How to Teach Ethics
The study of ethics is supposed to make us kinder and more open-hearted. At best, it helps us acquiesce and at worst it makes us complicit.
Many ethics textbooks include some metaethical reflections on the pedagogical aims of teaching ethics. These typically involve helping students to see the multifacited and complex nature of ethical disputes or the dangers of absolutist pronouncements about morality. The trouble is that students typically walk away from ethics classes with a heightened sense of their own moral enlightenment and ability to reason their way through moral disputes, or the sense that these disputes have no ultimate end. Most ethics textbooks strongly imply that the answer lies somewhere in the middle (guided, no doubt, by Aristotle). None of them discuss the material effects of power on the lives of oppressed people, or suggest that there is anything to be done about it. None of them say plainly that there are people that want you, personally, dead.
One major problem is that the study of ethics is typically approached as an introduction to the science of ethics. In the same way that introductions to biology or physics are largely about reviewing the major theoretical advancements in those fields and practicing in a limited way how the science gets done, ethics classes introduce students to deontology and utilitarianism and ask them to try these theories out on abortion, immigration, or promise breaking. This prepares students to think of ethics as a science or a means for resolving disagreements, rather than as a call for revolution. Many of the sciences can afford to ignore human concerns and the realities of their students lives, but the humanities can’t afford this. If ethics is supposed to be about the capital-G Good, then ethics can afford to ignore these realities least of all.
The demands of ethicists ought to be the demands of the disenfranchised and oppressed. To study ethics ought to be to study the history of these demands and the degree to which they continue to be unmet. Ethics ought to be about teaching people to betray their own ill-gotten power and how to dismantle the systems and institutions that curtail human flourishing.
This isn’t to say that teaching ethics is the same as teaching praxis. Ethics is still a philosophical discipline and so it is still fundamentally a theoretical discipline. It is at least as much about the questions as it is about the answers. But theory devoid of application is meaningless. Even worse, it’s immoral.
I don’t know what to do about this.
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