Kenan Institute for Ethics
The Kenan Institute for Ethics is an interdisciplinary home for faculty, students, and staff dedicated to understanding and negotiating the moral challenges of our time through the energetic and capacious pursuit of good.
Good judgment, good character, good citizens, good government, the greatest good, the common good… We speak often of good, but in the absence of agreement about what we mean when we deploy the word. Good pursuits are passionate arguments about what it means to be human—about who we are, what we are doing, and what we ought to do.
Read more about good pursuits in this letter from our director, and explore stories about our programs below.
Good Life
Offering transformational educational experiences to students, alumni, and the public
“Comfort with Discomfort”: How a Capacious Minds Fellow Learned to Sit with Uncertainty
Connor Melehan describes how his experiences as a Capacious Minds Fellow pushed him to live outside of his comfort zone.
How Visiting an Art Museum Can Help Students Become More Patient Healthcare Providers
A group of pre-health students in the Re-Imagining Medicine program visited the North Carolina Museum of Art. During their visit, they learned important lessons about how to engage with patients — not simply as diseases to treat, but as people with years of lived experiences.
Good Community
Building bridges from classroom and campus to local and regional communities
This Summer, Follow Our DukeEngage Social Media Ambassadors
Through DukeEngage, a program of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke undergraduate students spend eight weeks working with community partners in the United States or around the world. This summer, we have launched a social media ambassador program, so you can follow along with our students as they experience DukeEngage!
Good Pursuits with Mike Wiley
From state to state and school to school, actor and playwright Mike Wiley uses the power of performance to bring challenging histories to life. In this Good Pursuits feature, he reflects on how theater can spark empathy by inviting audiences to walk in someone else’s shoes.
Good Society
Assessing and imagining institutions that meet the needs of our common life
Duke Students Examine History Up Close With the Declaration of Independence
First-year students in a Kenan-affiliated group of interconnected courses, or “Constellation,” visited the exhibition of the Declaration of Independence at the Nasher Museum of Art. Through movement, writing, reflection, and conversation with faculty members, they considered the nuances of the document and differing conceptions of freedom.
Through the Lives of Black Women, Erica Armstrong Dunbar Tells Fuller Histories of Early America
As part of ”We the People” events commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar visited Duke and Durham to speak about her book “Never Caught” — the story of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who escaped from George and Martha Washington’s household in 1796.
