CRITICAL THINKING AND THE ETHICS OF TEACHING

(Thesis format: Monograph)

by

Sarah Patricia Lublink

Graduate Program in Philosophy

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario, Canada

© Sarah Patricia Lublink 2009

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THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

Dr. Samantha Brennan Dr. John Thorp

Supervisory Committee Dr. Robert Stainton

Dr. John Thorp Dr. Kelly Olson

Dr. Michael Milde Dr. Elisabeth Gedge

The thesis by

Sarah Patricia Lublink

entitled:

Critical Thinking and the Ethics of Teaching

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board

ii

ABSTRACT

In the area of practical ethics, contemporary philosophers have been quick to

study ethics in various professions such as medicine, law, business, and engineering.

They have been slow, however, to turn this ethical spotlight on themselves and to the

profession to which philosophers belong, that of educators in a university setting. To

some extent, of course, the student-professor relationship is covered by a broad code of

academic ethics, touching such matters as plagiarism, sexual harassment, unfairness, and

so on. This code of academic ethics concerns what could be called the "easy cases," for

they are cases in which the actions in question are generally seen to be obviously wrong.

But these "easy cases" are not alone in possessing moral significance. More

philosophically interesting are what can be called the "hard cases," in which determining

the morally justifiable course of action is complicated. How should teachers walk the

fine line between being sensitive to students' religious beliefs, and teaching critical

thinking about religion? How should teachers handle sensitive issues in-class, such as

sexual orientation, rape or abuse? What exactly does "desert" mean in grading? Does

good teaching require advocacy or neutrality of one's own beliefs? How should

philosophy teachers respond to student relativism? These questions present themselves

in particularly forceful ways in the undergraduate teaching of ethics.

The questions that arise for ethics teachers in the contemporary context are not

new, for similar issues arise in the writings of philosophers such as Plato, Locke,

Rousseau, Dewey, and Maritain. In order to address this question in the context of the

undergraduate ethics classroom I develop a framework for considering the issues

involved in teaching ethics and for moral deliberation about teaching goals and practices.

iii

This framework is a capabilities account of intellectual well-being that builds on the

account proposed, in the context of international development, by Martha Nussbaum and

Amartya Sen. I argue that this account is particularly well-suited to addressing the "hard

cases" mentioned above, as well as to the diverse contexts in which ethics is taught.

KEYWORDS: ethics, teaching, critical thinking, virtue, reason, capabilities

approach, well-being, autonomy, relativism, fundamentalism, advocacy, neutrality, Plato,

Locke, Rousseau, Dewey, Aquinas, Nussbaum

IV

"Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy."

~ Socrates ~

v

For my family, who have offered me unconditional love and support throughout the course of my graduate career.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the many people who made this dissertation possible.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Samantha Brennan, whose expertise, commitment, and patience added considerably to my graduate experience. I would also like to thank John Thorp and Michael Milde for their work as my dissertation readers.

Special thanks go out to Richard Davis, without whose motivation and encouragement I would not have considered a graduate career in philosophy.

This research would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario.

Many thanks to my graduate colleagues, especially Angela White and Jennifer Epp, whose steadfast encouragement through the ups and downs of graduate school was invaluable throughout the last five years.

Finally, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my family, especially to my husband Mike, without whose love and encouragement I never would have made it this far.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of Examination ii Abstract and Keywords iii Epigraph v Dedication vi Acknowledgements vii Table of Contents viii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: SOCRATES, PLATO, AND DIALECTICAL QUESTIONING 6

1.1. Plato's Warning about Dialectical Questioning 7 1.1.1. Plato's Warning 7 1.1.2. What is "Dialectic as Currently Practiced?" 9 1.1.3. Plato's Prescriptions 12

1.2. Socrates in the Apology 16 1.2.1. Socrates' Divine Mission 16 1.2.2. The Examined Life 18

1.3. Unrefiective Moral Beliefs and the Role of Dialectic 20 1.4. Plato: A Philosophical Parricide? 21

CHAPTER 2: REASON AND VIRTUE IN LOCKE AND ROUSSEAU 29

2.1. Locke's Educational Goals 30 2.1.1. Virtue 31 2.1.2. Rationality 34

2.2. Rousseau's Educational Goals 41 2.2.1. Virtue 43 2.2.2. Rationality 47

2.3. Conclusions 54

CHAPTER3: TRADITION AND COMMUNITY IN THE MORAL LIFE 55

3.1. Dewey's Pragmatic Approach to Education 56 3.1.1. Reflective Thinking as an Educational Goal 58 3.1.2. Moral Living as an Educational Goal 63

3.2. Virtue and Tradition in Thomistic Education 71 3.2.1. Aquinas: Human Reason and Natural Law 72 3.2.2. Maritain: Educating for Freedom 77 3.2.3. Maclntyre: Education and Tradition 84

3.3. Conclusions 89

CHAPTER 4: TEACHING ETHICS IN THE UNDERGRADUATE PHILOSOPHY CLASSROOM.90

4.1. The Purpose of University Ethics Courses 92 4.2. Teacher Advocacy or Teacher Neutrality? 97

4.2.1. The Possibility of Neutrality 98 4.2.2. Authenticity and Neutrality 102

viii

4.2.3. Neutrality and Relativism 103 4.3. Student Relativism 104 4.4. Student Fundamentalism 111 4.5. Reasonable Pluralism and Autonomy 120

CHAPTER 5: THE NEED FOR A RICHER ACCOUNT OF TEACHING ETHICS 128

5.1. The Need for a Richer Account 132 5.2. Possible Accounts of Teaching Ethics 146

5.2.1. Negative Obligations 146 5.2.2. Utilitarianism 150 5.2.3. Knowledge as the Good of Teaching 154 5.2.4. Virtue Ethics 155

5.3. What's Missing From These Accounts? 157

CHAPTER 6: THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH TO WELL-BEING 158

6.1. Desirable Characteristics of an Account of Teaching Ethics 158 6.1.1. Enabling Reasoning about Goals 158 6.1.2. Addressing Tough Moral Questions 159 6.1.3. Taking Account of Situational Factors 159

6.2. The Capabilities Approach to Well-Being 167 6.3. The Approach in Practice 172

6.3.1. Enabling Reasoning about Goals 173 6.3.2. Addressing Tough Moral Questions 179 6.3.3. Taking Account of Situational Factors 189

6.4. Conclusions 193

Bibliography 194

Curriculum Vitae 207

ix

1

INTRODUCTION

In the area of practical ethics, contemporary philosophers have been quick to

study ethics in various professions such as medicine, law, business, and engineering.

They have been slow, however, to turn this ethical spotlight on themselves and to the

profession to which many philosophers belong, that of educators in universities. To some

extent, of course, the student-professor relationship is covered by a broad code of

academic ethics, touching such matters as plagiarism, sexual harassment, unfairness, and

so on. This code of academic ethics concerns what could be called the "easy cases," for

they are cases in which the actions in question are generally seen to be obviously wrong.

But these "easy cases" are not alone in possessing moral significance. More

philosophically interesting are what can be called the "hard cases," in which determining

the morally justifiable course of action is complicated. How should teachers walk the

fine line between being sensitive to students' religious beliefs, and teaching critical

thinking about religion? How should teachers handle sensitive issues in-class, such as

sexual orientation, rape or abuse? What exactly does "desert" mean in grading? Does

good teaching require advocacy or neutrality of one's own beliefs? How should

philosophy teachers respond to student relativism? These questions present themselves

in particularly forceful ways in the undergraduate teaching of ethics.

In this dissertation I develop a framework for considering the issues involved in

teaching ethics, and for moral deliberation about teaching goals and practices in ethics

courses. In doing so I move beyond the narrow set of rules that concern the easy cases,

and consider what kinds of moral considerations are relevant in the teaching context. In

particular, I focus my attention on the context of the undergraduate ethics classroom.

2

Ethics courses are particularly interesting because their content is intimately connected to

students' and teachers' conceptions of the good life, and to their conceptions of self.

The framework I propose is a capabilities account of intellectual well-being that

builds on the account proposed, in the context of international development, by Martha

Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. It is particularly well suited to the teaching context for two

main reasons. First, the capabilities account allows for disagreements about the nature of

the good life. More specifically, teachers on this view should not aim to make their

students' lives good, but rather aim to enable students to make their own lives good.

Second, the capabilities approach counts many things as good, such as health, intellectual

development, and relationships. This plurality of goods makes room for a variety of

possible goals in different types of classrooms.

To ground this framework, I begin my project historically. While many

philosophers in the past century have turned away from the study of education,

philosophers of the ancient and modern periods had much to say on the subject. While

most of the authors considered in these first three chapters wrote in educational contexts

quite different from those in which philosophers teach today, many of the tensions and

questions that emerge are still vexing issues today.

In chapter one I bring to light a disagreement that subsisted between Socrates and

Plato on the topic of teaching young people to subject their moral beliefs to critical

examination. This disagreement represents a more general disagreement about the path

to the good life and the role of philosophy in living life well. This topic is significant

because it addresses a contemporary issue in Platonic interpretation, which questions

whether Plato's thought remained unified throughout his works. It is also significant,

3

however, because it points to a larger, more perennial issue: is exposing young people to

philosophy ultimately harmful? Could teaching young students to examine their beliefs

destabilize their moral convictions and leave them worse off? In the ethics classroom this

is a particularly significant question.

Chapter two is devoted to drawing out a tension that emerged in the works of

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both philosophers believed that education

should lead to intellectual autonomy, which is based in one's ability to reason well, but

should also lead to sound moral character. On both accounts the two goals turn out to be

in tension. In the end, neither can see a way in which moral education could take place

without indoctrination or deference to authority. This is a similar issue to that which

bothered Plato in his concern about the dangers of questioning one's moral beliefs. This

same issue finds new meaning in philosophy teaching today, for one of the difficult

questions that arises for ethics teachers is the place of critical thinking training in an

individual's moral education, and more generally the place of an ethics course in an

individual's moral education.

Deweyan pragmatism and Thomistic thinking both represent a middle ground

between Locke and Rousseau's emphasis on autonomy and Plato's emphasis on

adherence to traditional norms. While Deweyan pragmatists and Thomists disagree on

many points, in their general approach to thinking they are similar in their emphasis on

thinking in community. In chapter three I outline John Dewey's views on educating for

reason and for morality, and I outline the educational views of two Thomists: Jacques

Maritain and Alasdair Maclntyre. I ground the views of these Thomistic thinkers by

beginning with Aquinas' own account of the relationship between thinking and virtue.

4

Dewey, Maritain and Maclntyre do not all agree about the degree to which tradition

should be valued, but each limits the scope of critical thinking by reference to shared

values and practices. The difficult puzzle for those who follow these views is

determining when traditions should be critiqued and when they should not be.

Having completed my historical analysis of the issues that pose difficult moral

problems for philosophers concerned about moral education and education for thinking,

in chapters four through six I consider the ways in which these issues and problems

manifest themselves in the contemporary ethics classroom. As noted above, the

underlying issues will turn out to be the same issues that emerged in my historical

analysis, though coloured by the new realities of teaching in the contemporary context.

In chapter four I sketch a picture of this contemporary context in two related

ways. First, I outline some of the major disagreements and issues that have arisen in

what has been written about ethics pedagogy. These disagreements concern two general

questions: what the purpose of ethics courses should be, and whether or not teachers

should be neutral with regard to their own moral, political and religious beliefs. Second,

I outline three contextual features of the contemporary ethics classroom: the existence of

religious fundamentalism, the prevalence of student relativism, and the reality of

pluralism. My analysis reveals what must be taken into account in reasoning about ethics

pedagogy and uncovers many difficult questions for philosophers teaching ethics.

The central issue for those concerned with the ethics of teaching has generally

been to determine the limits on the pursuit of teaching goals: to decide which acts one

must not perform in service of one's goals, no matter how good the results. In chapter

five I argue that what is missing is a rich view of teaching ethics that allows for careful

5

deliberation about teaching goals themselves, and about the difficult questions raised in

earlier chapters. I then consider and reject four possible views of teaching ethics that

might fill this gap. My rejection of these views brings to light the desirable

characteristics of an account of the ethics of teaching: it can take into account the

situational factors that are relevant in the undergraduate ethics classroom, it can address

the tough moral questions raised throughout the dissertation but especially in chapter

four, and it can enable reasoning about teaching goals.

In the final chapter I outline my adaptation of the capabilities approach to well­

being for the teaching context and show how it meets the challenges I set for it in chapter

five. In the end, I do not propose to finally solve all of the problems I have raised in

chapters one through four. Rather, my raising those issues points to the need for careful

study of the ethics of teaching. My development of the capabilities approach provides a

starting point for this study.

6

CHAPTER 1: PLATO, SOCRATES, AND DIALECTICAL QUESTIONING1

No discussion of the practice of philosophy can be complete without considering

the works of Plato. One might even argue that the unifying theme in Plato's dialogues is

the idea that philosophy practiced well is superior to competitors like oratory or

sophistry. Explicitly, through arguments put forward by Socrates, and implicitly, through

his use of the dialogue form, Plato shows why philosophers outstrip sophists and orators

in their quest for the good life, and, perhaps even more importantly, in their role as

educators.

One might ask, however, why one ought to consult Plato's works for insights

about education. After all, Socrates claimed over and over again that he was not a

teacher, and Plato's vision of education described in Republic may not offer very much

that is appropriate in a liberal society. However, there is good reason to consult Plato in

the context of ethics education. He had much to say on the topic of teaching young

people to think critically about their moral beliefs, and by the time of writing Republic, as

I shall argue, he strongly disagreed with Socrates' views about the examined life being

good for everyone. The disagreement brings to light issues about the potential harms that

teaching philosophy brings about, and it calls into question which values should

undergird a commitment to teaching philosophy.

In this chapter I outline the disagreement that subsisted between Socrates and

Plato on the topic of teaching young people to critically examine their moral beliefs. This

disagreement represents a more general disagreement about the path to the good life and

the role of philosophy in living life well.

1 A version of this chapter has been accepted for publication in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, forthcoming 2010.

In Republic VII Plato has Socrates make a curious argument: dialectic as currently

practiced causes lawlessness, and thus the practice of dialectic should be restricted to

those of a certain age who have been properly trained and selected (537e-539e). What is

even more curious is his description of the current practice of dialectic, as the questioner

who is described sounds suspiciously like the Socrates of the elenctic dialogues.2 That

Plato would restrict dialectic to a certain class of people is not surprising given the

overall view of justice in Republic, which is that justice is served best when each does

what he or she is best qualified to do, and that philosophers are best at ruling because of

dialectic. Further, it is not surprising that he would be concerned about current practices,

given his frequent criticisms of sophistry. However, that Plato should describe dialectic

in a way that seems to implicate the Socrates of the elenctic dialogues in harmful

practices is surprising, given his longstanding admiration of Socrates.

1.1. Plato's Warning about Dialectical Questioning

In this section I will argue that it is reasonable to believe that Plato's Republic VII

warning was intended to apply to a broad array of practices, including Socratic practices.

The main implication of this will be that Plato in writing Republic was concerned that not

only those who practiced sophistry or oratory could harm young people, but well-

meaning truth-seekers could do so as well.

Plato's Warning

In Republic VII Plato is attempting to show why philosophers make the best

rulers by describing the education, practice, and duties of philosophers, as well as the

2 The Socratic elenchus is a technical term for Socratic refutation.

8

potential pitfalls. He is also keen to rescue philosophy from its bad reputation, since it

has been 'undeservedly besmirched' (536c). Rather than say that those who criticize

philosophy are completely wrong, however, Plato writes: 'Don't you realize what a great

evil comes from dialectic as it is currently practiced? ... Those who practice it are filled

with lawlessness.' (537e)4 Plato then describes how this process occurs:

We hold from childhood certain convictions about just and fine things; we're brought up with them as with our parents, we obey and honor them. . .There are other ways of living, however, opposite to these and full of pleasures, that flatter the soul and attract it to themselves but which don't persuade sensible people, who continue to honor and obey the convictions of their fathers . . .And then a questioner comes along and asks someone of this sort, 'What is the fine?' And, when he answers what he has heard from the traditional lawgiver, the argument refutes him, and by refuting him often and in many places shakes him from his convictions, and makes him believe that the fine is no more fine than shameful, and the same with the just, the good, and the things he honored most.. .Then, when he no longer honors and obeys those convictions and can't discover the true ones, will he be likely to adopt any other way of life than that which flatters him? No, he won't. And so, I suppose, from being law-abiding he becomes lawless. (538c - 539a)5

In order to avoid this fate, people ought not to taste these arguments while they

are still young, for the young enjoy treating arguments 'as a game of contradiction. They

imitate those who've refuted them by refuting others themselves, and, like puppies, they

enjoy dragging and tearing those around them with their arguments.' (539b-c) These

youths will continue this game until they disbelieve what they believed before, and as a

result philosophy is discredited. (539c) On the other hand, Plato argues, sensible older

people will not play these games - they will look for the truth rather than playing at

3 This passage no doubt refers back to the long discussion of philosophy's bad reputation at 487-496. 4 All quotations of Republic from John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, eds., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). 5 This account can be compared to Plato's account of the democratic young man at 560b-c, as well as to 495a-c, where Plato describes how a person with a philosophic nature can be corrupted. The corruption of young men is a central theme in Republic.

9

refutation for sport. These older people will bring honour to philosophy rather than

shame. (539c) Plato also claims that only those of the right disposition should be allowed

to take part in these types of arguments: those who are 'steady by nature.' (539d) He

concludes by writing that those who become properly trained in argumentation must be

tested in the city's matters before being allowed to practice philosophy and rule the city.

(539e-540)

Given the remarkable similarity between Plato's portrayal of the Socratic

elenchus in the elenctic dialogues and his portrayal of the dangerous dialectician in

Republic VII, it seems easy to conclude that Plato had Socratic practices in mind when he

penned the words of Republic. However, more argument is needed to prove such a

strong claim.

What is 'Dialectic as Currently Practiced?'

Plato's warning about dialectic 'as currently practiced' comes at the end of a long

discussion about the ability of philosophers to rule the city. In particular, Plato argues

through the allegory of the Cave and the divided line that philosophers possess true

knowledge, and thus are best suited to be guardians. In this context, dialectic is the

means by which philosophers achieve this knowledge, for it is the journey to knowledge

of things themselves. It is the ascent from the Cave of Shadows.

Plato describes the journey thus: 'whenever someone tries through argument and

apart from all sense perception to find the being itself of each thing and doesn't give up

until he grasps the good itself with understanding itself, he reaches the end of the

intelligible, just as the other reached the end of the visible.' (532a-b) Dialectic is the

10

inquiry that attempts to grasp the being of each thing, (533b) though the power of

dialectic can only reveal the truth itself to someone experienced in all of the lower

subjects, such as mathematics. (533a) Dialectic pulls 'the eye of the soul' out of the

'barbaric bog' and turns it around, leading it to knowledge. (533d) All of this means, to

Plato, that in order to call a person dialectical, he must be 'able to give an account of the

being of each thing,' (534b) and be able to 'distinguish in an account the form of the

good from everything else,' and be able to 'survive all refutation.' (534b-c)

This is the kind of person at which the educational scheme for the guardians is

aiming. The city's guardians must be 'naturally dialectical,' which means that they must

be capable of achieving the kind of unified vision described in the allegory of the Cave.

In order to test for this capacity, Plato recommends testing them 'by means of the power

of dialectic' (537d) However, this task requires great care, because of the great evil that

comes from dialectic as currently practiced. (537d-e)

The description of dialectic 'as currently practiced' involves a questioner who

presses someone for an account of 'the fine,' and whose argument refutes the person's

every answer. In this respect, the questioner is the Socrates of the elenctic dialogues.

Socrates' questioning clearly models the description, for example, when he asks

Euthyphro 'Tell me then, what is the pious, and what is the impious, do you say?' (5d)

Euthyphro gives the traditional answer, and Socrates proceeds to analyse his responses in

order to draw out inconsistencies and contradictions. In other dialogues Socrates pursues

the same strategy: pushing his interlocutor to come up with an account of a thing, while

showing inconsistencies in that account. All of the so-called elenctic dialogues (Apology,

Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Menexemus, and

6 All quotations of Euthyphro from Cooper and Hutchinson, eds., Plato: Complete Works.

11

Protagoras)1 - show Socrates engaged in the kind of questioning that Plato describes in

Republic VII.

The philosopher of Republic VII uses dialectic to get to the truth of things.

Socrates, in the elenctic dialogues, is usually either trying to get at the truth of things,

trying to expose the ignorance of his interlocutors, or both. The aims of the dialectician

in this passage are not made explicit. The only hint given is that the one being questioned

is made to believe 'that the fine is no more fine than shameful, and the same with the just,

the good, and the things he honored most.' (538d) However, in Plato's description it is

not the questioner who makes the person questioned believe that the fine is shameful, but

the argument: 'The argument refutes him.. .and.. .shakes him from his convictions.'

(538d)8 This effect could be completely independent of the questioner's aim.

One difficult question is determining how broadly Plato's conception of

'dialectic' should be understood. This is a generally complex issue in the study of Plato's

works. There are several kinds of inquiry described and modeled in Plato's dialogues,

including the Socratic elenchus, the sort of one-sided inquiry that characterizes dialogues

such as the Republic, and the quite different method of collection and division that one

finds in dialogues such as the Sophist or the Philebus. Further, the dialectic prescribed

for the philosophers in Republic VII presupposes careful study of mathematics and other

crafts in order to get at the truth. Plato, in passages very close to one another, uses the

word 'dialectic' to describe the ascent from the Cave and also to describe refutation ­

'dialectic as currently practiced.'

7 For this traditional list see Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 8 The relevant phrase is 'e^eXeyxn 6 Aoyos.'

12

Some have claimed9 that for Plato, 'dialectic' always aims at truth, and this is

what distinguishes it from practices such as eristic. However, if this is true, then when

Plato describes the harmful dialecticians of 537-539 he only has in mind those refuting

for the sake of the truth. To avoid this conclusion, we must attribute to Plato a rather

broad conception of 'dialectic,' at least in these passages. If the word is to be used

consistently in Republic VII, it must refer merely to 'questioning' or perhaps 'refutation.'

Dialectic, on this conception, is the method used by eristic refuters, by Socratic refuters,

and by Platonic guardians-in-training. There is thus no special word used for dialectic-

aiming-at-truth. The word 'dialectic,' at least in these passages of the Republic, can be

taken to refer to a means to an end: a method used to work toward whatever aims the

dialectician has in mind.

The initial description Plato gives of dialectic 'as currently practiced' is broad: it

involves refutation, but it is not clear what the refutation aims at. What follows this

description is Plato's set of prescriptions for avoiding the harms of dialectic. I will argue

based on these prescriptions that Plato's warning about the harms of dialectic applies to

all those practicing it, including Socrates.

Plato's Prescriptions

I now want to suggest that only by interpreting Republic 537-539 to apply to all

those involved in refutation, even those aiming at truth, can Plato's prescriptions make

sense. Plato claims that dialectic must be restricted to those of a certain age, who have

been properly trained and who are properly suited (539a-c). If Plato had only prescribed

being careful how young people are introduced to arguments (539a), this passage could

9 See, e.g., Richard Robinson, Plato's Earlier Dialectic (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1953), 85-86.

13

reasonably be taken as simply a condemnation of some refuters but not others, for one

might argue that someone like Socrates is always careful. However, since Plato

introduces as a 'lasting precaution' (539a) the three prescriptions, his critique becomes

very broad. That is because the three prescriptions clearly refer to restricting those who

are questioned dialectically and not those who are asking the questions.

The story Plato tells is of a young person being exposed to a dialectical

questioner. The young person jettisons his conventional beliefs, and is unable to discover

true beliefs with which to replace them. Next Plato claims: 'Isn't it only to be expected

that this is what happens to those who take up arguments in this way, and don't they

therefore deserve a lot of sympathy?' (539a) This follows immediately, and implies that

'those who take up arguments in this way' are those who are being asked the dialectical

questions but cannot answer them. It makes no sense that we should feel sympathy for

the questioner; clearly, we should feel sympathy for the person being questioned whose

beliefs have been undermined. Plato then writes: 'if you don't want your thirty-year-olds

to be objects of such pity, you'll have to be extremely careful about how you introduce

them to arguments.' (539a)10 As outlined above, this passage is the beginning of Plato's

prescriptions about age and training, and follows his claims about sympathy for thirty-

year olds. Those who will be asked questions, then, must be at least thirty years old,

properly trained, and carefully selected.

The relevant phrase is 'OUK ouv 'fvoc nfi yiyvr|Tai 6 EAEOS OUTOS Tiepi TOUJ TPICCKOVTOUTOCS ooi, EuXcefka/UEvep TTCCVTI xpo TTcp TCOV Xoycov ccrrTEOv.' There are four textual variants on the word eulaboumenoi. It is possible that Plato had in mind eulaboumenois or eulaboumenous, both of which would mean that some persons must engage the arguments carefully, eulaboumenos, which is the adverb 'in a carefully-undertaken manner' and whose subject is not specified, or eulaboumenoi, which would mean that Glaucon must engage the arguments with every care. In any case, the passage surely mirrors 537d, in which Plato is addressing those who are training the guardians.

14

The reasoning Plato gives for this conclusion is this: when young people are given

their first taste of argument, they misuse it by refuting beliefs until they disbelieve what

they believed before. (539b) Here Plato is adding to his earlier warning. Not only can a

dialectician undermine a young person's beliefs, but that young person can imitate the

dialectician and imitate his own beliefs and the beliefs of others. Older people, on the

other hand, are more likely only to imitate those looking for the truth, and not to play

around at arguments for the sport of it. (539c)

This last comment by Plato may lead one to think that truth-seeking dialecticians

are not dangerous, since Plato is not worried about those who imitate those seeking after

the truth. However, this interpretation is not consistent with Plato's overall argument in

this section. If truth-seekers were not dangerous, then Plato would not have needed to

restrict who is exposed to dialectic, but only those practicing dialectic. In other words,

Plato would only have needed to stipulate that dialectical questions only be asked by

those seeking the truth. After all, in this section, Plato has Socrates in the midst of

addressing those who will be training up the guardians, and telling them to be careful

about who is exposed to their dialectical questioning (537d). Surely those doing the

dialectical testing will be committed to the truth. If truth-seekers are not dangerous, they

would not need to be concerned about who is exposed to their questioning.

In other words, if Plato believed that some kinds of dialecticians caused harm to

the young and others not, he need only have placed restrictions on those asking questions

of young persons. That he went further suggests that no such restrictions could protect

young people from harm. Only by preventing any dialecticians at all from questioning

young people can the harm be prevented. It is thus reasonable to conclude that Plato

15

believed that Socratic truth-seekers, Socratic imitators and sophists can all question

beliefs in a way that can be harmful. To prevent them from doing so, none may be

allowed to ask questions of young, untrained people. Plato is thus making the claim that

dialecticians are dangerous no matter how devoted to the truth they are.

