Upcoming In Person and Virtual APPE Events

Designed for business, nonprofit, and government leaders, it will focus on ethical reasoning and deliberation in order to:

• Help leaders make tough ethical decisions
• Provide them with tools for talking through ethical disagreements, and
• Promote a culture of ethical responsibility within their businesses and organizations.

This program has been made possible through a grant from Indiana Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a grant from the Greencastle Walmart Distribution Center. Learn more.

Ethically Curious Book Club (Oct. 15, 12 to 1 p.m. ET)
The Ethically Curious Book Club is reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and will host its second of two book club meetings later this month. APPE Member Deni Elliott will moderate the discussion.

If you haven't joined the Bookclub officially, you'll need to sign up and join us on Bookclubs.com to get more information, including the Zoom links.
 

Ethics Roundtable: The Politics of Differences: Can Conservatives and Liberals Have a Conversation? (Oct. 16, 1 to 2 p.m. ET)
APPE is proud to partner with Felician University to host virtual Ethics Roundtable discussions that are free and open to the public; no RSVPs are required. Ethics Roundtables are opportunities to engage one another on current, ethical issues in order to generate meaningful dialogue.

This roundtable aims to explore the ethical foundations and challenges of bridging the ideological divide. Participants will engage in a nuanced discussion about the barriers to effective communication, including media influence, cognitive biases, and social fragmentation. This roundtable seeks to move beyond mere tolerance, aiming instead for genuine engagement and collaboration in addressing shared societal issues. By examining the roots of political differences and the ethical imperatives for dialogue, this event aspires to contribute to a more cohesive and inclusive public discourse.

Get the Zoom Link.

Daily rates range from $100 to $240 for members and non-members

Pre-Conference rates range from $25 to $190 for types of offerings and member/non-member rates.

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Reminders

The 2024 Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Regional competitions will be held across the country starting next month and registration is now open and cases are available.

Visit appeieb.org at any time to find the following:

• 2024 Regional Case Set
• 2024 Regional Competition Registration
• Regional, National Rules and Etiquette Guidelines
• Moderator and Judge Training Materials
• The ABCs of the Ethics Bowl
• Resources for using Ethics Bowl in the Classroom
• Information about how to start a team
• Information about the APPE IEB® National Competition (including a video of last year's final match)
• And more!

Update: Research Integrity Education Strategies

A group of APPE members continues to work on follow up strategies that were outlined in the report APPE released earlier this year titled "Improving Research Integrity: The Role of Accountability Across the Research Enterprise." This report was released after the National Dialogue on the State of Research Integrity Education that APPE convened last fall, and included strategies to strengthen the network of accountability within and between relevant partners, such as federal agencies, research institutions, accreditation bodies, and professional societies.

Most recently, APPE members Lisa M Lee, Trisha Phillips, and Dena Plemmons met with representatives from four federal agencies: The National Institutes of Health (NIH), The National Science Foundation (NSF), The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) and The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to discuss the report and how federal agencies could reframe their commitment to the responsible conduct of research as a positive and broad obligation, help hold research institutions and their leadership accountable, and more.

APPE Member Spotlight 

Name: Deni Elliott
Title/Organization: Professor Emeritus; Former Eleanor Poynter Jamison Chair in Media Ethics and Press Policy
University of South Florida
APPE Member since: 1991

You are a founding APPE member and have stayed active since the early years--helping to draft the charter and bylaws, creating the "Book Room" at the annual conference, and serving in a variety of other roles, notably with the Ethics Bowl community. Why is it important to you that APPE continues to exist and thrive?
How people should act toward one another, other species, and the natural world has been on the mind of philosophers at least since the time of Socrates. Yet, it wasn’t until the 20th Century that scholars of professions, policy, and societal roles began to examine questions of accountability, conventional behavior and ideal action systematically within the scope of their practices. APPE founders recognized the need to weave together the rigor of philosophical analysis with the reality of people engaged in real-life decision-making. From the start, practitioners were as essential to APPE’s work as were scholars who apply theory to practice. APPE members, and others who create interdisciplinary understanding, are increasingly important. In our small, shared global environment, technology and variations of human experience create divisions that can feel impossible to overcome. APPE provides tools to bridge differences through identification of similarities as well as differences in human capacities; APPE members model how to agree in disagreement about fundamental beliefs.

