Bah. I'm sure my friends in the physics department will be surprised to learn that the BA is an applied ethics degree.
Sorry, that's ambiguous and overbitchy. My initial reaction, fleshed out, is that the president cannot be seriously claiming that "ethical intelligence" is "the central outcome he'd like to see produced by a Swarthmore education" in part because if that were true, the college would have to be radically refashioned. If the goal of the institution is to produce moderately well-educated people competent in areas x, y, or z, we're doing ok. If the goal is to produce character, we're not even in the ballpark.
I'll have to outline the other seventeen reasons this idea makes me so unhappy in a post or another comment, since grading calls. The gist: we don't have a very good idea of how to do this with 18-22 yr olds, and implementation of the few good ideas we do have is often disastrous ("I would rather my character be molded by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book...").
So you can't get a little bit physics?
I think what Burke and Swarthmore's president are saying is very nice. Also, of little practical value. The question is, is it one of those nice things of little practical value like "democracy in the Middle East would be good" that causes you to do something like, I dunno, invade Iraq?
</tortured analogy>
It all makes sense now. The Bush administration practices quantum ethics.
Extra credit: explain the difference between potential and kinetic good.
quantum ethics
Right / wrong is not a continuum, but arrives rather in packets whose location and speed are mutually indeterminate. You can only make a probabilistic estimate about the influence of morality on any given action.
If the goal of the institution is to produce moderately well-educated people competent in areas x, y, or z, we're doing ok. If the goal is to produce character, we're not even in the ballpark.
Yes. (I would say that exposure to a broad base of information does, I think, have a beneficial effect on character; or conversely that ignorance has a negative effect. But that doesn't mean that a college is in any organized sense creating people of good character by teaching information.)
There are also colleges who I wouldn't want to be taught character by. The University of Chicago is a superb educational institution, up there with the very best at teaching information to students (and the professors are likewise wonderful). On the other hand, every interaction I every had with the administration, or where I had the sense I was dealing with the U of C an an entity, left me thinking that I wouldn't trust it or rely on it as far as I could throw the Regenstein. As a source of information on thirteenth century poetry, I thought it was great, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted it actively shaping my character.
Of course Chicago as an institution has a history of being pretty scuzzy with regard to reshaping Hyde Park and environs to as much of its likings as it could.
nasty people often have the most exquisitely attuned sense of the boundaries of right action
The most disheartening effect of teaching the catalogue of misfortunes and wickedness that is human history is the occasional student who articulates, quite defensibly, the position that, given our record to date, individual moral action clearly does not matter.
But if when grading students we are measuring them as people, surely we can claim that all our A and B students are ethically intelligent.
I expect what the president of Swarthmore is expressiong is my own feeling that better critical thinking skills lead one to better conclusions, by which we mean both "more correct" and "more good." But as Labs points out, that's probably just self-flattery, and anyway, god knows there are a lot of people out there teaching who are as dumb as rocks.
a lot of people out there teaching who are as dumb as rocks.
"Dumb as rocks" is relatively harmless. Vain and deluded into a sense of moral superiority is where your problem lies.
Yeah, but the two often go hand in hand, was my point.
In which case the president should say,
The BA represents our best effort to expose you to the wide range of human frailty exhibited in exquisite detail and exotic variety by our faculty. Narrowly educated in the fields to which their neuroses have led them, carefully selected to ensure that in their mediocrity they will not show up their colleagues, they can only demonstrate to you every vice of any corporate organization. Not only are they ill-equipped to judge their students as human beings, it's a damn miracle they can get to work each day.
Yet you will find that once you can get them safely onto the subject of their expertise, talking from love of their studies and not from fear of their fellow professors, they can display surprising sensitivity to nuance, sophistication of judgment, and even tolerance of dissenting viewpoints. This if anything is the genius of higher education, that it shows that each of us possesses depths of resources and also striking inadequacy.
So go now, and sin boldly, but also rejoice; and for the love of God remember sometimes that you, too, may be mistaken.
