The President of Ireland's Ethics Initiative

The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative Programme of Events Dublin City University: International Symposium on Disaster Ethics Disasters wreak havoc, leaving death and destruction in their paths. They also trigger many ethical dilemmas for those directly affected, and for planners and responders. What help should be sent? Who gets the limited resources available? Both in policy development as well as in our actual responses to disasters, ethical considerations and decisions are pivotal. However, few resources are directed as yet towards a consideration of disaster ethics. Policy makers, humanitarian agencies and individual responders experience a lack of ethical guidance and training materials that might help them to better address the challenging and distressful ethical dilemmas occurring in disasters. This symposium will highlight some of the ethical issues that arise in responding to, preventing or predicting disasters.

Dublin Institute of Technology: A Public Debate Series on Ethics and Society Dublin Institute of Technology will host four public debates on Ethics and Society in Ireland. The debates which will be open to the public will explore 1.

The Built Environment 2. Ethics and the Internet 3. Financial Services 4. Food Quality and Safety.

Debates will take the form of a moderated panel discussion with experts drawn from public affairs, academia, industry and civil society. The events will be interactive with opportunities for both live and virtual interaction. The debates will also be webcast and archived on a dedicated website.

NUI Galway: Ethics and Economics NUI Galway will host a public lecture on Ethics and Economics: Re-imagining our Economic Model for the 21st Century. This event will probe the possibility for re-imagining an economic model. It will explore the palpable failure of our economic model in the recent past and the need to bring fresh imagination to play in scoping out a different – and hopefully more ethically attuned – model into the future. This will inaugurate an ongoing process of embedding ethics deeper within and across all disciplines on campus.

The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative - 2014

NUI Maynooth: NUI Maynooth will run two workshops as part of the President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative.

Tolerance and Creation of Self-Identity within the Context of Heterogeneous Societies: a keynote address by German journalist and author, Henryk M. Broder, followed by a round table discussion. This workshop will be aimed at delivering a better understanding of tolerance as a concept and its fundamental role as a condition for discourse in pluralistic post-secular societies characterised by a diversity of positions. Scholars and representatives of various social and religious groups will investigate if tolerance can be seen as a key factor in establishing both self-identity and a stable society.

The Ethical Complexities of Data Collection and Use: With data collection currently at the centre of public debate NUI Maynooth will host a workshop that will advance conversation on the ethics of big data collection and use by focusing on the overlapping issues of privacy, security and forgetting. The workshop will feature international and national experts on the role of privacy and ethics in data collection.

In addition NUI Maynooth will c0nduct a campus-wide survey assessing current ethics-related activities and attends to announce the availability of small grants for new ethics oriented initiatives.

Queen’s University, Belfast: Religion and Public Life Queen’s University, Belfast will hold a two day conference on ‘Religion and Public Life’ on the 15th and 16th May.

Royal Irish Academy: RIA Discourse with Professor Martha Nussbaum Professor Martha Craven Nussbaum, an American philosopher and the current Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, will speak at the University of Limerick on 6 June 2014.

Ethics and Society Opinion Series An RIA opinion series exploring what ethics currently means to Irish researchers across a variety of disciplines will be undertaken.

The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative - 2014

Trinity College Dublin: Trinity College Dublin will run four major public events and a series of seven consultations on ethics as part of the President of Ireland’s Ethics initiative.

1. Designed life: The ethics of synthetic biology: this event exploring the ethics and future directions of synthetic biology was held in the Science Gallery on 16th January 2. A public debate on Cyberethics: This debate, involving experts from various fields, will focus on new ethical issues connected to the digital age, the proliferation of internet use and its growing role for information and communication. Issues will include security and privacy, uncontrolled access for children and adolescents, cyberbullying or the control of criminal or deviant behaviour on the internet.

3. The inaugural Edmund Burke lecture: Onora O’Neill, Cambridge Philosopher and Chair of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission, will deliver a lecture on the balance between rights and responsibilities.

4. Public discourse on Intercultural Ethics: Invited speaker Professor Anthony Kawme Appiah will deliver a keynote lecture on intercultural ethics, followed by a panel discussion exploring issues such as migration and borders, multicultural Ireland and obtaining Irish citizenship.

The Trinity Long Room Hub Consultations: a series of consultations with leaders from various sectors of public life. Themes to be explored will include Citizenship, Governance and Accountability, Ethical Lessons from the Crisis for the Business World, Ethical Lessons from the Crisis for Public Institutions and Representatives and Ethical Lessons from the Crisis for the Professions.

University College Cork: Towards Reconstructing a Moral Economy UCC will run various events in 2014 under the auspices of The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative. The University will also launch a new Centre for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy & Society. The Centre will initially have three substantive themes of teaching, research and publication, as follows: 1. Moral Censure, Legal Norms and Social Harm.

2. Recovering the Anthropological Foundations of Social Life 3. Amnesia and Ethical Social Memory

The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative - 2014

A panel of four papers on the theme of “The Ethics and Politics of Remembering, Forgiving and Forgetting” will be presented at the Anthropological Association of Ireland conference on ‘Memory and Recovery’ in Sligo.

“Finding Positives in Negative Times: Community Voices for a Renewed Ireland”: Two community forums to take place in Cork and Limerick. Developed under the auspices of The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, the forums will feature leaders in the development of social alternatives that preserve and extend the practice of ethical transformation of Ireland in the name of social and environmental justice.

UCC will also host an inaugural inter-institutional seminar series on Regulating Contemporary Capitalism in Ireland. There will be an ‘Economy & Society Summer School’ in Cork, in collaboration with WIT, and a collaboration between UCC Centre for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy & Society and UL Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies will explore ‘Critical Pedagogy in a Time of Crisis’.

University College Dublin: UCD will present two projects as part of The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative.

The Role of Conscience: Through a combination of academic workshop, public lectures and debate this project will explore three inter-related phenomena that are currently attracting significant global attention: conscientious objection, civil disobedience and whistle-blowing.

The questions raised are highly relevant to the contemporary Irish context. The worldwide financial crash of 2008 and the related banking crisis in Ireland has exposed many problems with existing regulatory structures and regimes; however, there is also a sense that many people knew that their new economic prosperity was ethically dubious but were reluctant to speak out, for complex reasons that require further investigation. Parallel to this are stories of whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who have taken certain risks to step out of line, apparently to highlight systemic injustice.

“We need to talk about ethics because...”: a campus wide engagement with students where students fill in their answers to why we need ethics on white boards. The answers are photographed and uploaded to a dedicated website. This serves as a springboard for follow up debates and projects around ethics.

The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative - 2014

University of Limerick: Under the banner ‘Ethics in Public Places, Public Spaces and Public Discourses’ the University of Limerick will run four seminar series: 1. Being an Ethical Hero, 2.Ethics in Public Spaces, 3. Speech, Friendships and Language and 4. Professional Ethics. Each seminar series will be aimed at different members of the extended local and university communities, including university students, local practitioners, community groups, academics and post-primary students.

Aimed at the local community, the first set of seminars will explore the ethics of political, sporting and music heroes and will include the joint UL/UCC community seminar on ‘Finding Positives in Negative Times’.

The second set of seminars will be aimed at the university student population and will examine ethical advertising, political lobbying and political advertising, the ethics of politics and the question of ethical housing and architecture.

The third seminar will bring local post-primary students on to campus to explore issues such as everyday hate speech, ethical friendships, ethics and social media and contemporary online life.

Finally, the last series of seminars will address the local professional community. Entitled ‘Professional Ethics’, it will explore ethical issues in the courtroom, in academia, in journalism, in healthcare, in pedagogy and in finance.

The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative - 2014