The Ethics Initiative is establishing Notre Dame as a premier global destination for the study of ethics, offering superb training for future ethicists and moral leaders, a platform for engagement of the Catholic moral tradition with other modes of inquiry, and an opportunity to forge insights into some of the most significant ethical issues of our time.
In December 2025, ECG received a $50.8 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to support The DELTA Network: Faith-Based Ethical Formation for a World of Powerful AI. This grant — the largest awarded to Notre Dame by a private foundation in the University’s history — will fund the further development of DELTA, a faith-informed framework for conversations about AI that is rooted in the Christian values of dignity, embodiment, love, transcendence, and agency. The grant will also support the establishment of a robust, interconnected network that will fuel the wide application and dissemination of this framework.
“The Notre Dame Ethics Initiative’s second year was a period of exceptional growth and strategic development. We look forward to building on that in the year to come," said Meghan Sullivan, director of the Ethics Initiative, Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy, and founding director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.
Sullivan focused on DELTA in her opening keynote for the Notre Dame Summit for AI, Faith, and Human Flourishing, which was hosted on Notre Dame’s campus in late September. Supported by a $539,000 Lilly Endowment Inc. planning grant, the Summit brought together a dynamic network of 200+ invited scholars, faith leaders, technologists, journalists, and policymakers who believe in the enduring relevance of Christian ethical thought.
In July 2025, the John Templeton Foundation awarded a $10 million grant to ECG’s Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Center for Virtue Ethics to advance the love ethic, an approach that centers interpersonal love in moral reasoning. With this funding, ECG will support residential fellowships for faculty and graduate students, fellowships and grants to nonprofit leaders and organizations, and an integrated series of public engagement and storytelling programs, forming a wide-reaching love ethic network informed by virtue ethics.
With Ethics Initiative support, the Philosophy Department created a new ethics postdoctoral fellowship program. ECG created three new ND–IBM Tech Ethics Program Chairs and five ND-IBM Tech Ethics Lab graduate fellowships. ECG selected two new ECG Program Chairs, five 2025-26 residential faculty fellows whose research focuses on The Future of Virtue Ethics, five Wilsey Distinguished Graduate Fellows, and a new cohort of 14 undergraduate ethics research fellows. ECG is recruiting faculty fellows, post-docs, and academic collaborators for its 2026–2027 slate of fellowships.
In conjunction with IBM, the ND–IBM Technology Ethics Lab hosted Raise the Bar, a major conference at IBM’s flagship headquarters in Manhattan in October 2025. Nearly 200 senior leaders from business, technology, and academia gathered to explore how large enterprises can deploy AI responsibly at scale.
During spring break 2025, 23 students participated in ECG’s new On Purpose immersion experiences, a program within the Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Center for Virtue Ethics. These immersions will happen again in the spring of 2026, with new cohorts of students returning to Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles (in partnership with Campus Ministry) and the Pueblo communities of New Mexico (in partnership with Alliance for Catholic Education). Also, ECG continues to grow the Apprenticeship in Virtue-Rooted Leadership, a year-long undergraduate formation program that now includes 20 students.
In March 2025, ECG and the Keough School of Global Affairs presented "AI and Labor Policy," a Washington, D.C., workshop led by ECG Program Chair for Technology Ethics Yong Suk Lee. This workshop featured fifteen experts who discussed evidence about AI’s impact on labor markets, shared perspectives from AI developers and adopters, and explored AI and labor policy, and resulted in a white paper published in September 2025.