Most recently, you have supported APPE by helping to bridge a partnership with the National Ethics Project. Can you tell us about the work you've done at NEP and why APPE was the natural "home" for the materials?
APPE is the natural home for the National Ethics Project outcomes as NEP research consortium members have created a foundation for creative evidence-based research in ethics education. In the 8 years between 2016 and 2023, scholars from a variety of disciplines and institutions examined trends in ethics education in U.S. higher education. Funded by small grants from the Spencer Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, and support from our home institutions, NEP members created the first population-wide and deep-dive campus study since The Hastings Center completed the previous such study in 1980. The Hasting Center’s committee work, with an eye toward best practices,  spawned a series of monographs, a book of essays on ethics in higher education, and a series of summer workshops on the teaching of ethics in various professions and practices. The National Ethics Project members increasingly found our research and conversations focused on alignment. For example, we studied how institutional messages align with availability of ethical education in the curriculum, outside the classroom, and in campus-community interaction. We looked for evidence to see how expressed ethics intention of the institution (such as “develop responsible leaders”) looked in practice. If the institution claimed to welcome people with disabilities, we wondered why audio description and closed captioning were not evident on the website. We developed a method for determining what counted as an “ethics” class and asked how ethics instructors’ learning goals aligned with their students’ expectations. By sharing our tools and techniques on the APPE website, we hope to encourage other scholars to do more research in the field and to take leadership in encouraging their own campuses to cut down on the dissonance created by inconsistency in messaging and in practical application. Incidentally, I helped teach one of the Hastings Center workshops in the early 1980s while I was still in graduate school. What I learned from those foundational scholars--Sissela Bok, Dan Callahan, Art Caplan, Chuck Culver, Lou Hodges, Amy Gutmann--among others gave me background that was helpful in bringing APPE and the NEP into being.

You're also moderating our current Ethically Curious Book Club selection, Braiding Sweetgrass. For those who missed the last meeting but want to join the second (and final) one for the book, what should they expect at the next conversation?
Please come to the conversation with a paragraph or two that resonated for you. Our discussion on how human-environmental interaction can help both to flourish grew naturally from our contributions in our first conversation.

What advice do you have for newer APPE members and how to take advantage of what APPE has to offer them?
NETWORK! The relationships I formed through APPE improved my research, my teaching, and my life in general. There is always someone who will help you think through an idea, or tell you when you have missed an important element. You will learn the most from collaborators outside of the field you know best.

What are you most looking forward to, personally or professionally, over the next few months?
I found a publisher for my new NON-ACADEMIC book, Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself. I hope to spend the next 20 years or so writing books that regular people want to read. Those books will be informed by my career in ethics education, of course!

Ethics in the News:

• Is It OK to Leave the U.S. if the Wrong Candidate Becomes President? (The New York Times Magazine)
• Medical Drama ‘Midnight Family’ Tackles Life, Death, And Ethics In Mexico’s Ambulance Crisis (Forbes)

APPE Members in the News
APPE Member Mohammad Hosseini recently attended the Summit of the Future at the UN headquarters in New York City and was featured on several panels: one about Trust in Science (Here is a recording of the panel hosted by Latif Nasser, the host of the RadioLab podcast and Connected show on Netflix) and one about Building Bridges through Science Diplomacy (viewable here).

Jobs & Events
Have you seen our job and event emails? Limited free access to post jobs and events of interest in the weekly email (as well as in the Info Hub) is a benefit of membership. If you're a member and would like to submit something for consideration, just login to the Member portal, go to Job & Event Postings and click "add." Non-members can access the jobs and events by creating a login but must pay a fee to list positions and events. Reach out to contact@appe-ethics.org for more info.

We Want to Hear From You! To be featured as a member spotlight or if you have news to share, including books published, send us an email at membernews@appe-ethics.org.

Ethics Bowl Case to Consider

This is Not Your Grandparent's Seance (Regional Ethics Bowl Competition Case Set, 2024)

It's the season of horror movies and pop culture's fascination with spooky beings that come back from the dead. But what if bringing someone "back to life" wasn't scary, but healing? That's what some companies are arguing as they program their deepfake technology to "behave like dead loved ones" allowing people closure, for example, by saying goodbye, expressing their love, or sharing other sentiments they may never have gotten the chance to express.

In an Ethics Bowl case from this year's regional set, students are prompted to think about the role of technology--especially artificial intelligence--in our lives, and also about exploiting grief, if it's possible to harm the dead, and more.

Read the full case set here (#10), and discuss with your colleagues, friends, and loved ones, maybe even while you're curled up on the couch watching a scary movie together.