Raymond J. Spencer Applied Ethics Program

Program Overview

Applied ethics seeks to relate concepts of moral philosophy to real-world dilemmas. The Raymond Spencer Program in Applied Ethics is specifically concerned with the ethics of the management of public and nonprofit organizations, and the distillation of moral philosophy throughout the organizations.

To that end, the program focuses on research, guest speakers, and seminars for nonprofit and government entities.

Program Structure

With a recent commitment of funding from Raymond Spencer, the School of Public Administration and Policy, Eller College of Management, and The University of Arizona began a program in applied ethics. Broadly speaking, applied ethics attempts to apply concepts of moral philosophy to real-world dilemmas.

The program has three points of emphasis:

Research
Speakers
Seminars

Research

Research focuses on two novel areas of applied ethics. The first concentration is research into ethics from an organizational perspective. Rather than explore ethics from the perspective of the individual, this effort will examine the various ways an organization — public, private, and non-profit — can prevent misconduct and encourage ethical behavior. Specifically, a main interest is what a leader can do in the domains of structure, organizational culture, and membership. Research will also take place on individual applied ethics, particularly contextual ethics.

Speakers

The second point of emphasis involves experts in applied ethics in a speaker series on campus. Professor James Svara of Arizona State University was the first invited speaker in this series.

Seminars

Third, the new program offers seminars in applied ethics to public, private, and non-profit agencies in Arizona.

Program Leadership and History

The new program will be directed by Dr. Neil Vance of the Eller College. Vance has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in applied ethics for a number of years.

Raymond Spencer is the CEO of Capgemini’s sixth Strategic Business Unit (SBU) – Financial Services (FS). Capgemini is a global consulting, technology, outsourcing, and local professional services firm headquartered in Paris. Operating in more than 30 countries, Capgemini has over 82,000 people.

Earlier, Spencer was the Chairman and CEO of Kanbay International, Inc. As a founder of Kanbay, he led the organization from its inception in 1989 to becoming a publicly–traded global company located in fourteen cities across eight nations. Thanks to his leadership, Kanbay was recognized as #9 on BusinessWeek's Annual Hot Growth Companies List in 2005 and #1 on Forbes Fast Tech 25 list for the fastest growing U.S. publicly–traded technology companies in 2006.

For additional information, please contact us.

RSS