Ethics as an Innovation?

In this section, we want to challenge a few common views about ethics. You hear them alot. We hear them all the time.

Take this one: While it is routine to make scientific and technological progress, ethics progress is more difficult if not impossible.

And how about this one: Ethics always lags behind what we are capable of accomplishing in science, technology and the arts. With every new advance in science, it takes the philosophers of ethics awhile to appreciate and understand its ethical consequences.

Then there's: Ethics deals with the same questions and gives the same answers, no matter what.

We think these are ethics stereotypes. Sure, they could be accurate. But we want to test them. So we have created the ethics lab. This is a place for you to ask and think about whether ethics can and should...and must or ought to be innovative.

While we suppose that some of you believe ethics evolves, there is after all, a whole discipline known as evolutionary ethics, can we use ethics like we use a new appliance considered to revolutionize and transform our lives?

We also suppose that some of you think this is pretty obvious. You might believe, for example, that new philosophies that include a high dose of ethics, are innovations. Christianity for example. Was that an ancient ethics innovation? Existentialism? Was its introduction a modern ethics innovation? 

In short, what about ethics and its relationship to innovation? 

There is alot out there on innovation these days. We think it is because so many of our political and educational leaders think that in order for us to survive in the 21st century, everyone is going to have to be comfortable with and embrace innovation. And that everyone must or ought to be an innovator.

If this is so, then we say, it may be true for ethics too.

So, please join us as we discuss possibilities and opportunities in our virtual ethics lab, focusing our microscope on :

the ethics of innovation;

ethics innovations; and

the ethics of ethics innovation.