CBD 2026: Applying Secular Ethics in the Era of AI: Practical activities for putting moral philosophy into practice in daily life with Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, PhD, DPhil

This interactive workshop moves from theory to embodied practice, exploring how secular ethical frameworks can guide meaningful human action in an AI-saturated world. Participants will engage in second-person contemplative exercises, dialogues and role-play scenarios that can be used in higher education or k-12 settings that translate ethical principles into concrete daily practices. These practices of collaborative inquiry allow learners to explore their own interiority dialogically and interactively, grounding moral philosophy not in detached reasoning but in concrete encounters of empathy and shared responsibility.

This Interactive Workshop is part of a two-part series with Brendan Ozawa-de Silva in the Contemplation By Design Summit.

To extend the knowledge and skills you develop during the workshop, please consider attending Brendan Ozawa-de Silva's keynote lecture workshop titled The Discovery of Who We Are: How we can cultivate human values through contemplative education and a rich pluralism on Tuesday, Oct.20 from 4:30-5:45pm.

You are welcome to join one or both of Brendan's Summit sessions.

Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, PhD, DPhil is an Associate Teaching Professor at the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics at Emory University. For over twenty years he has engaged in research on the cultivation of basic human values from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including philosophy, comparative religion, psychology and education. He served as a co-designer and principal curriculum writer for Emory University’s SEE Learning (Social Emotional and Ethical Learning) program, a free SEL and contemplative education program from pre-K to higher ed, and was also founding director for the Chillon Project, a college program for incarcerated women in the state of Georgia, and a co-founder of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, a national non-profit. Together with his wife Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, he co-directs the Social Empathy Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab at Emory University.

This session is part of the FREE Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 14-25, 2026.

The full summit schedule for this year will be posted at: https://med.stanford.edu/contemplation/summit.html.