This passage within the context of Republic is striking. The entire work is

devoted to defending Plato's conception of justice, which includes his conception of the

just city. The just city is one ruled by philosophers, and thus in books six and seven Plato

is defending his claim that philosophers make the best rulers, and by extension, the claim

that philosophy is useful. The analogy of the divided line and the allegory of the Cave

are both intended to defend this claim. Though philosophers might appear to have their

heads in the clouds, Plato argues, they are useful and are the most qualified to rule a city.

Thus, it is significant that right at the end of this section Plato makes the admission that

philosophical practice is dangerous. Dialectic, even when it is being put to the use for

which it is intended - climbing the path to knowledge of the Good - can be harmful.

Thus Plato's one and only method for escaping the Cave of Shadows is also something

that leads to lawlessness, and this means that dialectic must be kept out of the hands of

anyone who could be harmed by it. Not only that, but those who are rightfully practising

dialectic must not do so in the presence of those who are unsuited to practice it, lest they

be imitated in pernicious ways.

Plato's warning in Republic VII is thus a warning about the practice of dialectic in

general, and especially a warning about practicing dialectic with or in front of young

people. As it will become evident, it is thus a warning against the practices Socrates

16

defends in the Apology, which I turn to in the next section.11 I will argue that Socrates'

position in the Apology provides a sharp contrast to Plato's views in the Republic.

1.2. Socrates in the Apology

In the Apology, Plato has Socrates defend himself against several charges,

including that of corrupting the youth. This is noteworthy given that Plato's claim is that

dialectic can corrupt young people. It is thus significant that Plato believed by the time

of writing Republic that figures such as Socrates should not question others except in

carefully controlled situations.

Socrates' Divine Mission

In the Apology Socrates claims that his practice of questioning is a divine service

to the god. The oracle at Delphi prophesied that no one was wiser than Socrates, and

Socrates interpreted the prophecy to mean: 'This man, among you, mortals, is wisest

who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.' (23b) For this reason

Socrates believed that it was his god-given mission to expose the ignorance of others and

convince them that they are not wise. In response to the suggestion that he could agree to

cease practicing philosophy in exchange for his freedom, Socrates says:

If, as I say, you were to acquit me on those terms, I would say to you: 'Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your

11 All quotations of Apology from Cooper and Hutchinson, eds., Plato: Complete Works.

17

soul?' Then, if one of you disputes this and says he does care, I shall not let him go at once or leave him, but I shall question him, examine him and test him, and if I do not think he has attained the goodness that he says he has, I shall reproach him because he attaches little importance to the most important things and greater importance to inferior things. I shall treat in this way anyone I happen to meet, young and old, citizen and stranger. (29d-30a).

Socrates sees his role as a kind of gadfly - as an annoyance that never ceases to

rouse the citizens of Athens, 'to persuade and reproach you all day long and everywhere I

find myself in your company.' (31a) This mission includes citizens and strangers, and, as

Socrates repeats several times, both young and old.12 All can benefit from being shown

to be ignorant. This means that Socrates in the Apology believes that dialectical

questioning is beneficial to anyone, not only to those in the Republic's elite class of

guardians, and not only those who are of a certain age. It also means that Socrates

believes that undermining beliefs is beneficial, which is precisely what Plato is worried

about in Republic VII.

It should not be inferred from the passage above that Socrates only questions

those who are arrogant, or sophists, or anything of the sort. He claims that he will

question anyone who claims to care for his soul. That someone claims that he cares for

his soul does not make him arrogant. It is likely true that anyone would think that he

cares for his soul, given the religious nature of the city, and thus Socrates is really saying

that he will dialectically question anyone.

In the Socratic dialogues one can find Socrates doing exactly this - questioning

those he happens to meet, pushing them to come up with definitions of concepts such as

12 Cf. 33a: 'If anyone, young or old, desires to listen to me when I am talking and dealing with my own concerns, I have never begrudged this to anyone,' or 37d-e: 'It would be a fine life at my age to be driven out of one city after another, for I know very well that wherever I go the young men will listen to my talk as they do here.'

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piety (Euthyphro), the fine (Hippias Major), or temperance (Charmides), and so forth.

While he is not often seen cross-examining a young person, he often cross-examines

others in the presence of young people. He describes this in the Apology: 'The young

men who follow me around of their own free will, those who have most leisure, the sons

of the very rich, take pleasure in hearing people questioned; they themselves often imitate

me and try to question others.' (23c)

It is not clear from the text what Socrates thinks of this imitation. He may be

expressing regret that young people imitate him. Given the possibility that these

imitations may have led to the accusations against him, he may be complaining about

what has occurred.13 He may or may not believe this imitation was a perversion of his

own method. He may even be expressing satisfaction that his practice was continued by

others.14 Given the context of this passage, where Socrates is describing how he

acquired a bad reputation, but also defending his practice, it is not clear which of these

two views is right.

The young men in question are the sons of the very rich, and they take pleasure in

questioning. This suggests that at least some of the young men are contradicting one

another for sport. The point that is crucial here is that Socrates did not believe it to be

harmful to expose all sorts of young people to his questioning.

The Examined Life

Perhaps the most famous quotation ever penned by Plato is Socrates' claim that

the unexamined life is unlivable:

13 This is defended in Norman Gulley, The Philosophy of Socrates (London: Macmillan, 1968), 58. 14 This is Grote's view. George Grote, Plato, and the other Companions ofSokrates, vol. 4 (London: Murray, 1888), 210.

19

If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less. (38a)

The disagreement between the views in the Republic and the views in the Apology

becomes even starker when considered in this context. Plato's warning in the Republic

and its attached prescriptions imply that the vast majority of people ought never to be

exposed to dialectic, for their own good. Carefully selected philosopher-rulers of a

certain age are a minority group in the just city, and Plato thus has in mind that dialectical

investigations are reserved for that minority. This means that the majority of people

ought not to lead the 'examined life,' only those who are mature adults with a particular

kind of training.15 Plato seems to echo this idea elsewhere in the Meno, when he has

Socrates claim:

Is it not correct that when true opinion guides the course of every action, it does no worse than knowledge? ... Correct opinion is then neither inferior to knowledge nor less useful in directing actions, nor is the man who has it less so than he who has knowledge. (98b-c)16

Plato's views in the Republic thus imply that most people should be left in their

unreflective state, for their own good. That this is true is even more evident when one

considers elements of his republic which would fall apart if the ordinary citizen lived an

examined life, such as the noble lie that men are created of different substances based on

which class they belong to (414-416). That said, for Plato, the examined life is not just

This has been noticed by several commentators. See, e.g.: Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 91-92, Richard Kraut, "Socrates, Politics, and Religion," in Reason and Religion in Socratic Philosophy, ed. Nicholas D. Smith and Paul B. Woodruff, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19, C.D.C. Reeve, "The Socratic Movement," in .4 Companion to the Philosophy of Education, ed. Randall Curren, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 14, Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 125. 16 All citations of Meno from Cooper and Hutchinson, eds., Plato: Complete Works. Cf. Republic 589c, where Plato alludes positively to existing conventions.

20

incompatible with the just city, it is generally dangerous. Plato, after all, does not simply

limit the practice of dialectic in the just city but also argues that it is dangerous in the

current context - 'as currently practiced.'

It is thus clear that the views expressed in the Republic and those expressed in

the Apology differ markedly with respect to the examined life, with regard to who should

be exposed to dialectical questioning, and with regard to whether or not dialectical

questioning is dangerous.

1.3. Unreflective Moral Beliefs and the Role of Dialectic

It should be evident now that the import assigned to dialectical questioning differs

from the Apology to the Republic. While both claim that dialectic properly practiced

aims at truth, it has different aims within that framework. Republic dialectic aims to

allow an elite group of leaders to discern the true and the good, in order that those leaders

might be more effective rulers. Socratic dialectic in the Apology aims to rouse the

ordinary citizen from his unreflective life. While for both, dialectic is supposed to help

the ordinary citizen, in the Apology this help is direct rather than mediated through the

philosopher-rulers. In the Republic, dialectic is potentially dangerous in the hands of any

practitioner and thus its practice must be limited, whereas in the Apology, even in the

hands of ordinary people, it is the remedy for such dangerous practices as sophistry.

Further, the views in the Republic imply that ordinary citizens are better off

holding unreflective, conventional moral beliefs, than questioning those beliefs for

themselves. Socrates in the Apology, on the other hand, is a moral revolutionary who

uses dialectical questioning to expose the weakness of traditional views and those who

21

hold them. 7 By exposing dialectical weakness in the presence of young people,

Socrates encouraged young people to question conventional moral beliefs.

It is thus reasonable to believe that by the time Plato wrote Republic he had

changed his views about Socrates' practice. Given that the content and style of his

writings has also changed from being Socrates-centred and in lively dialogue style, this is

not an improbable conclusion. This leads to a difficult question. Since the most

famous charge against Socrates was corrupting the youth, is it possible that Plato in

Republic 537-539 has begun to believe that Socrates' accusers were right? That is, if in

the Republic, dialectic is a dangerous tool that can lead young people astray, has Plato

joined Socrates' accusers by the time he wrote Republic!

1.4. Plato: A Philosophical Parricide?

There are several potential arguments against the claim that Plato was joining

Socrates' accusers in his writing of the Republic. In what follows I will propose five

such arguments. I will argue that the first three should be rejected, and leave the last two

as relatively plausible 'ways out.'

The first argument turns on the meaning of 'currently' (vVv). On this line of

reasoning, Plato's warning does not apply to Socrates because it only refers to those who

are practicing dialectic at the time he is writing, that is, years after Socrates' death. It

17 In this connection, cf. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Socrates on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 199. Though they claim that 'Socrates' mission had the effect of showing young people how little their fathers really knew about how to live, and how ill-supported their values and traditions were,' they do not refer to Republic 537-539 in this connection, even though they claim that such an effect led to scepticism. 18 Beversluis and Kraut both take the moderate view that Plato had changed his mind somewhat about Socrates, though did not fully endorse his accusers' claims. John Beversluis, Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 382, Kraut, "Socrates, Politics, and Religion," 19.

22

should first be noted that to make this argument work, one would have to argue that

'currently' refers to the time within which Plato is writing the Republic, rather than to a

time within Socrates' lifetime. This is because the word is in Socrates' mouth in the

dialogue, and he is not portrayed as speaking from beyond the grave. While this would

be a tricky question in Plato interpretation, there is a good contextual reason to reject the

idea that Plato was referring only to the time of his writing. Plato's statement about

dialectic is so strong that in order for it to apply to all dialecticians practicing in Athens at

the time of writing the Republic, it would also have to apply to anyone practicing

dialectic in a relevantly similar scenario. That is, it is implausible to think that Plato

believed that Athenian youth were different enough in Socrates' day than in the time he is

writing the Republic that the warning would not apply a few years earlier. It would also

be implausible to argue that dialectic was completely different in Socrates' day, since as I

have argued Plato's use of the word in this passage is very broad. For this reason, I

believe this argument should be rejected.

The second argument involves the content of the Athenian court's accusations.

Socrates' accusers appeared to understand the corruption in terms of introducing new

gods, which is not Plato's worry in the Republic. In the text of the Apology it is clear that

those charging Socrates believe that the corruption involves religion:

Nonetheless tell us, Meletus, how you say that I corrupt the young; or is it obvious from your deposition that it is by teaching them not to believe in the gods in whom the city believes but in other new spiritual things? Is this not what you say I teach and so corrupt them?—That is most certainly what I do say. (26b)

This is the charge to which Socrates replies, and the only charge that is ever raised

in the text with regard to corrupting the youth. Of course, it is possible that the charges

23

were formulated in such a way as to ensure that Socrates could be charged with impiety ­

and so that is why the 'new gods' charge is introduced. Perhaps Socrates was condemned

because his accusers reasoned that since he had the ability to knock down beliefs, he must

have done it to people like Alcibiades and Critias, and thus corrupted them.19 Alcibiades

and Critias were both students of Socrates, and Alcibiades was especially cared for by

Socrates, but both became notorious tyrants in the reign of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens.

Even if this is so, however, Plato clearly has a different understanding of

Socrates' practices than the Athenian court does. After all, Plato has Socrates describe in

the Republic why virtuous philosophers are slandered, in the analogy of the navigator and

the ship-owner. The sailors on the ship do not know what a true captain should be like,

and so they reject him as a useless stargazer. (488-489) This simile should bring to mind

the Gorgias, where Plato has Socrates compare himself to a doctor who is being

prosecuted by a pastry chef, and judged by a jury of children. (52 le) Plato, in writing the

Republic, could still believe that the Athenians were unable to fully understand Socrates'

true purposes and his true usefulness, but could have come to believe that Socratic

practices were dangerous.

The trouble is here that though this explanation casts some doubt on the extent to

which Plato agreed with Socrates' accusers about the particulars of the case, or about the

usefulness of philosophy, it still has Plato agreeing that Socrates' practice is dangerous.

While Plato's reasoning is not the same as the court's reasoning, the conclusion they

come to is the same: Socrates is a dangerous practitioner whose philosophizing should be

stopped. Socrates certainly would not have been allowed into Plato's just city unless he

promised to stop practicing dialectic with or in the presence of young people. For this

19 This is Vlastos' position. Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 296-97.

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reason, this argument does not undermine the claim that Plato is a philosophical

parricide.

The third argument is to say that Plato did believe everything I have ascribed to

him in the first sections of the paper, but did not realize, or did not allow himself to

realize, that these condemnations would apply to Socrates as well. One would have to

make some kind of argument based on the idea that 'love is blind' in order to avoid the

idea that Plato is just stupid. As such, it is not a very appealing view. Socrates is, after

all, the main character in many of Plato's dialogues, and was his own teacher. It would

be surprising indeed if Plato did not notice the implication of his own view, and would be

inconsistent with his overall carefulness as a writer.

The fourth argument draws a distinction between the actual city in which Socrates

practiced, and the idealized city with which Plato is working in the Republic. The city of

which Plato speaks in the book is a description of what a fully just city would look like.

It is certainly not Athens. It is a city in which young people are communally raised and

divided into classes, where a noble lie is told in order to keep the lower classes

subservient, and where the philosophers rule.

It is implausible to argue on this basis that Plato believed that dialectic was

dangerous in the ideal city, but not dangerous in Athens. After all, his argument proceeds

as follows: since dialectic with the young brings harm in its current context, it will bring

harm in the ideal city as well, and thus it must be banned. It is also implausible to argue

that Plato would want to ban dialectic in the ideal city because he did not want the noble

lie challenged, but would permit it in Athens because those having their beliefs

challenged should reject those beliefs anyway. It is key to the story of the young person

25

in Republic VII that he would have been better off holding on to his conventional beliefs

than rejecting them entirely. The most plausible line of reasoning here is that in both

cases Plato believed that dialectic was dangerous, but in Athens he also believed it to be

necessary, since in general the moral and religious views of the Athenians were so far

from the true and the good that they needed to be thrown down. In other words,

Socrates' practices were dangerous but also necessary to moral progress.

On this view, Plato believes that Socrates' practices brought both harm and good,

but that the good could be outweighed by the harm. In other words, while some young

people will have their lives destroyed, at least someone will be challenging the ruling

conceptions of justice and injustice, and that is necessary for eventually changing minds

in the city as a whole. In the ideal city, however, since the philosopher-rulers are ruling

based on truth and goodness, there is no need for such destructive practices. Moral

progress, on this explanation, comes at the expense of the goodness of those young

people who fall into the trouble Plato describes in Republic VII. This explanation

commits one to the view that Plato agreed with the court that Socrates was corrupting the

youth, but did not agree that he should be stopped, or that his practices, when taken in a

larger context, were wrong. On this view, Plato believed Socrates harmed young people,

but did so for the greater good.

This kind of view is not terribly startling once one considers that if Plato is taken

literally, he is willing to take very drastic measures to bring about the just city: he is

willing to put all Athenians over a certain age into exile in order to indoctrinate the

young. It would not be too far of a stretch to say that he approved of casualties along the

road to goodness and justice. It does avoid the conclusion that Socrates should have been

26

put to death, but the disagreement between Plato and Socrates has deepened: not only do

they disagree about whether dialectic helps or harms a young person's soul; they disagree

fundamentally about what justice requires.

The fifth and final argument is based on the possible difference between claiming

that a method is dangerous and claiming that in actual fact it corrupted young people. In

other words, Plato could have believed that all dialectic was dangerous, but that Socrates

managed to avoid actually harming anyone. While Socrates' followers and interlocutors

were in some way exempt from harm, Plato believed that in order to be sure that dialectic

not be misused, its practice must be limited in the just city. This seems reasonable given

that the safeguards he introduces are consistent with his view that justice involves each

playing the role for which one is best suited.

The trouble with this argument is that it is clear from the first half of this chapter

that Plato's warning refers to all those practicing dialectic, 'currently,' and he claims that

it is 'only to be expected' (539a) that young people will be corrupted. As argued in the

first sections of this chapter, for Plato, it is the method itself that is dangerous, not the

intent or the character of the dialectician. Plato gives no reason to think that even

someone such as Socrates could practice dialectic without harming anyone. His

restrictions on the practice of dialectic imply that he does not hold this belief. Otherwise,

as I have argued above, to avoid harm, it would only be necessary to choose questioners

of Socrates' sort. The only way to make this argument work is to say that Plato believed

that Socrates had a kind of special protection from harming others not available to anyone

else, i.e., not available to those who would be training the guardians. Socrates' virtue or

knowledge would not be enough protection, since the guardians and those training them

27

are educated for such virtue and knowledge. One way to explain Socrates' uniqueness

would be to refer to Socrates' 'divine sign,' which according to Socrates in the Apology

warned him before he made a mistake. (3 lc-e)

Now it must be noted here that Socrates himself does not draw this connection,

and claims that he will question anyone he meets.20 But, it is possible that Plato believed

that Socrates had this kind of special protection. This argument would require the idea

that there are some young people who would not be harmed by being questioned or by

being exposed to questioning, but only Socrates' daemon has the knowledge to determine

who these young people are, and so to protect Socrates from harming others. There is no

direct textual evidence for this claim in the Republic, but an argument in favour of Plato's

special regard for Socrates could be made based on general indicators, such as Plato's

positive portrayal of the character in his dialogue. This argument relies on Plato

considering Socrates to be the recipient of a form of miraculous protection.

I have argued here that the final two arguments do explain away the claim that

Plato believed that the Athenian court was right to do what it did. They are consistent

with my analysis of Republic VII because they do not rely on the idea that dialectic is

only harmful when used for problematic ends. Of course, accepting one or other of these

sets of implications is not the only recourse we have in reading Plato. One can claim that

Plato really has become a philosophical parricide. Some authors have taken this view.21

What I have argued in this final section is that as things stand one can only avoid this

10 Apology 33a. 21 See Grote, Plato, and the other Companions ofSokrates, 211, Gareth B. Matthews, "Socrates's Children," in The Philosopher's Child: Critical Essays in the Western Tradition, ed. Susan M. Turner and Gareth B. Matthews, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998), 13.

28

view by attributing to Plato the beliefs I have laid out in either one of the two final

arguments.

To return to the question which began this investigation, it is certainly clear that

the difference of views between the Republic and the Apology is a profound one. The

difference in views between Socrates and Plato is quite deep. Fundamentally, the

Republic rejects the Apology's conception of the role and importance of dialectic in living

well, and rejects Socrates' defense of his practices in that work. It is a clear departure

from Socrates' views in the early dialogues.

For philosophers, it raises questions in our own context. Teachers of philosophy

in universities, colleges, and public schools worldwide are committed to teaching

students to think critically about their most fundamental beliefs. Yet there could be

something harmful about exposing a young person to dialectical questioning. Given that

university students are young and inexperienced (and sometimes, as Socrates' imitators

were, privileged and arrogant) it is possible that philosophers run a risk when giving

students tools they can use to dismantle their belief systems or the belief systems of

others. How should philosophers respond to this possibility? For those who agree with

Socrates about the importance of the examined life, this remains an open question.

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CHAPTER 2: REASON AND VIRTUE IN LOCKE AND ROUSSEAU

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had much to say about education, as both

were concerned to remedy the social ills they saw arising from bad educational practices.

Each believed that education failed in its inattention to reason and virtue. Both believed

that education should lead to intellectual autonomy, which is based in one's ability to

reason well, but should also lead to sound moral character. In the end, on both accounts

the two goals turn out to be in tension. This chapter is devoted to drawing out this

tension.

Locke and Rousseau were writing in an educational context very different from

today's university context. However, it is worth asking what kinds of factors brought

about the contradictions in their views in order to see whether or not these factors play a

role in teaching today. At bottom what is at issue for both is an inability to see a way in

which moral education could take place without indoctrination or inculcated deference to

authority. This also arose for Plato in his concern about the dangers of questioning one's

moral beliefs. In today's context, the underlying issue is still present. There are those

who believe that exposing children to various points of view is in tension with providing

them with moral or religious education. Parents who are religious fundamentalists often

seek to prevent their children from being exposed to that which they believe will

undermine their efforts to instil a particular kind of virtue.

Many university ethics teachers will encounter students who have been raised in

this kind of environment, for whom thinking critically may well destabilize their belief

systems. It is a difficult question to determine how to respond to such students. As well,

the question remains for ethics teachers what teaching goals should look like: should

30

ethics courses be part of a students' moral education in some way? How do teachers'

efforts to teach students to think critically fit into the students' overall educational

programme?

These and other difficult questions arising for ethics teachers are not new, but

they find new meaning in today's teaching contexts. As such, it is worth looking at

where and how philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau have erred, in order to learn

from their mistakes.

2.1. Locke's Educational Goals

Locke begins his Some Thoughts Concerning Education by claiming that "of all

the Men we meet with, Nine Parts of Ten are what they are, Good or Evil, useful or not,

by their Education."1 Some Thoughts was thus written to address what Locke considered

to be the bad educational practices of his day, and was based on Locke's letters to his

friend Edward Clarke. In the Epistle Dedicatory, Locke writes to Clarke that errors in

education "carry their afterwards-incorrigible Taint with them, through all the parts of

and stations of Life."2 Though much of the work is dedicated to pointing out how current

educational practices lead children to vice, Locke proposes his own system of education

dedicated to leading a young gentleman into virtue.

As the overall goal of Some Thoughts is to outline an educational scheme that will

lead its students to virtue, I begin by examining Locke's conception of virtue and the

ways in which he intends his methods to achieve it. However, Locke's view of virtue is

1 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), §1. 2 Ibid., Epistle Dedicatory.

31

closely connected to his view of reason, and accordingly I devote a section to how

Locke's educational scheme is intended to lead its students to a life of reason.

Virtue

"A Sound Mind in a sound Body, is a short, but full Description of a Happy State

in this World." For Locke, the strength of both the mind and the body is being able to

endure hardships, and "the great Principle and Foundation of all Vertue and Worth, is

placed in this, That a Man is able to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own

Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' the appetite lean the

other way."5 This ability is engendered by custom and habit, and thus beginning "from

their very cradles,"6 children are to be taught to go without that for which they long.

While they are young children, and cannot reason on their own, the reason to which they

are to submit their desires is that of their parents or tutors.7 Children are to be taught not

to be slaves to pleasure and pain,8 but to submit those desires to reason, in order to

achieve overall happiness. They begin by submitting to the authority of their parents and

tutors, and gradually learn to submit to their own reason.9

Much of what Locke says about inculcating virtue in Some Thoughts involves

ways in which the father of the child can maintain authority. Because submitting to the

father's authority teaches the child to submit to his own reason, it is paramount that this

authority be established as early as possible. Locke writes:

Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, § 1. 4 Ibid., §33. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., §38. 7 Ibid., §36. 8 Ibid., §55. 9 Ibid., §39.

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Those therefore that intend ever to govern their children, should begin it whilst they are very little, and look that they perfectly comply with the Will of their Parents. Would you have your Son obedient to you when past a Child? Because then to establish the Authority of a Father, as soon as he is capable of Submission, and can understand in whose Power he is. If you would have him stand in awe of you, imprint it in his Infancy; and, as he approaches more to a Man, admit him nearer to your Familiarity: So shall you have him your obedient Subject (as is fit) whilst he is a Child, and your affectionate Friend when he is a Man.10

I cite this passage at length because some11 have argued that this passage suggests

that Locke's educational scheme aims at making people perpetually obedient to the wills

of their fathers. It is hard to resist this conclusion, especially because Locke writes

further on:

Your Authority is to take place and influence his Mind from the very dawning of any Knowledge in him, that it may operate as a natural Principle, whereof he never perceived the beginning, never knew that it was, or could be otherwise. By this, if the Reverence he owes you be established early, it will always be Sacred to him, and it will be as hard for him to resist it, as the Principles of his Nature.

The concern that arises for readers of this passage is that the grown child's

obedience to reason is merely obedience to his father. Locke claims that morality

requires submitting one's desires to reason, but in these passages it appears as though one

is submitting one's desires to the reason of another rather than to one's own reason.

One attempt to avoid this conclusion is Peter Schouls' argument that "since it is

the parents' reason that forces the child to the freedom of rational action, it is, in effect,

10 Ibid., §40. 11 Joseph Carrig, "Liberal Impediments to Liberal Education: The Assent to Locke," The Review of Politics 63 (2001), 48, Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 95. 12 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §100.

33

reason that is the child's teacher."13 For Schouls, this follows from the fact that, for

Locke, good parents are those who are ruled by their reason.

It is true that Locke directs his writings at those who are reasonable. Locke ends

Some Thoughts by writing that he has published his thoughts in the hope that it will give

"some small light" to those who "dare venture to consult their own Reason, in the

Education of their Children, rather than wholly to rely upon Old Custom."14 However,

that one is willing to consult one's reason does not imply that one is wholly ruled by it.

Further, even if Locke's intended audience includes only those ruled by their reason, and

thus the will of the fathers he is describing is a will dominated by their reason, this is not

an adequate reply. The concern is that Locke's educational scheme produces adults who

cannot be governed by their own reason, who believe they are governed by their reason

when they are truly being governed by their father's will. Even if that father is governed

by his own reason, it is still the case that one is submitting to the reason of another.

Another way to respond to this worry is to argue that in the passages cited above,

Locke is not referring to adults, but to older children. Thus, when Locke writes of the

son who is "past a child," he refers to a son who is an adolescent. This interpretation,

however, does not take into account two factors: one, that in the first passage Locke

speaks of "a Child" and "a Man" without mentioning a third category, and that in the

second passage, he refers to a "natural principle" which will "always be Sacred to him."

This is a tension in Locke's view. Locke has in mind that when a child matures

he will be ruled by his own reason, and yet he also argues that deference to paternal

authority should be instilled so deeply in a child that it will remain there through

13 Peter A. Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 217. 14 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §217.

34

adulthood, and will appear to be an innate principle.15 This tension is echoed in Locke's

writing about rationality, which I explore in the following section.

Rationality

Rationality stands alongside virtue as an important educational goal for Locke,

and this is manifest in the fact that reason is an integral part of his conception of virtue.

