Teaching Ethics

By assigning relevant readings about moral issues, creating writing assignments that force students to take ethical positions and argue them, and gently directing class discussion away from avoiding moral issues, freshman composition instructors can accomplish much in equipping students to face the difficult moral issues they will confront in their lives. But it is also essential that teachers model ethical behavior for students as part of an institution-wide commitment to teaching ethics across the curriculum. Rules, such as those against plagiarism or against using sexist or racist language, need to be explained, justified and fairly enforced.

First impressions are of a place that is warm, friendly, open and comfortable; some would say the "niceness" is as pervasive as the creeping "kudzu" that invades our woods each Spring. Yet any mention of overtly teaching ethics or values as part of the curriculum is met with skepticism, caution and occasionally overt hostility. For Aquinas College, like many of its counterparts, is a long way from the Catholic "ghetto" of the 60's. The price of adapting to contemporary times, however, has been a mixed blessing. Aquinas is not alone in its struggle to reconcile the differences between the commitment to diversify and its identity as a Catholic college, as well as its tradition as an educational institution committed to the values espoused by both the founding sisters of the college and the country in general.

Here then is evidence of a boom in teaching ethics. There is more. For example, a significant number of philosophers now have their primary appointment in a medical school (often in a department of medical humanities). Not only do these philosophers teach ethics to medical students, many also sit on hospital ethics committees or make rounds with physicians. None of this even seemed possible in 1970.

Many workshops carried out under the banner of "Ethics Across the Curriculum" are basically a philosopher's course in ethical theory capped with some applications to professional ethics. We had heard that, while participants generally enjoyed these workshops, relatively few thereafter integrated ethics into their technical courses. Such workshops seem to support research in professional ethics (and perhaps in-house courses), not integration of ethics into technical courses. Our workshop, on the other hand, was supposed to teach professional faculty enough ethics, and enough about teaching ethics, to make them both willing and able to discuss issues of professional ethics in their courses, to give assignments with an ethical dimension, and to hold students responsible for the work assigned. So, our workshop had to be different from its predecessors.

We concluded that what blocks teaching professional ethics in professional courses is primarily lack of experience with teaching ethics. Professional faculty will teach professional ethics when they have enough background to feel confident that they can teach ethics. That background consists of such nuts-and-bolts matters as how to devise problems for homework or class discussion and how to grade work consisting almost entirely of non-mathematical reasoning. Ethical theory, though occasionally helpful, is relatively unimportant.

Relativism is the name for two distinct entities. One is a theory of how we should act, or "moral relativism"; the other, an attitude toward all moral theories, or "metaethical relativism." Moral relativism is in fact consistent with some other moral theories (for example, MacIntyre's). In any case, moral relativism is no bar to teaching ethics (which, as I defined it, differs from morality precisely in being relative to the group it governs). All three readings for the day dealt with the empirical literature on teaching ethics. The third reading, while summarizing this literature, tried to deal with specific fears faculty may have about teaching professional ethics (indoctrination, appearing holier-than-thou, and so on).