extensive ethical challenges that characterize or will characterize the 21st century, to prepare you to be an ethical participant in creating the world in which you will live and not a bewildered bystander.

The mission of this Arizona State University center is to enable humanity to develop the ethics and institutions to adapt to the world that is increasingly impacted at all scales, from human health to climate change, by human decisions. It is to improve the ethical awareness and understanding of people and thereby their responsible decision-making and behavior, individually and collectively, in the public and private sector. Nothing is more crucial for humans to sustain the essential conditions for living fulfilling and fruitful lives. A society dominated by unethical, irresponsible, selfish individuals and organizations not only is an unpleasant place to live, it is not a society that can long endure.

The center core programmatic clusters are in ethics and emerging technologies, public health and healthcare, ethics education and innovation, human rights and cross cultural communication, applied sustainability. The center also invests in public outreach, including support for students through the Barrett Scholarship Initiative.

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