Making Good Understood
We convene a multidisciplinary community to develop compelling responses to the most pressing ethical issues of our era.
Fellowships
Current Fellows
Meet our 2025-26 ECG Fellows.
Their Work
Explore publications created by ECG Fellows.
Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Center for Virtue Ethics
Supporting preeminent scholars whose research advances human flourishing in both moral and spiritual contexts, facilitating the development of undergraduate courses exploring topics such as justice and the common good, and deepening the ethical formation of Notre Dame students and faculty.
Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab
Promoting broad-based, far-reaching interdisciplinary research, thought, and policy leadership in artificial intelligence and other technology ethics by engaging with relevant stakeholders to examine real-world challenges and provide practical models and applied solutions for ethical technology design, development, and deployment.
This changing world will confront humankind with enormous new moral problems of unprecedented proportion and consequences … it will take a very special kind of university to direct change in such a way that humans do not destroy themselves and their world … It is this kind of institution that Notre Dame aspires to be.
—Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C.
Notre Dame is one of the most trusted universities in the United States. No institution is better positioned to foster reasoned, constructive conversations rooted in the Catholic ideals of respect for human dignity and the unity of knowledge, and guided by the rational ideals of adherence to evidence and consistency in argumentation. And no institution is better positioned to develop students who approach the world with openness, with curiosity, with compassion, and with moral courage.
—Rev. Robert Dowd, C.S.C.
Virtue ethics tells us that the moral life is not simply about discrete actions properly performed, nor about achieving laudable results in the world, but about becoming a certain kind of person.
—Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
News
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America
When Catholic higher education meets A.I.: We can’t let new technology override moral wisdom
August 13, 2026
From University President Fr. Bob Dowd: "In a world with A.I., the humanities, which have always been at the core of Catholic higher education, have never been more important. All academic disciplines, from finance to biology to chemical engineering, develop important capacities for analysis and understanding, and they play critical roles in advancing human knowledge. At the same time, it is essential to study the humanities—philosophy, theology, literature, history and the arts—for the rich wisdom they offer on the most fundamental questions: what it means to be human, why there is suffering in the world and how to pursue truth."
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The Wall Street Journal
Pastors Using AI to Help Write Sermons Grapple With Where to Draw the Line
July 19, 2026
Meghan Sullivan, a University of Notre Dame professor of philosophy who is leading a research project on AI and religion, said that using AI to draft anything spoken in worship reflects a basic misunderstanding of what Christians believe is happening when a preacher delivers a homily.