Locke also claims that children should be reasoned with from the earliest possible age,

for "they understand it as early as they do language; and, if I misobserve not, they love to

be treated as rational creatures, sooner than is imagin'd."16 Reasoning with children will

help them to understand moral rules more easily than dictation, and listening to children's

reasoning will help them to love learning. "Particularly in Morality, Prudence, and

Breeding, Cases should be Put to him, and his Judgment ask'd. This opens the

Understanding better than Maxims, how well soever explain'd, and settles the Rules

better in the Memory for Practice."

Locke is quick to point out that the type of reasoning one should perform with

children is not the same type of reasoning that one would expect of adults. Instead,

children should be taught that what you are asking for is reasonable, "by such Reasons as

their Age and Understanding are capable of, and those proposed always in very few and

plain Words."19 He writes:

The Foundations on which several Duties are built, and the Fountains of Right and Wrong, from which they spring, are not perhaps easily to be let

15 Locke's view of parental authority in the Second Treatise finds some parallels here, and according to Susan Turner, the same tension emerges there as does here. Susan M. Turner, "L'il Savages: Locke and a Sort of Parental Dominion," (Unpublished Manuscript). 16 John Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, Thomas Fowler (New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), §81. 7 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §98.

18 Ibid., §81.

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into the Minds of grown Men, not used to abstract their Thoughts from common received Opinions. Much less are Children capable of Reasonings from remote Principles.

The reasons, Locke claims, must be "obvious," and capable of being "felt, and

touched." If no other reasons are available, Locke suggests telling children that the

action in question "will be a Discredit and Disgrace to them, and displease you." He

does not write further as to what kind of reasoning is appropriate for young children.

Locke's description of appropriate reasoning for young children, which involves

not "remote principles" but more simple reasons, leads some to the conclusion that on

Locke's view, there is no real distinction between reasoning with children and using

esteem and disgrace.22 According to Nathan Tarcov, Locke's view is that reasoning

simply involves letting children know in advance which actions will be esteemed and

which will result in disgrace. Locke claims earlier in Some Thoughts that "Good and

Evil, Reward and Punishment, are the only Motives to a rational Creature," and that

children are to be treated as rational creatures.23 Tarcov understands reasoning with

children to be making them aware of the stakes, so that the children can act from the

motives of rational creatures.

Tarcov's conclusion is too quick. While Locke certainly suggests that as a last

resort, one may appeal to the consequences that will arise from the action in question,

especially punishment, his words do not imply that these are the only kinds of reasons

that can be used with children. While children cannot understand long deductions, it is

possible that they could understand a third kind of reason that Tarcov does not mention.

1L/IU. 21 Ibid. 22 Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 118. 23 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §54.

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In the second part of Some Thoughts, after Locke has given a general outline of a

gentleman's education, he proceeds to speak of particular subjects. These subjects are to

be chosen based on four intended outcomes: wisdom, virtue, good breeding, and

learning.24 While virtue is defined throughout as the power of one's reason to overcome

desire, in this section Locke sets out a new understanding of virtue, the foundation of

which is belief in God. Children should be taught "that God made and governs all

Things, hears and sees every Thing, and does all manner of Good to those that love and

obey Him."25 Locke follows this with an injunction to take notice of a child's particular

tendencies in order to remedy those which lead toward vices. One possibility for the kind

of reasons Locke believes one might give to children for behaving in a particular way is

that Locke had in mind reasons springing from a conception of a good God.

Aside from this, however, there is no reason to think that one could not use as

reasons other kinds of consequences that do not involve punishment, esteem or disgrace.

If one is telling a child not to steal, it is perfectly reasonable to give as a reason that

stealing will harm the person from whom one is stealing.

Given that Locke distinguishes between the kind of reasoning that is appropriate

for children and the kind of reasoning that should be engaged in when one is an adult, it

is worth asking how one is supposed to lead to the other. An adult who is making use of

his reason should be able to reason from remote principles, but Locke maintains that

children are incapable of doing so, at least when they are very young. Locke does not

outline in specific terms how this process is to occur, but it can be expected that he would

suggest that the manner of conversing with children and reasoning together will change

Ibid., §134. Ibid., §136.

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as the child matures, so that the child could learn through conversation and reasoning

with his parents and tutor how to make full use of his reason. In both the Conduct of the

Understanding26 and in Some Thoughts21 Locke suggests that the study of arithmetic can

help in this regard.

However, Locke also rejects the study of rhetoric and logic as a means to better

one's rationality. He rejects these because "of the little advantage young People receive

by them. For I have seldom or never observed any one to get the Skill of reasoning well,

or speaking handsomly by studying those Rules which pretend to teach it." Locke's

emphasis is on reasoning well, and the "contemplation and study of those Formalities" is

not the best way to get there: "Right Reasoning is founded on something else than the

Predicaments and Predicables, and does not consist in talking in Mode and Figure it

self."29 Locke does not say outright that his curriculum excludes logic and rhetoric, but

his tone suggests it. He introduces them thus: "Rhetorick and Logick being the Arts, that

in the ordinary method usually follow immediately after Grammar, it may perhaps be

wondered that I have said so little of them,"30 and then follows this introduction with the

passage cited above. There is thus no reason to believe that he includes them, especially

considering the fact that he speaks negatively about teaching logic throughout Some

Thoughts.

Locke also objects to the current educational practice of disputations, formal

debates which took place in the context of the university, and with which Locke would

26 Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, §7. 27 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §180. 28 Ibid., §188. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Yolton and Yolton, who claim that he does include them, are therefore wrong. Yolton and Yolton, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 33.

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have had first-hand experience at Oxford.32 Locke claims that in current education, "we

learn not to Live, but to Dispute; and our Education fits us rather for the University, than

the World." Disputations, according to Locke, do not teach one to distinguish between

truth and falsehood. Teaching one's son disputations will either lead him to become an

"insignificant Wrangler," "priding himself in contradicting others," or worse,

"questioning every thing, and thinking there is no such thing as truth to be sought, but

only Victory in Disputing."33 Disputations teach students not to yield to reasoned

arguments, but to stick to one side of a dispute no matter what. According to Locke, the

truth is found by due consideration of things themselves, and not by artificial terms and

ways of arguing.34 In the Conduct, Locke adds that disputations teach one to judge

matters by one argument rather than by all of the relevant arguments,35 and to make

artificial distinctions and to use words which do not correspond to clear ideas.36 One

cannot help making the connection here to Plato's concern at Republic VII 537-539, that

young people exposed to dialectical questioning will play at contradiction for sport, and

lose sight of truth and falsehood.

In speaking of education to reason, Locke rejects logic, rhetoric, and disputations

as not being conducive to finding the truth. He suggests that arithmetic can help one's

reasoning skills, and that parents can reason with their children based upon their age and

abilities. What is still missing from this account is an understanding of what the rational

adult formed by Locke's educational scheme will look like. This is not spelled out in

32 According to Richard Yeo, "Locke was describing "practices which he knew first hand as a student and teacher at Christ Church, Oxford." Richard Yeo, "John Locke's 'Of Study' (1677): Interpreting an Unpublished Essay," Locke Studies 3 (2003), 156. 33 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §189. 34 Ibid. 35 Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, §7. 36 Ibid., §31.

39

Some Thoughts, and it is thus useful to consider Locke's writings about mature rationality

in the Conduct of the Understanding.

It should first be noted that Locke's use of the word "understanding" in the

Conduct should not be equated with his use of the word "reason" in Some Thoughts.

Locke begins the Conduct by claiming that "the will itself, how absolute and

uncontrollable it may be thought, never fails in its obedience to the dictates of the

understanding."37 Since Locke's definition of virtue in Some Thoughts is reason's

mastery over one's passions, unless all human beings are virtuous by definition, which is

certainly false, "understanding" has a different sense here than "reason" does in Some

Thoughts. Reason in the Conduct is a faculty of one's understanding,38 a definition

which seems consistent with its use in Some Thoughts.

There are two aspects of the Conduct that I wish to highlight. The first is that

Locke believes that right use of one's reason comes through practice.39 The second is

that one should only come to believe some proposition if the evidence is in its favour, and

the evidence will always favour the truth rather than falsehood. Locke writes that "I

never saw any reason yet why truth might not be trusted to its own evidence; I am sure, if

that be not able to support it, there is no fence against error, and then truth and falsehood

are but names that stand for the same things."40 Until we have evidence favouring one

proposition over the other, we must be indifferent toward what we believe is true or false.

We must not desire that one proposition be true rather than the other until we have

Ibid., §1. Ibid., §3. Ibid., §4. Ibid., §34.

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evidence for it.41 Reason thus requires that one rids oneself of prejudice and to consider

all of the relevant arguments for and against a particular proposition before believing the

proposition that the arguments favour.43 It requires thinking for oneself, rather than

following the opinions of others.44

The question to ask here is whether the person educated in the method prescribed

in Some Thoughts can mature to become an adult who uses his reason in the way

recommended by the Conduct. Several commentators argue that he cannot. Joseph

Carrig argues that the project of habituation and paternal authority means that "the

'educated' are not ruled by their desires, but are 'rational' merely through force of

habit."45 Tarcov claims that Locke finds himself in the position of "simultaneously

siding with reason against custom and advocating the use of custom rather than reason to

teach the qualities that Locke's own reason favors and the world's custom rejects."

Alex Neill, in trying to avoid this conclusion, suggests that Locke's view is that education

instills habits that are necessary in order to allow reason to develop; that education

involves creating the circumstances under which reason can develop on its own.47 Even

if this is so, however, the problem which remains is how the child educated through habit,

through submitting his desires to the will of his father, and through reputation, can grow

up to use his reason to question prejudice, and common opinions, and to believe only that

which he has discovered to rest upon firm foundations.

41 Ibid., §12. 42 Ibid., §10. 43 Ibid., §7. 44 Ibid., §3. This is echoed in the Essay, 4.20. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1961). 45 Carrig, "Liberal Impediments to Liberal Education: The Assent to Locke," 62. 46 Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty, 92. 47 Alex Neill, "Locke on Habituation, Autonomy and Education," Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1989). 48 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §58.

41

The underlying tension in Locke's writings on education is thus that Locke's

method for instilling virtue is also a method which seems to undermine rationality.

While children raised on Locke's scheme may acquire good habits, they do so in a way

that prevents reflection on the habits themselves. Further, the way in which they are

trained to think about morality undermines the possibility that they could critically reflect

upon the principles instilled by their fathers. This sort of critical reflection is essential for

intellectual autonomy, according to Locke, and yet it is undermined by his own

educational scheme. After all, as I have outlined above, Locke appears to intend that the

adult remain in awe of his father, accepting his father's esteem as an innate principle. In

other words, Locke's two major educational goals - rationality and virtue - create a

tension in his work that he cannot resolve.

This tension mirrors the tension raised by Plato's concerns in Republic. I have

already noted that Locke's concern about disputations brings this to light, but it is also

true that the same tension exists in Locke and Plato: between instilling moral virtues or

values and encouraging the development of a critical attitude toward received opinions.

In what follows I will outline a similar tension in Rousseau's work.

2.2. Rousseau's Educational Goals

John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau agree on a significant point: that vice is

learned, and a good education leads to virtue. While Locke advocates instilling virtuous

habits from a very young age in order to safeguard against vice, Rousseau advocates for a

"negative education" in a child's early years, which means keeping children away from

42

that which can corrupt, and avoiding the formation of any habit.50 Rousseau's

educational scheme is based on the idea that happiness is achieved by keeping as close to

nature as possible. Unnatural influences, such as the corrupting influence of society,

must be guarded against in a child's education.

For Rousseau, a person within civil society who attempts to preserve the primacy

of the sentiments of nature is always in contradiction with himself, for that person is

always torn between his wishes and his duties. If one is educated solely in the

education of nature, one is raised uniquely for oneself, but if one is raised solely in

society, one is not free. In order to avoid the contradiction, and to remove the obstacles

that impede happiness, education for self and education for society must be integrated.

Rousseau's most important educational work, Emile, ou de I 'education,52 outlines the first

steps toward achieving this integration. This does not mean that education for citizenship

is combined with an education for nature, for Rousseau believes it to be impossible to

make, at the same time, a man and a citizen. This passage has puzzled commentators,

for it appears to undermine the possibility of integration. Joseph Reisert suggests that

what Rousseau has in mind is that "a man 'educated uniquely for himself will also, as a

consequence of his education, be good for others."54 This seems to be what Rousseau has

in mind, given that he claims that the task of Emile is to understand the natural man.53

49 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education," in Oeitvres Completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 323. 50 Ibid., 282. Rousseau speaks favourably of habit at p. 339, when he claims that imitation can lead to the formation of good habits. Rousseau's overall framework of negative education suggests that the p.339 passage is an anomaly. 51 Ibid., 249-250. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 248. 54 Joseph R. Reisert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 9. 55 Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education," 251.

43

Emile is brought up in accordance with nature, and the later books in the work show what

such a man will look like and how he will relate to others.

Just as it did for Locke, so too for Rousseau reason plays a significant role in

morality. However, the interplay of reason, morality, and moral development is quite

different in Rousseau than it is in Locke.

Virtue

Rousseau offers a complex account of moral development, one in which reason

and sentiments work together to create a virtuous adult, under the guidance of a patient

teacher. A child in his56 early years has no real understanding of morality. Rousseau

claims that though young children have some self-regarding moral sentiments,57 they do

not yet have any moral sentiments which extend to others. This means that young

children should not be punished for failing to act morally,59 though natural consequences

of actions can be used to teach various lessons, such as the concept of property rights.

Rousseau, however, is quick to point out that these kinds of lessons should be limited to

the concept of not harming others, and should only be taught through natural

consequences, not through moral injunctions.61 The most important educational task for

the early years, aside from shielding the child from negative influences, is to teach him to

561 use the masculine pronoun throughout, as Emile's education is only for male children. The education Rousseau prescribes for females will be discussed below. 57 Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education," 286. 58 Ibid., 504-505. 59 Ibid., 319. 60 Ibid., 330-334. 61 Ibid., 340.

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suffer, for the content of a young child's virtue is learning not to fight against the laws

of necessity.

When a child reaches puberty, he is born for a second time, for this is when he is

truly born to life. It is also, in a sense, the beginning of his education.64 At puberty,

Emile's passions begin to emerge, and his education takes that into account. Emile's

passions cannot and ought not be destroyed, for as they are a part of nature, they are the

work of God. However, some passions are artificially inflamed and are not the work of

nature. The original passion, and the source of all others, is amour-de-soi, which is

always good as it is the passion which drives us to our own preservation.65 Amour­

propre, on the other hand, makes comparisons with others and can lead to unhealthy

passions.66 Much of Emile's adolescent education is devoted to ensuring that amour­

propre gives rise to pity for those who are worse off than him, rather than to envy of

those who are better off.67

Pity is the first relative moral sentiment, and involves the act of putting oneself in

the place of others by use of one's imagination. It is not unhealthy, for even though

Emile compares himself to those he pities, he feels the happiness of his own situation.

What it requires is the recognition that he could find himself in the situation in question,

and that is how it arises from self-regarding sentiments. Once a sense of pity is

cultivated, it takes time for the sentiment to generalize to become affection for

Ibid., 300. Ibid., 488. Ibid., 490. Ibid., 491. Ibid., 492. Ibid., 523-526. Ibid., 504. Ibid., 507.

45

humanity.70 When Emile becomes capable of affection, he becomes aware of it, and the

tutor has the ability to acquire a hold over him, because Emile will realize all that his

tutor has done for him. That said, the tutor must be careful to ensure that Emile realizes it

himself rather than being told.71 When Emile is capable of affection, he has entered the

79 '

moral world. The emergence of this sentiment begins Emile's education in helping

others, and his training as a man involves him learning to do good deeds, for it is in doing

good that we become good.73 Emile's learning affections and acting on them is the basis

for learning virtue.74

When Emile reaches the age of twenty or so, he is ready to learn to submit his

passion and desires to his reason. I will speak of the development of Emile's reason

below, as it is developed gradually and carefully. Emile is kept ignorant of his own

sexuality even past puberty, for his own protection.76 However, at the point where he is

ready to enter society, he is to be taught about sexuality in order to protect him from the 77

potential dangers, and to teach him to act on his reason rather than on his passions.

Having learned of the dangers from his teacher's passionate warnings, Emile will place 7S '

himself under his tutor's care in order to learn how to submit to his own reason. Emile

learns the true meaning of virtue when he falls in love with Sophie, and is told by his

teacher that he must leave her for two years. When Emile realizes that he must act

against his passions is when he learns that virtue requires a struggle. Even Emile's pure 70 Ibid., 520. 71 Ibid., 521. 72 Ibid., 522. 73 Ibid., 543. 74 Ibid., 547. 75 Ibid., 637. 76 Ibid., 641. 77 Ibid., 641-651. 78 Ibid., 651.

passionate love for Sophie must be controlled, or else he will be enslaved by it.

Rousseau tells Emile:

Ce qui nous est deffendu par la nature c'est d'etendre nos attachemens plus loin que no forces, ce que nous est deffendu par la raison c'est de vouloir ce que nous ne pouvons obtenir, ce qui nous est deffendu par la conscience n'est pas d'etre tentes, mais de nous laisser vaincre au tentations. II ne depend pas de nous d'avoir ou de n'avoir pas des passions; mais il depend de nous de regner sur elles. Tous les sentiments que nous dominons sont legitimes, tous ceux qui nous dominent sont criminels. °

This rule, according to Rousseau, is not only the guiding principle of virtue and

the rules of morality, but is also the basis of happiness.81 At first glance this seems

identical to Locke's view, but Rousseau's view is more complex than this. Emile's

passions are part of what makes him a good person, for his moral sentiments are the basis

of his care for others. Virtue means not being ruled by one's passions, but one's passions

are also the basis of living well. It is thus not entirely clear what the relationship is

between Emile's correctly groomed passions, and his virtue. Rousseau does claim that

when Emile falls in love with Sophie, he experiences his first passion.82 It follows from

this and the fact that Emile is described as having passions emerge at puberty that the

word "passion" is being used in more than one sense. Further, Rousseau claims earlier

in the work that concepts like justice and goodness are not merely abstractions but are

true affections of the heart enlightened by reason, and that reason alone does not account

79 Ibid., 817-819. 80 Ibid., 819. "What is forbidden us by nature is extending our attachments further than our strength; what is forbidden us by reason is wanting what we cannot obtain; what is forbidden us by conscience is not being tempted, but letting ourselves be conquered by temptation. It does not depend on us having or not having passions, but it depends on us ruling over them. All sentiments which we dominate are legitimate; all those which dominate us are criminal." 81 Ibid., 819-821. 82 Ibid., 818. 83 Rousseau does admit that the words he uses sometimes have more than one sense. Ibid., 345.

47

for any laws of morality. The relationship between reason, affections and virtue is thus

complicated. One interpretation could be that this is an instance where Rousseau's two

aims, making a man and making a citizen, yield a conflict. Emile's natural passions are

what makes him a man, but virtue is required to live in society. However this complexity

is resolved, it is clear that on Rousseau's view, both affections and reason are needed for

moral development, and the educational path chosen for Emile leads him to a kind of

interplay between correctly trained reason and correctly bred affections and passions.

For this reason, it is difficult to separate out Emile's moral education from

Rousseau's conception of reason, but Rousseau's conception of reason is so complex that

it deserves a section of its own. In this next section I will consider Emile's education to

reason and its place in his moral education.

Rationality

Rousseau's conception of educating reason begins with his conception of

happiness, which, for Rousseau, is a state of equilibrium between one's power and one's

will. In other words, the unhappiness that is engendered by society is based on the fact

that society triggers one's imagination to desire more than one has the power to get.

This is why virtue means keeping one's passions in control, so that one does not desire

more than is possible. The only man who is free, according to Rousseau, is the man who

follows his own will and relies on his strength alone.86

This aim is not to be sought by teaching children to reason from a young age,

however. It is not to be taught as Locke teaches it, by having children submit to the

84 Ibid., 522-523. 85 Ibid., 304. 86 Ibid., 309.

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reason of their parents in order to learn to submit to their own reason. Instead, it is to be

taught in two ways. Children's imaginations must not be allowed to be inflamed by

living in society, and children must be taught to live within the bounds of natural laws.

Rousseau's education "from things," means that young children should only find

resistance in things, not in the wills of others, so that they do not develop

rebelliousness.88 Through this kind of learning children discover that nature imposes

some boundaries on what they may have. Children learn to suffer, and not to fight

against the laws of necessity.90

In the early years, children are capable of what Rousseau calls sensitive reason,

which consists in the formation of simple ideas through the association of sensations.

Once they reach puberty, they are capable of learning to reason at a higher level, which

Rousseau calls intellectual reason, and which consists in the formation of complex ideas

through associating simple ones.91 In coming to learn to use this reason, Emile is

encouraged by engineered circumstances to seek out only that knowledge which is useful

to him. As well, Emile must be encouraged by circumstances to learn and invent things

for himself, rather than to learn from authority of any kind. Substituting authority for

reason will result in Emile being bound by the opinions of others rather than his own

reason.93 Rousseau's method teaches Emile to love truth above all, and to teach him to

find it when needed, and to find it himself.94

87 Ibid., 247. 88 Ibid., 287. 89 Ibid., 300. 90 Ibid., 488. 91 Ibid., 417. 92 Ibid., 448-450. 93 Ibid., 430. 94 Ibid., 486-487.

49

One of the ways in which Rousseau and Locke disagree is about the use of reason

in moral development. While Locke advocates reasoning with young children in order to

persuade them to act in certain ways, Rousseau explicitly rejects this notion. According

to Rousseau, it does not make sense to use reason, a faculty which develops later, to help

develop the other faculties. If children understood reason they would not need education.

Instead of being helpful, reasoning with children is harmful:

En leur parlant des leur bas age une lange qu'ils n'entendent point on les accoutume a se payer de mots, a controller tout ce qu'on leur dit, a se croire aussi sage que leurs maitres, a devenir disputeurs et mutins, et tout ce qu'on pense obtenir d'eux par des motifs raisonables, on ne l'obtient jamais que par ceux de convoitise ou de crainte ou de vanite qu'on est toujours force d'y joindre.95

Rousseau gives an example of what such reasoning will look like - it is always

either circular or dependent upon threats of punishment. 6 The fear of punishment

makes children deceitful and makes them rebel against what they perceive as the tyranny

of their teacher. All of a young child's education is devoted to avoiding the corrupting

influence of authority, which can lead a child to develop inflamed amour-propre. The

idea of not reasoning with children is based on this premise.

However, once young children become adolescents and their intellectual reason

begins to develop, the ban on reasoning with children is lifted. While Rousseau, like

Locke, recognizes that adolescents should be kept away from disputations, he

endeavours to teach Emile to seek the truth.

Ibid., 317. "In speaking to them from a young age a language they do not hear, we accustom them to use words to their advantage, to control everything that is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and mutinous, and everything that we think we can obtain from them by reasonable motives, we only obtain by the motives of greed, fear or vanity which we are always forced to join to the reasonable ones." 96 Ibid., 318. 97 Ibid., 319. 98 Ibid., 237, 546.

50

One way in which Rousseau explains how Emile will learn to use this

intellectual reason is outlined in the sub-section entitled "Profession de Foi du Vicaire

Savoyard" (Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar). Rousseau claims that Emile will

not have his religion chosen for him, for religion is mostly the opinions of men, but he

will be placed into a condition to choose for himself the one to which the best use of his

reason leads him." Rousseau uses a story from his own life as an illustration of how

such a preparation could occur. As a young man, who through his own folly was poor

and exiled, and through his experience of corrupt people, including corrupt clergymen, he

learned to see nothing but evil, to renounce virtue and religion as a mask for selfishness

and hypocrisy, to see heaven and hell as mere prizes for disputations.100 A kind vicar

takes him in, and to help him to find truth about virtue and religion, recounts his own

similar story, in which the vicar himself was subject to similar doubts. Philosophers

multiplied those doubts by caring more about winning than about seeking the truth, and

so the vicar decided to rely on his reason and experience alone to find the truth.101

The vicar's story amounts to a vindication of natural religion,102 and morality

based solely on one's conscience.103 For Rousseau, teaching Emile about religion should

take something like this form. Generally:

Tant qu'on me donne rien a l'autorite des hommes ni aux prejuges du pays ou l'on est ne, les seules lumieres (sic) de la raison ne peuvent dans l'institution de la nature nous mener plus loin que la religion naturelle, et c'est a quoi je me borne avec mon Emile. S'il en doit avoir une autre, je n'ai plus en cela le droit d'etre son guide; c'est a lui seule de la choisir.104

99 Ibid., 558. 100 Ibid., 560. 101 Ibid., 568-569. 102 Ibid., 607. 103 Ibid., 594-599. 104 Ibid., 635-636. "So long as nothing is given me by the authority of men or by the prejudices of my native country, reason's light alone can only, in the institution of nature, lead us as far as natural religion,

51

Once Emile has an understanding of God, Rousseau believes that he will have a

new understanding of morality, for the love for God mingles with his own amour de soi,

and then alone does Emile find a true interest in being good.105 This appears to be

connected to the idea that Emile is learning to submit his passions to his reason, for

Emile's reason tells him that he has an interest in pleasing God. As I have already noted,

Rousseau's conception of virtue is full of complexities. While he is being taught to

submit his passions to his reason, his tutor is making use of those passions in order to

convince Emile to follow the right path. Rousseau claims that when he is attempting to

convince Emile to act rightly, he is not reasoning "drily," but passionately.106 Early on in

the work, Rousseau claims that the reason that young children are not capable of

understanding morality and why their actions have no moral content is that reason alone

teaches us to know good and evil. Conscience teaches us to love the one and hate the

other, but cannot develop without reason.107

Perhaps the reason Rousseau's view is so difficult to sort out is that the book

seems to be attempting to aim at many goals at once. It is, by Rousseau's own admission,

an attempt to understand what a man educated from nature would look like. However, it

is also a work in moral psychology, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. It is

not always clear whether a claim that Rousseau is making about moral psychology is

intended to be a description of one stage of Emile's education, a description of an ideal

citizen, a description of natural man, or a construct for the sake of examining a particular

and that is to what I limit myself with my Emile. If he needs another, I no longer have the right to be his guide; it's up to him alone to choose it." 105 Ibid., 636. 106 Ibid., 645-649. 107 Ibid., 288.

52

type of education. Working out the relationship between reason, morality and virtue is

thus not a straightforward matter.

