What Is the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard?

Updated

The Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard (ethics.harvard.edu) is Harvard University's center for research, teaching, and public engagement on ethics. Its site is a place to find the center's research, events, and commentary—for example, the piece "How AI Fails Us." If you want to know what the institution is and what you can use its website for, the sections below cover that.

What the center is

It is a Harvard-based ethics center named for Edmond and Lily Safra. Its work spans ethics research and public engagement: scholarly projects, discussion of applied ethical questions, and programming that brings ethical analysis to a wider audience.

What the website offers

Based on the site's own description, ethics.harvard.edu provides:

  • Machine-learning models — resources tied to the center's work on technology and ethics
  • Research — the center's scholarship and project output
  • Training resources — materials for learning about and applying ethics
  • Evaluation — assessment resources connected to its research

It also hosts commentary and public-facing writing, such as "How AI Fails Us," which examines the ethical limits and failures of AI systems.

Who it is for

If you are… You can use the site to…
A researcher or student Find the center's research and training resources
A practitioner facing an ethical question (e.g., in AI) Read commentary and analysis like "How AI Fails Us"
Someone looking for events or public programming Check the center's events and engagement material
A journalist or curious reader Understand the center's positions and current work

A practical example

Suppose you are working on an AI project and need to think through where the technology could fail users or communities. You could start with "How AI Fails Us" to see how the center frames those failures, then look through its research and training resources for deeper material. The site is a starting point for the center's published work, not a general-purpose tool.

What to keep in mind

The site's description mentions a "subscribe" option, but no pricing or access details are given, so do not assume content is free or requires no login—check the specific page you need. For current programs, events, and publications, go directly to ethics.harvard.edu rather than relying on summaries.