Advances in science and technology have outpaced careful inquiry into their ethical implications. For example, new tools like CRISPR and large language models may hold tremendous potential for our collective benefit, but also exacerbate already existing social disparities. Our initiative recognizes that meeting these challenges is just as much a battle for our collective imaginations and ethical commitments as it is a set of technical problems to solve. 

Leveraging Princeton’s strengths in the sciences and the humanities, the Future Values Initiative supports scholarship that expands traditional approaches to normative inquiry and applied ethics of science and technology, critically examining present injustices by imagining and co-creating radically different futures. We envision new modes of scholarship where scientists are given tools to understand how values shape the production of science and how its benefits and costs are socially distributed, and where humanists are partners in the innovation process rather than critics after the fact. Ultimately, we aim to evolve normative thinking and scientific practice to meet the challenges of the present age. 

The Initiative is co-organized by Catherine Clune-Taylor in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and M.J. Crockett in the Department of Psychology and UCHV. 

Applications for the 2024-25 Future Values Fellowship are now open! Please apply by October 15, 2024.