Institutional Ethics

DARTMOUTH'S ETHICS INSTITUTE, established in the early 1980s, is part think tank, counseling service, and place where students can deepen an interest in ethical questions. According to religion professor and Ethics Institute director Ronald Green, faculty at the College, the Medical School, Tuck, and Thayer created the institute to foster collabora tive research and teaching about ethics.

Since its start the Institute has tried to untangle thorny ethical questions. It developed guidelines, for example, for psychiatrists troubled by ethical controversies surrounding the use of shock therapy in the treatment of depression. More recently the Institute has been sorting through the ethical implications of the rapidly expanding field of genetics. The Institute's collaborative research has led to undergraduate and professiOnal-school courses in biomedical ethics, death and dying, and aspects of business ethics, augmenting courses in moral philosophy and ethical theory already offered by Dartmouth's philosophy and religion departments. "Though we aim to improve students' skills in moral reasoning, and their understanding of the complexity of ethical issues, we always adhere to a standard of objective scholarship and research," says Green. "Our aim is not to indoctrinate but to raise questions and to suggest different ways of answering them."

And occasionally provide a public forum. Last November the Ethics Institute worked with the Tucker Foundation to bring the Association of Moral Education to campus for workshops and discussions on moral development in young people. Open to Dartmouth students, the workshops and discussions attracted more than 150 scholars from around the world.

Does Green believe that Dartmouth educates the whole person? "I think we are beginning to." he says. "There's a long way to go, and we have much to learn about how to do it better. I would like to see an ethics or moral-reasoning requirement in our curriculum; Harvard and some other schools already have one. I don't think a person should graduate from Dartmouth who has not been exposed to rigorous thinking about moral issues. Our task is to challenge students to think about their own values—to lead them to form at least the foundation of an ethical philosophy that they can carry into life."