as Socrates said, “the unexamined life is a life not worth living.” If the two assumptions above are conceded, then the task of teaching ethics must address these two questions: (1) from whence does ethics come? and (2) to where should ethics go? The first question assists us with the first assumption that students and others arrive at the university with a tacit awareness of proper ethical behavior. The second question assists us with the second assumption that students (and others) benefit from examining and reflecting upon that tacit awareness to bring it to a fuller one that can assist them in living well. They can do so by confronting the question of what is a good human life? But as most people already know, and as we shall see, answers to this question are so contested that the question readily gets neglected or abandoned in the modern university for fear that the answers will produce too much conflict.
From whence does ethics come?
Ethics never begins in a vacuum. Ethics cannot be taught like a science experiment that seeks to remove the contingencies of everyday existence and create ideal conditions. Human action is too complex for such a possibility. Plato famously argued that to have a just city we would need drastic actions. We find ourselves already in the middle of preferences and injustices that prohibit the necessary harmony for justice to prevail. Plato proposed that to acquire justice we would need to start anew by exiling or killing everyone over the age of ten. Whether Plato was being ironic or conveying how difficult it is to bring about justice in a city has been debated and never fully answered, but he found the contingencies of human existence thwarting ethical pursuits. Unfortunately, some political leaders have attempted his experiment, trying to destroy everything that stands in the way of ideal conditions. Teaching ethics in the university can fall into the trap of assuming the university is an ideal condition in which students can now slough off everything that prevents them from adopting a putative ideal ethical theory. This assumption rejects the first assumption above that students arrive at the university with some measure of ethical formation, a formation that can be built upon but does not need to be destroyed. From whence does this ethical formation come?
It arises from diverse sources—family, friendships, attention to nature, participation in culture through a diversity of means such as novels, television, education, oral stories, worship, and everyday practices like athletics, music, theatre. These means are mediated through neighborhoods, local schools, urban, suburban or rural living, ethnic and racial identities, citizenship in nation-states, participation in civil society or in corporations and the market. Ethical formation takes place in religious institutions, churches, synagogues, mosques. Students who enter an ethics class already have a complex formation derived from these and other sources. Of course, student’s formations from these sources differ widely. Perhaps this complexity is why ethicists are tempted to reduce students to either autonomous, rational or self-interested individuals. It is easier and gives them something in common, but it is also similar to Plato’s odd counsel in that it takes the history of the student as something to overcome rather than build upon. It treats an ethics course as if it is a retraining camp in which everything the student has been taught to this point must be destroyed for the sake of making him or her anew.
Let’s briefly consider how we receive ethical formation from these diverse sources beginning with the family. For most of us, ethical formation begins with the care received from immediate or extended family located within neighborhoods. We learn practices before we learn any theory. I doubt few parents set their children down at a certain age, went over possible ethical theories by which they could live, and encouraged them to choose one and live consistently with it. John Mill, J. S. Mill’s father, approximated such an education with his son. J. S. Mill published an autobiography in which he tells of his father’s rigid educational instruction. He was taught Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight and had a complete course in political economy by thirteen. In 1822 at the age of sixteen he started a Utilitarian society, and when he turned twenty he had a nervous breakdown.1 Perhaps his strict education had no bearing upon his breakdown, but few of us are given a rigid ethical and political education as he was. Our ethical formation was less planned, less systematic and we are the better off for it.
How are we formed by our familial and neighborly relations? It usually occurs informally. Within them we learn to cooperate, to care for others, to eat appropriately so that others might be able to do so as well. We learn to take our turn, and ask for and give forgiveness. We learn by example, both positive and negative. Let me offer an example. My grandfather never returned from World War II. He did not die in the war; in fact, he was never deployed overseas. He betrayed my grandmother, took up with another woman and had children with her without my grandmother’s knowledge. It devastated her emotionally and financially. She had to raise five children by herself, my father being the oldest. They were so poor that he would be “farmed out” in summer to a local family who gave him shelter, food, and a stipend to work their farm. He remembers that time fondly, but he also taught his children and grandchildren that there were consequences to sexual and marital relations. We were not supposed to be like our grandfather, whom we never knew. Each family has narratives like mine that set forth positive and negative ethical exemplars that make possible the ethical projects that we find ourselves in the middle of, and that is why acknowledging students arrive at the university with an ethical formation matters—they are already in the middle of ethical projects of which they may or may not be aware.
Families and neighborhoods bring with them histories that make possible the exercise of virtues or vices; those virtues and vices will differ depending upon those histories. In his retrieval of an Aristotelian virtue ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, “What the good life is for a fifth-century Athenian general will not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun or a seventeenth-century farmer. But it is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what give my life its own moral particularity.”2 MacIntyre distances his virtue approach from individualism. An individualist approach to ethics falsely assumes each student emerges without moral particularity so that their histories do not matter. If we take their histories as moral starting points, then teaching ethics will connect more with their lives and become more complex. For instance, a white student from the US inherits ethical obligations arising from the long history of the slavocracy, Jim Crow, segregation and mass incarceration that will differ from a black student in the US. Someone with a Christian, Jewish, Islamic or secular history will also differ in their moral starting points.
Beginning with particular histories raises the question, But do we not have anything in common, anything we share by nature? The question is important. There is no reason that a focus on histories should reject the assumption that some of our ethical formation also comes from what we hold in common such as “nature.” Humans have a “nature,” which is why the term “human nature” makes sense. The term “nature,” like the term “culture” that we will examine momentarily, is a complex and difficult term, especially when it is appropriated for teaching ethics. The ancient Stoics founded ethics upon a “natural law.” The universe has a natural purpose amenable to the right use of reason. There are a variety of teachings about the natural law, but on the whole the natural law assumes this basic form: moral norms are present in nature and can be accessed by reason. Within that basic form, natural law teaching has great variation. Some interpret the natural law as a set of rules. Jean Porter contests this interpretation. Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas she suggests that the natural law is better “described as a capacity or power for moral discernment rather than as essentially or primarily a set of rules for right conduct.”3 As a capacity for moral discernment rather than a rigid set of rules, the natural law can be common—everyone has a sense that they should pursue the good and avoid evil—and at the same time what is common gains concreteness through our histories and actions. Vincent Lloyd’s work on Black Natural
