New ethics institute to tackle key morality questions

A new Institute for Ethics will help fill the void left by the Catholic Church, it was claimed today.

Dublin City University is funding the new Institute to examine basic questions about law and morality, integrity in public life and honesty within business transactions.

Its president, Ferdinand von Prondzynski, said that in the past the sense of ethics within Irish society had been grounded by the Church.

“In recent years, that has become less of a consensus issue in society. We don’t pretend we’re going to produce easy answers for this, or that there are easy answers,” he said.

The Institute for Ethics will be the first of its kind in the world and will be headed by a professor with an initial staff of 10.

Mr von Prondzynski said the Institute would be a more useful form for addressing ethics issues than the public tribunals and added that ethics were not just about brown envelopes.

“Underlying it is the assumption that when ethics go wrong, it’s about bad people doing bad things. In reality, it’s much more complex than that,” he said.

The Institute for Ethics will run a new Masters course in business and social ethics as well as providing modules on the subject to students in DCU.

There will also be short ethics courses for business people, civil servants and members of professional organisations.

Mr von Prondzynski said the Institute for Ethics would not be like the Centre For Public Inquiry, the controversial body which had its funding withdrawn by American billionaire, Chuck Feeney, after a sustained government criticism of its activities.

“We are not going to be setting as our agenda the pursuit of individual wrong-doing,” he said.

Mr von Prondzynski said the role of the Institute was to influence the wider social debate on ethics but added that this did not rule out the possibility that it would be saying things that would be “uncomfortable for people”.

“We need to raise the levels of debate about appropriate standards that would apply in a more prosperous society,” he said.

The Institute will draw its funding from DCU and a number of private backers, who will be carefully assessed, to ensure there are no conflicts of interest.

The president of the Mater Dei Institute, Dermot Lane, said the Institute for Ethics would have a key contribution to make in the area of science and technology.

“The big issue here is that technology and science has advanced so rapidly that ethical debate and discussion is far behind,” he said.

The Institute for Ethics is expected to tackle ethical issues surrounding human embryo and stem cell research, the human genome project and cloning.

It will also address ethical issues in media organisations, which have attracted criticism for their coverage of murder investigations and the death of Fianna Fáil TD Liam Lawlor, in a car crash in Russia.