WHY TEACH ETHICS TO ETHICAL PEOPLE?

Leon Levitt, Madonna University

I hope you will forgive the would-be catchy title; its purpose should be obvious; viz., to attract your attention. In fact, this paper is intended to be seriously analytical while being (I hope, mildly) polemical. And I will attempt to answer the title's question. I begin with a bit of history.

In 1980, the Hastings Center (Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences), under the leadership of its co-founder, Daniel Callahan, announced that the Center was broadening its focus from its first goal of encouraging "the teaching of bioethics to physicians" to a "much wider concern with the teaching of ethics in higher education" (1980, p. v). The Center subsequently issued a series of reports, the first of which, written by Callahan and the distinguished ethicist, Sissela Bok, was entitled, The Teaching of Ethics in Higher Education.

As "Increasing perplexity," they wrote in its preface, "was being expressed in all of the professions about the moral problems of their work and the deficiencies of professional schools in preparing their students to meet them" (pp v-vi), they had undertaken to study ethics teaching in U.S. higher education and to make recommendations for curricular placement, staffing, and content of ethics courses. These they reported in the 1980 pamphlet.

Since the time of Callahan and Bok's study, concern about the ethical standards of our society and about the state of moral development of our people (not to mention in the rest of the world; but that is too ambitious a topic for so brief a paper as this), as revealed in the behavior of individuals, both as individuals and collectively, and, most particularly, in their corporate identities within and for organizations, has increased exponentially and has led to widespread critical inspection by and of the press and in scholarly, governmental, and public forums. Also under scrutiny are physicians, professors, teachers, school administrators, corporate executives, elected officials, lawyers and judges, journalists, artists, the poor and the wealthy -- in fact, anyone who inadvertently or egregiously might invite scrutiny.

As a consequence, colleges and universities are today inundated by a pervasive vogue for applied ethics courses or modules in the behavioral and social sciences as well as in other departments in colleges and universities. On the surface, this would seem to be a good thing. But here I would alert you to what Callahan and Bok called "worries," one of which I find just as valid today as in 1980 and I consider a critical problem of ethics teaching. It is, as they put it, their "central worry about . . . whether [teaching a course in ethics] can be done without indoctrinating students in one moral point of view" (Hastings, 1980 p. 9).

My concern stems from two phenomena I deem disturbing; both have resulted from the current vogue for ethics. One is an influx of full- and part-time faculty from many disciplines into ethics teaching. This result would not ordinarily seem problematical, especially in light of the fact that Callahan and Bok's survey of more than a thousand college instructors of ethics revealed very few who acknowledged a goal of indoctrinating students to a particular code of ethics. But I am not dissuaded from the worry they expressed, first, simply because they took the trouble to express it and, second, because I suspect they may have naively accepted (perhaps pious) denials of proselytizing as valid. If I am wrong, and their data were valid, then hindsight suggests that the field had not yet been infiltrated by faculty members among whose aims was, indeed, to indoctrinate their students to their way of thinking. The inference I would draw therefrom is that the proliferation of doctrinaire ethics faculty has occurred in the last decade and a half, as individuals have gravitated to teaching ethics, not necessarily because they possess particular expertise, but because their own fields are experiencing a glut and ethics teaching has presented an attractive opportunity.

Before I go on, let me clarify all this by distinguishing between theoretical and applied ethics. Philosophic ethics is reflective and theoretical, and philosopher-ethicists attempt to derive ethical principles from observation and analysis of what people think and do, sometimes ascribing theoretical generalizations to universal laws or, if they are religious ethicists, to religious dogma. Applied ethicists reverse the order by confronting each situation at its decision points and striving to apply known ethical theory and established ethical principles to situations at hand in order to arrive at ethically sound choices (Levitt, 1992).

Now, to return: a confounding problem I have found in some twenty-five years of activity in organizations concerned with teaching theoretical and applied ethics; as a teacher of ethics both as separate courses and as modules in courses on the relationship of business and society; from my reading of ethics organizations' journal articles, of their members' and others of my peers' books, is that a significant number of the men and women who teach ethics do so in the mistaken notion that through their teaching they can and should alter students' value systems to conform to the instructor's standards of moral behavior. The efforts are thus unmistakable attempts to proselytize to motley persuasions that define prescribed ethical standards and behavior. Such efforts are not only wrongheaded, they are properly doomed to failure for reasons not limited to the fact that adults rarely experience true classroom epiphanies and that, being adults, their moral development is essentially complete.

The reality is that -- as the psychology of human intellectual and emotional development has shown -- individual moral standards are well set by the time people reach adulthood. Changes in individual moral standards are difficult if not impossible to achieve in adults (Kohlberg & Mayer, 1972). And today's college and university students, whose average age has risen in recent decades from that of the so-called FTIAC (18-23) to thirty plus, mature adults, mainly commuting returnees, are highly moral people who do not need to be indoctrinated into new ethical systems; nor can or should they be. In fact, by their dedication to higher education, they are manifesting their well-formed moral approach to occupational advancement conjointly with acts of personal enrichment.

Examples of doctrinaire instruction in applied ethics abound in my memory, which, as they are necessarily anecdotal, may not hold much credibility from a scientific perspective. I could regale you with stories of ethics taught from the absolutisms of religious fundamentalism of every stripe to vigorous rejection of religiosity and espousal of relativism and "situation ethics" from statism and legalism to anarchism; from utilitarianism and pragmatism to Millsian civil libertarianism; from hedonism and Machiavellianism to the "selflessness" of Gilligan's "caring" paradigm (Gilligan 1977); from Marxism to Reaganism.

