Letter from the Chair
by David Goldman, Founder and Chairman
Over the course of the 15 years that FASPE has been granting Fellowships, we have seen trends.
Trends in which ethical issues are top of mind for our applicants—then: for example, a focus on the traditional question of whether businesses exist solely to produce profits for their shareholders, how the professional navigates different obligations and loyalties, the appropriate limits to investigative journalism, end-of-life debates; today, what seem to be existential questions around the limits of generative artificial intelligence, corporate responsibility for the damage to the environment, the ethics of genetic manipulation, navigating the proliferation of misinformation, and more.
There are also differences in the external realities that are the energizing factors for FASPE—then: for example, the implications of corporate scandals like the Madoff fiasco, the perennial economic challenges of traditional media, broad access to a fair system of justice, the limits of life-saving techniques and other end-of-life decision- making; today: the realities that occupy all of us that seem almost apocalyptic— climate change (I write this as fires consume Los Angeles), global challenges to normative democracy, unremitting war in Ukraine and the Middle-East, the movement of peoples (e.g., immigration that results from climate change and unremitting war fanned by challenges to normative democracy), fears of unrestricted technology, and on and on.
Learning from the past remains the FASPE approach, of course, though now intensified by stakes that seem to grow ever higher. As we know from the ethical failures of the past, now is the time that we require ethical leadership from those with the authority and expertise to lead. For FASPE, that means our professionals. And, in FASPE terms, there is circularity: we define professionals as those who, because of their expertise and positional authority, have the capacity to have impact.
Our curriculum is now even more intentionally directed at establishing personal agency and the potential impact of the individual professional. As a society, we cannot merely rely on public policy enacted by our politicians to solve our challenges. The individual technologist must be ethically thoughtful in creating new algorithms; the individual journalist must be responsible for reporting the truth; the individual lawyer must establish ethical limits to advocacy; the individual religious leader must introduce faithful morality even in non-church venues; and the individual doctor must take responsibility for delivering effective healthcare even in light of the power of insurance companies and the profit-making motivations of their employers. Ethical capitalism is the province of the individual business executive in the absence of overriding regulation.
The professionals must be conscientious and self-aware, examining their own motivations as they assert impactful leadership. And that is what you will see reflected in the wonderful writings of our 2024 FASPE Fellows in this journal.
— David