What Can We Teach When We Teach Ethics?
Carla R. Payne, PhD
Professor of Graduate Studies
Union Institute & University (retired)
Community College of Vermont
E-mail: paynec@fairpoint.net
Introduction
What can philosophers teach when they teach ethics? The greatly increased recent popularity of ethics courses seems to carry the implication that more instruction in that subject can make a moral difference, at a time when instances of corruption in high places have probably contributed to a general sense that we are ethically deficient. These courses usually fall within the philosophy department, but what can philosophers actually offer in this area? There is an essential equivocation in the stated purposes for which some ethics courses are included in college curricula, as well as problems with their content and the methods by which progress toward their objectives are to be evaluated.
Many students take ethics courses as required parts of pre-professional curricula, and others take them merely to satisfy humanities requirements, but some students clearly look to learn how to “be good,” or fear to discover that they are not. Most descriptions for basic courses restrict themselves to offering an introduction to critical analysis of ethical theories and their application to situational cases, but there are others which suggest that moral improvement or growth is a course objective. Here they are inconsistent with recent philosophical practice; in the long shadow of the “Meno,” and in the age of meta- studies, philosophers generally eschew the notion that “virtue” is a kind of knowledge that they can teach. It is true that even in examining the implications of ethical theory for decision-making, one acknowledges that ethics is not simply another branch of philosophy, because decisions belong to the practical realm, but this would not justify the return to a didactic of values in a philosophy course. There are problems with both the content and methodologies of courses which aim at ethical improvement or are normative in intent; there are also other questions associated with the assumption that developing “critical thinking” ability will influence behavior, or at least “decision-making,” in an ethically positive way. What outcomes, then, can reasonably be expected from an introductory philosophy course in ethics? The stated objectives of several such courses are examined in this paper, as well as some of the ambiguities and issues that are inherent in them. An attempt is made to establish the reasonable expectations we may have in teaching ethics as philosophers.
Objectives and Promises
An informal survey conducted over the internet of the descriptions of general or introductory college ethics courses reveals a great deal of commonality in their stated objectives. The emphasis is on familiarity with ethical theories, on analysis of problem situations or cases, and on application of theory to such cases. A typical set of course objectives included:
- Develop an understanding of major ethical theories
- Develop the ability to relate various general principles of ethics to individual situations
- Appreciate the complexity and difficulty of ethical problems
- Develop the ability to identify and analyze problems in ethics, as well as formulate defensible solutions to ethical problems. (Caseldine-Bracht, 2006)
Sometimes, however, the blurbs for these staples of the undergraduate curriculum are more prescriptive, including goals such as developing “an ethical framework for defining and addressing issues in one’s own life” (PHIL 1040, Introduction to Ethics, Essential Objectives). We can find some rather definite indications of these kinds of desired outcomes:
“ . . . I hope that by the end of the semester you will have fully examined your own ethical beliefs and reformulated some of them in light of theoretical pressures . . . .” (Patton, 2006)
“ . . . The goal is to develop a more adequate understanding of what it means to be practically reasonable, and of how practical reasonableness can be embodied in personal and social life.” (Madigan, 2006)
Even more specifically, David Ozar (2001), in his discussion of an “Outcomes-Centered Approach to Teaching Ethics,” also believes that “It ought to be the case . . . that students leave an undergraduate program having grown in certain aspects of motivation/conviction and having become more habitually appreciative of the presence of certain motivations/convictions in others.” All of these statements imply the possibility of achieving certain desired changes in the moral/ethical dimension of personality within the framework of an academic course.
Angela Hernquist (2005) surveyed a variety of approaches to integrating an ethical component into the curriculum. The sources she cites seem to agree that the introduction of such material serves important social purposes but are not clear about the ways in which academic study can effect or affect personal change or, indeed, which changes should be promoted. There is a kind of general hope that cultivation of “. . . intellectual and practical skills, informed by knowledge and ways of knowing . . .” will make students “responsible for personal actions and civic values.” But how would this work? How can these ends be realized within the parameters of a “course”? Even within a religious context, as at the University of Dubuque, the methods or measures for “character education” are not identified beyond “course work, creating student scholarships, and underwriting a lecture series” (Hernquist, 2005). Apart from an evaluation of its intrinsic merit, the purpose of fostering ethical improvement in a philosophy course presents us with both technical/pedagogical and philosophical issues.
