Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics is a center at Harvard University. It seeks "to advance teaching and research on ethical issues in public life." It is named for Edmond J. Safra.

Founded as the Program in Ethics and the Professions in 1986, the Center has supported the work of more than 500 fellows and visiting scholars, most of whom have spent a year or more at the Center. They include professors, graduate students, and undergraduates, journalists, physicians, lawyers, psychologists from many educational institutions and governments in the United States and throughout the world.

The Center does not promote a particular theory or conception of ethics or morality but rather encourages rigorous study of difficult ethical issues, informed by empirical research and philosophical analysis. Although the range of topics studied by fellows range widely, major themes have included professional ethics, institutional corruption, “Diversity, Justice and Democracy.”

Former fellows have gone on to start centers at Princeton, Duke, and Toronto. The Harvard Center helped establish a sister institution, the Safra Center at Tel Aviv University. The Harvard Center took the lead in creating the first international association devoted to ethics in public life, the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

The current director of the Center is Danielle Allen, who was appointed in 2015. She succeeded Lawrence Lessig, who served from 2009-2015. Dennis Thompson, appointed by President Derek Bok in 1986, is the founding director.

Harvard faculty who were key contributors to the Center include John Rawls, Kenneth Ryan, Amartya Sen, Thomas Scanlon, Martha Minow and Michael Sandel. More than 50 Harvard faculty from all the schools at the university have been active in the Center.

Harvard President Derek Bok argued that there was a pressing need for "problem-oriented courses in ethics" that would prepare students for the moral dilemmas and ethical decisions they would face throughout their careers. By his own account, he could not make much progress on meeting this need until he recruited Dennis Thompson, then a professor at Princeton, to come to Harvard to start a new program.

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