John Lysaker is on a mission: to support and stimulate ethics-oriented researchers and teachers across Emory University.
As director of the Emory Center for Ethics (CFE), Lysaker is taking another step toward fulfilling that mission by establishing the CFE’s new Aretē Ethics Scholars Program. Launching in fall 2025, Aretē (pronounced ah-reh-tay) provides research fellowships for scholars addressing ethical questions in their field of research.
The inaugural cohort of Aretē Fellows includes Emory faculty Jola Ajibade (Department of Environmental Sciences), David Barba (Department of Film and Media), Valérie Loichot (Department of French and Italian) and John Stuhr (Department of Philosophy). Each will participate for one semester.
Melvin Rogers, associate director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics and the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brown University, will participate as a visiting fellow for the full academic year.
Applicants to the program submitted project descriptions that clearly articulated the ethical question animating their project, the central value terms involved (e.g., fairness or courage) and any rival approaches to that question, which they expect to engage.
Within Emory’s mission — to create, preserve, teach and apply knowledge in the service of humanity — lie the principles of humane teaching, respectful interaction among scholars, the integration of research and teaching across disciplines, and a strong commitment to not only use but seek knowledge for the benefit of humanity.
“The Center for Ethics’s mission is to facilitate and intensify the research, teaching and enactment of ethics at Emory and beyond,” Lysaker says. “Supporting research that clarifies who we are at our better is essential to that mission. I am thrilled that we are able to support these scholars and their work.”
To nurture community, fellowship recipients will be in residence together in a newly renovated third floor suite of the 1462 Clifton Road Building during their funded semester.
Meet the 2025-26 Aretē Scholars and learn about their projects
Associate professor, Department of Environmental Sciences
Director, Climate Resilience and Transformations Lab
Project: “From Precarity to Prosperity: Advancing a New Theory of Labor Justice in Global Energy Transition”
My research questions include:
- What are the current ethical principles guiding labor practices, relations and policies in the renewable energy sector, specifically the solar, wind and lithium mining industries?
- How do governance structures and policies contribute to labor precarity in the renewable
energy sector?
- What ethics do renewable energy experts, government agencies, investors, justice scholars and wage laborers perceive as “just” labor practices and policies?
- Which combination of ethics can inform more just labor relations, practices and policies in the renewable energy sector?
The intellectual merit of this research lies in its potential to generate new knowledge and ethical frameworks for addressing critical gaps in labor practices and policies within the renewable energy sector. Shifting labor policies and practices to prioritize fairness and justice could positively impact millions of current and future workers in the industry. This work aligns closely with the goals of the Aretē Ethics Scholars Program and contributes to the interdisciplinary study of labor and just energy transitions. The findings will be shared widely at local, regional and international conferences, as well as through policy briefs and media outlets like Science Friday and Inside Climate News. They will also be disseminated to study participants, policymakers, energy companies, local groups and labor organizations. I plan to publish two open-access peer-reviewed articles and a book to ensure broad accessibility and impact. I will also share the preliminary findings of this study at TED Countdown in Nairobi later this year, where I have been invited as a speaker.
Assistant professor, Department of Film and Media
Project: “The Ethics of Surrogacy”
I propose spending the fall semester studying the ethical questions around surrogacy in order to create a feature film screenplay outline.
Surrogacy is a practice wherein “a woman carries and gives birth to a baby for another person or couple” (Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, 2022). A controversial issue at the intersection of bioethics, technology, biomedical engineering, law and gender, surrogacy provokes vastly conflicting attitudes and beliefs.
The ethical question animating my project: With the surrogacy industry booming as a result of growing infertility rates, technological advances in IVF, couples having children later in life, and same-sex and disabled couples looking to have children, should commercial (contract) gestational surrogacy and even “altruistic” (unpaid) surrogacy remain legal and regulated or should it be banned in all cases? The subject is ripe for ethical consideration and a translation of that research into a contemporary, multifaceted, thought-provoking film.