The Challenges
Making individual ethical growth or improvement a course objective, or even aiming to enhance practical skills in applying ethical insights to the student’s own life situation would involve solving multiple problems. First, from a procedural point of view, how would the outcomes of such efforts be assessed? Action and application generally take place in a world outside the classroom, and we have only what the student says about it as evidence.
We must first address the problem of the veracity and accuracy of student self-reports, if we use them as a basis for assessing ethical progress, as Ozar (2005) does:
Teachers rarely have much opportunity to observe students’ behavior outside class, much less to learn their reasons for conducting themselves as they do. So teachers’ assessments of their students’ awareness will come chiefly from providing opportunities for students to engage in relevant discourse, i.e. to consider situations in which moral/ethical matters are at stake. This will ordinarily be in the form of students discussing hypothetical cases or situations from current events or from the students’ own lives, with the faculty then assessing the students’ discourse in terms of the kinds of awareness they reveal.
Extrapolating from class discussions to mental states, rather than only to the skills evidenced in the use of language, is also a questionable process. Ozar here seems to be moving well beyond evidence-based assessment. The instructor’s subjective appraisal of what is recounted of activities beyond the classroom or their purported influence on “awareness” is shaky ground for assigning a grade or other indicator of achievement. Student discourse may, of course, be evaluated for indicators of “critical thinking skills” using some scheme such as Henri’s, (Lally, 2001 ) but such analysis is applied to cognitive domains rather than to affective dimensions of personality. If we practice what we teach about critical thinking, we will not make the jump from what we can observe to what we can conjecture, even in an atypical one-to-one context implied by Ozar’s description: “And one can fairly dependably assess a person’s awareness by examining their discourse and by posing relevant questions if the dialogue still leaves matters in doubt (taking account, of course, not only of the words spoken, but of the nonverbal elements of the interchange as well)” (2005). This seems to be out of keeping with rigorous philosophical method; an additional practical difficulty is that in the expanding online environment, these “nonverbal elements” are frequently not observable and thus not available as a basis for assessment.
A related issue has to do with the limitations of the classroom as a venue for learning.
In his detailed examination of methods for assessing development in ethical “motivation/conviction” among undergraduate students, Ozar (2005) concedes that “formation of undergraduate students in these motivations and convictions, whatever they are, does not occur chiefly by means of the institution’s ethics curriculum,” stipulating instead that it is the example of faculty and staff which is the principle vehicle for accomplishing the desired changes. This raises an issue of qualification for the teaching of ethics which is separate from the requirement of academic credentials, and which is probably intractable if the relevant modeling is not limited to what is demonstrated within the classroom.
An equal difficulty is determining which theoretical standpoint would be adopted for determining ethical progress. What we think we can actually teach in an ethics course is largely defined by our underlying assumptions about the nature of moral values and how they enter into human lives. If we believe that we “know the good,” then we may also believe that we can teach it, and that will compel our students to “do the good.” The nature of “the good,” however, has not been conclusively settled from the philosophical point of view. Philosophy’s project is a pervasive revelation of its own premises and the adoption of a “critical” stance vis-à-vis particular positions; to attempt to inculcate any one system of values or to undertake assessment from the perspective of such a system, is to leave philosophy behind.
One aspect of this issue is connected to the assertions by some commentators that students come to ethics courses with “moral” knowledge and relevant ethical experience, which needs only to be refined or cultivated. The nature of such knowledge is frequently not specified. While biologists currently speculate that “people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution,” they also concede that such a grammar would not generate specific rules, which vary according to the weight placed on “the elements of the grammar’s calculations” (Wade, 2006). This does not support claims for innate, specific or common ethical knowledge: that “Human beings generally know right from wrong, honor from shame, virtue from vice” (Toner, 1998), that “Everybody has a conscience . . .” (Rhodes, 2003) and that students “already possess experience with moral problems and knowledge of moral matters” (Henderson, 2002). There are some reasons, then, to believe that we may have an innate capacity for moral thought and behavior, but that does not ground any assumptions about specific ethical systems or moral values, nor the predication of any curricular agenda. Although Henderson (2002) recommends that as part of the teaching process “the philosopher now has the opportunity to point the student towards some ethical theory,” in the context of a philosophy class the adoption or promotion of any one point of view, except for the sake of argument, would be suspect. Perhaps equally important is that it, too, would be inconsistent with efforts to model the critical stance.
