He cites Frederick Douglass’s emphasis on our common humanity made in the image of God as a basis for ethics. Douglass, like many others, professed that all humans share a similar human nature. Yet Douglass was born a slave and treated by his oppressors as if he had no nature in common with them. This disconnect between a common human nature and a history that denies it reveals that it is insufficient simply to appeal to nature; too many people miss what the natural law is. It, too, is only a starting point. For this reason, Lloyd argues that the history of Black suffering provides Blacks with an access to what this common humanity should be that is unavailable to others without a similar history.4 Everyone can and should learn from the history of those denied their common humanity to discover what it is. Our natures are historical so learning about what we have in common also requires discernment arising from our histories.
Students arriving at the university have already engaged with “nature” and learned from it. Take as an example something as trivial but morally significant as stopping at red lights. It is a form of natural knowledge in that laws intrinsic to being human are present in such a simple practice. One such law is that two automobiles cannot inhabit the same space at the same time and any attempt to force them to do so will have bad consequences. Yet how should we define the moral significance of the “natural law” that we learn from this practice? Is it self-preservation that causes us to honor this natural wisdom, or a desire to cooperate with others, or an instinct to do no harm? The practice itself is not self-interpreting, and when I use this example in teaching ethics I find students who will staunchly defend all the possibilities noted above. Although all might agree that stopping at red lights is ethically important, how they conceive of its ethical importance will have entailments for how they think about politics, economics, family life and much more. Are our relations within each of these based on virtue, grace, dignity, utility or caring? The answers we give affect how we inhabit forms of ordinary life.
Related to “nature” is culture. Stopping at red lights conveys natural knowledge, but red lights are also cultural artifacts. We can easily imagine societies where the natural law that two bodies cannot inhabit the same space at the same time is present, but someone might learn it from something other than red lights. Perhaps it is a society without automobiles, or a society where every red light has been replaced with roundabouts. Nature is mediated to us through culture. “Culture” is as confusing a term as is nature. The two are usually set in contradiction to each other. Culture is human activity that transforms nature in some way. Nature is the “stuff” upon which culture works. Yet clearly delineating where nature ends and culture begins, as with the previous red light example, is not easily done. It is natural to eat, sleep, reproduce, reason, study, act and so on, and yet each of these natural activities only occurs within specific cultural contexts.
No student arrives on campus or in an ethics course without having already participated in some of these ethical sources. I hope the above brief discussion will convince the reader that students have ethical formations that should provide the university with confidence that they can abide by some basic norms. They share a nature, but that nature has been mediated through diverse cultural means. The diversity of their ethical formation, however, will be both a strength and a weakness in the classroom. It gives us enough in common to discuss and debate ethical matters, and differentiates us so that those discussions and debates have the potential to be lively, if not conflictual. Think of any ethical issue: abortion, sexuality, war, pacifism, torture, eating, economics, reproduction, euthanasia, technological enhancements, alcohol or drug use. Most students already have some intuitive sense of these issues based on the intersection of their histories, interaction with nature, and diverse cultural mediations. That mediation may have come through television or novels, through formal education or oral stories told around the dinner table. It may have come through worship or conversing with friends. That cultural mediation may have been profound or superficial. Students may have had a serious training in the virtues or they may be emotivists who think moral judgments are primarily subjective preferences. They arrive with a moral starting point from their histories that should be honored and built upon at the same time that it will be subjected to scrutiny, not in order to free them from it, but to assist them to inhabit it. A tacit assumption in teaching ethics is that students still have work to do; there is something that they should know or practice that they might not yet know or practice. It is insufficient simply to inform students that they already have an ethical formation. It must be subject to examination. This implies normative judgments, and here is where teaching ethics gets tricky. Whose and which normative judgments should prevail?
To where should ethics go?
Teaching students to be aware of their ethical formations is one thing. Teaching them to examine and build upon it is another; the latter assumes that not all ethical formations are the same; some are better than others. How is it possible to make normative judgments about deeply held ethical convictions? Take for instance the morality of obliteration bombing in World War II. Many of our relatives were involved in it, and it is the case that without it some of us might not be here. Directly targeting civilian populations may have brought that war to a quicker end and saved relatives who were soldiers preparing for invasion. To subject this event to moral scrutiny raises all kinds of questions, especially after the fact. And yet—this scrutiny is what a course in ethics must do, not so that we judge our forebears, but so that we might know how to own our histories and act morally given the times in which we live. According to both the Stoic natural law and Roman Catholic teaching, directly intending to kill the innocent, even if it reduces the amount of suffering in the world, is an evil that should be avoided. Questioning one’s country’s role in the bombing of London, the fire bombing of Dresden, dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be unsettling, as can reminding students that there were voices at the time who spoke out against these practices.5 Once a teacher points out that Roman Catholic and natural law teaching oppose them, some students will respond by noting that they are neither Roman Catholics nor natural lawyers so that they feel no moral compunction about those teachings. On what grounds then do they justify or reject directly targeting innocents? This example often demonstrates that most students are utilitarians or emotivists, who argue that no universal, objective moral norms exist.
A common experience in teaching ethics is dealing with students who are primarily emotivists. Emotivism is a theory of meaning in which moral statements are expressions of preference. To say directly killing the innocent is intrinsically evil is to assert that the one making the statement does not like directly killing the innocent; one expresses his or her emotional dislike. If another person disagrees and likes it, then no rational adjudication between them is possible. Of course, emotion is an important aspect of moral education. We rightly question the probity of someone who observes moral horrors such as genocide or lynching with emotional detachment. But the wrongness of moral horrors must be something more than individual preference. Upon a little reflection students can usually be dissuaded from an emotivist theory of moral meaning. They unanimously agree, in my experience, that genocide is morally objectionable. When asked why, some students give an emotivist answer: “I don’t like it,” or “It just feels wrong to me.” When you follow up by asking if they truly think that such a moral horror is wrong because of their feelings, many (although not all) acknowledge that there must be something more to its wrongness than the way they feel about it.
Where is its wrongness located? An important way to begin to answer this question is to ask students if they think there is a purpose to human existence and what that purpose is? The question assumes that there is an answer to the question, What is a well-lived life? or What does it mean to be human? but identifying a common answer provokes disagreement. One compelling reason for teaching ethics is to gain clarity on the broad disagreements that quickly arise when we seek to answer these important and basic questions. Some awareness of the discipline assists us in that clarity.
Ethics is both a practical and theoretical discipline; in fact, it is unique in that it combines practical and theoretical reason. Practical reason culminates in an action. Theoretical reason culminates in thought or contemplation. Let me provide a famous example from W. D. Ross (1871–1977) to illustrate the difference. Imagine you promised to meet a friend for lunch. You are on your way to keep
