Senior Fellow Michael Davis to give lecture, "Why You Have a Duty to Pay Even Higher Income Taxes."

Michael Davis, senior fellow at the Center for Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, will share his thoughts on the topic at a special lecture hosted by California State University, Bakersfield’s Kegley Institute of Ethics on Thursday, Jan. 28, at 7:00 p.m. His talk will present the argument, "Why you have a duty to pay even higher income taxes."

For more information, please visit the article appearing in the Kern Valley Sun from January 19, 2010.

Recent Biomedical Ethics Case

An article in the January 15th edition of the New York Times caught our director's eye recently. It describes a recent lawsuit filed by a former medical device executive who blew the whistle on his company Guidant after the company had for years told him to market stents that had been approved to treat digestive tract cancers to treat blood vessels in other parts of the body. These devices (called biliary stents), which have only approved by the FDA for use in the digestive tract, have not been approved for these other, off-label uses. Studies have shown that injury or death can occur in patients as result of device malfunctions when the stents were used off-label.

Click here to read the fully article, "Lawsuit Challenges Marketing of Stents" by Barry Meier. New York Times. January 14, 2010

"Ethics in the Details" in IIT Magazine

Michael Davis, senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, appears in the winter 2010 issue of the IIT Magazine in an article discussing the "Ethics in the Details" project, a effort that seeks to integrate ethics into the graduate engineering curriculum through low-dose mini lessons by changing existing technical problems to include an ethical element. This project is generously funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Click here to read the full article from IIT Today.

American Sociological Association - Teaching Ethics Throughout the Curriculum

The American Sociological Association's Task Force on Teaching Ethics has developed a web resource dedicated to help sociology faculty with teaching students about professional ethics from early in their undergraduate careers all the way through graduate school.

Teaching Ethics throughout the Curriculum consists of case studies, discussion questions, bibliographies, and web links that can be quickly downloaded or printed for use in sociology classrooms or by department chairs. It is a very good resource for faculty interested in new cases to use for discussing the American Sociological Association's Code of Ethics, or for students or practitioners interested in the kinds of ethical issues that come up in the daily research and practice of sociologists.

Come Watch the APPE Upper Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl!

Come join us and watch the 4th annual APPE Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl at Northwestern Illinois University on Saturday, November 21, from 10-7. Teams from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan will answer questions about ethics cases on a wide range of topicsm such as the classroom (e.g. cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (e.g. dating or friendship), professional ethics (e.g. engineering, law, medicine), or social and political ethics (e.g. free speech, gun control, etc.). The three top-scoring teams will proceed to the final competition, held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in March of next year.

The competition will be held in the Student Union on Northwestern Illinois University's main campus, at 5500 N. St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. You can download a copy of the cases, and also learn more about the history of the Ethics Bowl. For information about how to participate in future Ethics Bowl competitions, please visit APPE's Ethics Bowl page.

Best of luck to all of the participating teams, and we hope to see you there!

Thanksgiving Hours

The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions Library will be closed from Thursday, November 26 to Sunday, November 29th for the Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend. We will resume normal hours on Monday, November 30th.

Developed an ethics case study? Share it with us!

Have you developed a case study that you use in your ethics course?

Have you and a group of friends acted out a case study looking at ethical issues in scientific research?

Do you think you could write a case based on recent stories in the media?

We are looking to collect ethics case studies that have been developed by faculty, students, and instructors to be included in the Case Study Collection of the Ethics Education Library. This collection -which already includes over three hundred cases- is meant to be a clearinghouse for students, instructors, and researchers interested in finding ethics cases to use in workshops, presentations, or in the classroom.

We are interest in cases from all areas of professional ethic including the sciences, social sciences, medicine, arts, and the humanities.

Please email Kelly Laas, the librarian of CSEP, with any cases or questions you may have.