While the cognitive approach to the content of an ethics course, resting on the development of “reasoning and other reflective skills” (Ozar, 2005), seems to be intellectually safer, in the context of teaching ethics it also implies assumptions which need examination. As Marino (2004) puts it, “Ethics missionaries are driven by the assumption that improving our moral lives is a matter of developing our conceptual understanding and analytical acumen.” But since the exact relationship between the cognitive and the ethical dimensions of human nature has not been finally ascertained, we cannot be certain what effect, if any, the promotion of analytical reasoning skills will have on ethical decision-making or behavior. This is only to remind ourselves that we still do not know whether “to know the right is to do the right.”
The Defining Issues Test, a well-known instrument for evaluating ethical growth in connection with character education, developed by James Rest, assumes, however, that we do know that there is a link between moral “knowledge” and moral action. It is grounded in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, which correlates cognitive and ethical growth (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau & Thoma, 1999). Whatever their merit as psychological tools, such tests present us again with the same philosophical and pedagogical problems. Do we know conclusively, for example, that Kohlberg’s scheme of development accurately reflects the universal human moral ideal? Even apart from the feminist critique of Kohlberg’s work as skewed toward a male perspective, we may wonder whether promoting change via curriculum and assessing it according to the system of stages or levels he describes, is not equivalent to imposing a set of ethical norms, which would not be consistent with the philosophical agenda. From the teaching perspective, since these tests are usually constructed for use with young adults or children, they are often not fully appropriate for the increasingly diverse college class, which typically includes mature adults (see the bibliography of test research at the Center for the Study of Ethical Development). The widespread demographic shifts among college students are still often ignored even by those who make prior life experience the basis for their discussions of how to shape course content.
It should be noted that assertions that ethics instruction is an academically viable part of a curriculum are frequently made in support of the teaching of applied ethics, i.e., the parameters and particulars of acceptable practice in business or the professions. “When people ask, ‘Can ethics be taught?’ they do not seem to be asking whether philosophical ethics can be taught. Often, perhaps most often, they are asking whether professional (or business) ethics can be taught” (Davis, 1994). This kind of content, which often includes explication of codes of behavior in defined contexts as presented by practitioners, aims to “Develop a sense of personal identity that incorporates the norms and values of a profession” (Bebeau, 2006). Such implementation or preparation for “particular social roles” is one of the four “ideal outcomes” listed by Ozar (2005) for the ethics curriculum, but a clear distinction should be drawn between these concerns for professional acculturation and the content and purposes of a philosophy course on ethics.
Conclusions
The 1978 report of the Harvard Task Force on the Core Curriculum declared that “An educated person is expected to have some understanding of, and experience in thinking about, moral and ethical problems. It may well be that the most significant quality in educated persons is the informed judgment which enables them to make discriminating moral choices” (MacDonald, 2000). Cultivating this kind of judgment seems to be at the limit of reasonable expectations for a course in philosophical ethics, because we cannot answer the theoretical, methodological or practical questions implied by efforts to go beyond those expectations. As many commentators have pointed out, to ask whether ethics can be taught is not the same as asking whether ethical values can be learned. The focus here is on claims for the teaching of normative ethics within the context of academic courses in philosophy, which would require that essential questions be answered: If virtue can be taught, which virtues should be taught? Who is qualified to teach them? And how will we know when the desired learning has taken place?
For better or for worse, the role of the academic philosopher is now very different from what it was in the nineteenth-century, the last time when ethical and moral philosophy was such a preeminent concern in American life: “Until after the Civil War . . . the philosopher connected with an institution was the custodian of certain truths necessary to the functioning of civilized society. His job was to convey these truths to the youth who would one day assume positions of leadership. . . . The president of the college often taught the final course in moral philosophy in the senior year to ensure the insemination of proper beliefs” (Kuklick, 2005). Philosophers can no longer pretend to such acquaintance with absolute ethical truths, nor is their inculcation part of the philosophical charge. Even the propounders of the great ethical systems presented us with their reasoned arguments for the values they espoused, inviting critical examination and response. This is not to espouse ethical relativism or any other position but merely to acknowledge the evolution of our thinking, under the chastening effect of time and events.
References
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