Founded in 1986 by former President Derek Bok, led for over 20 years by Professor Dennis F. Thompson, and currently directed by Danielle Allen, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics encourages teaching and research about ethical issues in public and professional life. It is the core of a well-established movement at Harvard to give ethics a prominent place in the curriculum. By promoting a perspective informed by both theory and practice, the Center helps to meet the growing need for teachers, scholars, and leaders who address questions of moral choice in the professions and public life more generally. In 2009, Lawrence Lessig succeeded founding director Dennis F. Thompson as the Center's director and launched a new Research Lab, a major initiative designed to address fundamental problems of ethics in a way that is of practical benefit to institutions of government and society around the world. As its first undertaking, the Lab is tackling “institutional corruption" from both an empirical and normative perspective. Over a five-year period, a wide range of important institutions will be studied, with the ultimate goal of producing a set of practical tools they might use both to understand the dynamic of institutional corruption and to respond to it. A new fellowship program supports the project and draw scholars and researchers from a wide range of disciplines across academia, industry, and government. In 2015, Danielle Allen took the helm as Director of the Center with a focus on advancing conversations on the most important and most challenging ethical issues of our time—whether those issues pertain to personal or public ethics; to professional or civic ethics; to habits and norms or policy-frameworks. Under her leadership, the Center has cultivated conversations about the hard questions involved in determining how we should live, singly and collectively. Safra Foundation, whose gifts have enabled the creation of a permanent endowment for the Center. Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarvardEthics