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of French
Chair, Department of French and Italian
Project: “For an Ethics of Opacity”
For Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, opacity is key to an ethical relationship to the other. In Poetics of Relation (1997), Glissant calls for a “right to opacity,” while anticipating his decriers’ protest: “What a return to barbarism! How could one communicate with what one could not comprehend?” (203). He responds that “the general consent to particular opacities is the plainest equivalent to non-barbarism” (209). During my tenure as an Aretē fellow at Emory’s Center for Ethics, I would write a field-shaping article enhancing Glissant’s “right to opacity,” with a plea for an “ethics of opacity.” “For an Ethics of Opacity” would propose models resisting the bulldozing forces of transparency and would inform multiple academic disciplines and life practices.
My colleague Noura Howell, assistant professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose research “offers tactics for making AI and biometric systems more ethical and inclusive,” urged me to write an essay on Glissant’s notion of opacity, which “would fill a great need for those of us who strive to fight against the dangerous transparency that algorithmic thought reduces humans to transparent beings.”
The Aretē fellowship would give me uninterrupted time and intellectual space to do just that. “For an Ethics of Opacity” would give food for thought to thinkers from multiple fields including, but not limited to, theology, environmental thought, inclusive pedagogies, environmentalism and medicine.
The essay will counter our contemporary obsession with radical transparency that aims to comprehend humans fully. Neither obscurantism nor blindness, opacity is a way of seeing built upon the recognition that the other cannot be fully seized by my own system of thought. Thus, the acknowledgement of the other’s irreducible ‘part of opacity’ is not an obstacle to love, friendship or good neighborly relations. To the contrary, it is precisely by recognizing the other’s thick differences that an ethical relation based on humility can flourish.
I am eager to dialogue with other ethics-bound scholars. For instance, I would love to exchange ideas and methods with colleagues from the medical sciences on how to deal deontologically and efficiently, with the opaque zones of a patient’s narrative and to offer my humanist, close reader, opacity-aware perspective to their own praxis. The Center for Ethics will be an ideal home to pursue these scholarly and human endeavors.
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies
Director, American Philosophies Forum
Editor, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
Series editor, American Philosophy, Indiana University Press
Project: “Human Flourishing: Ethical Implications of Genetic Set Points and Neuroplasticity”
The Aretē Ethics Fellowship program signifies Emory’s commitment to bringing theoretical understanding to bear on the central practical question that everyone must address every day: What sort of person should I be and how can I best strive to become that sort of person? This question has long been at the heart of my teaching, research and scholarship on ethics, social and political philosophy and human flourishing.
I applied to the program to pursue this matter in an interdisciplinary and collaborative setting that provides scholars with that very rarest of resources: time. I'll use that time to focus on the consequences both for the lives of individuals and for public practices and institutions of our best contemporary understanding of human genetics (and different so-called genetic happiness “set points” for each individual) and human neuroplasticity (and non-fixed neural pathways and their possibilities for new actions and habits). In short, my focus will be on pragmatically thinking about what flourishing lives are for human organisms with certain sorts of genes and certain sorts of brains.
Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Brown University
Associate director, Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics
Next year, I will research James Baldwin’s existential account of identity, race and freedom, arguing that his reflections on whiteness, Blackness and liberal democracy reveal a deeper human evasion of freedom’s burden through the construction of protective but distorting identities. By situating Baldwin within a postwar tradition of ethical inquiry alongside Niebuhr, Ellison, Wright, Trilling and Camus, the project explores how his thought offers a searing critique of American moral life and a demanding vision of love, responsibility, and democratic possibility amid the tragedy of modern identity.
About the Emory Center for Ethics
The Emory Center for Ethics is a welcoming, interdisciplinary and supportive home for scholars across the university’s schools, colleges and varied centers and units. The center stands as resource — an “ethical tour guide” — for those seeking to advance humanity through ethical research, teaching and practice as it explores diverse questions of value wherever they arise, from clinical consults to personal moral dispositions.