Examples of doctrinaire textbooks by teachers of ethics abound. I choose as an example a 1996 work precisely for the reason that it is not preachy but purports to be open-minded, permissive, and reflective. The mostly scrupulous writer, in a few words addressed presumably to faculty members who might consider adopting the book, confesses to an avowed purpose as, I surmise, a persuasive selling point. "I wanted to develop in students," he wrote, "something more: a sense of moral commitment and responsibility" (Nash p. 9). He goes on to state his apologia as follows: "I believe that religion and spirituality are an integral part of ethical investigation. . . . I agree essentially with Andrew M. Greeley [the well-known maverick Catholic priest, sociologist and novelist] that religious 'pictures' are the foundation upon which all worldviews rest" (Nash p. 43). Here, on two grounds, is evidence that open and nonjudgmental as his book may seem, the writer's purpose and fundamental belief cannot avoid coloring his text, his class discussions, his comments on student "cases" and other writing, and his evaluations of student performance.

A concomitant problem to that of doctrinaire teaching and writing has been the creation and growth of organizations that provide forums for interchange and publication on the subject of applied ethics. Myriad organizations and "think tanks" have arisen which publish newsletters, journals, and books whose aim is to expose, explore, and to correct unethical individual and corporate actions. This aim would likewise seem, on first inspection, to be a good thing. However, some of the organizations, are situated in sectarian colleges and universities and are therefore supportive of their institutions' sectarian missions and, willingly or unwillingly, have thereby relinquished a measure of academic freedom, as they propound the sectarian roots of their institutions. Other organizations, whether from lack of adequate funding, or having no university home to call their own, have been co-opted by self-serving individuals or groups whose goal is to promulgate dogmatic moral positions. Sometimes the subsidy -- tied as it may be to such donors' logical expectations regarding the organization's agenda and point of view -- exists so that the organization will work to justify and thereby to protect the behavior of its corporate sponsors. Finally in this regard, it is almost superfluous to mention the extent to which ethics bureaus and ethics investigations in government have been subverted to political purposes.

These developments have, I believe, cast a pall upon the ethics enterprise at universities, in corporations, and in government, and have led me to question the validity of that enterprise. But I do not mean to wield so broad a brush. My purpose at the last is to address the paper's title question: If indoctrination is not a proper objective, and the literature of the field is somewhat contaminated by special interests and subtly doctrinaire teachers, textbooks, newsletters and journals, should we abandon teaching applied ethics totally, or partially; or do valid goals and methods exist for this endeavor?

My position is that teaching ethics, whether theoretical or applied, or a combination of both, is a partial means by which adult students may be sensitized and alerted to the ethical dimensions of the decisions and actions they make every day in work or non-work activities. I have settled on this purpose after years of observing how people habitually reserve ethical standards solely for relations with family or with non-business friends, and either unthinkingly act in unethical ways or rationalize that morality does not pertain to commercial or other competition-based or market-based intercourse. I call this phenomenon compartmentalization. The phenomenon has been recognized by others; but I have not seen nor heard that specific word applied to it. Involved are gradations in awareness of the moral dimensions of situations and actions, from Machiavellian disingenuous and conscious disengagement to, more commonly, ingenuous failure to recognize the moral dimensions of a decision, thereby separating the decision and subsequent action from the morality implicit in them. The latter is especially true when the choices present themselves within or in relation to organizations. Thus, to draw an analogy to the findings of Piaget (1932), and Kohlberg (1958) after him, that children are moral philosophers, it seems fair to observe that, as adults, we are all applied ethicists, either applying, misapplying, ignoring, submerging, or being blind to our own ethical principles, each act of commission or omission in its own way an act of conscious or unconscious compartmentalization.

In sum, my goal as a teacher of ethics, is sensitization, not change of ethical standards. Nor is it my goal to create a double effect. Nevertheless, the possibility exists that, when sensitization occurs, it may be accompanied by more or less traumatic soul-searching at either the personal or professional level; since psychological trauma often occurs when one faces and recognizes a moral problem or dilemma. As is well known, writing about one's responses to emotion-laden situations can have a cathartic effect (Sanders, 1997). Toward that end, my practice is to make writing assignments that focus on the individual's own thoughts and actions. But I do not discount coverage of intellectual content I suggest -- no, more strongly, require -- that the students in their writings associate their adult choices with our study of the possible sources from which humans draw their moral judgments, content which I normally address in an ethics course or module, whose pedagogic rationale is that understanding the base line from which one may be thinking or acting is, in my experience, a step toward recognizing moral issues.

References

Gilligan, C. (1977, November). In a different voice: women's conceptions of self and morality. Harvard Educational Review 47, 481-717.

The Hastings Center. (1980). The teaching of ethics in higher education. The teaching of ethics I. Hastings-on-the Hudson: The Hastings Center Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences.

Kohlberg, L. (1958). As quoted in Kuhmerker, L. (1991). The Kohlberg legacy for the helping professions. Birmingham, Alabama: R. E. P. Books.

Kohlberg, L., and Mayer, R. (1972, November). Development as the aim of education. Harvard Educational Review 42, 449-496.

Levitt, L. (1992). Sources of ethical standards: a critical introduction. Livonia, Michigan: Madonna University.

Machiavelli, N. (1950). The prince and other discourses. (1513). New York: Random House.

Nash, R. J. (1996). "Real world" ethics: frameworks for educators and human service professionals. New York: Teachers College Press.

Piaget, J. (1932). The moral judgment of the child. Translated by M. Gabain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

Sanders, S. R. (1997, October 10). From anonymous, evasive prose to writing with passion. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B4-5.