These difficulties aside, there are many criticisms that can be made with regard to

Rousseau's description of Emile's moral education. Julia Simon worries that Emile's

unrestricted liberty in childhood makes it impossible that Emile could one day learn to

submit his desires to his reason, and that Rousseau's reliance on concepts of

contractual obligations and rights means that Emile will be incapable of forming healthy

attachments to others.109 Timothy O'Hagan critiques Rousseau for his use of

concealment and manipulation in Emile's education, for he claims that such an education

will not likely produce an autonomous, honest adult.110

One serious criticism concerns Rousseau's prescriptions for the education of

Emile's wife, Sophie. Sophie is given what Rousseau believes is the correct education

for a woman, given that the primary role of women is to please men. Her education is

almost precisely the opposite of Emile's, for her virtue is based on reputation rather than

on personal freedom,112 and thus her life is characterized by learning to submit to others

rather than to her own reason. Her early education involves discipline and punishment so

she can learn the tasks expected of her as a woman,113 and she is to have little freedom, so

that she can learn to submit to her husband's injustices and life's annoyances without

complaint.114 Further, as a woman's conduct is ruled by opinion, so her religion is ruled

108 Julia Simon, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Children," in The Philosopher's Child: Critical Perspectives in the Western Tradition, ed. Susan M. Turner and Gareth M. Matthews, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998), 111. 109 Ibid., 114. 110 Timothy O'Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999), 81. 111 Rousseau, "Emile, ou de l'education," 693. 112 Ibid., 702-703. 113 Ibid., 708. 114 Ibid., 710.

53

by authority.115 Rousseau does claim that she should use her reason to balance prejudice

and her own conscience, but this is done solely so that she can maintain her good

reputation for the sake of her family.116

Though Rousseau's treatment of the education of women is long and complex,

those are its central tenets. Given Rousseau's rejection of prejudices, it is surprising that

his view of women is so in line with the prejudices of his day. Some commentators claim

that this is simply a result of his unreflective patriarchy and violates his overall social

theory,117 while others believe that it is the genuine application of his social theory and

I 1 Q

views about nature. Whatever the origin of his views about women, however, they are

a startling example of patriarchal thinking, and should be rejected.

The final major criticism of Rousseau's educational work is that it produces an

adult who is incapable of freedom and autonomy. In the final pages of Emile, Emile

claims that now that he has a child of his own, he needs his teacher more than ever, and 1 1 Q r

will need him for the rest of his life. In the unfinished sequel to Emile, once Rousseau

leaves Emile and Sophie, their lives fall completely to pieces. It should be asked

whether Rousseau's man educated by nature is really capable of living in society, or

whether his plan was, even in his own view, a failure.

115 Ibid., 721. 116 Ibid., 730-731. 117 Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 99. 118 Susan Meld Shell, "Emile: Nature and the Education of Sophie," in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 273. 119 Rousseau, "Emile, ou de 1'education," 867. 120 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires," in Oeuvres Completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

54

2.3. Conclusions

All of these criticisms of Rousseau's work point to one overriding concern: that

Emile's moral education does not produce a virtuous and autonomous adult. While he is

taught to question all authority, he is perpetually submissive to his tutor's authority. In

this way, the failing of Rousseau's view is similar to the failing of Locke's view.

Locke's young pupils are also perpetually submissive to the moral authority of another.

While both authors intend to create adults who are both virtuous and critical of authority,

they both end up producing adults who are in perpetual obedience to the reason of

another. Neither can see a way in which moral education could take place without

indoctrination or deference to authority.

55

CHAPTER 3: TRADITION AND COMMUNITY IN THE MORAL LIFE

In the historical background I have outlined so far, two views have emerged. In

the tradition of Socrates, both Locke and Rousseau emphasized the value of intellectual

autonomy. What is central to both thinkers' educational projects, and indeed to Socrates'

mission, is the idea that thinking critically and independently is crucial to a life lived

well. While I have argued that both Locke and Rousseau failed in their attempts to

create an educational project that realized this goal, it is nonetheless true that both

attempted to reach it because they believed it to be valuable.

On the other hand, there is Plato's elitist conception that only a few should be

permitted to think critically, especially about received traditions, because the masses are

not able to think in a productive way. Plato's view, in contrast to the Socratic view, is

that the examined life can only be lived by a select few. In the case of ordinary people,

their lives are best lived by unreflectively believing what is told them by the intellectual

elite.

In this chapter I consider a third strand of thought, which is in contrast to the

individualism about reason present in Locke and Rousseau's educational aims, and in

contrast to Plato's elitism. This is the view that thinking necessarily occurs in particular

contexts, and is best when performed in a community rather than on one's own. While

Deweyan pragmatists and Thomists disagree on many points, in their general approach to

thinking they are similar in their emphasis on thinking in community.

This community-based thinking is intended in part to be a remedy against Plato's

worry that too much critical thinking can be destructive. In each case the value of

received tradition is emphasized. Not all of the thinkers considered here agree about the

56

degree to which tradition should be valued, but each limits the scope of critical thinking

by reference to shared values and practices.

In the contemporary context this third way provides an alternative to the emphasis

on individualism that might be present in an ethics classroom or indeed a critical thinking

classroom.1 It is an alternative to an ethic of belief that claims that each person must be

able to justify each of his or her own beliefs. It opens the door to the possibility that

justification might be a shared enterprise; that in order to be intellectually virtuous each

person need not question all of his or her beliefs.

3.1. Dewey's Pragmatic Approach to Education

John Dewey's theory of education is a theory of education for a democratic

society. On his view, education aims at transmitting the aims and habits of life to the

next generation, and is thus a fundamentally social process. Since it is a social process,

any critique of education must presuppose a particular social ideal, according to Dewey.

Dewey's democratic social ideal measures the worth of a form of social life by

two points: "the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members,

1 To see the individualism that is often present in critical thinking teaching contexts one need only look to the introductions to many critical thinking textbooks. Perhaps the starkest example is in Lewis Vaughn's textbook: "If you passively accepted beliefs that have been handed to you by your parents, your culture, or your teachers, then those beliefs are not really yours. You just happened to be in a certain place and time when they were handed out. If they are not really yours, and you let them guide your choices and actions, then they—not you—are in charge of your life. Your beliefs are yours only if you critically examine them for yourself to see if they are supported by good reasons. To examine your beliefs in this way is to examine your life, for your beliefs in large measure define your life. To forego such scrutiny is abandon your chance of making your life deliberately and authentically meaningful." Lewis Vaughn, The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning about Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. Most textbooks do not make this claim so explicit but certainly many laud Socrates' ideal of the examined life. 2 John Dewey, "Democracy and Education," in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale, II: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 6. 3 Ibid., 105.

57

and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups." A society that

scores well on these points is democratic, and a society which does not is not democratic.

Societies that are not democratic set up barriers to free communication of

experience, and thus cannot have values in common. This lack makes intellectual

stimulation unbalanced, and means that thoughts and routines are not challenged.5

Democratic societies, on the other hand, make provision for the participation of all

members on equal terms, and allow interactions between different forms of associated

life to adjust its institutions.6 Dewey frequently emphasizes the fact that social progress

comes from social intercourse between various groups, especially socio-economic groups

and those with varying kinds of livelihoods. Interactions between those whose work is

menial and those whose work is more cerebral can not only help in creating

understanding between the two groups, but can contribute to improving the situation of

those who find themselves in disadvantaged groups. In this light, Dewey argues against

the idea that education should be divided into liberal and technical schools, and supports

the idea of the comprehensive school.

According to Dewey, this conception of democracy means that education has two

primary and interrelated goals: to promote reflective thinking and to enable individuals to

live well in society. These two goals together mean that "all educational institutions

should be equipped so as to give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas

and information in active pursuits typifying important social situations." Activities are

4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 90. 6 Ibid., 105. 7 Ibid., 169.

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central to Dewey's conception of education, and are understood to enable thinking well

and living well.

In this section I will offer an analysis of Dewey's views on these two educational

o

goals, by reference to several shorter early works, as well as Democracy and Education,

a mid-career work which was his most important work on education, and his later work

on teaching thinking, How We Think?

Reflective Thinking as an Educational Goal

For Dewey, reflective thinking consists in "active, persistent, and careful

consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds

that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends," which "includes a conscious

and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a firm basis of evidence and rationality."10 It

is thus distinguished from other types of thinking such as daydreaming or simply having

images or thoughts appear into one's mind.

Reflective thinking is not, however, found only in ivory towers, for it occurs in

ordinary situations. While it involves considering one's belief and one's grounds for

holding it, reflective thinking takes place in situations where determining which belief is

true or justified is important to resolving some problem. An ordinary situation such as

attempting to arrive at an appointment on time and weighing one's options can involve

reflective thinking, for one is considering which path is most likely to result in success,

and the reasons one has for believing that the path in question is the best one. Reflective

8 Ibid. 9 John Dewey, "How We Think," in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986). 10 Ibid., 118.

59

thinking can take place in situations involving concrete problems such as this, or in

situations involving more abstract problems to be solved, such as proposing to students

hypothetical situations where a moral judgment is required. In all cases it involves two

stages: a state of doubt or perplexity, which is the origin of thinking, and the act of

searching for material that will resolve the perplexity. ' Thinking consists in problem­

1 9

solving, and no thinking will take place unless there is some problem motivating it.

In defending these claims Dewey points to three values that he ascribes to

reflective thought. First, it "emancipates us from merely impulsive and merely routine

activity," or, in positive terms, it allows us to plan our actions.13 Without being able to

make connections between events and ideas, we would not be able to act in a deliberate

way. Second, it makes possible systematic preparations and inventions, allowing us to

develop signs, such as lighthouses and warning buoys, to remind us in advance of

consequences.14 Finally, it enriches things with meanings, by conferring upon physical

events and objects "a very different status and value from those which they possess to a

being that does not reflect."15 Rather than being "mere excitations of sense organs," they

are charged with significance through repeated, thoughtful experience of them.16 In this

light, reflective thinking is what separates us from unthinking animals, and allows us to

act consciously and intentionally.

Given all of this, the two main reasons for training thought are that although

thought "frees us from servile subjection to instinct, appetite, and routine," it also "opens

11 Ibid., 121. 12 Ibid., 135. 13 Ibid., 125. 14 Ibid., 126. 15 Ibid., 127.

the possibility of failures," such as errors in reasoning and mistakes about consequences,

"to which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink."17 Though reflective thought

allows us to act deliberately, since it is prone to error, it must be trained well.

Because many of the errors involved with thinking come from dispositions, such

as the disposition to place too must trust in authority figures, Dewey argues that training

thought requires training dispositions. Set exercises in correct thinking cannot by repeat

performance cause one to think well, for "no individual realizes their value except as he

is personally animated by certain dominant attitudes in his own character."18 Though one

may have all of the thinking skills required to think well, if one is not motivated by

dispositions to use those thinking skills, one will not use them.

Dewey argues that there are three dispositions that are favourable to thinking

well. First, open-mindedness, which consists in "freedom from prejudice, partisanship,

and such other habits as close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems

and consider new ideas." This is active rather than passive, for open-mindedness does

not mean taking in any idea that comes along, but seeking out new ideas which are

illuminating.19 The second is whole-heartedness, which means taking interest in the

subject itself, rather than working for some external cause. Dewey argues that it is

especially important to allow students to pursue activities for their own sake, rather than

in order to receive some external reward. Whole-heartedness appears to be a

combination of two dispositions in Dewey's earlier conception, called "directness" and

Ibid., 130. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 137.

61

"single-mindedness," in Democracy and Education.21 He repeatedly criticizes

classrooms in which the only motivation to pursue some task is to gain the teacher's

approbation or to receive a high grade. Students must be enabled to pursue activities

which they deem to be intrinsically important. Finally is responsibility, which involves

willingly adopting the consequences of a position one already has taken. This last

99

attitude secures integrity, which consists in "consistency and harmony in belief."

Essentially, "upon its intellectual side education consists in the formation of wide­

awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking."23 This does not happen through external

pressures or the imposition of formal structures, but through placing students in situations

where thinking is required of them in order to solve some problem in which they are

interested. 4 To give an example, in order for students to learn mathematical skills,

instead of setting textbook examples, they can be sent to the store to buy materials for a

carpentry project they are working on, and left to calculate the bill themselves.25 Rather

than learning mathematical skills in order to do well on exams, students will learn the

same skills because they see them as useful in real situations.

Generally, each educational situation should involve an activity pursued for its

own sake, a point that Dewey stresses throughout. The students in the above example

who are buying materials for a project they are working on are pursuing the overall

project for its own sake, not in order to receive a grade. Basing education upon such

principles involves creating an environment in which students pursue projects because

they deem them to be worthwhile. Dewey claims that this is essential for true learning. 21 Dewey, "Democracy and Education," 181-83. 22 Dewey, "How We Think," 138. 23 Ibid., 177. 24 Ibid., 180-83. 25 Ibid., 194.

Each educational situation should also involve a move from uncertainty to clarity

through thinking.26 In the contexts in which a student finds him or herself, it should be

useful to think reflectively in order to solve some particular problem. In the mathematics

case above, it is clear to the students that some amount of thinking is required in order to

pursue the carpentry project.

Given these two requirements for educational situations, it should come as no

surprise that Dewey advocates a certain amount of freedom in schools. Not only is it

necessary for encouraging students to pursue activities for their own sake, it is necessary

97 98

for thinking. For Dewey, one is only truly thinking if one is free to think for oneself,

for thinking involves solving a problem in which one is personally invested. Dewey

claims that freedom "designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of

movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair leeway of

movements in exploration, experimentation, application, etc." In other words, the

mental freedom required for reflective thought cannot develop without a relatively free

environment in which to learn. Students cannot pursue what they perceive to be

intrinsically valuable activities if their education is overly structured. Freedom is

required in order for students to think reflectively at all, and also for students to learn to

use reflective thinking well.

In this light, a useful distinction can be drawn between what Dewey calls

"objective knowledge," which is what is taken for granted in social intercourse, and

"subjective thinking," which starts from uncertainty and critiques and revises

26 Ibid., 195. 27 Dewey, "Democracy and Education," 311. 28 Ibid., 312. 29 Ibid., 314-15.

63

knowledge.30 Objective knowledge is necessary for social interactions, as it is the

common ground for those interactions. However, living in a democratic society as

Dewey conceives it means constantly learning from social interactions how to improve

those interactions and to improve social life. In this way, objective knowledge and

subjective thinking remain in balance, where customs make thinking possible, but

thinking can question those customs in order to improve them.

That said, the process of revising should be done a little at a time, without

throwing out all that has come before, and in order to allow for a "reorganization of prior

intellectual habitudes." The role of the individual is thus the "redirection, or

reconstruction of accepted beliefs," a role which can only be played in a society which

allows individuals to think freely and trains them to think critically. The training to

reflective thinking thus prepares students for becoming free individuals who can live in

and contribute to democratic societies.

Moral Living as an Educational Goal

Dewey argues that since moral considerations are the deepest and most common

of all the problems of life, it is most important for students to think about them

intelligently, since their habits will then extend out to other problems as well. While in

most areas transfer of thinking is difficult, thinking on these "human and social factors,"

can carry over, and "furnish the material best suited for developing generalized abilities

of thinking."33

30 Ibid., 304. 31 Ibid., 305. 32 Dewey, "How We Think," 165. 33 Ibid., 167.

64

Thinking about moral considerations is not thinking about abstract principles,

however. Dewey carefully distances himself from traditional theories of morality and

conceives of the study of morality as a fundamentally practical one. In "Teaching Ethics

in the High School," an early work, Dewey claims:

Ethics, rightly conceived, is the statement of human relationships in action. In any right study of ethics, then, the pupil is not studying hard and fixed rules for conduct; he is studying the ways in which men are bound together in the complex relations of their interactions. He is not studying, in an introspective way, his own sentiments and moral attitudes; he is studying facts as objective as those of hydrostatics or of the action of dynamos.34

For this reason, the teaching of ethics must not fall back onto principles, but must

inculcate in the pupil the habit of mentally constructing some actual scene of human

interaction, and of consulting that for instruction as to what to do. The focus is on cases

rather than on principles. Thus, in the process of teaching, cases where a person is in

need should be put to students, and they should be expected to think about how to decide

what to do in a given case: whether to offer help, and what kind of help to offer.

Dewey has in mind here cases where charity is called for, such as meeting a person who

is in a state of miserable poverty. In such cases, students can think reflectively about how

to be charitable in the most helpful way possible. Dewey claims that the goal in such a

method is "the formation of a sympathetic imagination for human relations in action; this

is the ideal which is substituted for training in moral rules, or for analysis of one's

sentiments and attitude in conduct."

34 John Dewey, "Teaching Ethics in the High School," in John Dewey: The Early Works 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 56. 35 Ibid., 57. 36 Ibid., 56. 37 Ibid., 57. Emphasis in original.

65

Studying human relationships in the context of action allows students to conceive

of acting morally rather than to think abstractly about moral rules. Dewey emphasizes

that the study he has in mind is not the study of ethical theory, but of the content of

human relationships.38 For this reason, the study of ethics is the study of how human

beings actually do interact, and is thus a study of empirical facts rather than normative

ones. In studying these facts, Dewey believes that students will be better able to interact

well with others, without being given rules or principles for how they ought to do so.

Dewey does not explain further how this process will occur. However, it is

possible to better understand his claim by returning to his view of thinking as problem-

solving. Each student learns the facts of how humans interact, and in so doing learns

about the various problems which arise from human interactions. Having learned to think

reflectively, students can think about how to address or resolve those problems. In

thinking about troubling cases, students can conceive of how those cases might be

resolved. What is still missing, however, is the mechanism by which a sympathetic

imagination will develop. One can imagine students who can think well about how to

resolve a particular problem without being at all motivated to put their solution into

action. Dewey's solution appears to be the inculcation of habits. Just as habits of

thinking are intended to lead to dispositions, what might be called "moral habits" can

lead to moral dispositions.

Determining whether Dewey is correct, that is, whether it is true that learning to

think through situations which involve human interactions will lead to the development

of moral dispositions and a sympathetic imagination, would involve complex sociological

and psychological studies tracking the moral development of children. For this reason, I

38 Ibid., 60.

will put this particular issue aside and return to Dewey's general claim about moral

education. For Dewey, moral thinking, like all reflective thinking, must be grounded in

activity and practice rather than in abstractions. Learning to live the moral life is not

merely a matter of intellect but a matter of practice. Thus, though students can learn by

thinking about hypothetical cases, participating in shared activities is even more effective

at teaching students to live with others. An activity which involves cooperation with

others imparts moral knowledge, for it "builds up a social interest and confers the

intelligence needed to make that interest effective in practice." One can assume that

Dewey has in mind the same type of process as that which occurs when students are

studying cases. By learning how to respond to problems that arise from human

interactions, students learn to think morally and to cooperate with others.

Since morality involves living with others, to be virtuous does not consist merely

in cultivating a few character traits, but means "to be fully and adequately what one is

capable of becoming through association with others in all the offices of life."4 In other

words, a fully moral person is one who lives well with others in every respect. Education

for morality thus means a social education that involves cooperation, and which involves

connections with life outside school to breach the gap between the school and the society

of which it is a part.41 In this way, the school is not an artificial institution which is

separate from human interactions, but an integral part of human interaction.

Dewey's overall context is that education's main purpose is for social life. This

means that all education has a moral component, and even the intellectual dispositions

discussed above are called moral ones, for they enable individuals to live well in

39 Dewey, "Democracy and Education," 366. 40 Ibid., 368.

society. The implication of this educational context is that cooperation with others is

the method of education, and also its goal. By sharing activities with others in school,

students learn to think well and to interact well, so that they can think and interact well

when they are sharing activities with others outside school.

The process of teaching students to interact well with others is not only intended

to contribute to individual improvement, but also to contribute to social progress. In his

early "My Pedagogic Creed," Dewey claims that because education involves learning to

adjust one's activity on the basis of social consciousness, "education is the fundamental

method of social progress and reform."43 Dewey claims in "Moral Principles in

Education" that "the introduction of every method that appeals to the child's active

powers, to his capacities in construction, production, and creation, marks an opportunity

to shift the centre of ethical gravity from an absorption which is selfish to a service which

is social."44

This means that activities in school ought to teach students to think reflectively

and to cooperate, but ought also to encourage a spirit of social service rather than

selfishness. Dewey's ideal school involves students working together in practical

projects such as gardening and small-scale farming. These types of activity can be

pursued for their own sake, but they also teach students to cooperate. As well, since an

important feature of school activities is that they connect with the world outside the

school, choosing activities such as farming is a good way to bridge the gap between

school life and extracurricular life. This is especially true in cases where the activity

42 Ibid., 366. 43 John Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed," in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 93. 44 John Dewey, "Moral Principles in Education," in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 277.

68

itself bridges the gap by involving members of the community in some way; e.g., by

trading produce with local farmers, or buying tools from local tradespeople.

Dewey's commitment to social progress means that his two educational goals,

reflective thinking and moral living, work together to enable individuals to contribute to

positive social change. Individuals with a well-formed moral imagination use their

reflective thinking to consider how to address problems caused by shared social practices.

Some of these problems arise from unreflective habits which must be questioned.

Dewey's view, as noted above, involves an attempted balance between unreflective

habits and reflective thought. On the one hand, education involves the formation of

habits, and societal customs are called "objective knowledge." On the other hand,

individuals are trained to use reflective thinking to analyse and critique this knowledge.

However, this reflective thinking does not consist in upturning habits for the sake

of change. Dewey claims that much of common life relies upon the assumption that

individuals share a common background. This assumption is what makes social

intercourse possible, and it is sometimes best left in an unconscious attitude. Trying to

formulate it simply for the sake of making it conscious "is both an impertinent influence

and a source of boredom,"45 however, it is also fatal to good thinking "to fail to make

conscious the standing source of some error or recurring failure."46 While Dewey claims

that it is impossible to give a strict rule which will keep these in balance,47 the loose rule

seems to be that "where the shoe pinches, analytic examination is needed."

Dewey, "How We Think," 343. Ibid., 344. Ibid., 343. Ibid., 344.

69

This claim follows from Dewey's idea that reflective thinking always begins with

doubt. In other words, inquiry should never involve doubt for the sake of doubting, but

work toward resolving some doubt which is already present. Inquiry should not

introduce new doubts; rather it aims to resolve doubts that arise from experience and

from attempts at living together. This theme also presents itself in Dewey's conception

of philosophy. Taking the stance of an inquirer is taking the stance of a scientist, and

"philosophy is the standpoint of science extended to all life."49 Philosophers go "beneath

the surface and inquire," but "inquiry proves that a man has already had something which

he believed to be true, and also some doubt or dissatisfaction."5

In interpreting Dewey's views on this matter, it is important to keep in mind that

the relationship between his empirical claims and his normative ones is often less than

clear. It is not entirely apparent whether he is saying that thinking always does begin

with doubt, or that good thinking only should begin with doubt. However, for Dewey,

this lack of clarity exists because the subject matter is itself neither fully empirical nor

fully normative. Dewey begins How We Think by claiming that "no one can tell another

person in any definite way how he should think, any more than how he ought to breathe

or have his blood circulate,"51 but that one can describe the various ways in which people

do think, and give reasons for why some are better than others. If one has a good

understanding of how one's thinking could be better, it is easier to improve.

What is evident is that inquiry always has practical ends, for it is always directed

at understanding and solving a particular problem. Moral inquiry is directed at solving

49 John Dewey, "The Relation of Philosophy to Theology," in John Dewey: The Early Works 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 365. 50 Ibid. 51 Dewey, "How We Think," 114.

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practical problems which arise from living in society, not at elucidating the metaphysical

foundations of moral claims. This is Dewey's pragmatism at work.

In this light, Dewey's thoughts about teaching thinking and teaching morality can

be read as attempting to combine reflective thinking with the acceptance of some

customary morality. Though thinking can lead to change, moral practices need not be

questioned unless there is some reason to question them in the form of a practical

problem needing to be solved. Though Dewey is short on examples, one might think

here of something like the "murderer-at-the-door" example. One ought to question the

rule against lying if lying would mean revealing the location of one's friend to a

murderer. In a situation where a moral practice such as truth-telling would lead to

appalling consequences, Dewey would recommend thinking reflectively about whether or

not that practice is always a good one, and perhaps abandoning it as an absolute rule.

Though students should not be taught to question all moral rules for the sake of critical

inquiry, they should be prepared to question them in situations where following them

leads to problems.

Dewey's educational goals thus involve teaching students to take a practical

view of all inquiry, and especially of moral inquiry. Reflective thinking begins with

doubt, and in this context it begins with doubt about a particular social practice.

Questioning one's own beliefs begins with doubt; for Dewey, the examined life is worth

living insofar as it contributes to improving social relations.

While Dewey and Aquinas and his followers are not generally considered to be

similar thinkers, they share a rejection of the individualism that is so central to Locke and

Rousseau's views of reason and morality. Neither Dewey nor any of the Thomists value

71

intellectual and moral autonomy in the way that Locke and Rousseau do; at least they do

not believe that tradition and inherited social practices should be rejected for the sake of

autonomy. In what follows I will elucidate the Thomistic way of thinking in more detail.

3.2. Virtue and Tradition in Thomistic Education

Though Thomas Aquinas wrote no treatises on education, his work in related

areas has been used by many Thomists to ground particular views about education. His

conceptions of natural law and of first principles, which are central to his moral theory

and theology, have been influential in many Thomistic educational writings. These

conceptions also form the background assumptions of much work in Catholic moral

philosophy and theology, including many papal encyclicals.

In this section I will examine the relationship in Thomistic thought between

reason, first principles, and natural law. What emerges from this analysis is the primacy

of moral virtue in the moral life, for one's moral judgment depends upon the possession

of virtuous habits. This conception, central to Aquinas' moral theory, is also central to

the educational theories of many Thomists. I will position two of these theories by

beginning with Aquinas himself. Next, I will outline the educational philosophy of

th

Jacques Maritain, who is one of the most influential Thomists of the 20 century. Last, I

will explore Alasdair Maclntyre's examination of the relationship between tradition and

moral inquiry. Generally, I will draw out the ways in which these thinkers have

understood the relationship between education to reason and education to virtue.

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Aquinas: Human Reason and Natural Law

In this section I outline Aquinas' views on reason and natural law. Much of what

Aquinas claims about reason depends upon the presupposition that God exists. His

conception of the provenance of human reason, as well as the source of moral principles,

is theistic through and through. That said, central to his view of moral reasoning is his

idea that moral virtue is a necessary precondition for good moral reasoning. This idea is

not necessarily linked to the belief that God exists, and it is in fact the common thread

that I will pursue throughout this section on Thomism. However, I will first situate that

idea in Aquinas' general view of reason.

For Aquinas, there are two kinds of truths, and this is most evident in the context

of theology. There are those truths which are attainable by natural reason, such as the

reality of God's existence, and there are those truths which surpass natural reason, such

as the reality of the Trinity. This is because the human intellect depends upon its senses

for knowledge, and those things which do not "fall under the senses" cannot be grasped

by the human intellect, except insofar as knowledge of them is gathered from sensible

things.54 On this basis, Aquinas argues that one should not reject a claim about God

simply because it cannot be demonstrated by reason.55 Believing in truths which surpass

human reason can aid in curbing presumption56 and in teaching the soul to aim for higher

perfection.

Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis, vol. I (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955), 1.3.2. 54 Ibid., 1.3.3. 55 Ibid., 1.3.8. 56 Ibid., 1.5.4. 57 Ibid., 1.5.5.

