Our Mission

The mission of the Rock Ethics Institute is to promote ethical awareness and inquiry across the University, and in the public and professional sectors, through a three-fold emphasis on teaching, research, and outreach.

• EDUCATION: We support the ongoing development of innovative courses on theoretical and practical issues in ethics—and provide resources for faculty across Penn State to develop ethics modules tailored for their courses. Our ethics curriculum is designed to ensure that every student inherits a legacy of ethical integrity and ethical leadership as part of their Penn State education.
• RESEARCH: We sponsor innovative, interdisciplinary research on ethical issues—research designed to impact scholarship, policy, and public dialogue.
• OUTREACH: Working with community and public leaders through a variety of outreach activities, we support local, national, and international projects that promote general ethical awareness.

Guiding the work of the Rock Ethics Institute is our commitment to ethical literacy, which we define as:

• the ability to recognize ethical problems and to assess the complex issues that they raise; and
• the ability to evaluate ethical problems from many perspectives and to assess disagreements on, and proposed responses to, these problems.

The Rock Ethics Institute aims to help people better understand the cultural—and frequently multi-cultural—contexts of ethical problems, disagreements, and responses. We believe that in today’s world, ethical literacy is essential to being active, informed citizens, and to living vibrant professional and personal lives.