William Deal Named as Inamori Professor and Center Director
 William E. Deal, whose approach
to ethical inquiry is informed by
his study of East Asian religious
traditions, has been named the
first Inamori Professor of Ethics
and founding director of the
Inamori International Center for
Ethics and Excellence at Case
Western Reserve University.
Formerly the Severance Associate
Professor in the department of
religious studies, Deal joined the
Arts and Sciences faculty in 1989.
For the past three years, he has
served as a faculty mentor to visiting fellows in SAGES (the Seminar
Approach to General Education and Scholarship) while leading his
own seminar on religious and ethical views of the human body.
The establishment of the ethics professorship and center was made
possible by a $10 million gift from Kazuo Inamori, the Japanese
industrialist and philanthropist who founded Kyocera Corporation
and created the Kyoto Prize. The Inamori Center will be a campuswide
initiative that builds upon the university’s substantial strengths
in ethics research and teaching. Among its many projected activities,
the center will administer a new international prize in ethics.
For Deal, the Inamori gift represents, above all, a chance to initiate
“programs and dialogue about ethics, the human condition, and
human values.” Many of the center’s activities will engage the larger
university community: Deal hopes to organize classes and forums
with the department of bioethics in the School of Medicine, the
Center for Professional Ethics in the School of Law, and other established ethics programs. At the same time, given
the Inamori Center’s commitment to “thinking about
ethics and excellence in the broadest possible terms,”
Deal will be looking for ways to involve faculty and
students from programs that do not have an explicit
ethical focus.
Over time, the center will establish fellowships for
faculty members who wish to study ethics or design
courses with a significant ethics component. There
will also be funding for students conducting ethics-related
research or service projects. In addition,
the Inamori gift provides for international fellows
to teach SAGES seminars on ethical themes. These
fellows may engage in collaborations with Arts and
Sciences faculty or with colleagues in other units of
the university.
The first Inamori Prize will be awarded in 2008 and
establish an international profile for the new center.
The selection committee will consist of respected ethicists
from around the world, and the award ceremony
will be accompanied by a symposium devoted to the
work and ideas of the honoree. For those who cannot
attend these events, the Inamori Center will offer
streaming video of the proceedings on its website.
Speaking Across Cultures
The role of an ethics center is not to tell people what
to believe or how to behave, Deal says. Rather, its
mission is to “provide people with the tools to think
as deeply about ethics and morality as they are willing
and able to do.” In pursuing this mission, the Inamori
Center will place a distinctive emphasis on crosscultural
dialogue and a reformulation of conventional
ethical questions.
 “I’d like to see the center do some fundamental work in providing education around ethical traditions—probably starting from a Western perspective,” Deal explains. “But I want the center to go well beyond the traditional ways we have thought about ethics in the West. Our purpose is to think about human values much more broadly conceived—to think about human relationships, how cultures can relate to each other, how political systems can be made ethical. When a specific culture makes ethical judgments, what categories is it using? Can we ever arrive at some broader global conversation that transcends specific cultures? I want the Inamori Center to take the lead in thinking about such matters.”
The Inamori Center’s initial home—a newly renovated space on the ground level of Crawford Hall—will incorporate several Japanese design elements and open out onto a garden. In addition to faculty offices and a library, the plans include adaptable meeting spaces that can accommodate a small seminar or a community forum. The architectural firm of Ewing Cole, which created SAGES Central on quad-level Crawford, has been commissioned for this new project, which will provide both a physical and a symbolic link between SAGES and the Inamori Center. Ultimately, when a new Campus Center is built beside Kelvin Smith Library, the Inamori Center will take its place there, at the geographical heart of the university.
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