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Aquinas argues that since natural reason is given to human beings by God, it

follows that it cannot be opposed to the truth of the Christian faith.58 What follows from

it, for Aquinas, is that any arguments brought forward against the Christian faith, even if

they are based on "first and self-evident" principles embedded in nature, are either invalid

or they only make their conclusions probable rather than certain.5 Aquinas'

recommendation is thus that if one encounters an argument which contradicts one's

Christian faith, one should assume that the fault is with the argument, not with

Christianity. The task is then to discover where the error occurred in the argument.

His conception of God-given reason grounds his two-fold conception of truth,

which according to Aquinas is best understood by comparing theology to a science. For

Aquinas, while some sciences are based on principles that are evident through natural

reason, other sciences are based on the principles of higher sciences. Theology, for

Aquinas, is like this second kind of science, for "just as the musician accepts on authority

the principles taught him by the mathematician, so sacred science is established on

principles revealed by God."60 Aquinas reasons that just as these sciences do not argue to

prove their premises, but take them as given to make something known, so theology takes

its premises as given as well. This is why St. Paul can infer the resurrection of all from

the resurrection of Jesus Christ.61

What this two-fold conception of truth implies is that if an opponent accepts none

of the first principles in question then there is no way to make the articles of faith

reasonably credible, except those that are accessible through natural reason. Thus, all one

58 Ibid., 1.7.2. 59 Ibid., 1.7.7. 60 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1920), 1.1.2. 61 Ibid., 1.1.8.

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can do when responding to an opponent of this kind is to attempt to solve the difficulties

the opponent raises. Because any argument which contradicts Christian doctrine will

contain some flaw, this is a project that can be pursued successfully given enough time

and effort.

This two-fold division of truth exists not only in the realm of theological inquiry,

but in the realm of moral inquiry as well. There is the divine law, which concerns those

things which are necessary for our eternal happiness, but which are beyond our human

reason, and there is the natural law, which is within the grasp of our natural reason.

For Aquinas, a law is a "dictate of practical reason emanating from the ruler who

governs a perfect community."65 Since God is the ruler of the whole human community,

the laws governing that community emanate from him, and are the content of the natural

law. 6 These laws are instilled by God into the minds of human beings so that they can

be known naturally.67

The natural law instilled in the minds of human beings is but one part of the

eternal law, which is imprinted on all things. Each living thing acts in accordance with

fro

the eternal law, because each thing's inclinations are ordered to its proper ends. Every

law of nature flows from the first law of nature: that "good is to be done and pursued, and

evil is to be avoided." This law is not intended to be vacuous, but to capture the fact

that each thing pursues its own good by nature. Each acts toward its own end, which is

the good for that thing in particular. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 11.91.4. 64 Ibid., 11.90.4,11.91.3. 65 Ibid., II.91.1. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., II.90.4. 68 Ibid., 11.91.2. 69 Ibid, II.94.2.

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For Aquinas, because human beings are rational creatures, they participate in the

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eternal law in a special way, and this participation is what he calls the natural law.

Human reason is the rule and measure of actions, since "it belongs to the reason to direct

to the end."71 All human acts of reasoning are based on principles that are known

naturally, and thus "every act of reason and will in us is based on that which is according 79

to nature" and every act of appetite is derived from the natural appetite. Reason directs

a person's actions to our good, which means that "whatever the practical reason naturally

apprehends as man's good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as

something to be done or avoided."73

From the general conception of the natural law, human reason can move to

particular cases. Aquinas' conception of reason in general is that it always moves from

principles to particulars, and reasoning about natural law is no different. However,

universal human knowledge only extends to the general principles of natural law, not to

its instantiation in particular cases. This means that some will run into error with regard

to what should be done in particular cases, and this is why it is necessary to enact civil

laws.74 For Aquinas, human understanding of the natural law can become perverted and

blotted out completely, though never in its general principles. Thus, some have a better

understanding of what should be done in particular cases than others do.

This understanding is dependent upon possession of the moral virtues. Aquinas

claims that "for a man to do a good deed, it is requisite not only that his reason be well

70 Ibid., 11.91.2. 71 Ibid., 11.90.1. 72 Ibid., 11.91.2. 73 Ibid., II.94.2. 74 Ibid., 11.91.3. 75 Ibid., 11.91.4-6.

disposed by means of a habit of intellectual virtue; but also that his appetite be well

disposed by means of a habit of moral virtue." For Aquinas, both reason and appetite

interact in directing human action. The acquisition of moral virtues, which comes about

through habituation,77 involves training one's appetites in the direction of the human

good. Even if one's reason is capable of understanding what good ends to pursue, if

one's inclinations and appetites urge a person in the wrong direction, that person can end

up choosing the wrong action. Thus Aquinas claims that sometimes the universal

principle to pursue the good and avoid the evil, "is destroyed in a particular case by a

passion: thus to one who is swayed by concupiscence, when he is overcome thereby, the

object of his desire seems good, although it is opposed to the universal judgment of his

reason."

In this way the passions and appetites, when they are not trained properly into

virtue, can cloud a person's ability to see the true good. Though one never acts toward

what one believes to be a bad end, one's ability to discern a good end from a bad end can

be compromised when the moral virtues are not present. When the moral virtues are

present, and a person's appetites are directed toward the good, prudence, which is the

faculty of human reason which determines what should be done, can lead that person

aright by determining how best to act toward that good. Even though the appetites are

directed toward the good, prudence is required to determine how best to achieve those

Ibid., II.58.2. Ibid., 11.55.1. Ibid., II.58.5. Ibid., II.57.5.

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Thus, for Aquinas, education into virtue, which involves habituation, and

education into reason, which involves learning to reason from principles to particulars,

are both necessary for the moral life. One cannot reason rightly about morality without

possessing the moral virtues, for without the virtues one cannot see truly.

Both of the Thomists I will be examining in this section make use of Aquinas'

ideas about morality and reason in their educational theories. This brief overview of

Aquinas' views should serve as a basis for understanding their theories more deeply, and

understanding their connections with each other and with Aquinas. Each is writing in the

context of the twentieth century, and each uses the context of Thomistic principles to

ground their views about moral education.

Maritain: Educating for Freedom

Jacques Maritain wrote in the early part of the twentieth century, and his most

SO

significant writing about education was Education at the Crossroads, though he also

wrote several shorter works on the subject.81 For Maritain, education's ultimate end is

that its students become truly human beings. In long form, this means that the aim of

education is: to guide man in the evolving dynamism through which he shapes himself as a human person—armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues—while at the same time conveying to him the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which he is involved, and preserving in this way the century-old (sic) achievements of generations.

Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943). 81 These are collected in Jacques Maritain, The Education of Man, ed. ed. Donald Gallagher and Idella Gallagher (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962). 82 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 9. 83 Ibid., 10.

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Education thus enables individuals to become autonomous and free, but also to

become part of the tradition in which they live. Individuals must become liberated from

the bondage of common opinion,85 and taught to seek after truth.86 Philosophical training

in the college setting can help in this regard, for developing one's own philosophy is "the

only way of avoiding the damage wrought by an unconscious belief in a formless and

prejudiced philosophy."87

Maritain claims that intellectual cultivation involves learning to see things as they

really are, and that knowledge is an end in itself.88 The liberal education that Maritain

advocates for all89 prepares each young person to think in a genuinely free way.90 In this

light it is important to note that Maritain presupposes that truth understood in a universal

way is something that can be attained by careful study. To give one example, Maritain

suggests that students in schools with a particular religious affiliation such as Christian

schools should meet various people from different schools of thought. However, he sets

as an "inviolable rule" that after such meetings, discussion should continue in seminars

between the students and their teachers, "until they have completely mastered the

problem and brought out the truth of the matter."91 Similarly, he claims that teachers

should not raise problems for students that the students cannot solve, a practice he

believes burdens the mind rather than frees it. Maritain makes his presupposition

explicit when he claims that the reason many in the twentieth century have lost their way

84 Ibid., 12-14. 85 Ibid., 16. 86 Ibid., 55. 87 Ibid., 72. 88 Maritain, The Education of Man, 47. 89 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 64. 90 Maritain, The Education of Man, 48. 91 Ibid., 140. 92 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 49-50.

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is because they have lost their faith in truth. Teaching students to have faith in the

power of reason to find truth is one of Maritain's most emphasized educational goals.

However, like Aquinas, Maritain claims that knowledge is insufficient for moral

virtue, for an upright will is needed in order for reason to judge well what to do in a

particular case.94 The key to an upright will is love, on his view, which can only be

learned through trial and suffering, and through help from those who possess moral

authority. For Maritain, the primary educational sphere for learning to love is the

family.95

However, institutional education can also make a positive contribution to moral

development, in five ways.96 First, the school can provide a kind of premoral training,

which consists in learning to obey rules. This constitutes a direct influence on the

student's will, and prepares him or her for the moral life. Second, the school can enable

intellectual enlightenment, which contributes indirectly to moral development by

liberating the "spiritual energy of love within the soul."98 By this, Maritain has in mind

the idea that false philosophies and "pseudo-science," such as "cheap Darwinism" or

"cheap Machiavellianism," can cause a person's love to wither and die. Thus, Maritain

believes that such errors or any systems of thought which mock the idea of truth and

goodness should be thoroughly discussed and criticized.99 Though teaching which

93 Ibid., 115. 94 Ibid., 95. 95 Ibid., 96. 96 Maritain, The Education of Man, 75. 97 Ibid., 120. 98 Ibid., 121. 99 Ibid.

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inspires trust in goodness and truth is not enough to cause a student to love, it can protect

a student's awakening love and set it free from bad influences.100

Third, Maritain claims that education has a civic role because it prepares young

people to live in a free society. For Maritain, "a society of free men implies agreement

between minds and wills on the bases of life in common,"101 such as equality and

freedom, and this "democratic charter" should be promoted through education.102

However, Maritain argues, since the body politic has no right to impose a rule of faith or

a philosophic creed, the body politic cannot impose one basis for the democratic charter.

Each citizen should adhere to the democratic charter from his or her own mind, based on

his or her own rule of faith or philosophic creed.103 This overlapping consensus raises a

problem for education, however, for questions arise regarding how one can teach such a

democratic character without also teaching what justifies it. Maritain claims that teachers

should justify it with their own reasons, but must possess a sense of intellectual openness

and generosity toward those who justify it in a different way.104

Fourth, the school can inculcate what Maritain calls "natural morality." Natural

morality consists of morality not based on faith; in other words, it concerns those moral

considerations that are not connected to the afterlife.105 It is best taught through literature

and history, for by studying these students learn about moral heroes and moral villains

and in general can be taught moral virtues through the example of others.106 According

to Maritain the reading of literature and history "feeds the mind with the sense and

100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 62. 102 Ibid., 63. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 64-65. 105 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 94-95. 106 Maritain, The Education of Man, 123.

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knowledge of the natural virtues, honor, pity, of the dignity of man and of the spirit, the

greatness of human destiny, the entanglements of good and evil, [and] the caritas humani

i r\n

generis.'"

Natural morality is not only distinguished from morality based on faith, but also

from moral philosophy. Moral philosophy, on Maritain's account, is a systematizing of

moral principles at an abstract level. Maritain calls moral philosophy a "highly and

delicately rationalized" system of thought. It is essentially abstract, and engaging in it

requires an understanding of how the principles of the natural law fit together in a

systematic way. For Maritain, an understanding of how these principles fit together is the

most valuable part of moral philosophy. For this reason, Maritain argues that moral

philosophy should only be engaged in by those in the last two years of college, for it is

only at that point that students can understand moral philosophy well enough for it to be

valuable.109

Natural morality, on the other hand, can and should be taught to young children as

the basis for their moral knowledge. Being steeped in it is a necessary step toward moral

development, as moral knowledge is necessary for virtue.110 Maritain recommends the

discussion of particular cases taken from ordinary life as a tool "to sharpen ethical

awareness."111 These discussions should rely upon the "natural moral instinct" of the

student. Later, more general considerations can be studied, culminating in the course

of moral philosophy Maritain recommends for the last two years of college study. The

107 Ibid., 124. 108 Ibid., 123. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 105. 111 Ibid., 124. 112 Ibid.

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teaching of natural morality involves the passions, as well, for in reference to natural

morality and the "great ideas" of civilization he claims that "teaching should be

i i "i

permeated with the feeling for such values."

Though Maritain recommends teaching natural morality in schools, he also

believes that morality without religion is incomplete. For Maritain, natural morality

provides non-religious reasons for the kinds of rules that govern interactions with

others,114 because they are based on the good of living together with others in a civilized

way, rather than being based on the afterlife.115 However, personal virtue and piety can

only be justified based on religion.116 This follows Aquinas' distinction between natural

law and divine law.

For this reason religious teaching, according to Maritain, cannot be left out of the

curriculum. Since the schools are secular, however, such religious training should not be 1 1 7

compulsory, and should be provided by representatives of various faiths. This is the

fifth way in which Maritain believes that schools can contribute to moral development.

Though he does claim that natural morality can furnish much of what is required

for the moral life, he is sceptical about its ultimate effectiveness in terms of virtue. He

writes: "I confess at this point that, although I believe in natural morality, I feel little trust

in the educational efficacy of any merely rational moral teaching abstractly detached

from its religious environment."118 The tension that Maritain feels here appears to be

based on his own beliefs about the failure of secular moral education, and his resulting

113 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 68. 114 Maritain, The Education of Man, 124. 115 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 95. 1,6 Ibid. 117 Maritain, The Education of Man, 76-77. 118 Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 68.

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conviction that education can only be fixed if religion is re-introduced into the curriculum

with new purpose. On the one hand, he believes that natural morality furnishes reasons

for acting well toward others, but on the other hand he believes that the only reasons

which will be effective in securing good action are religious ones.119

In the end, it is a difficult tension to resolve. Maritain is committed to the

necessity of religious education for moral virtue but is also committed to the existence of

the natural law. It is not simply that he desires the divine law to be taught as well as the

natural law, but that he believes that people will only follow the natural law if they have

the motivation that comes from religious belief. One way to interpret this is to say that

Maritain is drawing a distinction between knowing what is right and doing what is right.

His reference to the necessity of an upright will for virtue could be evidence of this,

though when he discusses forming the will, he claims that what is necessary is love, not

religious belief. However, one could still say that the knowledge of natural law that

comes from the teaching of natural morality has to be supplemented by something else:

love, or the motivation that comes from religion. While there are non-religious reasons

available, Maritain appears to believe that these alone are not enough to bring about good

choices. In the end, Maritain agrees with Aquinas that knowledge without a good will is

insufficient for virtue.

In the discussion of Locke in the previous chapter, the worry emerged that habit

and autonomy exist in a potentially problematic relationship. That is, how can one think

freely and make autonomous choices about how to behave when one has been trained

into particular habits by one's parents and teachers? This theme recurs here. By the time

Maritain, The Education of Man, 76. Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 96.

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one is able to use one's moral reason well, one's patterns of action and one's dispositions

have been formed by someone else, and religious belief has been inculcated from an early

age. Since for Maritain this must precede good moral thinking, one cannot determine

what is virtuous before one is virtuous oneself. Thus on the Thomistic scheme one must

rely on the moral authority of others in order to develop one's own moral judgment.

However, Aquinas is not as concerned as Locke, Rousseau, or Socrates are with

the kind of intellectual autonomy that they advocate. While Maritain argues that freedom

is an important educational goal, he also claims that one of the goals of education is to

enable individuals to become part of the tradition in which they live.121 Habits and some

deference to tradition are not inherently bad on Aquinas' view and Maritain's view.

Indeed for Alasdair Maclntyre, the Thomist I consider in the following section, they are

not negative intellectual traits, but are necessary for a life lived well.

Maclntyre: Education and Tradition

Maclntyre, in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, a book published a

decade after his best-known work, After Virtue,121, outlines what he believes moral

inquiry must look like if it is to be at all useful in the moral lives of human beings. He

rejects what he calls the "encyclopaedic" conception of moral inquiry, in which morality

is seen as fixed and knowable, as something that can be written about in an

encyclopaedia. He also rejects the conception of moral inquiry offered by the

genealogist, in which there is no truth to be found, and nothing can be fixed. What he

suggests instead is a conception of moral inquiry as rooted in tradition.

121 Ibid., 12-14. 122 Alasdair Maclntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). 123 Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

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Maclntyre defends the conception of tradition-based inquiry by arguing that

without a tradition, moral inquiry can get nowhere. The current state of moral inquiry,

according to Maclntyre, is characterized by a lack of consensus, and an inability to reach

any kind of consensus. This is due to three facts: the absence of any agreement about

where the justification of belief ought to begin, in other words the lack of agreed-upon

first principles, the existence of "ineliminable conflicts" as to how types of considerations

ought to be ranked as reasons, and the fact that since much of logical reasoning consists

of entailment relations, there are limited resources for deciding whether a particular

premise ought to be rejected because it leads to a particular conclusion.124 For example,

if a moral theory entails that torture is permissible, there is no way to determine whether

that means that the moral theory should be rejected.

This is what leads Maclntyre to the conclusion that there are only two options

with regard to moral philosophy: either one takes up the Enlightenment project of

attempting to ground moral rules in reason apart from any particular tradition, in which

case one must eventually end up concluding that Nietzsche was right that morality is

simply the manifestation of one's will, or one rejects the Enlightenment project

altogether. Maclntyre takes the second option and advocates for a conception of

tradition-based morality. He argues that there is no other option if one wants to avoid

Nietzsche's conclusions. If one sticks with the thinkers "at the heart of the contemporary

curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant, and Mill" it is not surprising "that the

teaching of ethics is so often destructive and sceptical in its effects upon the minds of

those taught."125 No doubt Maclntyre has in mind that young people will be unconvinced

Maclntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 10-11. 125 Maclntyre, After Virtue, 118.

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by the efforts of those thinkers to ground moral rules in reason, and since they have also

been taught to reject tradition, they will reject the concept of moral truths altogether.

Maclntyre is thus not only echoing Plato's worry that young people will not be able to

defend morality through the use of their reason, but adding on a more serious worry:

well-trained philosophers will not be able to do so either. Moral injunctions, according to

Maclntyre, cannot be justified by reason alone without reference to tradition, and any

attempt to do so must eventually lead to scepticism.

Maclntyre's alternative involves the idea that standards of rationality and

justification can only emerge from particular traditions, and can only count as the best

standards so far. These various traditions can coexist within the university, where they

can each develop their own inquiries.127 Traditions can interact with each other when

each defends itself and critiques the traditions of others, taking into account the different

conceptions of rational justification by taking on traditions on their own terms.

This account of tradition is not surprising given Maclntyre's conclusion in After

Virtue that moral concepts are rooted in particular traditions. In that work he argues that

virtue cannot be understood without "some prior account of certain features of social and

moral life in terms of which it has to be defined and explained." At base, Maclntyre's

account is rooted in the idea of a practice, which, in short, is any kind of cooperative

human activity that requires certain kinds of dispositions, which come to be called the

Maclntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 64. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 231. Maclntyre, After Virtue, 186.

87

virtues, in order to flourish. That said, virtues must also be understood in the context of a

whole human life which is aiming at the good.

Just as one must learn a practice from those already practicing it before one can

become proficient enough to improve it, so one must have a certain moral character

before one can enter into moral inquiry.131 However, since for Maclntyre possessing the

virtues means having some idea of what those virtues are, and knowing in some way

what makes particular habits virtuous, we are led to the paradox described in the Meno:

seeking after an understanding of the virtues requires having some understanding of what

they are before one begins one's search, and thus it seems impossible to begin at all.

Famously, Meno asks Socrates: "How will you look for [virtue], Socrates, when you do

not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at

all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not

know?"132

Maclntyre escapes the paradox by concluding that one must take the virtues on a

teacher's authority before one can engage in moral inquiry. One follows the moral

virtues established in one's moral tradition, and only when one becomes virtuous in the

context of that tradition can one begin the moral inquiry necessary to change that

tradition.134 Maclntyre thus follows Aquinas in claiming that knowledge of what is good

requires that one be virtuous.

130 Ibid., 203. 131 Maclntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 60. 132 Plato, Meno, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, trans. G.M.A. Grube, Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 80d. 133 Maclntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 63. 134 Ibid., 64-65. 135 Maclntyre, After Virtue, 219.

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Of course for Aquinas, Maritain, and Maclntyre, virtue and vice is not an all-or­

nothing affair. Most human beings are neither perfectly virtuous (in which case all of

their particular moral judgments would be true) nor perfectly vicious (in which case all of

their particular moral judgments would be false). Most are moderately virtuous, and thus

have a somewhat reliable but imperfect moral judgment. Determining what to do in a

particular case will thus involve attempting to discover whether what appears to be good

is actually good, and this will involve determining whether the appearance of good is a

manifestation of one's passion or of one's reason. Thus an implication of the Thomistic

view is that part of moral education should involve training young people to make such

determinations as part of their moral reasoning. This, of course, is only possible if it is

possible to adjudicate between what one's reason is calling good and what one's passion

is calling good. However, if this were not possible, then an individual cannot correct his

or her own vicious behaviour and develop virtues instead.

This does point again to the importance of the moral community in making moral

decisions on the Thomistic view. Since one's own judgment can be clouded, it is useful

to learn from the judgment of others who are virtuous. This also suggests that if one

cannot on one's own see the justification for a particular moral injunction, that in itself is

not a good enough reason for rejecting it. Since one's reason may be clouded by vice,

one may simply not be able to see the justification that others see. If Thomists are right

in their conceptions about virtue and moral reason, the challenge for an individual thinker

is to determine whether he or she is mistaken, or everyone else in one's tradition is

mistaken and change in the current practices is required. This challenge is particularly

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relevant to university students, who enter university before their habits are fully formed

and who encounter there rival traditions to the one from which they emerged.

3.3. Conclusions

Reason and morality are closely interrelated in Thomism. Each of the thinkers

has emphasized the importance of thinking well to acting well. However, that thinking is

only useful if it is practiced by someone with a virtuous character. Further, Maclntyre

worried that a certain kind of thinking could be inimical to moral virtue: that modernist

thinking leads to Nietzsche's conclusion that all moral claims are merely manifestations

of will. Moreover, moral thinking for Thomists cannot exist in a vacuum; it always

begins in a particular tradition, for it always occurs in individuals who have been raised

with particular virtues. Critiquing that tradition must be done carefully, since one's

judgment can be clouded by vice, but it must be done nevertheless.

While Thomists and Deweyan pragmatists take very different approaches to

philosophy, both reject the individualistic notion of moral and rational autonomy present

in Locke and Rousseau. Dewey argues that thinking must only be in response to a

problem, and should occur in community in order for it to be good thinking, and all of the

Thomists considered here argue that while thinking is crucial to learning to be a good

person, it should not involve tearing down the tradition in which one inhabits. In these

ways, they represent a kind of middle ground between Plato's views in the Republic and

those spoken by Socrates in the Apology.

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CHAPTER 4: TEACHING ETHICS IN THE UNDERGRADUATE PHILOSOPHY CLASSROOM

Education in the last century has seen drastic changes. While for writers such as

Locke and Rousseau the paradigmatic educational setting was a private tutor in a

gentleman's home, for writers today it is the public school system. As well, the number

of people (at least in the English-speaking world) with university degrees has been

steadily increasing. In Canada, the percentage of the population attending university has

risen from less than five percent in the early twentieth century to over twenty percent at

the end of the twentieth century.1 The numbers continue to rise in the twenty-first

century, though Canada's enrolment rates are lower than the United States' or the United

Kingdom's. While many barriers to higher education still exist, it is more accessible

now than it was a century ago.

Added to this is the relatively recent proliferation of ethics courses at the

university level. In most of the nineteenth century most American colleges offered a

course in moral philosophy, generally taught by the university president. This course was

required for all senior students and had two functions: to function as the capstone of a

student's entire course of study, and to equip graduates with ethical sensitivity and

insight. As universities became more specialized in the early twentieth century, moral

philosophy became isolated within the philosophy department.3 In its isolation, however,

1 Warren Clark, "100 Years of Education," Education Quarterly Review (Statistics Canada) 7, no. 3 (2001). Clark traces the numbers from 1921 to 1996. 2 Trends in Higher Education, vol 1 - Enrolment, (The Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada, 2007). In 2003 Canada was at 22% enrolment, the United Kingdom at 25%, and the United States at 28%. These numbers represent the percentage of young people aged 18-21 enrolled in university education. 3 An outline of the history of the teaching of ethics in American colleges and universities is available in Douglas Sloan, "The Teaching of Ethics in the American Undergraduate Curriculum, 1876-1976," in Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, ed. Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok, (New York: Plenum, 1980), 318.

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it began to be recognized as a field of study in itself rather than as a subject that anyone

with good character could teach.

Ethics as a field of study was for the most part limited to meta-ethics until the

second half of the twentieth century. However, the last part of the twentieth century has

seen a move toward studying more practical topics. As a result of this and the increased

demand for professional schools to produce ethical doctors, lawyers, and so on, a new

phenomenon has emerged: the practical ethics course. Professional schools such as

business schools and medical schools are now beginning to offer professional ethics

courses, often taught by faculty from a philosophy department. As well, philosophy

departments themselves have begun to offer a wider variety of ethics courses, in

metaethics, moral theory, and especially practical ethics.

This surge of teaching in ethics brings with it many intriguing philosophical

questions, not only because it is a relatively new context for teaching, but also because of

the nature of the course material. In ethics courses, philosophers encourage students to

critically examine moral concepts. This is done in various ways and at various levels of

abstraction. Many of these courses will require students to do precisely that which Plato

rejected in the Republic: to investigate through dialectical procedures the meaning of

moral terms and the content of moral claims. This is thus an interesting new context in

light of the difficult relationship between critical thinking and virtue in the writings of the

philosophers considered in the previous chapters.

It is also a complex environment in which many difficult questions arise. There

are the questions that arise for all university teachers, such as those raised by plagiarism,

the student-teacher relationship, issues of sex, gender, and race, and the limits of

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academic freedom. However, there are also questions that arise specifically for the ethics

teacher, such as whether philosophical exploration of ethics should be conceived as a part

of an individual's moral development.

The teaching of ethics has received relatively little attention from philosophers,

and most of what has been written about university teaching is by non-philosophers.

That said, work has been done, and disagreements have arisen.4 In this chapter I will

outline some of the major disagreements and issues that have arisen in what has been

written about ethics pedagogy. Through my analysis of these issues, and through my

analysis of the context of the undergraduate ethics classroom itself, I will illuminate some

of the morally salient features of the ethics classroom. I will argue that these features

must be taken into account when thinking about how to teach ethics in a morally

responsible way.

4.1. The Purpose of University Ethics Courses

All of those teaching philosophy in North America are aware that the discipline is

constantly fighting to protect itself from those who believe that universities should give

up the liberal arts, especially "useless" ones like philosophy, and focus on those fields of

study that will make young people more productive, such as science or business. One of

the methods philosophy departments use to attract students is to tell them how well they

can do with a philosophy degree in business or law school, or in any profession that

requires critical thinking skills.

