Shannon E. French is the Inamori Professor of Ethics, Director of the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence, and a tenured member of the Philosophy Department at Case Western Reserve University. Prior to starting at CWRU in July 2008, she taught for eleven years as an Associate Professor of Philosophy with tenure in the Ethics Section of the Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. She also served as Associate Chair of that department. Dr. French received her B.A. (Philosophy, Classical Studies, and History) from Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) in 1997.

Dr. French’s main area of research is military ethics. Her first book, The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values, Past and Present, features a foreword by Senator John McCain and includes chapters on the need for warriors to maintain a code that restrains their conduct in war, on the warrior codes of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Celts, Native Americans, medieval knights, Chinese warrior monks and Japanese samurai, and on new challenges to the warrior’s code in the context of modern combat. She has published numerous other works, including a chapter on terrorism and asymmetric warfare in Terrorism and International Policy (Oxford University Press, 2003) and a chapter on modern challenges to Just War Theory in The Price of Peace: Just War for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She is an associate editor for the Journal of Military Ethics and for the Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Her on-going scholarship is focused on current issues in military ethics, ethical leadership, command climate, sacrifice and responsibility, warrior transitions (including concerns about PTSD and homeless veterans), ethical responses to terrorism and the future of war. Dr. French has presented papers at international conferences throughout the U.S. and in France, England, Australia, Canada, and Norway.

In 2004, she helped design and present a series of four-day training seminars on moral reasoning and ethical advisement to leadership for the Navy’s Chaplain Corps at Navy and Marine Corps bases around the U.S. and in Naples, Italy and Okinawa, Japan. Dr. French and her fellow Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) were brought back in 2006 to create and present a second series of seminars to the Chaplain Corps on the subject of character development.

At the U.S. Naval Academy, Dr. French taught “Moral Reasoning for Naval Leaders” (the core ethics course), “The Code of the Warrior,” and other electives. In 2000 she was awarded USNA’s campus-wide Apgar Award for Excellence in Teaching for demonstrating “effectiveness in teaching the qualities of leadership, with special emphasis on character, responsibility, and integrity.” At Case Western Reserve she teaches a “War and Morality” class and a “Business Ethics” independent study course for the Philosophy Department, as well as character and ethics seminars for the School of Medicine, an annual workshop on research ethics and guest lectures on ethical leadership and engineering ethics. She recently founded a new student organization, the Global Ethical Leaders Society (GELS). She also works with local high schools to enhance their ethics curricula and has made several presentations on ethics for corporations.

Dr. French has participated in the public debate on ethical issues through articles or interviews in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Sun, and other major news publications, and has appeared on NPR (National Public Radio) and NPR affiliates, BBC radio, CBS radio, C-SPAN, PBS and A&E. She also serves as a consultant for the Life’s Building Blocks Corporation, which produces children’s games, toys, and books intended to promote positive character development.