This fall, I’ve been teaching Intro Ethics for the first time in years. It’s a strange assignment, as though the students were previously feral and my task was to begin their moral education, age 18 to 22. Presumably, most were introduced to ethics already by their primary caregivers. At least, I hope they were.
There are difficult questions about what to teach in such a class and how. I once wrote about the risks of Intro Ethics, echoing Annette Baier’s “Theory and Reflective Practices.” “The obvious trouble with our contemporary attempts to use moral theory to guide action,” she wrote, “is the lack of agreement on which theory to apply.”
The standard undergraduate course in, say, medical ethics, or business ethics, acquaints the student with a variety of theories, and shows the difference in the guidance they give. We, in effect, give courses in comparative moral theory, and like courses in comparative religion, their usual effect on the student is loss of faith in any of the alternatives presented. We produce relativists and moral skeptics, persons who have been convinced by our teaching that whatever they do in some difficult situation, some moral theory will condone it, another will condemn it.
I think the danger here lies not so much in moral theories themselves as in the tacit epistemology that treats “intuitions” as evidence, when they are not. Moral theories do not organize intuitive “data” but codify basic forms of ethical reasoning. That such reasoning can be better or worse may be impossible to demonstrate on neutral grounds—as it is impossible to prove the rationality of science to a committed denialist—but there’s no more reason for doubt in one case than the other.
This situation sets a pedagogical problem. While there are standards of good reasoning in ethics, there is disagreement about what they are—arguably more pervasive than disagreement about scientific reasoning, though the difference is one of degree, not kind—and there is no rational means by which to force convergence on the truth. At the same time, it is morally problematic to exploit one’s position as a teacher to influence students non-rationally. So there is a sense in which Intro Ethics cannot, and should not, teach ethics.
That doesn’t mean it cannot teach students about ethics, and the history of ethics, and possible modes of ethical reasoning, in ways aim not to induce moral scepticism. Often this takes the form of sharing theories and distinctions that will enrich students’ ethical thinking, whatever they believe. I try to leave my students no worse than they were when I found them—though I make no promises.
I rehearsed these thoughts this fall as I returned to the classroom, reading Notes on My Dunce Cap, a book about pedagogy by the novelist Jesse Ball.
It is in many ways a humbling document. Ball is a wildly creative and ambitious teacher: at one point, he suggests that a good syllabus should be “contagious”—merely seeing it should inspire “a sudden desire to take the class, or even to begin conducting research on parallel lines.”
But when Ball petitions for humility, he is perversely empowering:
You will find as a teacher that you must actively combat one idea in particular. What is it? The idea that you are wise and know anything at all. The reason for this is not necessarily that you are ignorant. You may be. Or you may indeed be wise. However, the only place from which progress can be made is the posture of a beginner—that person who is prostrate before the entirety [of] what may be known.
“Do not under any circumstances permit your students to confirm you in your belief that you know things,” he continues.
You are in many ways a fraud and you have escaped notice until now. Why then should you be allowed to teach at all? Because you are kind and you love the material and you may demonstrate the way in which small progress may be made.
What I love about these lines is that they make of my necessity a virtue: the refusal to evangelize that is the obligation of the Intro Ethics instructor is in harmony with teaching well.
What I hate is the reminder that the lecture format, a default for Intro Ethics, is at odds with that—not because “active learning” is more effective, though it may be, but because the lecture encodes the expectation of knowledge, because it advertises “I am not a fraud,” because it is complicit in a cold war against common curiosity.
I wish I could find a way to lecture that defeats these tendencies of the form, but as a teacher, I am not wise and know nothing at all.