Many students enter philosophy courses announcing that they look forward to

learning how to better their lives, not by learning to examine their lives, but by learning

4 This has for the most part happened in the journal Teaching Philosophy and in a few edited collections.

the argumentative skills necessary for attaining a well-paying career. It is not clear why

some students have this perception of what philosophy is; perhaps it is a result of a lack

of exposure to philosophy before university. At any rate, ethics courses appeal to these

students because they offer a chance for them to improve their arguments about issues

they have long been debating with their friends and family: abortion, euthanasia, and now

perhaps same-sex marriages. For students with this view of the matter, philosophy

classes look like debate classes.

There is good reason to reject this view of ethics courses. After all, learning to

make arguments for material gain or for the sport of it is the province of sophistry, not

philosophy, and philosophers have rejected sophistry since the time of Plato. However,

things are not so simple. There is a difference between a marketing strategy and the

actual goals of ethics courses. Further, one might argue that teaching students to make

good arguments is a valuable goal in itself, no matter what reasons they may have for

wanting to learn to make such arguments.

What this tension brings to light is that students and teachers may have different

goals in mind when participating in ethics courses. The purpose of an ethics course can

also be different in the eyes of the university itself or department within that university.

For example, if a business or law school decides to offer an ethics course, the aim of

doing so may have nothing to do with learning to make arguments, but instead with

teaching a particular code of ethics, or with encouraging moral improvement in their

students.5

5 Groarke and Scholz argue that this is in fact how professional schools perceive ethics courses, and that they are right to do so. Leo Groarke and Sally J. Scholz, "Seven Principles for Better Practical Ethics," Teaching Philosophy 19, no. 4 (1996), 338.

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In the late 1970s the Hastings Center commissioned a study on the teaching of

ethics in the university environment. The result was the book Ethics Teaching in Higher

Education,6 which stands alone as a comprehensive treatment of the topic. Among the

many contributions in that volume is an attempt by Daniel Callahan to outline the

purpose of university ethics courses. Generally, Callahan argues that the overall goal of

an ethics course should be to "make it clear that there are ethical problems in personal

and civic life, that how they are understood and responded to can make a difference to

that life, and that there are better and worse ways of dealing with them."7

This general conception leads Callahan to five goals that are important to teaching

ethics at any level. First, stimulating the moral imagination, which involves evoking the

emotional side of students in order to lead them toward empathy, feeling, caring, and

Q

sensibility. Second, distinguishing those emotional responses that represent a moral

judgment from those that do not. Third, eliciting a sense of moral obligation, which

means to "highlight with students an internal requirement of ethical thinking: that it calls

us to act in the light of what we perceive to be right and good."10 According to Callahan,

this avoids the charge of indoctrination because it only concerns what is formally

required in order for ethical thinking to take place, not what actually counts as a good

act.11 The fourth goal is to develop analytical skills, since concepts, rules and principles

are the tools of rationality in ethics. Students must be taught some amount of logical

analysis in order to consider the status of moral rules, the relationship of principles to

6 Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok, eds., Ethics Teaching in Higher Education (New York: Plenum, 1980). 7 Daniel Callahan, "Goals in the Teaching of Ethics," in Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, ed. Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok, (New York: Plenum, 1980), 62. 8 Ibid., 64-65. 9 Ibid., 65. 10 Ibid., 66. 11 Ibid.

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ethics, and so on. Finally, the fifth goal is to tolerate and reduce disagreement and

ambiguity. In order to make it possible for students to make progress in ethics, it is

necessary to seek out points of agreement and to clarify what actually is vague as

opposed to what merely appears vague.14

That said, Callahan rejects the idea that ethics courses should aim to change

behaviour. On his view, ethics courses may only aim to change behaviour in a potential

way by providing students with the tools they need to evaluate their own behaviour. He

reasons that in order to aim at changed behaviour in a direct way, a teacher would have to

have "a pre-established blueprint of what will count as acceptable moral behavior," and

this conflicts with critical inquiry, which should be the purpose of an ethics course.16

It is surprising that Callahan makes this claim, given that he argues that there are

areas of agreement in ethics, and that one of the goals of an ethics course is to seek out

those areas. A teacher attempting to change the behaviour of his or her students need not

aim to provide them with a fully worked-out moral code, but merely aim to change their

behaviour in those areas in which there is substantive agreement in the moral community.

Further, aiming to change students' moral thinking is in fact aiming to change their

behaviour, especially if thinking counts as a form of behaviour. Changing the way

students think about morality requires taking a stand on normative matters such as the

place of rationality in the moral life, and what kinds of critical and rational attitudes are

worth instilling.

Ibid., 67. Ibid. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 69-70.

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For example, Mike McNulty, who follows Callahan in arguing for the conclusion

that teaching virtue is not a legitimate goal in teaching ethics, nevertheless argues in

favour of instilling a kind of intellectual virtue. His general goal in teaching applied

ethics is "to guide students in coming up with sound ideas for conduct," and stresses that

this implies that teachers must attempt to "instill a critical, rational attitude in the

students."17 Such guidance enables students to keep those moral beliefs that can be

rationally justified and to jettison those that cannot.18

It is here that the terms start to become slippery. Callahan rejects "behavioural

change" as an aim, but argues in favour of a kind of change of thinking. McNulty rejects

"virtue" as an aim, but argues in favour of intellectual virtues. Several philosophers on

the academic weblog "PEA Soup" (Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia), in the comments

on an article19 about the usefulness of moral theory in helping students improve morally,

reject the idea of "moral improvement" but argue in favour of "better moral thinking."

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Judith Andre and Michael Davis argue that ethics teachers ought to have as an explicit

goal to "foster moral growth." By this, Andre means that students should become "moral

professionals" who have the following characteristics: they can see the world and respond

to it accordingly, they are able to think fruitfully about ethical dilemmas, and they have

strength of character. Davis's conception includes raising sensitivity, increasing

17 Mike McNulty, "Teaching Applied Ethics Effectively," Teaching Philosophy 21, no. 4 (1998), 362. 18 Ibid. 19 Matt Zwolinski, How Useful is Moral Theory for Applied Ethics? (2006 [cited September 29th 2007]); available from http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2006/10/how_useful_is_m.html. Similar comments can be found here: Heath White, Teaching Ethics (2006 [cited September 29th 2007]); available from http://peasoup.typepad.eom/peasoup/2006/10/teaching_ethics.html#more. 20 Judith Andre, "Beyond Moral Reasoning: A Wider View of the Professional Ethics Course," Teaching Philosophy 14 (1991). 21 Michael Davis, Ethics and the University (London: Routledge, 1999), 164-65. 22 Andre, "Beyond Moral Reasoning: A Wider View of the Professional Ethics Course," 364-65.

knowledge of professional codes, improving judgment, and enhancing willpower. Joan

C. Callahan argues that "influencing behavior" is the goal that must underpin all of

Daniel Callahan's goals.24

It is difficult to make sense of all of the distinctions made here, but two basic

disagreements emerge. First, philosophers disagree as to whether or not teaching

students to improve their moral thinking is in fact contributing to improved moral

behaviour. This is at least in part a matter of one's moral theory, since, for example,

Socratic ethics would not allow a distinction between improved moral thinking and

improved moral behaviour. Second, whatever the answer to this question, these

philosophers disagree as to which goals should be on the list aside from "improved moral

thinking." Neither of these questions is easily answered.

4.2. Teacher Advocacy or Teacher Neutrality?

Alongside the disagreement about the purposes of ethics courses vis-a-vis moral

improvement is a disagreement about whether or not teachers should advocate their own

moral beliefs. These disagreements are not wholly distinct. As noted above, Callahan

argues that aiming at behavioural change involves abandoning neutrality, and that that is

reason enough not to have such an aim.

There has been much written about whether teachers should be neutral in their

teaching or not. However, as Linda Bomstad points out, the locus of the disagreements is

not always clear, for "it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what pedagogical policies

23 Davis, Ethics and the University, 164. 24 Joan C. Callahan, "From the Applied to the Practical: Teaching Ethics for Use," in Teaching Philosophy: Theoretical Reflections and Practical Suggestions, ed. Tziporah Kasachkoff, (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 67-68.

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are being defended or rejected by disputants in this discussion."25 That is, it is not simply

a matter of whether teachers should be neutral in their teaching or not. Questions arise

regarding what neutrality means, what it would mean not to be neutral, whether advocacy

means merely disclosing one's beliefs, defending them, or actively showing that all other

belief systems are false, and so on. In what follows I will outline some of the major

disagreements that have arisen with regard to these matters.

The Possibility of Neutrality

The debates about advocacy and neutrality often begin with the question of

whether neutrality in teaching is even possible. Some philosophers have argued that

since all philosophy teachers do have substantive positions, it is more honest for teachers

to disclose their position than not, since their moral commitments will influence the way

in which they teach. As Diane Raymond claims, our moral commitments influence "the

very topics we select for our courses, [and] even the order in which we teach them."27

Teachers' moral beliefs can affect anything from the readings selected to their tone of

voice in presenting the course material. Whether or not teachers intend to persuade

students of their views, it is impossible to be completely neutral in teaching.

However, this does not commit us to advocacy. Even though complete neutrality

is impossible, we can take one of several views. There is the idea that teachers should

strive to be as neutral as possible, that teachers should actively advocate their views, and

that teachers should disclose their views but not advocate them.

25 Linda Bomstad, "Advocating Procedural Neutrality," Teaching Philosophy 18, no. 3 (1995), 197. 26 See, e.g., Michael Goldman, "On Moral Relativism, Advocacy, and Teaching Normative Ethics," Teaching Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1981), 9. 27 Diane Raymond, "Moral Commitment and Teaching Philosophy," Teaching Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1982), 106.

A stronger view than any of these three is that taken by Hugh Wilder, who argues

that teachers should reject the idea of neutrality in grading. In other words, students

should (at least sometimes) be graded down for disagreeing with the teacher's beliefs. In

other words, he rejects what he calls the "principle of liberal tolerance," which he

describes to his students thus:

In evaluating papers, I care more about the arguments you give than the conclusions you defend. Although I care about what you believe, my immediate concern is why you believe what you believe. Papers will be graded more on cogency of argumentation than on the substantive claims made. And of course, students don't have to agree with me on substantive issues in order to get a good grade.

This principle or some variation thereof is likely familiar to most of those who

teach philosophy to undergraduate students. However, Wilder explains that he rejected it

after being presented by a rejoinder by one of his students: he was accused of being

disingenuous in his adherence to the principle. The student argued that Wilder could not

give a paper a good grade if he disagreed with the conclusion. Since, on this view,

Wilder had professed to be an atheist, he must believe that there are no good arguments

for theism, since a good argument is a sound argument, and a sound argument, by

definition, has a true conclusion. Therefore, since a good paper contains a good

argument, he cannot consider a paper to be good unless he agrees with the conclusion.

Wilder amplifies this argument by claiming that implicit in the principle of liberal

tolerance is a faulty distinction between cogent argumentation and true conclusions.

Arguments include conclusions, and good arguments include true conclusions. Wilder

claims that even though it is sometimes difficult to determine when we know that a claim

28 Hugh T. Wilder, "Tolerance and Teaching Philosophy," Metaphilosophy 9, no. 3-4 (1978), 311. 29 Ibid., 312. 30 Ibid., 318.

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is true, it is obvious that we do know that some claims are true, e.g., "that murder is

wrong, that "affirming the consequent is a fallacy, etc., etc."31

Wilder's conception of a good undergraduate essay is rather surprising, for as

Elias Baumgarten notes, if Wilder were a utilitarian, and Kant was a member of his class,

"Kant himself could not earn an "A" (or be judged an excellent philosopher) unless he

changed his mind." Wilder's mistake is in his assumption that any argument containing

a false conclusion includes a flaw large enough in it to deserve a lowered grade. Not only

are such expectations unreasonable in the context of the undergraduate classroom, this

policy is fundamentally coercive. As Mike Martin notes, all this will do is "pressure

many students either to drop the course or to lie about their beliefs,"33 especially since

Wilder advocates his atheism in class.

What Wilder fails to recognize is that for teachers to notice their own biases in

grading does not have to lead to the conclusion that they should act on those biases,

especially if they adhere to a kind of principle of reasonableness. That is, if the teacher in

question knows that there are reasonable people with whom he or she disagrees, he or she

can be sure that there are reasonably good arguments for those positions. A person can

be committed to his or her view, and believe that the arguments for that view are the most

persuasive, without believing that the arguments for other views are terrible arguments

and worthy of bad grades.

A variation on the "impossibility of neutrality" argument is based on the idea that

a philosophical commitment to reason is itself a form of non-neutrality. In other words,

31 Ibid., 319. 32 Elias Baumgarten, "The Ethical and Social Responsibilities of Philosophy Teachers," Metaphilosophy 11, no. 2 (1980), 189. 33 Mike W. Martin, "Advocating Values: Professionalism in Teaching Ethics," Teaching Philosophy 20, no. 1(1997), 22.

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expecting students to give reasons for their views is not being neutral with regard to the

use of reason.34 However, it is worth asking what it would look like to be completely

neutral about the use of reason. As Robert Simon notes, expecting students to argue

rationally is not a kind of advocacy, but merely a commitment to the academic

enterprise.35

However, conceptions of reason, and of "good philosophy," differ from thinker to

thinker. Philosophers have deep disagreements about what counts as a justified belief,

about whether one's beliefs have to be justified objectively, whether one has to know that

one knows a proposition, and so on. These disagreements are the stuff of contemporary

epistemology, but also affect teaching thinking, which relies at least in part upon

conceptions of reasons, justification, and rationality. Students cannot be taught to give

reasons for their beliefs without also being taught what counts as a reason. Further,

teachers' ethics of beliefs will affect how they teach students to think critically about

their beliefs. If one follows Clifford in his evidentialism, justifying beliefs may look

quite different than if one follows James' pragmatism. The differences between Anglo-

American and continental philosophy are also relevant here.

However, as argued above, noticing that it is impossible to be fully neutral does

not mean that one must accept advocacy as the only alternative. There are other

possibilities that should be acknowledged even though neutrality is impossible. In other

words, in order to defend advocacy it is not enough to claim that neutrality is impossible:

one must further claim that advocacy is desirable.

34 Michael Goldman and Diane Raymond both make this argument. Goldman, "On Moral Relativism, Advocacy, and Teaching Normative Ethics," 7, Raymond, "Moral Commitment and Teaching Philosophy," 106. 33 Robert L. Simon, Neutrality and the Academic Ethic (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 22-23.

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Neutrality and Authenticity

One way in which this argument might go is to claim that a person's teaching

cannot be fully authentic if that teacher stifles his or her passionate moral views in order

to maintain neutrality in teaching. In other words, one's deepest moral commitments are

so fundamental to one's sense of self that they should not be hidden from view, even

from students. This seems especially true when considering issues of social justice and

injustice. Mike Martin argues that when teaching about issues of race or sex, it would be

wrong to be perfectly neutral about racism or sexism. On his view, advocacy in issues

that concern basic respect for persons is the only morally acceptable option, for non-

advocacy compromises a person's integrity.37 Martin suggests, however, that teachers do

not need to advocate for all of their beliefs, but simply for those they hold particularly

strongly. He does recommend complete openness with students, who should be told what

the teacher is doing in every case, whether it be advocating or withholding views.38

Martin's view is thus a kind of middle ground between complete advocacy and

complete neutrality. One reason to take his view seriously is that it allows for a

distinction between kinds of moral commitments: fundamental versus peripheral, non­

negotiable versus negotiable, those which one believes are necessary to reasonableness,

and those about which one believes that reasonable people can disagree. For example, a

person might believe that it is impossible to reasonably be a racist, but that others can

reasonably disagree with his or her views about affirmative action. This kind of middle

36 Martin also cites homophobia as an example. Martin, "Advocating Values: Professionalism in Teaching Ethics," 30. 37 Ibid., 29. 38 Ibid., 27.

view allows us to treat at least some those with whom we disagree as reasonable, where a

view like Wilder's does not.

Neutrality and Relativism

The second argument for advocacy is based on the idea that only advocacy can

avoid or mitigate student moral relativism. This is an echo of Plato's worry in Republic

VII that being exposed to argumentation can lead to moral relativism or scepticism, or

simply a distrust of reason. Students are shown good arguments for conflicting views,

and as a result abandon the idea that there is a right answer, or that reason can lead them

to it. To avoid this, teachers should advocate for a particular moral position.

This argument has not been well worked out in the literature. Authors making

this argument have asserted the link between relativism and neutrality rather than argued

for it, and the connection between relativism and seeing many arguments has not been

made clear. However, even if the connection is real, this is not a good argument for

advocacy. Arguments such as these only make sense if students only ever learn from one

philosopher, for as soon as students are exposed to a professor advocating an opposing

view the same problem will re-emerge, especially if each professor claims to know that

his or her position is true.40 As in the case of the first argument for advocacy, this

argument is inconclusive.

Much more work needs to be done if either advocacy or neutrality is to be

defended. The disagreements about goals in teaching ethics have also been inconclusive.

39 Wilder, Goldman and Raymond each make this argument. Goldman, "On Moral Relativism, Advocacy, and Teaching Normative Ethics," 5, Raymond, "Moral Commitment and Teaching Philosophy," 106, Wilder, "Tolerance and Teaching Philosophy," 320. 40 Baumgarten makes this point explicit. Baumgarten, "The Ethical and Social Responsibilities of Philosophy Teachers," 187.

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This points to a need for foundational work in the ethics of teaching ethics. In the rest of

this chapter, I will outline some of the morally salient features of the ethics classroom

that need to be taken into account when doing this foundational work. These features are

those that must be taken into account when making teaching decisions as ethics teachers.

In the final chapter, I will develop a framework for considering the ethical issues arising

in the ethics classroom.

4.3. Student Relativism

Student relativism has been of concern to many philosophers writing about

teaching. In particular, many philosophers have written about student moral relativism as

an obstacle to overcome.41 Stephen Satris calls student relativism "one of the most

serious, pervasive, and frustrating problems confronting most philosophy teachers

today." Thomas Carson claims that "the issue of moral relativism is very troublesome

for those of us who teach ethics," because relativism is inimical to rational discussion. 3

From the writings of philosophers considering how to understand the

phenomenon of student relativism, three major positions have emerged as to what it

consists in. These positions emerge primarily from the teaching experiences of these

philosophers.

The first is that student relativism is a belief that students hold about the meaning

and source of moral claims. In other words, student relativism is a primitive

41 See, e.g., Judith Andre, "Dealing With Naive Relativism in the Philosophy Classroom," Metaphilosophy 14, no. 2 (1983), Thomas L. Carson, "An Approach to Relativism," Teaching Philosophy 22, no. 2 (1999), Goldman, "On Moral Relativism, Advocacy, and Teaching Normative Ethics.", Stephen A. Satris, "Student Relativism," Teaching Philosophy 9, no. 3 (1986). 42 Satris, "Student Relativism," 193. 43 Carson, "An Approach to Relativism," 161.

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philosophical position. It is philosophical relativism, though perhaps a shallow version of

it. This is the understanding of student relativism that is presupposed when teachers

tackle relativism by adducing arguments for and against it and weighing their relative

merits.

Two philosophers who have argued that student relativism is philosophical

relativism are Roger Paden and Harry Brighouse. Paden argues that relativism is at least

sometimes the result of an argument that students have come to accept without being

fully aware that they have done so. This argument is an argument from toleration, where

students seem to believe that respecting others means insulating them from our beliefs

and arguments. Paden believes that student relativism is the result of an argument

because he has observed students who appear to hold to relativism "against their will,

interests, and beliefs, in defense of positions which they found both mistaken and

repugnant." Brighouse argues that student relativism comes from students' misguided

ideas about what tolerance entails. Students mistakenly believe that tolerance requires

treating all beliefs as equal, rather than treating all persons as equal.46

If Paden and Brighouse are right, then students who are relativists have developed

a kind of embryonic philosophical position that, in the eyes of many philosophers, is

false, or at least unsupported by good reasons. However, this is not the experience of all

philosophy teachers. Several have argued that student relativism is not a philosophical

position at all, and should not be treated as such.

This is the second position regarding student relativism: that student relativism is

a psychological defense mechanism rather than an intellectual position. Students entering

44 Roger Paden, "The Student Relativist as Philosopher," Teaching Philosophy 10, no. 2 (1987), 99. 45 Ibid., 98. 46 Harry Brighouse, School Choice and SocialJustice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 96.

university classrooms do so with moral and religious beliefs that they are often

unprepared to have challenged. Many of these students have never before been asked to

think critically about their most cherished beliefs. They have not been prepared for the

kinds of skeptical assaults they will encounter in some of the thinkers they are expected

to read, and for the high standards of justification they are expected to adhere to in

writing papers and in defending their opinions. On this view of student relativism,

students make relativistic claims in order to protect themselves and their beliefs. If all

beliefs are equally valid, then one is spared the task of having to show why one's own

beliefs are true.

Two philosophers who have argued that at least some student relativism is of this

sort are Stephen Satris and Richard Momeyer. Satris argues that students seem to be

making relativistic claims at the same time as they are making conventional moral claims

that they cannot defend well and do not want challenged.47 Richard Momeyer suggests

that in some cases words like "who's to say" can be "less matters of conviction than

expressions of fear."48

Determining which characterization of student relativism is true is a matter of

experience in the classroom and a certain amount of sensitivity to students' mental states.

Both explanations of student relativism seem plausible, and it is certainly possible that

student relativism is an amorphous phenomenon, and that most student relativism is a

hybrid of the kinds of characterizations outlined here. This could mean that one

classroom could contain many types of student relativists. If this is the case then dealing

with student relativism is a complicated endeavour.

47 Satris, "Student Relativism," 199. 48 Richard W. Momeyer, "Teaching Ethics to Student Relativists," Teaching Philosophy 18, no. 4 (1995), 304.

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It is further complicated by the possibility that student relativism is merely a

developmental stage that students must pass through in their university years. This idea

has been developed by sociologists and psychologists.

Student development gained importance as a research area beginning in the

1960s, and several types of student development theories have arisen. These theories are

generally classified into four categories: psychosocial theories, which are concerned with

psychological development in the context of a person's social environment, identity

theories, which are concerned with the development of identity, cognitive-structural

theories, which examine intellectual development more specifically and concentrate on

the ways in which thinking patterns change during college, and typology theories, which

look at how students develop based on personality type and learning style.49 Each kind of

theory maps the progress of students from the time previous to entering university until

shortly afterward. Some theories place this development in the context of development

throughout life, drawing on theorists such as Erikson and Piaget.

The most relevant kind of theory to this context is a cognitive-structural theory,

and the most influential research in this area was that performed by William Perry.50

William Perry conducted research in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s on university students

For a general introduction to various student development theories of the late 20 century, see Nancy J. Evans, Deanna S. Forney, and Florence Guido-DiBrito, Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998). 50 Other prominent theorists include M.B. Baxter Magolda, Knowing and Reasoning in College: Gender-related Patterns in Students' Intellectual Development (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992), M.F. Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986), Bomstad, "Advocating Procedural Neutrality.", Arthur Chickering and Linda Reisser, Education and Identity, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), Ruthellen Josselson, Finding Herself: Pathways to Identity Development in Women (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), P.M. King and K.S. Kitchener, Developing Reflective Judgment: Understanding and Promoting Intellectual Growth and Critical Thinking in Adolescents and Adults (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), J.E. Marcia, "Development and Validation of Ego-Identity Status," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (1966), S.L. Mustapha and J.A. Seybert, "Moral Reasoning in College Students: Effects of Two General Education Courses," Education Research Quarterly 14 (1990), J.R. Rest, Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory (New York: Praeger, 1986).

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at Harvard.51 Though this research is dated, it is still very influential in theories of

student development. Perry is also the first theorist to point to relativism as a

developmental stage. His research generated a theory of nine "forms" or "positions"

which were points of view that shaped how people view their experiences. Perry's

structure is complicated but I will outline it in its most basic form by looking at the

overall process of development that students generally seem to follow.

Students begin in a position of what Perry calls dualism. In this position of

dualism students see the world as divided between right and wrong, good and bad, we

and others, and what teachers want versus what teachers do not want. In the earliest stage

students do not recognize that a question could have more than one answer. In the later

stages students see this, but assume that there is only more than one answer because the

other answers are all clearly wrong. Students in this position tend to complain that

teachers do not "stick to the facts."

There are several ways in which students move from dualism to what Perry calls

"multiplicity," but almost all arrive there at some point. A student viewing the world

from this position believes that "everything goes" - that all opinions are equally valid,

and that all marking is therefore arbitrary. No final answers can be found. All assertions

are simply matters of opinion, and the teacher's opinion matters no more than anyone

else's.

From multiplicity students move to what Perry describes as relativism. In this

position students are capable of committing to one position, but they do not see this as

absolute or objective. Students in this stage realize that there are many ways to live, and

51 William G. Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1970).

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that they cannot necessarily judge other ways to be morally wrong. They also see

knowledge as contextually based and not absolute. The final stage of development

occurs when students have made commitments within this relativistic framework. They

recognize that their values, beliefs, and decisions are based on individual choice, and

make those choices. Students recognize that they have made a choice, excluding other

alternatives, and take responsibility for that choice. This is often seen as discovery ­

what one really believes, or who one really is.

Here are the remarks of several students who have reached Perry's final stage of

cognitive development. "I think a person who spends his time at cocktail parties, and

spends four evenings a week on the telephone getting dates for the other three evenings is

not accomplishing anything. . .1 can reject this way of living because I think that you

should really do more in the way of work. But on the other hand, I would have to say

that there is no absolute moral right and wrong to this. I can't condemn such a person on

any final grounds." Another student: "You can't let go of your own standards, but you

can't really afford to look down on anyone who has a different - I won't say lower

anymore - a different set of standards. Perhaps it isn't tolerance, perhaps it's just

awareness of the fact that that's the way it should be, if it isn't."53 Again, '"if you're

confronted with a person who doesn't do things like you do, 'Well, he has decided to do

things like this - /wouldn't. I don't think it's right.'' And yet you have to come back and

say, 'But this is only subjective - this is only my way of looking at things.'"54

Thus, the difference between relativism and multiplicity is that on multiplicity,

students see all positions as equally valid and cannot choose one, but on relativism,

52 Ibid., 163. 33 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 173.

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students are able to choose a position, and see that position as best for them, but not

necessarily for anyone else. However, the students do appear to be somewhat conflicted

about this, as if they want to make a judgment but believe they cannot do so.

It should be noted that it appears that Perry was, at the time of the study, a

relativist, and sees this as the highest stage of intellectual development in university ­

possibly in life. He does not specifically point to what adults might develop into after

college, but seems to imply that this is the position people do or perhaps should stick

with. One question that is worth asking about the study itself is whether Perry's own

relativism influenced him to see students developing toward a higher level of critical

thinking and self-reflection as developing toward relativism. At times he seems to

conflate the two. One possible implication of this study and the fact that it has been

widely referred to is that university professors in many disciplines see this progression

toward relativism as a good thing. Perhaps many see relativism as a good thing in the

realm of morality, even if most professors of philosophy do not.

