Future direction for the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics
On Thursday, Oct. 8, professor Neil McArthur will deliver a public presentation outlining his vision for the U of M’s Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics. McArthr is a candidate for the the directorship of the centre.
“I will try to provide a vision for the Centre for the next five years,” he says. “Over its thirty year history the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics has become a leading voice in public debates on a number of topics both in Winnipeg and nationally, through our media exposure and outreach activities. I hope to focus on developing our capacity in two areas: first I’d like to increase our connections with third sector groups, and second I’d like to increase our profile as a research centre. I’ll lay out more details about those plans at the talk.”
What: Public presentation by Neil McArthur, candidate for director for the Centre for Profession and Applied Ethics
When: Thursday, Oct. 8, 12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Where: Rm 203 University College
About the Ethics Centre
Historical Background
Although the history of medical ethics goes back to classical Greece and the Hippocratic tradition, the discipline of Applied Ethics has come to prominence as a field of study only in the last fifty years or so. The catalyst for this “ethics boom” has, doubtless, been the explosive development of modern technologies; in particular, the growth and expansion of bio-medical technologies.
Within the field of biomedicine much public concern and debate has centred on such issues as organ transplantation, the definition of death, stem cell cloning and genetic testing and genetic engineering. Moreover, recent advances in science and technology have also raised questions of profound importance concerning, for example, law and the environment, modern industrial agriculture, policing and punishment, business and professional ethics, individual privacy and the internet.
Whether in biomedicine, business or the environment, the questions raised by both scholars and ordinary citizens have frequently been ethical questions: about right and wrong, justice and injustice, fair distribution of benefits and burdens. Answers to these questions have serious implications for how we live our lives, as individual citizens, as members of this or that particular community, and as human beings who share many common aspirations and fears.
The University of Manitoba’s Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics is not committed, nor are the Centre’s Associates, to any one answer or set of answers to the troubling questions raised by modern technological society; but we are firmly committed to the full, fair, and free discussion of every issue and to the advancement of knowledge in this vital area of human endeavour.