the president governs by Twitter. Yet the ethical dilemmas are no less complex than the subject matter; cyber security, prison reform, labor rights, abortion, artificial intelligence, or gun laws are common table topics over lunch. Struggling through that complexity is central to understanding its implications for our culture. As scholar D. Stephen Long so eloquently writes in his chapter, “It is insufficient to inform students that they already have an ethical formation. It must be subject to examination.”
This book brings together some of the leading ethicists in the country together to consider the rightful place of ethics in the university today. Twenty years ago, William F. May, a distinguished ethics scholar, set the foundation for an ethics program at SMU when he stated, “A university does not fully discharge its duties to its students if it hands out knowledge—and the power that knowledge yields—without posing questions about its responsible uses.” Philosophy, religious studies and theology professors still engage students on topics related to contemporary moral issues but there is another movement on campuses, one that we should support: the teaching of applied ethics by professors of practice. When a self-driving car hits a pedestrian because it misinterpreted a sign, or when another corporation defrauds its investors, we will wish that we had spent more time thinking not only of what it is possible to do with our knowledge but also what is right, just, and honorable. Educators have a duty to empower students to cultivate their character, ethically assess situations and prepare them for an ever-hostile world. However, just as accomplished professionals look to physicians, lawyers, and engineers when they need the help of a professional, so too can individuals look to ethicists for solving complex moral issues.1
The question of the proper role of ethics courses in the university curriculum takes on particular debates when considered in light of the secular focus of most universities. Robert Howell considers this debate in light of our own experiences in developing an undergraduate curriculum that requires ethical education for all students. So what does it mean when we say we teach ethics? As he addresses the issue of the Secular University’s Dilemma (“either Morality and Ethics encode God’s will [and thus have a religious backing] or they are merely a matter of cultural custom”), Howell claims that the debate does not lessen the importance of the concepts.2 In fact, in a highly secular world of diverse belief frames, learning how to reason with one another across religious and cultural contexts is more important than ever. Contextualized in the framework of Howell’s concept of “Google Ethics,” he explains the criticality of doing more than what is thought to be right and just. Students must also know why they do what they do.
This book also provides a much-needed overview of the field of Christian ethics, including the Social Gospel movement, Christian realism, Catholic social teaching, the proper role of the state in social and economic life, subsidiarity, religious liberty, human rights, the Christian right, and liberation theology. This grounding demonstrates the depth and complexity of Christian ethics and concludes that the rightful place for such thinking and debate also resides at the university.
The university faces unique institutional challenges when it claims a commitment to ethics education. Its core population is often comprised of the traditional college-aged student who is leaving home perhaps for the first time, faced with an expanded range of possible experiences, seems unaware of the consequences for risky behavior, and is certainly not thinking about the impact of actions on the image of the university. To be fair, students are not the only ones who make poor choices, perhaps not even the most impactful ones. Still, our country is blessed with some excellent university ethics programs, numerous ethics-based community groups, and shelves of books to enlighten our journey. Yet as David Brooks, author of The Road to Character, notes, “We’ve accidently left this moral tradition behind. Over the last several decades, we’ve lost this language, this way of organizing life. We’re not bad. But we are morally inarticulate.”3 It’s time we got that back. Our future depends on it.
That’s why this book is important.
1. See Charles Curran, chapter 3.
2. See Robert Howell, chapter 2.
3. Brooks, Road to Character, 15.
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Can Ethics Be Taught? Connecting the Classroom to Everyday Life
D. Stephen Long
Can we, should we, teach ethics in the modern university? Teaching ethics differs from teaching other disciplines. Few students arrive at the university aware of Organic Chemistry and the importance of Grignard reactions. They most likely have not studied the causes, major dates, or key persons in the French Revolution. The means for teaching and evaluating students in these subjects can be relatively straightforward. Either one has success in the laboratory forming carbon-carbon bonds or one does not. One can give the dates for Robespierre’s life and describe his role in the revolution or one cannot. But what about ethics? Our assumptions about teaching ethics cannot be the same as they are for teaching Organic Chemistry or French History. On the one hand, we assume students already have some sense of ethics before they arrive, which is why we hold them accountable for their behavior from their first day on campus. No one can avoid being disciplined for a violation of an honor code by protesting, “But I have not yet had my ethics course!” We would not hold a student accountable for her ignorance of Grignard reactions or French history prior to receiving instruction in the field, but we do hold students accountable for their actions with or without a course in ethics. On the other hand, we also assume that students should reflect on ethics across the curriculum, and that assumes that ethics needs to and can be taught. How do we make sense of both these assumptions? (1) Students arrive capable of being held accountable for ethical behavior. (2) Students arrive in need of an education in ethics.
A cursory reading of these assumptions might find them to be contradictory. If students can be held accountable for ethical behavior without an ethics course, then why teach ethics? If students need an education in ethics, then why hold them accountable for ethical failure? This essay explores these two assumptions, noting why they are not contradictory, and why the teaching of ethics should depend and build on the ordinary formation with which students arrive on campus. Teaching ethics in the university will be most successful when it connects with students’ previous histories of doing good and avoiding evil in their everyday life, connects that to the university’s moral history, and points toward the ordinary events that will constitute their future endeavors. It is in these histories that teaching ethics makes best sense.
If the two assumptions of my opening paragraph are granted—first, we assume students arrive at the university with some understanding of ethical behavior so that we can hold them accountable for their actions even if they never had a course in ethics; second, we assume students should be taught ethics in their curriculum, including courses in ethics across the curriculum—then two possible objections arise based on the possible contradiction present in the assumptions. We could argue that students do not arrive at the university with a sufficient understanding of proper ethical behavior such that we should hold them accountable for their actions. This argument, however, would make the life of the university nearly impossible. Even if we cannot give convincing theoretical reasons why we hold the first assumption, living together in a complex space like the university requires that practically we assume students arrive with at least a tacit awareness of doing good and avoiding evil. We do not need to assume they all share the same ethical convictions, or that every student has the same level of ethical awareness, but the practice of everyday, university life assumes students (along with everyone else associated with the university) have some tacit ethical awareness.
Universities are composed of adults who have already been formed into ways of seeing the world and acting within it from a diversity of social forms of life. They are also composed