Student relativists in ethics classroom could be either at the multiplicity stage or

at the relativism stage. Those philosophers who worry that relativism makes moral

discourse and in particular moral philosophy impossible ought to be concerned about

students in either stage. While the "relativists" on Perry's view are capable of making

commitments, they are also incapable of or unwilling to make objective moral judgments.

Since in their case morality is a matter of personal choice, the role of moral philosophy is

not clear.

Given these possibilities, as well as the further possibilities suggested by

philosophers above, it is not clear how ethics teachers should respond to student

I l l

relativism. If it is a defense mechanism, dealing with it on a philosophical level may not

be appropriate. If students are merely using the words normally associated with

relativism to express tolerance and politeness, then it may be a mistake to attribute a

substantive position to them. Things become even more complicated if it is a

developmental stage, for the role of philosophy courses in cognitive development is not

clear.

It should also be noted that characterizing student relativism as a problem that

needs to be overcome is taking a substantive position about the merits of relativism. This

position is perhaps not very controversial, since student relativism often appears to shut

conversation down in a classroom. Claims that a student, by defending a moral position,

is forcing his morality on others often have a silencing effect that has negative

consequences for open discussion. It is perhaps simply a presumption in favour of

rational discourse vis-a-vis morality, but this should be flagged as a presumption that may

not be shared by all philosophers.

4.4. Student Fundamentalism

Related to the subject of student relativism is the subject of student

fundamentalism; in particular, of religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism is

significant in the context of the ethics classroom because of the close relationship

between beliefs about morality and beliefs about religion, in particular when those beliefs

are fundamentalist ones.

Students in university classrooms come from various socio-economic,

educational, religious, and cultural backgrounds. These backgrounds form the

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conceptions of morality and the good life that they bring to ethics courses. Not only do

students hold divergent beliefs about particular moral issues, they hold divergent beliefs

at the level of moral theory and metaethics, even though they may not yet know how to

distinguish between these three levels of moral thinking. In other words, not only are

there disagreements between students about issues like abortion, euthanasia, or same-sex

marriages, there are disagreements as to the source or status of those moral judgments.

Generating a definition of religious fundamentalism that captures neither too

much nor too little is a complicated task that I will not attempt. Instead, I will draw

attention to some of the attributes of religious fundamentalism that are especially

pertinent to the context I am considering. I will do this by relating some of what is

happening in the evangelical Protestant Christian context, especially in the United States.

At the outset, however, I must stress that not all evangelical Protestant Christians are

fundamentalists in the sense I am considering, and of course not all Christian

fundamentalists are evangelical Protestants. Many evangelical Protestants, even though

they resemble their fundamentalist neighbours in their devotion to the Bible and to

proselytizing, do not share their views about women or about education. These believers

will be discussed further at the end of this section.

According to a recent study55 by the U.S. Department of Education, the number of

children being homeschooled is on the rise. The percentage of children being

homeschooled rose from 1.7 percent in 1999 to 2.2 percent in 2003. This translates into

over one million children being homeschooled in the United States in 2003. For thirty

percent of those parents choosing to homeschool, providing "moral and religious

55 Homeschooling in the United States 2003: Statistical Analysis Report (U.S. Department of Education: National Center for Education Statistics, 2006 [cited October 17 2007]); available from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/.

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instruction" was the most important reason they chose to do so. The study did not inquire

further into the particularities of this moral and religious instruction. However, since

many homeschooled teenagers are using media such as weblogs and online forums to

communicate with each other and to propagate their views, it is possible to get a glimpse

at the kind of instruction many homeschooled children are receiving.

One online community of particular interest is The Rebelution. Founded by two

homeschooled teenagers, Alex and Brett Harris, it is devoted to inspiring teenagers to

rebel against "the low expectations of an ungodly culture" by "doing hard things."56 The

pair has traveled the country to hold conferences, and maintain active online forums on

the site. Much as the idea of inspiring teenagers to defy low expectations is

commendable, much of what The Rebelution seeks to promote is returning to traditional

gender roles, including the idea that women should first submit to their fathers, and then

to their husbands. In 2006, they hosted a "modesty survey," which consisted of

questions, submitted by teenage girls and responded to by over 1600 (mostly) teenage

boys. Almost 700 of the respondents were homeschooled.57 The idea was that girls

wanted to find out what kinds of clothing and attire could cause boys to lust. The

underlying principle is that Christian "brothers and sisters" should not cause each other to

sin, and therefore girls have a certain amount of responsibility to dress modestly. While

most of the male respondents agreed that they were responsible for their own behaviour,

the idea was that women should do their best not to make a man's struggle against lust

harder. Recently, as they are now at the age where they are deciding about college, the

56 Alex and Brett Harris, About The Rebelution ([cited October 17 2007]); available from http://www.therebelution.com/about/. 57 Alex and Brett Harris, Modesty Survey: Overview ([cited October 17 2007]); available from http://www.therebelution.com/modestysurvey/overview.

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Harrises have recommended two college guides, to help conservatives avoid "liberal

indoctrination."

Many homeschooled Christian students choose to attend Patrick Henry College,

in Purcellville, Virginia. Established in 2000 by Michael Farris, founder of the Home

School Legal Defense Association, it now enrols several hundred students per year.

Many of these students are homeschooled, and refer to the school as "Harvard for

Homeschoolers," due to its rigorous academic standards. Its website claims that their

goals are "to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our

culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding."59

Several Patrick Henry students have ended up working in the White House, and many are

intent on political careers.60

At Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, students (only women) have the

opportunity to take a B.A. with a "homemaking" concentration, which according to a

recent Los Angeles Times story61 "includes lectures on laundering stubborn stains and a

lab in baking chocolate-chip cookies." Courses include "Biblical Model for the Home

and Family," which teaches "that God expects wives to graciously submit to their

husbands' leadership." According to the story, this program is the first in several planned

programs at Southern Baptist seminaries. According to one student, the program is

valuable because it helps her to "restrain her instincts to take charge." As she claims, "I

have to be able to shut my mouth." Another said: "I'm not one of those out to rebel, out­

58 Hanna Rosin, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2007). 59 About Patrick Henry College (Patrick Henry College, [cited October 17 2007]); available from http://www.phc.edu/about/default.asp. 60 Rosin, God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America. 61 Stephanie Simon, They Love To Do Their Homework (Los Angeles Times, 2007 [cited October 17 2007]); available from http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na­homemakingl loctl l,0,6958746,full.story?coll=la-home-nation.

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to-be-my-own-woman types." Still another, when asked whether it would matter if she

did not enjoy homemaking: "It really doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the

Bible says."

Some fundamentalists, such as the women who run the website Ladies Against

Feminism, urge against women going to college at all, for going to college only

encourages women to choose a career, and a woman's place is at home serving her

husband.62

Generally, these fundamentalists are fighting against those who they believe

would destroy Christianity, especially liberals and feminists. Because liberals refuse to

legislate "Biblical" standards of morality, and because feminists reject "Biblical" gender

roles, they are seen as the enemy. Higher education is often seen as dangerous, because

universities are filled with liberals and feminists (and Marxists and other kinds of so-

called radicals) hell-bent on disabusing Christians of their faith. Online communities

such as TrueU.org (an offshoot of James Dobson's Focus on the Family), promise to help

students to "stay Christian in college." Young Christians are often given books in

apologetics to help them through their philosophy classes. The oft-told story of the

atheist philosophy professor out to ridicule Christians and undermine their beliefs is used

to motivate young people to learn to defend their faith.

There are two major features of religious fundamentalism that must be considered

in the context of thinking about teaching in ethics classrooms. I will continue to use the

example of Christian fundamentalists who are evangelical Protestants.

Ladies Against Feminism FAQ Database (Ladies Against Feminism, [cited October 17 2007]); available fromhttp://pub32.bravenet.com/faq/show.php?usernum=2692425141&keywords=education#ql.

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The first is the source of moral beliefs. For Christian fundamentalists, the

ultimate authority on how to live is the Bible. This is often taken to mean that the only

source of knowledge on how to live is the Bible. Last year, at Patrick Henry College, a

professor came under fire for suggesting the opposite. In a government class, while

discussing a "lifeboat example" and its relation to the state of nature, he asked students

what Hobbes or Locke would say about the example. He suggested that quoting the

Bible verse about laying down one's life for one's friends was too simplistic. As a result,

he was almost fired.63 Following this, several members of the faculty published a short

article arguing that there was valuable truth to be found in the "great works" of Western

history other than the Bible. They were subsequently denounced by the college

president, who claimed that they did not believe the Bible, and that "the wisdom of this

world is foolishness with God."64

Religious fundamentalists are sometimes expected to justify their beliefs, but the

only source of justification is often taken to be the Bible itself. While all Christians take

the Bible to be an important source of insight into the character of God and his

expectations for how to live, Christian fundamentalists who are evangelical Protestants

often take it to be the only source.

The second feature of religious fundamentalism that should be considered is the

content of the moral beliefs often held by fundamentalists. Moral beliefs emerge from

religious beliefs in the context of fundamentalism. The relationship between the two is

sometimes complicated, but several beliefs are typical of evangelical Protestants who are

fundamentalists: a rejection of homosexuality as diseased and sinful, a rejection of

63 Thomas Bartlett, Give Me Liberty Or I Quit (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2006 [cited October 19 2007]); available from http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i37/37a01001.htm. 64 Ibid.([cited).

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egalitarian conceptions of marriage in favour of traditional gender roles, and a rejection

of legal access to abortion. Politically, most reject the idea of the separation of church

and state.

It may seem as though this analysis ignores the most important feature of

fundamentalism, which is the certitude with which many fundamentalists hold their

religious and moral beliefs. One might think that in the case of many fundamentalists,

certitude is disproportionate to objective certainty. However, the idea that this is the

main feature that distinguishes fundamentalist students from their classmates should be

rejected, for the disproportion between certitude and certainty is not limited to religious

believers. As well, when comparing young people from fundamentalist backgrounds to

their more secular classmates, it is important to note that young fundamentalists are often

driven by passion and the desire to please God and live well. This may mean they are

actually more receptive than some of their more cynical classmates.

While I have made general claims about what typifies evangelical Protestant

fundamentalism, especially in the United States, it should also be pointed out that

fundamentalism is not a homogeneous phenomenon. However, the existence of religious

fundamentalism in general raises many questions for ethics teachers at the undergraduate

level. Should ethics teachers be in the business of disabusing students of fundamentalist

beliefs? For example, some say that philosophers should be undermining anti-feminist

beliefs, which are central to some versions of fundamentalist Christianity.65 Are there

some moral convictions that philosophy professors have a duty to actively challenge?

65 Ann Cudd takes this view. Ann Cudd, "Revolution vs. Devolution in Kansas: Teaching in a Conservative Climate," Teaching Philosophy 30, no. 2 (2007). The rest of the essays in that volume are devoted to first person accounts of teaching in American fundamentalist contexts, though the focus is more on academic freedom than on ethical obligations.

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These questions raise issues of autonomy and religious freedom, as well as the limits of

the role of the teacher, but also practical issues, since some fundamentalist students are

avoiding secular universities on the grounds that they do not want their anti-feminist

beliefs challenged.

Some believe that the business of philosophy courses is to teach students to

defend the beliefs they already possess, and some students seem to believe that this is the

role of such courses. However, questions arise as to whether such practices can be

justified and what end they are intended to serve.

Finally, there is the complicated relationship between student relativism and

religious fundamentalism. As Momeyer and Satris noted above, these two can exist in

tandem: students can profess to be relativists but also hold fundamentalist beliefs. As

well, it is often the case that students fail to see a third option: either one is a

fundamentalist, or one is a relativist. One might ask whether the role of philosophy

teachers is to help students find such middle ground.

As noted above, there are many Protestant evangelicals who are not

fundamentalists, or who even if they might call themselves fundamentalists, do not fit the

profile sketched here. There are evangelical feminists, evangelicals who are

evolutionists, evangelicals who are liberals, and evangelicals who are committed to the

ideals of liberal education. The authors whose essays are collected in the book Should

God Get Tenure?66 cannot be accused of being anti-intellectual; they are evangelical

intellectuals. Their version of liberal education incorporates the exploration of religious

faith and an emphasis on the study of religion, but it is nonetheless liberal in its focus on

David W. Gill, ed., Should God Get Tenure? Essays on Religion and Higher Education (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997).

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training the mind and discovering truth for oneself. Such evangelicals can find

themselves facing difficult questions when determining how to balance their commitment

to their faith and their commitment to their students' freedom of inquiry. These difficult

questions mirror the tensions in the debate between those who defend teacher advocacy

and those who defend neutrality. For evangelicals, the issues are made even weightier

because the eternal salvation of their students hangs in the balance.

Evangelicals of this sort are worried, just as fundamentalists are, about the anti­

religious bias they see in many universities. However, instead of isolating themselves

they advocate for the integration of religion in the university curriculum. Evangelical

parents of this stripe, just as the fundamentalists above, are concerned that their children

will lose their faith in college, in particular in philosophy courses. In general, they

believe that religion is an integral part of one's lived identity and should not be ignored in

the formative years that are spent in college or university.

This raises the issue of whether and how discussion about religion should find a

home in ethics courses. As the authors in Should God Get Tenure? have argued, while

today most moral philosophers reject divine command theory, religion and ethics remain

closely bound together for many members of our societies. If these evangelicals are

right, it is wrong to expect students to deliberate about morality without allowing them to

consider their beliefs about God. Teaching ethics without religion therefore requires

taking a stand about the place of religious belief in moral deliberation.

The questions raised above with regard to fundamentalism can apply to religious

believers, especially evangelicals, more generally. Should ethics teachers encourage

students to defend their religious beliefs? Should ethics teachers try to undermine divine

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command theory? What is the relationship between dogmatic religious belief and

relativism? In general, the questions concern how philosophers should respond to their

students' religious beliefs when teaching ethics. The next section will explore more

questions relating to these.

4.5. Reasonable Pluralism and Autonomy

Western societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become

increasingly diverse. To use John Rawls's terminology,67 such societies are characterized

by the fact of pluralism. Disagreements abound regarding religious, philosophical, and

moral doctrines: the idea of the good life is not agreed upon by all citizens. According to

Rawls, this is the inevitable result of the political and social conditions in democratic

societies, for free institutions tend to generate a variety of doctrines and views.68

What Rawls calls particular attention to, however, is not simply the fact of

pluralism, but the fact of reasonable pluralism. According to Rawls, the various

religious, philosophical and moral doctrines that develop as a result of the public culture

of democracy are not merely a product of self-interest and class interests, and they are not

merely a product of the standpoints of individuals. Instead, "they are in part the work of

free practical reason within the framework of free institutions." 9 In other words, not

only do individuals in democratic societies disagree about morality, religion, and

philosophy, it is possible that they do so reasonably.

Rawls does not make claims about the reasonableness or unreasonableness of

particular disagreements about the good life, but explains how such disagreements can be

67 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 37.

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reasonable. "The burdens of judgment" (detailed below) constitute Rawls's explanations

for why reasonable and intellectually careful people can disagree so deeply. On Rawls's

view, a reasonable person recognizes that the burdens of judgment often make agreement

difficult or even impossible. They answer the question "Why does not our conscientious

attempt to reason with one another lead to reasonable agreement?" They allow us to

explain the existence of disagreement without positing that the beliefs of individuals only

reflect their narrow interests or their irrationality.

These burdens of judgment are: the conflicting nature and complexity of

evidence, differences about weighing of considerations, vagueness of concepts and

borderline cases, the disparate experiences of diverse people, the varying normative

considerations of differing force on both sides of issues, and the tendency of social

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institutions to force us to select some values for emphasis and de-select others.

While Rawls allows that some disagreement is unreasonable, that "prejudice and

bias, self- and group-interest, blindness and wilfulness" play a role as well, he claims that

it is "unrealistic - or worse, it arouses mutual suspicion and hostility - to suppose that all

our differences are rooted solely in ignorance and perversity, or else in the rivalries for

power, status, or economic gain."72

For those interested in education, the question that arises here concerns how

moral education, and educating students about ethics and morality, should proceed in the

context of reasonable and unreasonable pluralism. Liberal philosophers have wondered

for some time what moral education in the public schools should look like in a pluralistic

context. In particular, two questions have arisen. The first concerns the content of moral 70 Ibid., 55. 71 Ibid., 56-57. 72 Ibid., 58.

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education. If moral education means teaching students a particular set of moral values,

then questions arise as to which values should be taught. If moral education means

character formation, then some conception of character must be presupposed, for some

character traits must be selected as more desirable than others. This raises the issue of

whether it is possible to have moral education devoid of the kind of content that requires

adherence to a particular conception of the good. Possibilities here include a conception

of shared values, or a conception of moral education as content-free, as in the case of

models based on "values clarification," in which students are not taught what their values

should be, but enabled to discover what their values are.

The second question is related to the first, and concerns how parental authority

should be balanced with a concern to enable students to make autonomous choices about

how to live. Liberal philosophers have argued that moral education should enable

students to make their own moral commitments. However, the question arises as to

how this should be balanced with a concern for the rights of parents to raise their children

in their own religious or cultural traditions. Should schools teach students to think

critically about their moral and religious beliefs, so that they may make autonomous

choices about them? This, as well as the practice of exposing children to various cultural

and religious traditions, is often seen by parents as an unjustifiable intrusion on their right

to pass on their religious and cultural ways of life. However, if children are not enabled

to make decisions autonomously about their lives, it appears as though they are being

denied their rights.

See, e.g., Brighouse, School Choice and Social Justice, Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable comprehensive doctrines

adds a layer of complications to these issues. One might argue that education should be

aimed at allowing students to choose a reasonable comprehensive doctrine for

themselves, but should not aim at allowing them to choose unreasonable ones. A

stronger position would be that unreasonableness in comprehensive doctrines ought to be

actively undermined, and reasonableness encouraged.

This is one way of understanding the idea that philosophers and teachers more

generally ought to be teaching students to think critically. This would mean that teachers

would work toward indirectly eradicating unreasonable comprehensive doctrines by

teaching students to think critically about them. This could serve political ends in a

liberal state, but also could be understood to be in the best interests of those being taught.

In the university context, the rights of parents are less significant since students are

entering adulthood, even though fundamentalist parents do not see it that way.

Putting aside the issues of parental rights, however, even in the university context

these practices should be interrogated. I have indicated two possible goals in teaching

critical thinking in the context of pluralism. A teacher's goal could be to enable students

to choose any conception of the good for themselves, or to enable students to choose a

reasonable conception of the good for themselves. It is also possible for a teacher to

have neither of these goals, for one's goal in teaching students to think critically about

their beliefs could be something else, or could be an end in itself.

These potential goals should be evaluated based on what is reasonable to expect

students to be capable of, however. It is probably unrealistic to expect that each person

can, from a completely neutral position, choose his or her values and commitments, or to

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expect that each person can do so all at once. It is more likely that individuals choose

their conceptions a piece at a time, adding to and subtracting from what they inherited

from their parents and communities. It follows that any conception of teaching which

encourages students to evaluate all of their moral beliefs and make new moral

commitments within the context of one course is probably expecting too much. That is

not to say that the undergraduate ethics course is not a place for students to evaluate their

moral commitments. However, it is likely not the place for them to evaluate and replace

all of their moral commitments.

Another consideration in evaluating such goals is the possibility that a teacher's

efforts to encourage students to critically evaluate their moral and religious beliefs may

turn out to be counter-productive. Several philosophers have found this to be their

experience while teaching. Wesley Cragg claims that students can become moral

sceptics as a result of taking an ethics course. This is because students find objections to

their beliefs and reject them, but are then unable to find new beliefs that survive criticism.

Cragg claims that "the fact that the very process of reflection can lead to scepticism and

sometimes cynicism is widely known and frequently discussed, at least informally, by

those who care about the impact of their teaching activity on the lives of their students."74

Similar worries have arisen for Annette Baier75 and for Daniel Calcutt,76 and for those

mentioned above who believe that the only way to avoid this is to practice advocacy. It is

this kind of situation that had Plato concerned in Republic VII. Once students come to

74 A. W. Cragg, "Bernard Williams and the Nature of Moral Reflection," Dialogue 28 (1989), 356. 75 Annette Baier, "Doing Without Moral Theory?," in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals, (London: Methuen, 1985), 234. 76 Daniel Calicut, "The Value of Teaching Moral Skepticism," Teaching Philosophy 29, no. 3 (2006), 223­24. See also Ronald D. Lawler, "Professional Ethics Courses: Do They Corrupt the Young?," Listening 16 (1982).

believe that some of their moral beliefs are not well founded, and are open to refutation,

the worry is that students will abandon all their moral beliefs. This theme is also echoed

in Aristophanes' Clouds where a young man is taught by a fictionalized version of

Socrates to question all of his beliefs, and then proceeds to perform morally reprehensible

acts.77

There are no statistics about whether or not ethics courses have this sort of effect

on students, but that several philosophers have raised the concern and believe it to be

universal should carry some weight. This possibility means that if a teacher's purpose in

teaching students to reflect on moral philosophy and ethics is to enable them to rationally

and autonomously choose how to live, it is possible for the means to undermine the end.

However, one might argue that this line of reasoning is too short-sighted, and that

an ethics course can function as one step along the path of an individual's moral

development. Even if students doubt all of their beliefs in an ethics course, they may

rebuild an edifice of beliefs and values further along the road. It is not essential that all

of that work be done within the ethics course itself. Martha Nussbaum argues that the

overall purpose of liberal education is to teach young people to distinguish between

objective moral laws and human conventions, and generally to enable individuals to live

a life "that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by

tradition or become familiar through habit, a life that questions all beliefs and accepts

only those that survive reason's demand for consistency and for justification." An

ethics course could serve one role within this overall goal. Following in the Socratic

77 This is described well in Martha Nussbaum, "Aristophanes and Socrates on Learning Practical Wisdom," in Yale Classical Studies: Aristophanes Essays in Interpretation, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 78 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9.

tradition, philosophers could be the gadflies who encourage students to question

traditional beliefs, even if they are not finally involved in the process by which students

replace their rejected beliefs with new ones.

However, it should be asked whether Nussbaum's goal is too far-reaching. After

all, a life which questions all beliefs may well turn out to be an overexamined life. A

worry here is that such a use of a person's critical thinking skills would negatively impact

their interpersonal relationships and happiness in general. While reason must play a role

in making decisions about relationships, it could be destructive when used in a way that

denigrates the role of emotion and intuition, or forces like love and devotion. As well,

perhaps Dewey and the Thomists are right that some practices and beliefs can usefully

remain unquestioned.

However, even if Nussbaum's goal is too far-reaching, her general framework can

be of use. Perhaps the overall purpose of liberal education is to enable students to make

reasoned decisions about their beliefs and values, and the ethics course plays one role

within that, albeit a destructive one. The ethics course on this conception is akin to the

wrecking ball that must take down buildings before new ones can be built. That said, if

the conception above of how beliefs are formed is accurate, the metaphor of demolishing

the entire edifice only to rebuild it again is misguided. In the end, whether or not one

accepts the idea that philosophy courses should play a destructive role, it is certainly

possible to accept the view that an ethics course should be understood as part of a larger

process of moral and intellectual development. What all of these considerations point to,

of course, is the question with which this chapter began, which concerns the purpose of

ethics courses. This question will be dealt with in more detail in the next chapter.

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I have argued in this section that the existence of pluralism about comprehensive

doctrines raises many complex questions for the ethics teacher at any level of schooling.

I have also argued that the liberal ideal of education as enabling students to choose their

conception of the good is a promising view generally speaking, but that such choices

should be seen as emerging within long and complicated processes. The potential goals

of ethics teachers are constrained by what is possible in the lives of their students.

Generally, pluralism is significant as a social phenomenon but also significant

personally for students who are negotiating the terrain between relativism and

dogmatism, and for teachers who are torn between advocacy and neutrality. The features

of the classroom that have emerged from this chapter's analysis are not, in the end,

completely separable from one another. In combination, they make undergraduate ethics

teaching a morally complex practice. The many complexities are the features that must

be addressed in a reasonable account of the ethical obligations of ethics teachers. In what

follows, such an account will be explored.

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CHAPTER 5: THE NEED FOR A RICHER ACCOUNT OF TEACHING ETHICS

Moral philosophers have applied their skills to a wide range of professional roles

in attempts to specify what duties and obligations properly attach to people who occupy

such roles. Such attempts recognize that there are (at least) two sorts of moral obligations

that an individual might have. First, there are the general obligations that the individual

has by virtue of being a moral agent. Different moral theories will give different

accounts of what these obligations consist in, but all moral theories agree that there are

some obligations that apply to everyone. Second, there are the obligations that arise from

the role(s) that individual occupies. For example, a parent has a special obligation to care

for his or her child that arises from his or her role as a parent, not just from his or her

status as a moral agent. A doctor has moral obligations that a non-doctor does not have,

such as to treat those who are sick. This obligation arises not from the doctor's general

obligation to help anyone he or she can (if anyone has such an obligation), but from the

role of healer that he or she has chosen to occupy. In other words, as Michael Hardimon

claims, there is a distinction between the obligations human beings have as human beings

and the obligations that arise from what he calls "institutional roles," which are

"constellations of institutionally specified rights and duties organized around an

institutionally specified social function."1

There are difficulties working out all of the complexities inherent in the idea of

role obligations. For example, in ordinary situations a doctor does not have an obligation

to treat every sick person. Some obligations are strictly relational, such as the role

obligations of parents. A mother has obligations to care for her children, but not for all

1 Michael Hardimon, "Role Obligations," The Journal of 'Philosophy 91, no. 7 (1994), 334. Hardimon's paper is an excellent analysis of role obligations.

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children. However, what is important to note is the particularity of the obligation: it

attaches to the person by virtue of the role he or she occupies, not by virtue of being a

person. The way in which these role obligations are related to general obligations will

depend upon one's view of moral theory in general and one's conception of the source of

moral obligation.

Given this rise in philosophical theorizing about obligations, philosophers have

concerned themselves with the obligations that arise from various roles. Thus, there have

been philosophers writing about the particular obligations of doctors, of lawyers, and

more recently, of parents4 (to give just a few examples). But rarely have philosophers

considered what obligations apply to those who occupy the professional role of

philosopher. It is a notable absence in an otherwise rich and productive field. Not only

this, but philosophers who do choose to write about teaching often find themselves

feeling marginalized by others who believe that teaching is not a subject for legitimate

philosophical research.5

It is not within the scope of this project to inquire as to why so many philosophers

appear to believe this. In part, that would be a sociological analysis. There is certainly

no prima facie reason to believe that teaching should be treated differently from

professions such as medicine, law, or business; if these professions are amenable to the

methods and techniques of philosophical analysis, then surely teaching is as well. While

2 The involvement of philosophers in medical ethics is well-established; especially in this age of ethics consultants. 3 There are many philosophers writing about legal ethics, e.g. David Luban, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 See, e.g., the recent edited collection on obligations to children by Brennan and Noggle. Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle, eds., Taking Responsibility for Children (Waterloo, ON: Laurier University Press, 2007). 5 This has been reported to me in informal conversations with philosophers from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

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the study of each requires the kind of empirical study that is the province of fields such as

sociology or psychology, and the skills learned from years of practice, each also benefits

from the kind of conceptual inquiry that is the province of philosophy.

