Center for Applied and Professional Ethics

Mission

The Center for Applied and Professional Ethics (CAPE) aims to advance practical ethical and moral understanding, judgment, and decision making. It assists students and faculty of Ohio University and the larger community through interdisciplinary discussion, education and collaboration. 

Its particular focus is on applied and professional fields, where real-life ethical dilemmas and conflicts need to be analyzed and resolved. Through educational activities — such as its signature public lecture series, a podcast, and a newsletter service — it attempts to address the general public as well as students, scholars, and faculty at Ohio University.

"Applied ethics" includes moral, social and political philosophy, which is why the center also contributes to public debates on social and economic justice, environmental issues, and socio-political questions.

Recent and Upcoming Speakers

Professor Kent Berridge

CAPE Spring Lecture (together with OU Department of Psychology)

'Pleasure, Desire, and Addiction in the Brain'

with Kent Berridge (James Olds Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Michigan)

Friday, March 28
12:55 p.m. - 1:50 p.m.

Porter Hall Rm 102

Abstract: Wanting and liking for pleasant rewards usually go together.  But the brain separates wanting and liking mechanisms, creating potential for the two to diverge. Addictive desires can arise even without expectation of pleasure or actual pleasure when reward is received.  I’ll show a laboratory example as 'wanting for what hurts’, which can also create narrowly focused addictions. Counterintuitively, reward ‘wanting’ may also overlap in mechanisms with forms of fear.  These conclusions have been applied to several clinical conditions, ranging from addictions, to anhedonia, to paranoia.

CAPE Speakers and Events

Activities and Focus

The Center for Applied and Professional Ethics emphasizes professional and applied ethics, particularly in departments and disciplines with a professional orientation, such as media and communication, engineering, medicine, nursing, and business, but also in the larger community. In addition to organizing events on ethics issues, the center's goal is to contribute to both educating future professionals and providing workshops for faculty in these disciplines.

The center also promotes well-informed, critical reflection about economic, social and political discourse across academic disciplines and with the wider public. In recent years, for example, the center's guest lecturers have focused on voting rights, the status and condition of U.S. American democratic institutions, the challenges of social media (ab)use in the public sphere, and the topic of "fake news."

Leadership

The director from 2011 to 2016 was Dr. Alyssa R. Bernstein (Philosophy). From 2016 to 2021, Dr. Bernhard Debatin (Journalism) was leading the center.

Dr. Christoph Hanisch began his tenure as the center's associate director in 2020, taking over the directorship from Bernhard Debatin in fall of 2021. After completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Vienna, Dr. Hanisch did his graduate studies at the University of St Andrews and at Bowling Green State University, where he received his Ph D. in Applied Philosophy in 2012. After a postdoc and visiting professorship at the University of Vienna, Hanisch returned to the United States in 2016, starting his assistant professorship at Ohio University. Hanisch has published widely in the fields of ethical theory, applied political and social philosophy, and the history of moral philosophy.