Slow Learner -- a very nice commencement speech. Is it original to you, or taken from elsewhere?
Thanks. It's mine, composed just now while not grading. Except, of course, for the parts I borrowed from Martin Luther and Oliver Cromwell.
The question is, is it one of those nice things of little practical value like "democracy in the Middle East would be good" that causes you to do something like, I dunno, invade Iraq?
This is an excellent question. For my sins, I am involved in a similar project at my university--there is a campus-wide Ethics Initiative--and I keep hearing that people on the central committee have said things like, "We should have at least fifteen minutes of ethics instruction in every course." Which, if there's a better way to convey the message that ethics is a hoop that you need to jump through and a distraction from the business at hand, I don't know what it might be. (Fifteen minutes of ethics in real analysis! And then the exact same fifteen minutes of ethics in algebraic geometry! And that's not to say that different fields might not benefit from thinking about their relation to ethics, but not like that.)
The concern has also been raised that maybe every single instructor on campus isn't a good person to be teaching ethics.
"We should have at least fifteen minutes of ethics instruction in every course."
Meaning fifteen minutes per class meeting, or per semester?
I'm still getting the hang of this pseudonymity thing...
Sure you don't secretly want to be caught?
I should point out that this is something I heard one guy was saying, and that those of us on the committee that's actually supposed to be dealing with ethics in the curriculum are trying to gather some data and figure out some assessment metrics before endorsing any broad-brush programs.
One of the most useful lessons to learn about sitting on academic committees is that not every idiot needs responding to.
Ttam -- what if the 15 minutes were spread out over the course of the semeseter? If a class met say 30 times, the professor could open each session with a quick 1/2 minute reminder to "behave ethically, everyone!"
Implementing the suggestion made in 26...
Isn't the ethical intelligence argument about process as well as substance? Swarthmore's pretty serious about the liberal arts distribution requirements. Requiring engineers to take philosophy or english lit probably won't make them much better engineers (if only I were clever enough to make a non-gawdawful joke about deconstruction), but i thought the point was that experience was trying to teach you how to think more effectively as much as teaching you specifics, esp outside of your hard science axis.
To Labs' point about the first 100 names in the Boston phone book...I certainly don't remember hearing any faculty members articulate their institutional competence concerns that they weren't qualified to help us shape ethical understandings, but I think most of them probably did more good than harm. Despite Swarthmore's deserved reputation as a bastion of student leftism (in the PCU sense of the word, where the pressure to non-conform is high, and using the non-approved phrase for a persecuted group out of ignorance may touch off a student protest), my profs were more enamored with using their expertise to force you to re-examine what you thought, rather than bringing you around to what they thought. I was pretty surprised a couple times when I picked up books they'd writted and realized what they actually believed.
I had one prof who taught semi-socratic and did a fantastic job of forcing everyone to consider the moral elements of the arguments they made, and where they might lead. Did it make me a better person? I doubt it, but enough so I'll use my ethical intelligence and refrain from explaining how ironic it was for that particular prof to be effective, given that his past included the stuff of Labs' off-color jokes that make internet anonymity professionally appealing for those who teach young women even when they're only jokes.
Matty, your comment brings up another general point about this sort of ideal: either it's trivial (and fine) or substantive (and dumb). If "ethical intelligence" is expansive enough to include, say, good critical thinking skills and a broad base of general knowledge, then it's more or less what we were always shooting for. (The idea of liberal education has always been a little hazy to me, but I think it's supposed to preclude science-only courses of study-- i.e., everyone reads a few good books along the way.) If "ethical intelligence" is something more robust-- such as an attempt to make better people-- it's something our current institutions are poorly suited to do.
The point about the phone book is simply that people trained in various academic specialties have no particular competence to teach "ethical intelligence" in the robust sense of the term. They might be good at teaching their content, and they might be good at getting people to think critically about their content, but this, as I've claimed, is different from at least the robust construal of EI.
