Deborah S. Mower

Deborah S. Mower is the founding director of the Center for Practical Ethics and a professor of philosophy, and holds the inaugural Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Hume Bryant Lectureship in Ethics at the University of Mississippi. Her work centers on civility, moral conviction, and ethics education across all age spans, with applications for teaching, assessment and research, curricular design, and policy. She is a nationally recognized scholar, author, speaker, and consultant, and is the editor of Civility in Politics and Education (Routledge, 2012) and Developing Moral Sensitivity (Routledge, 2015). She has held a variety of leadership roles in professional societies and networks of higher education, such as the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum, the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization, the National Institute for Civil Discourse, and the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wake Forest University Educating Character Initiative (funded by the Lilly Endowment), the Department of Justice, and the National Science Foundation.

Mower’s project, “Cultivating Civility: The Role of Ethics and Structured Peer Conversation in Reducing Political Polarization,” will explore moral convictions — firmly held beliefs about what is right — and their centrality to our identity and political behaviors, influencing the news we consume, the friends we choose, how we vote, and even how strongly we react to opposing views. In particular, she will examine how “Just Conversations,” a structured peer conversation model focused on ethical content, impacts moral convictions, with the goal of identifying methods for reducing polarization.

May 2026