A Note from the director

We are very pleased to be publishing the first issue of the Rutland Institute for Ethics Issues and Perspectives.

Welcome to the Rutland Ethics Alliance! We very much appreciate your support and interest in the Institute’s activities. We also welcome your input, for example, in determining what to include in this publication. More important, we welcome your ideas about how we can extend the good work of the Institute, particularly if you can help us make connections with people and organizations in the business and professional communities.

In this issue we provide information about what we have done and what we are working on. In addition, in the first part of a two-part article on three ethical perspectives, or tools of ethical deliberation, C. Calhoun Lemon Fellow of the Institute Stephen Satris discusses the “harm-benefit approach” and the “rights approach” (The third tool, the virtue ethics approach, is the subject of part II.) In future issues we will take a look at other perspectives in ethics as well as issues that are, quite rightly, on our minds and yours. Here then is an opportunity for you to tell us what ought to be taken up in the issues section of the RIE Issues and Perspectives. In the section Ethics Challenges and Responses you will find links to articles that may be of interest. We will be updating this section of RIE I&P periodically, so you may want to bookmark this site.

I am very pleased to report that the Institute’s collaborative work with the MBA program and the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership, both in the College of Business and Behavioral Science, has expanded. We have been working with the Spiro Institute on projects and programs for some time now. Sending a team of MBA students to the Ethical Leadership Case Competition at Baylor University, which inspired a now annual internal competition, held in the spring, is prominent among the things we have undertaken together. Starting this fall, as the result of the vision and commitment of Caron St. John, associate dean for research and graduate programs in the College of Business & Behavioral Science, who also directs the MBA programs, the Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership and the Renaissance Center, the MBA curriculum includes a required course in Ethical Leadership. I am team-teaching this course with David Wyman of the Spiro Institute. There are two sections of the course. One meets on campus and the other meets in the evening at the University Center in Greenville. The students have diverse backgrounds (engineering, finance, and landscape architecture, for example) and levels of work experience, so working with them is a treat.

Our successes in outreach are the direct result of the hard work of Linda Gallicchio, who, among many other things, is responsible for this publication. Her brief piece in this issue will give you a sense of what she has been able to accomplish. Having developed many promising relationships, for example with Rotary, the Greenville Chamber of Commerce, and the Society for Human Resource Management, I have no doubt that in the next issue she will be reporting on several new and exciting collaborations!

Again, welcome to the Rutland Ethics Alliance. We are very grateful for your interest and support. We look forward to hearing from you.

~Dr. Daniel E. Wueste, Director

ernest@clemson.edu