I have a computer geek friend who had a liberal arts education, and it made him better at his job (tech writing for Techtronics). He was the only geek who could write, and the only writer who could geek. Liberal arts stuff makes tech people better at the point where their work impinges on non-tech reality.
Since about 1980 I've been appalled by the glib ethical shallowness of most of the Ivy League types I met. They have seemed significantly more opportunistic, cynical, and slippery than most of the common people I've known. Success and technical chops are everything for most of them. (Plus being cool, sexy, and well-dressed).
So I applaud Bloom's perhaps-hopeless effort.
I would add that the teaching of philosophical ethics is not the worst way of teaching ethical consciousness. It's better than watching snuff movies, for example. But after a year of high intensity ethics a student would be stuck arguing formally about deontics, emotivism, and act and rule utilitarianism, to the point of being incapacitated for dealing with ethically substantive issues.
This is about the belief that thinking better leads to wiser choices. That's almost a necessary part of emphasizing critical thinking over specific bodies of rote knowledge in a liberal arts curriculum. If critical thinking skills don't lead to better outcomes in your personal life and your professional life, it's hard to figure out why we should emphasize that as a part of a liberal education. You could just say that "better" in this case means "I will be wealthier than others because I think better than they" or even "I will be happier" (though this one I doubt: being able to think critically often makes one less happy, at least in the sense of mood, if not in the sense of well-being and satisfaction). But I'd like to think that "better" here also means, "Wiser", which I think also means, "Ethical standards".
That being said, I agree that faculty aren't qualified to *teach* people to be ethical in that sense. In fact, I would also agree that thinking that you're wise and involved in teaching others wisdom is usually a really good sign that you're nothing of the sort. Wisdom strikes me as, ideally, osmotic from critical thought: it seeps in through the pores, in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable. That's precisely why I think you start from the premise that students (and others) are to make their own mistakes, why the kind of regulatory nanny-state impulses of most colleges and universities are a bad idea in terms of educational mission. Students want to fuck naked in the window? Up to them. If somebody calls the cops on them, there's one kind of lesson. If somebody wants to snap photos of them, there's another. In both cases, groups of students can safely be left to have their own debates about the cops and the photographers and the exhibitionists. If those debates persuade--and if in persuading cite or make use of material from classrooms--so much the better. But I wouldn't ever want either administrators to get up and attempt to re-educate any of the people involved in some kind of pennyante Orwellian act of "counseling" nor would I want any faculty to dream that they're competent to get up and teach in any simple way what one should or should not do in this context.
The wisest faculty I've met, the people who transfer wisdom most reliably, are usually the most subtle about it, and often the least conventionally scholarly or academic people. This is not unique to higher education, I suspect.
Students want to fuck naked in the window? Up to them.
This strikes me as a nonrandom hypothetical.
Right; you'll have to follow the link to, then from, Tim's post.
Everyone gives such good advice here, as Dorothy would say. Or maybe it's Alice.
Thanks, Profs Labs and Burke. FL, I guess I was thinking that you can teach in a way that tries to point out the ethical implications and moral qualms that are raised when students are engaging in arguments in the non-sciences in a way which illustrates substantive issues without necessarily trying to impose your own values. And that doing so in areas where students are not used to the arguments may be more applicable down the road in novel situations, as you learn to look for them. Or it might not be. My fantasy football league is names "Eff Al Bloom."
And maybe its a result from having gone from liberal arts school to law school, but here I notice when a good prof can use the socratic method in a way that still does make some sense, and is useful in a larger sense than showing the complexity of doctrine.
Last, given my last post, I'd like to emphasize that Prof. Burke was most certainly not the un-named prof above. And while it may just be gratuitous fluffery, my former roomate says Burke taught the two best classes he ever took. Bummer I never took one.
