Programs & Events

Recent Events & Programs

• Guided Inquiry

  Regular guided inquiry seminars, which are at the heart of the fellows’ experience, focus on the interdisciplinary research that influences current conceptions of ethics based in social theory. Fellows study expansive, supplemental readings from the relevant literature that invites them to consider the foundations of ethical thought, further build moral competence, embrace ethical practice in their own public life and promote ethical reasoning among their students.

  The guided inquiry curriculum generally covers the following topics: 

  • Justifying ethics: By what standards do we judge ethics?
  • Virtue ethics
  • Principled ethics
  • The moral mind and the ethics of care
  • Faith, morality and meaning
  • Human rights and moral responsibility
  • The social contract
  • Balancing freedom, autonomy and community
  • Norming the bad: accountability in word and deed
  • Post-modern insights
• Colloquies at the Thomas Moran Seminar Room

  The Institute for Ethics in Public Life houses a set of offices embracing a central conference area, the Thomas Moran Seminar Room, dedicated on May 13, 2022. A handsome and stately table comfortably seats 18, around which the institute hosts weekly colloquies — conversations on a wide variety of themes: education, public policy, social justice, plus many more. 

  Image: Dr. Thomas Moran unveils the wall plaque for the Thomas Moran Seminar Room

  The ethics institute has held close to 650 colloquies since its founding in 1999. Led by its fellows in residence, past fellows, the institute’s six senior scholars, college faculty, students, alumni, community members, and experts from afar, our Wednesday colloquies remain a unique component of faculty professional development here at SUNY Plattsburgh — a weekly intellectual oasis where members of our campus community (and more recently during the shift to a virtual environment) members of the SUNY-wide community have been able to gather and freely engage with each other in collegial and open dialogue about stuff that matters.

  During the recent spring semester, the online format allowed us to invite several scholars from around the U.S. and overseas to lead our colloquies. To view all of spring 2022 semester colloquies, visit the institute’s playlist on YouTube.

• Capsule Conversations

  The pandemic did not halt the institute’s work. Our conversations around the table suspended, we began a series of recorded capsule conversations with our resident and past fellows, senior scholars and other friends of the institute, which ran past the end of spring semester 2020 and well into the summer. We resumed live, weekly colloquies online the following fall, bringing dozens of participants to our virtual table every Wednesday in the regular semester.

• Constitution Day

  Obligated as a public institution of higher learning receiving federal funds, SUNY Plattsburgh, through its Institute for Ethics in Public Life, has led educational activities every September since the establishment of Constitution Day by Congress in 2004. 

  To mark Constitution Day in fall 2022 SUNY Plattsburgh will be partnering with SUNY Cortland, SUNY Old Westbury and Nassau Community College in a half-day of educational and participatory activities on the theme of voting and free speech.

• International Conference

  In May 2022, the Ethics Institute also hosted a day-long international virtual conference on women’s reproductive rights, featuring more than 20 educators, policy makers and healthcare professionals speaking directly to 120 attendees around the world plus hundreds of students in classrooms patching in from 14 universities and colleges in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.