ethics news & views: Teaching ethics: the 2001 Faculty Ethics Seminar

June 01, 2001

Teaching ethics: the 2001 Faculty Ethics Seminar

The Center For Ethics faculty seminar this year focused on “Teaching Ethics.” The seminar proceeded with most of the participants discussing their classroom experiences and especially focusing on the various instructional challenges they encounter.

From my vantage point, what seemed most interesting in all of these discussions was the way ethics was understood or grasped by each of our participants as a function of their professional contexts or environments. Those of us, for instance, who are primarily trained in the history of moral philosophy tend to understand teaching ethics as teaching the literature. Others of us, however, understand ethics as a kind of “praxis” which centers on the formation of character and the occasional need for moral courage. Consequently, whereas one group of faculty might emphasize knowing and its intellectual components, another emphasizes doing and its character components.

Perhaps a key to appreciating this distinction is to focus on what ethics might very well be ultimately about: namely, how issues of right, wrong, good, evil, and so forth punctuate human relationships. For the philosophy professor, his or her relationship occurs with students and is largely an intellectual one. The relationship is mediated by texts, and the professor understands his or her responsibility as communicating the message of those texts and then assessing whether the student “got it,” usually by way of assigning essays or giving examinations.

For the ethics instructor who is “teaching” ethics to medical students or health providers, however, the instructional context is quite different. There, the relationship between teacher and student is highly focused on the practical nature of the student’s vocation. So whereas vocational choices among the philosophy professor’s undergraduate students may well be undecided and leave the professor free to teach whatever he or she can justify, medical students and residents have an exquisitely obvious context that will occasionally present them with moral perplexity. Their ethics professor will more than likely target representative problems and decision making strategies that appreciate the context of suffering and healing.

A familiar problem in ethics for most of the 20th century has been the debate over the value of theory: how to understand it; the extent of its usefulness; indeed, whether ethical theory is even possible, given the conspicuous plurality of values that exists in liberal democracies. While most reasonable persons agree about the need for structure and coherence in one’s moral life—especially as it is played out publicly—our society’s public insistence on privacy, individual rights, cultural and gender sensitivity, freedom of expression and so forth sometimes blurs our sense of obligations and duties. This is all rather apparent in the area of professional ethics, with which most of our faculty participants are involved. While traditional ethical theory tried to demonstrate a set of timeless ethical rules and norms that exist independently of the historical contingencies of any society, professional ethics inevitably finds itself immersed in the culture in which a particular profession finds itself. To the extent, then, that the ethical professional’s profession must take its cues from the political, economic, spiritual, and scientific trappings of that society, the professional may well encounter challenges over whether or not to “adjust” his or her ethical sensibilities and understandings as well.

Ultimately, “teaching ethics” witnesses a struggle over the apparent conflict of injecting moral coherence and stability into social contexts that witness remarkable change (such as what managed care has wrought among physicians who are trying to be “ethical.”) Participants of the seminar are currently considering the merits of producing a book of readings on teaching professional ethics. Interestingly, not much is available on that very subject, which provides some evidence perhaps for how complex and multifarious the topic is.

[ Posted by John Banja at June 1, 2001 06:38 PM |