According to the professor from the accounting department who guest lectured in my ethics class, during college most students progress a little on the Kohlberg moral development scales, accounting student regress a little, and philosophy students progress a lot. I offer this up for what it's worth, as a bit of a thumb in the eye of Emerson's 33, and maybe supporting Tim's point. Although perhaps it only shows that if you train people to think about ethics in terms of abstract principles they will think about ethics in terms of abstract principles.
It may also be why I felt that a lot of the time I was expected to be teaching, "This is wrong and you shouldn't do it."
Or maybe it's just that in the past few years no major Texas companies have gone belly-up in part due to malfeasance by philosophers.
I understand people who majored in being kicked in the groin in college often move up a level on the Seraglio scale eunuch-hood. Accountants, not so much.
Yeah, I do not necessarily believe that attaining the highest level of Kohlberg development is the be-all and end-all. You need some of those body Thetans to get along in life, don't you? But maybe this does show, in re 33 and 34, that this kind of study does affect your everyday moral decision-making somehow.
43 is a gleaming gem.
I'll just note that how people score on Kohlberg doesn't tell us anything about how they actually behave. However, lots of philosophers are great at explaining why they're assholes.
Hope no one's going to try to claim that accountants don't have a problem.
If you Google Kohlberg + scale the first header you get is "Kohlberg's scale has to do with moral thinking, not moral action".
http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm
According to Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichmann had a Kantian explanation of what he was doing -- if he had been more merciful, he would have been letting personal feelings and relationships to individuals keep him from doing his duty.
If you have Godwin problems with that, take them to Hannah please. She's in Heaven with Martin now, possibly discussing this very topic.
The Kohlberg scale looks like a well-meaning artifact of some philosophical self-improvement program. Much of the human race lives their whole lives at levels one and two. (For example, my Mafioid ex-brother-in-law, who is very well respected in his Kansas community). It may be that the higher levels are unattainable by small chlidren, but adults who fail to attain these levels are not infantile. (Stage six could be adapted for Catholocism, Islam, Christian Science, Maoism or practically anything, with a little effort).
Yeah Emerson, but your original claim was that studying philosophical ethics makes you incapable of dealing with ethically substantive issues, so if studying philosophy affects people's moral thinking you're still busted. And nobody said that it was a magical bullet for making people good.
Nor am I saying that advancement on the Kohlberg scale is the be-all and end-all of morality--close readers of comment 40 will notice that I made that concession at the very beginning. Still, studies of corporate ethical organization suggest that an understanding of corporate values produces more ethical behavior than just trying to get people to follow rules.
Philosophical ethics seems to have a strong bias toward ethical theory, even though ethics seems to me to have an essential practical or applied nature. There are a lot of areas of though where a theoretical field can be autonomous and does not need an applied field, but I don't think that ethics is one of them. To me ethics has to be about applications, the way crystallography or fractals or formal logic don't have to be. But I don't think that ethics as taught in schools recognizes this.
In self-confident sciences, the relationship between theory (eg. physics) application (eg. engineering) and popularization is pretty comfortable. Lots of major scientists have made major efforts to write non-technical descriptions of their work.
But in social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities it seems that there's an impulse to make the primary work as opaque and distant from practice as possible, because the scientific and theoretical status of these studies is uncertain or contested.
Anyway, I don't see that training in meta-ethics, which is what is usually taught, would in practice be very helpful. Maybe there are studies that say that it is, but based on what I've seen I don't see how that could be.
Most ethical disputes seem to come down to primitive ethical principles which might be discussable, but I don't think that the professional ethical discussion of these primitives is illuminating or powerful. Nozick, for example, builds his whole system, which isn't specifically an ethical system but which has major ethical consequences, on an egoistic or individualist assumption that I can neither accept nor refute.
Back to the specific point, someone educated in academic ethics who is faced with an ethical decision would have to have decided a number of questions of ethical theory for himself, even though the field itself had not decided these questions. So the solution would have to come from outside ethics, it would seem. And if they are still uncertain about these questions, abd if they feel that it is important to decide these theoretical questions before making practical applications, I could see some sort of quagmire or infinite regress developing.