About the program

This program addresses the increasingly vital need for practitioners and decision-makers in government, industry, business, and the professions to have a high degree of competence in identifying, analysing, and resolving ethical issues that arise in their field.

Organisational change, political change, wars, globalisation, new technologies and practices, corporate collapses, corruption, scandals in the health and research sectors, environmental disasters, conflicts of interest, all raise distinctive and pressing issues of policy and practice. Finding practical and ethically sustainable solutions requires a thorough understanding of both the ethical and the empirical aspects of the situation.

The Master of Arts program aims to give graduates the theoretical and analytic tools to understand the central issues in professional and applied ethics, to conduct research on and analyse key ethical concepts and arguments in their field of specialisation, and so to develop their capacity to contribute to policy discussion and development in a wide range of professional, institutional and industry settings. The program embraces specialisations such as the ethics of health care, computing, business, politics and criminal justice; as well as the broad themes of bioethics and global justice.

The objectives of the program will be to equip students with the skills necessary to:

• identify the relevant ethical issues in professional and public contexts
• critically evaluate a range of theoretical and practical approaches to ethical issues
• contribute to policy development in inter-disciplinary and professional settings
• conduct further high-level research in theoretical and applied ethics.

 

At ANU the program will be coordinated by Dr Jeanette Kennett and taught by staff from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE). The Centre is a partnership between the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne. CAPPE is an Australian Research Council funded centre and constitutes the largest concentration of philosophers working on applied philosophy and public ethics in the world.

The Australian National University is distinctive among Australian universities in its research intensity, its national capital location and its special mission for contributing to nation-building and advancing Australia's place in the world. ANU has evolved into a research and teaching university, with international networks of scholarly activity and outreach. It has played a major part in the transformation of Australian higher education over the past decade.

The ANU was founded as Australia's centre for world-class research. Its researchers and their work have led the University to be ranked No. 1 Australian University in 2006 by Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; The Times Higher Education Supplement and Newsweek magazine; in the world's top 50 institutions, and in the top 10 globally in the Humanities . Researchers have won 5 Nobel Prizes and, importantly, made a difference in people's lives. The University offers the chance to study alongside some of the world's greatest minds and to be a part of the research breakthroughs that accompany that process.