Where philosophers have thought about professional ethics in an academic

context, the main questions asked have concerned the limits on the pursuit of goals: on

the acts one must not perform no matter how good the results in terms of achieving those

goals. In the field of research, good philosophers do not plagiarize the work of others, for

example. In the field of teaching, good philosophers do not humiliate students in an effort

to motivate them to perform. Indeed, in the field of teaching almost all of the rules

specify what sort of behaviour on the part of the teacher is prohibited. The rules against

sexual harassment are a classic example of this sort of rule.

This focus on rules rather than on moral behaviour more generally is not limited

to academia. In her recent book on workplace ethics, Cynthia Estlund argues that our

conceptions of workplace ethics in general should go beyond adherence to codes of

conduct and general obligations to others and should take account of the importance of

relations of cooperation, sociability and connectedness.6 In academic ethics, what is

missing is a rich view of teaching ethics that allows for careful deliberation about

teaching goals and practices, aside from reference to practical matters or to codes of

ethics.

It must be pointed out how wide-ranging the term "academic ethics" really is. As

it stands, it applies to all those who are researching and/or teaching in higher education,

and perhaps even in other educational sectors. There are many ways in which a

6 Cynthia Estlund, Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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philosopher interested in academic ethics might proceed, and one way to narrow the field

of inquiry is to choose one context in which teaching takes place. This is the approach I

take. My focus is on philosophers, more particularly on philosophers who are teaching,

and even more particularly on philosophers who are teaching ethics. This is still a broad

field. There are many types of ethics courses taught by philosophers, and in many

contexts, such as philosophy departments and professional schools. The conclusions I

draw from my analysis will have broader implications.

However, ethics courses are particularly interesting because their content is

intimately connected to students' and teachers' conceptions of the good life, and to their

conceptions of self. There are also a great many ethics courses being taught not only in

philosophy departments but in many relatively new contexts such as professional schools.

Finally, as I discussed in the previous chapter, there exist many varied expectations for

what an ethics course should achieve. All of these factors make the ethics course

particularly worthy of careful consideration.

In this chapter, then, I consider academic ethics in the context of the ethics

classroom. I first reject two views. I reject the conception of academic ethics mentioned

above: the "code of ethics" approach. Such an approach forbids any action which

violates the rules (such as harassment or sex with students), but permits any other action.

The second view I reject combines the "code of ethics" with just one general role

obligation: that teaching practices reflect carefully considered goals, or in other words,

that a teacher always acts in a way that promotes teaching goals. I argue that neither

approach is rich enough to engage the difficult questions that arise in teaching ethics.

These questions must be addressed by reference to other moral factors.

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Once I have made this argument, in the second half of the chapter I will consider

frameworks for academic ethics. This requires considering which moral conceptions are

appropriate for the teaching context and which enable fruitful deliberation. I will outline

several possibilities and discuss their shortcomings. In the next chapter, I will defend my

own view in contrast to the others. I will claim that an account of well-being, specifically

a capabilities account of well-being, is the most promising fit.

5.1. The Need for a Richer Account

It is easy to see that the code of ethics approach is inadequate to the moral

complexities of teaching. Good teachers do more than simply obey the rules: they are

careful and reflective about their practices on a deeper level. This leaves the second

approach I suggested: the idea that good teaching means acting on the basis of carefully

considered goals. As I have defined this approach, the two general role obligations of

teachers are, first, that they not violate the code of ethics, and second, that they are

careful about choosing their goals and acting on them. Now, by "careful," in this context,

I do not mean that teachers choose morally acceptable goals. If this is what the word

means, then this is the beginning of a rich account of teaching ethics, the sort I am

looking for. Here I am describing something quite different, and so morality cannot enter

the picture aside from the moral injunction to be careful about goals. No, what "careful"

means in this context is that teachers do not simply teach on a whim, that they choose

their goals based on good reasons, and that they act on the basis of those goals.

In other words, on this approach, good teaching practice looks like this: the

teacher respects the rules, and deliberates carefully about his or her practices. He or she

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thinks well about what his or her goals should be - perhaps settling on, e.g., "to enable

students to read well" because he or she sees that as a valuable skill at the university

level. Then, he or she thinks hard about which strategies would best achieve this, and

implements them. Would a course with mostly tests be more effective, or a course with

mostly writing? Which philosophers should come first? The questions about means are

entirely practical: they are addressed by reference to experience and to facts about

students and the classroom, not by reference to moral principles or rules.

Teachers operating in this way are using practical reasoning almost exclusively:

they are not asking themselves a lot of moral questions, since the moral injunctions (aside

from the injunction to teach carefully) concern acts that are not seriously considered by

good teachers. Good teachers do not ask themselves whether they ought to harass their

students until they learn, or whether beating their students would be a good way to teach

them Kant. They are not guilty of a lack of carefulness, nor do they deliberately harm

their students. What they are missing, however, is one feature of what reasoning about

teaching practices should look like. In other words, they are failing to recognize

normative questions that arise from their practices, and normative factors that should

influence their decisions.

In other words, teachers operating in this second approach to teaching ethics are,

if they succeed in their teaching, good teachers. However, their decision-making about

teaching could be enriched by a consideration of moral factors as well as practical ones.

In what follows, I will show this to be the case. In other words, I will argue that purely

practical reasoning about goals leaves important normative considerations unaddressed.

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Practical reasoning about teaching, in this context, takes place on two levels: at

the level of goal-setting, and at the level of means-end reasoning. Means-end reasoning

means deliberating about which means best promote one's teaching goals, and is almost

entirely based on teaching experience and knowledge about one's students. Reasoning

about goals is more difficult. It is not clearly like means-end reasoning, because the

question concerns choosing one's ends. In what follows I will consider some possibilities

for how teachers might reason about their teaching goals on a purely practical level.

Here is the first possibility: an appeal to the profession of philosophy itself and to

the idea of what it means to teach philosophy. In other words, perhaps there are certain

goals that are presupposed by the concept of philosophy that philosophers share (or at

least, that most philosophers share to a certain degree). Let us say that it is generally

agreed upon that philosophy involves seeking after truth through the consideration of

arguments. This is, for the vast majority of philosophers, what it means to do philosophy.

This means that goals in teaching philosophy could derive from this general conception.

One's general goal as a teacher is thus to teach students philosophy, and what that means

is to teach students how to seek after truth through the consideration of arguments. Of

course, this can be modified given the subject matter at hand: in an epistemology course;

students learn how to seek after the truth regarding knowledge, and so on.

However, even in that simple formulation, a word has slipped in, and it is not

clear whether it should be there or not. I could have written "to teach students to seek

after truth through the consideration of arguments," rather than introducing the "how."

The presence or lack of "how" signifies the difference between teaching a capacity for

doing philosophy and teaching students to do philosophy, and thus significantly changes

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what a teacher's goals are. A teacher whose goal is to teach students "how" achieves that

goal if the students leave the course with developed philosophical skills; a teacher whose

goal is to teach students "to do philosophy" only achieves that goal if the students utilize

those skills. The first goal involves giving students the skills they need should they

choose to use them; the second involves taking responsibility for students' behaviour.

This preliminary analysis shows that even this attempt at non-normative reasoning

about teaching goals runs into a normative question right at the beginning: should

philosophy teachers take responsibility for whether or not their students use their

philosophical skills, or not? This question hits harder if we ask whether or not a teacher

should take responsibility for the way students use their philosophical skills. One can

imagine a student who learns how to argue in his or her philosophy course, and then uses

those skills to further the interests of a racist group in the public square. Whether that

student's teacher should be held accountable is a moral question. Deriving teaching goals

from the concept of philosophy itself thus runs into moral questions right from the

beginning.

It also runs into the problem of being overly general. Whether or not the "how" is

included, in the context of ethics what the formula produces is something like: an ethics

course should teach students (how) to seek after the truth about ethics (or perhaps "ethical

truth") through argument. This immediately raises questions regarding the meaning of

"the truth about ethics" or "ethical truth." Philosophers have strong disagreements about

what truth is, what moral truth is, and whether objective or absolute truth in ethics is

possible. At this level of generality, this goal cannot inform particular practices in ethics

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teaching. If the agreed-upon "truth about ethics" has little content, it is not clear how

teachers can use it as a goal.

This conception of philosophy teaching goals also appears at first glance to

exclude some of the possible goals listed in the previous chapter, such as "increasing

moral sensitivity" or "stimulating the moral imagination." They do not obviously fit into

the picture of teaching students (how) to seek out the truth through argument. Perhaps,

though, they could be included as a necessary condition for truth-seeking or for arguing

well. It would be reasonable to argue, for example, that moral sensitivity and

imagination are needed in order to argue well in the context of ethics, or in order to be

more likely to find the truth. The trouble here is that this way of setting things out does

not necessarily reflect the attitudes of those actually taking these as goals. In other

words, it is probable that many of those who think moral sensitivity is important think it

important regardless of whether it makes students better at arguing or not, or better at

discovering truth or not.

On the line of reasoning I am following, however, all other goals must be means

to seeking out the truth through argument. This is at odds with current practices, for

aside from moral sensitivity and imagination, there is the idea of the importance of

history. Many philosophers teach the classic works of philosophy as important in

themselves, either as a matter of personal improvement or as a matter of cultural literacy.

For example, many (probably most) philosophers take great pains to ensure that students

remember not just what the categorical imperative is, but whose name it is associated

with. These teachers aim at teaching not only arguments, but also about the great

thinkers in the philosophical tradition. Not everyone does, and of course this is a vexed

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issue, especially in first year courses. It arises whenever someone asks whether an

introductory course should be a "problems" course or a "history" course. Again, one

could understand learning about history as a means to an end. However, those who think

history is important, like those who think moral sensitivity is important, often think it is

important regardless of whether it makes students better at arguing or not, or better at

discovering truth or not.

What this analysis shows is that deriving teaching goals from the general

conception of philosophy as seeking truth through argument ends up devaluing many

goals philosophers set for themselves. Two options emerge from this. Either all goals

are subsumed to the one ultimate goal, or other goals are allowed in that are not a means

to that goal. The first option denies the convictions of those who take those other goals

(sensitivity, imagination, cultural literacy) to be important regardless of their contribution

to finding out the truth about philosophy in general, and ethics in particular. The second

option means abandoning the project of deriving all teaching goals from this general

conception of philosophy. In other words, if this second option is taken, then one is

forced to appeal to considerations other than the concept of philosophy itself, and then

will find oneself back at the beginning: trying to figure out which considerations should

be relevant in determining teaching goals.

There is a possible way out. Perhaps what has gone wrong is that the definition of

philosophy with which I began (seeking out the truth through the consideration of

arguments) is too narrow. Perhaps those other goals (sensitivity and so on) reflect a

broader conception of philosophy on the part of teachers. In other words, perhaps those

philosophers who take moral sensitivity as a goal see good philosophy at least in the

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realm of ethics as consisting (in part) of moral sensitivity. To be a good philosopher on

this view is to be morally sensitive, because only when a person is morally sensitive can

he or she have reasonable views about morality. This attempt to broaden my definition of

philosophy can also be seen in the context of the importance of history: many of those

who take history as important in teaching do so because they see the study of history as

part of what philosophy is.

Taking this way out will mean adding to the original definition of philosophy that

I proposed, or at least making it more inclusive. The trouble here is figuring out what

this new definition should look like. It should be pretty obvious that it will be impossible

to get the majority of philosophers to agree to a definition that goes beyond the very

general one I proposed. What has emerged in the consideration of issues such as the

history of philosophy is that even the definition I proposed may not be general enough to

generate broad agreement. If teaching goals are to be derived from a conception of

philosophy, then some conception of philosophy will need to be generated, and it will

need to be broadly acceptable to philosophers. What my analysis has suggested,

however, is that any conception that is specific enough to generate teaching goals will be

too specific to garner broad agreement.

Here is what someone might say to all of this: we can base our goals on a

conception of what philosophy is, and such a conception will be specific enough if each

of us uses our own conception. So long as our own conception is based on good reasons,

there is nothing wrong with each of us generating our own teaching goals based on our

own conception of philosophy. This is possibly how many teachers go about setting their

goals, anyway. So what's wrong with that picture?

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There are two problems with it. The first is that it leaves the question unanswered

that I posed at the very beginning of this analysis: whether a teacher is responsible for

ways in which students use their learning. That question cannot be answered without

regard to moral factors, for it is a moral question. The second is that it makes teaching

into an individualistic exercise. The line of reasoning I am examining in this section

presupposes that the courses we teach are fixed: that is, all a teacher has to do is look at

the course title (Ethics!) and determine what his or her goals should be. This ignores the

fact that we as philosophers are also in the business of determining what courses should

be taught, and in which contexts. Why choose to teach any particular course? It cannot

just be because the subject matter exists, and the more knowledge a person has, the better.

This approach does not give us a basis for collectively deciding, as teaching departments,

what parts of philosophy should be taught to which students and in which contexts. In

other words, even if an individual's conception may furnish everything he or she needs to

make a decision about his or her own teaching goals, it cannot provide a shared

background against which a department can deliberate. Decisions about courses will

have to either be compromises between differing camps, or based on something other

than each individual's conception of what philosophy is.

Many of these issues are in the realm of metaphilosophy, which is full of difficult

problems that I do not propose to resolve here. My point in raising these issues is to

show that deliberating about what philosophy "is" does not cover enough ground in

determining what one's teaching goals should be. It does not answer why a teacher

should teach philosophy to particular students, it does not address how goals should differ

in differing contexts, and with different students. It cannot differentiate between teaching

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philosophy to first-year students taking philosophy as an elective, and fourth year

students taking an honours seminar. In other words, trying to figure out teaching goals

requires considering what we are trying to do to particular students. We cannot answer

this by referring to a conception of philosophy.

What this analysis shows is that a teacher's conception of philosophy alone

cannot do all of the work when it comes to determining teaching goals. But, perhaps

there is another source of teaching goals that is purely practical, and that is a conception

of what a university education ought to achieve, in general.

It must be noted right away that the "ought" in this sentence immediately

introduces a normative consideration. However, what is going on here is that the

normativity applies to the general purpose of a university, and teachers use practical

reason to think about how they might contribute to that. In other words, a teacher's

reasoning about teaching goals is means-end reasoning, because he or she is reasoning

about how promoting teaching goals in a particular course could further the general ends

that the university has set for itself.

Determining what ends universities set for themselves is rather difficult. There is

much disagreement about what the purpose of a university education is. For parents of

college students, a university degree is often most valuable as a ticket to a promising

future, career-wise. For academics, this is not necessarily the most valuable outcome of a

university education, and especially for those in the liberal arts, it may seem wrong­

headed to consider degrees in terms of jobs rather than in terms of knowledge for its own

sake. There is certainly not room here to canvass all of the disagreements regarding the

scope and purpose of higher education. A teacher could reason through these

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disagreements for him or herself and determine what he or she believes the purposes of a

university should be, and then tailor his or her teaching goals appropriately. The trouble

that arises here is that doing so will require that he or she appeal to something or other in

order to determine what the purpose of a university should be. If that "something or

other" is normative, then this approach fails in explaining how teachers could limit their

reasoning to practical concerns. If it is not normative, then a new layer of complication

has been introduced, for now it must be determined what that "something or other" is.

One possible way to think about university goals in general is to consider what

universities are expected to do, policy wise. There is a movement in the United States

and in the United Kingdom toward independent evaluation of universities. Standards are

being set by external bodies (accrediting agencies and governmental commissions) and

tests are being devised to see if universities are meeting those standards. In the United

States, there are assessment programs at various levels of government. These programs

are intended to assess student learning over the course of their university career, in order

to assess what kind of a job the university is doing. These assessments take the form of

interviews, or marking student essays, usually by committee. The idea is that faculty

reports of their own teaching success are not enough to judge whether students are

learning or not, and some kind of objective tool must be employed. Many academics are

Q

struggling against such practices, which they see as intrusive and a waste of time.

7 Robert Ennis has written a critical summary of one of the major assessment programs in the United States. The "Spellings Commission" has urged critical-thinking testing for all college students. Ennis explains how this works and how teachers ought to respond to it. Robert H. Ennis, "Nationwide Testing of Critical Thinking for Higher Education: Vigilance Required," Teaching Philosophy 3\, no. 1 (2008). 81 have gained this knowledge through many conversations with teachers in colleges and universities in the United States. A quick internet search reveals how widespread these practices are.

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What academics are forced to do in an institution that does assessment is to

consider at which student outcomes they are aiming. Assessment programs make lists of

characteristics that university students should have by the time they graduate, and assess

student learning based on these criteria. For example, the capacity for critical thought

might be one such outcome. Particular courses are then evaluated by their ability to

contribute to the outcomes. Philosophy courses are often understood to contribute to

critical thinking in particular.

The United Kingdom's assessment system is centralized in the Quality Assurance

Agency for Higher Education (QAA).9 This agency is an independent body whose

mission is "to safeguard the public interest in sound standards of higher education

qualifications and to inform and encourage continuous improvement in the management

of the quality of higher education."10 In other words, they are evaluating universities on

behalf of the public. Many academics in the United Kingdom resent this intrusion as

the QAA evaluates not only teaching but research.

As far as teaching is concerned, universities are evaluated by student outcomes,

just as in the assessment projects in the United States. Essentially, the QAA defines what

it means to be a graduate, or in other words, what those who receive an honours

bachelor's degree ought to be able to do. According to the QAA, a graduate of any

discipline should be able to "deploy techniques of enquiry; comment on current research;

9 http://www.qaa.ac.uk/ http://www.qaa.ac.uk/aboutus/default.asp

11 Again, this was discovered through personal interactions with philosophers in the United Kingdom.

10

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appreciate uncertainty, ambiguity and the limits of knowledge; manage their own

learning; evaluate critically; and solve problems.12

I have described these assessment programs to suggest one source for philosophy

teaching goals that is not based on moral deliberation. Philosophy teachers could look at

what the university experience is supposed to achieve for students, and tailor their goals

appropriately. The reasoning a philosopher does thus is means-end at both levels: he or

she chooses which goals to pursue based on how well they contribute to the overall

university outcomes, and chooses which practices based on how well they contribute to

those goals. It might also be possible to bypass the middle step and base the choice of

one's teaching practices on their possible contribution to assessment outcomes.

This method, like basing one's decisions about teaching goals on the concept of

philosophy, does make much reasoning about teaching possible, especially when

combined with the practical reasoning abilities of an experienced teacher. The outcomes

themselves are reasonable. However, this scheme solves the practical reasoning problem

by adding another level of reasoning: the reasoning that has to take place on the part of

those who are deciding what the assessment goals should be. So, while a teacher, a

department, or even a university may be able to rely on the assessment criteria in order to

make teaching decisions, at some point someone will have to be reasoning based on

normative considerations. As well, concerns for academic freedom may conflict with

accepting such a scheme as valid. There is also the reasonable assumption that teachers

ought to be making at least some decisions about goals themselves, given that they are

12 The QAA standards as they are written in the official documents are rather complex. This summary comes from George MacDonald Ross, Making Them Think (University of Leeds Learning and Teaching Bulletin, 2008 [cited August 10th 2008]); available from http://www.lts.leeds.ac.uk/bulletin/issuel8/page5.php.

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uniquely placed to understand the needs of their classes, and that they have chosen

teaching as a profession and thus should have some say in what their professional goals

and standards are.

In this section I have surveyed two practical ways in which one might reason

about teaching goals, and I have shown that these methods do not provide enough

information for deciding which goals to pursue. Furthermore, these approaches leave

important questions unanswered. These questions, aside from those discussed above, are

those I raised in the previous chapter. These questions are normative, not practical, and

are not covered by the scope of a code of ethics. For these reasons, they are left

unanswered by the frameworks I have been considering.

• Should ethics teachers aim at moral improvement in their students? If so,

what would moral improvement consist in, and what is its relationship to

improvement in moral reasoning?

• Should teachers be neutral with regard to their own moral, political and

religious views, or does good teaching require advocacy or at least

disclosure of one's beliefs? If teachers should be neutral, what should that

look like, and is it even possible?

• How should ethics teachers respond to religious fundamentalism, and to

student relativism? Given that these are both strong forces in the

classroom, and that they concern moral beliefs, how should philosophers

position themselves? Are there some forms of belief that must be

challenged or even deliberately undermined?

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• Generally, what should teaching goals be with regard to the students' own

moral, political and religious beliefs, that is, the beliefs with which they

entered the course?

These questions concern moral and political goals, and religious considerations.

Addressing them means considering issues such as what it means to be a good person,

whether university teachers have moral authority, what the relationship between morality

and religion is, and the ethics of belief. Questions of neutrality involve moral and

political ideals. The relationship between morality and reason is a deeply contested

question within normative moral theory and metaethics. The issues I have raised in the

foregoing chapters are not resolved by practical considerations alone, but concern deep

issues of the good life. In other words, the teacher I described above - the teacher who

abides by the code of ethics, and is careful about goal-setting - cannot answer these

questions without regard to moral factors.

The existence of these unanswered questions, as well as the problems I have

raised with purely practical reasoning about teaching goals, give good reason to reject the

view that a teacher can make all important teaching decisions using purely practical

reason within the bounds of a code of ethics. Non-moral considerations are not enough

for dealing with the difficult questions that arise for philosophers teaching ethics. In

order for a teacher to be able to reason fruitfully about teaching decisions, moral factors

must be considered. This moral reasoning must go beyond determining whether or not

one is violating the code of ethics.

Many philosophers talking about teaching practices have appealed to moral

factors in their arguments. However, these moral factors are usually mixed in with

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practical considerations, and the moral claims made are often not defended. What I will

do in the second half of this chapter is to look for a framework that will enable

philosophers teaching ethics to appeal to moral factors in their reasoning about teaching.

I will look at several possibilities and discuss their shortcomings. In the next chapter, I

will defend my own framework. It is not the only plausible way to think about the ethics

of teaching, but I will give reasons to prefer it over a few alternatives.

5.2. Possible Accounts of Teaching Ethics

In this section I will lay out several alternative frameworks for teaching ethics and

show some of their weaknesses. This analysis will reveal those characteristics that a

preferable framework should possess. In keeping with the conclusions of 5.1., what a

good account of teaching ethics will need to do is to help with deliberation about goals, to

take into account the characteristics of the ethics classroom discussed in the previous

chapter, and to address the tough moral questions I have raised in chapters one through

four. These requirements will be discussed in further detail in the next chapter.

Negative Obligations

The first framework that should spring to mind emerges from my rejection of the

"code of ethics" approach. Perhaps what was wrong with the code of ethics approach

was that it was too narrow, and what needs to be in its place is a fuller account of

Brook Sadler's insightful article on student participation is a good example of this sort of mixed reasoning. Brook J. Sadler, "How Important is Student Participation in Teaching Philosophy?," Teaching Philosophy 27, no. 3 (2004).

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negative obligations. In other words, a richer account of teaching ethics can be based

solely on the idea of negative obligations so long as those obligations are not too narrow.

The obvious way to think about this is to speak of autonomy, for the idea of

respect for autonomy is closely tied to the idea of negative obligations. Autonomy can be

roughly defined as the capacity for self-governance, and has historically been the central

concept of Kantian moral philosophers. To violate a person's autonomy is to undermine

that person's ability to govern him or herself. One classic Kantian case of violating a

person's autonomy is to tell that person a lie, since in that case one is making it

impossible for that person to make an informed choice. Respect for autonomy is often

contrasted with paternalism, where one person makes choices for another person in an

effort to do that person good. If I believe my friend is making a poor choice with regard

to who she is marrying, it is a violation of her autonomy if I try to prevent her from acting

as she chooses. Attempting to convince her to change her mind is one thing; forcibly

preventing her from showing up at the wedding is another.

Thus one could think of a teacher's moral obligations as being entirely negative,

and as stemming from the obligation not to violate his or her students' autonomy. On

this view teachers should not trick their students, or lie to them, or interfere with their

self-governance in any way.

This is not the place for a full-scale analysis of deontological moral theories.

However, there is good reason to reject a purely negative view of moral obligation in the

context being considered here. I have argued above that the fuller account of teaching

ethics I am seeking must enable decision-making about teaching practices and goals, and

must address the questions I listed above. A purely negative approach cannot enable

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productive deliberation about teaching goals. It can say which practices are off-limits,

and which goals are off-limits. For example, one's goal cannot be to brainwash one's

students, for that violates their autonomy. However, if a person is deciding between two

competing goals, neither of which involves violating his or her negative duties, this

approach cannot give any moral weight to one over the other. To put this another way,

there are no moral factors to appeal to when deciding between two goals, aside from

whether or not the goal involves violating a student's autonomy.

An example will help, here. As discussed above, one of the most debated issues

in teaching philosophy, particularly in first-year courses, is the "history versus issues"

approach to teaching. Some disagree on the basis of whether historical or contemporary

works are more conducive to getting students to think about the "issues." The deep

disagreement, however, is not about means but about ends. It is about what counts as

valuable in a philosophy course, and indeed, in philosophy itself. Essentially, the

disagreement comes down to whether or not it is valuable for students to learn the history

of philosophy, and by extension, whether or not the history of philosophy itself is

valuable to philosophers.

A teacher trying to decide for him or herself whether or not history is valuable

cannot appeal to a conception of negative moral obligations. A teacher's conception of

what philosophy is can provide an answer as to whether history is valuable to philosophy

generally or at least to his or her own research. However, it cannot give an answer as to

whether history should be taught in philosophy courses, and especially not in particular

contexts, as I have argued above.

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In essence, the problem with an entirely negative approach is that it does not give

an answer to questions about what teachers ought to do to their students, only what they

should not do. The negative approach leaves the teacher with a list of morally acceptable

practices and goals from which to choose, but gives no reason to choose one over the

other.

Now some may believe that this is a good thing. After all, teachers should be

allowed to make decisions for their own courses and in their own contexts. And, perhaps

much deliberation about teaching should be practical rather than moral. However, with

regard to the former concern, extending the reach of moral obligation from negative

duties to positive ones does not prevent individual teachers from deliberating about what

they should do, and taking into account the intricacies of their contexts. As for the latter

concern, as I have argued, it makes perfect sense for much of a teacher's deliberation

about teaching to be practical. Once a teacher has goals in mind, even very broad goals,

determining which practices will best achieve those in a given context can be an entirely

practical enterprise, within the bounds of moral constraints. However, deciding about

what those goals will be cannot be an entirely practical matter, as I have argued above.

Moral factors are needed, and if those factors take the form of negative constraints alone,

there is still much to choose from. Teaching the history of philosophy and learning

contemporary philosophy are both morally permissible in that neither violates students'

autonomy. How should teachers decide between them? What good is one trying to

achieve by teaching them?

I do not want to discount the negative view completely. Certainly, it has good

potential for addressing many of the questions I posed above, to do with advocacy,

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neutrality, and so on. However, what is missing is an account of the good, or perhaps the

goods, of teaching. In making decisions about teaching goals one is deciding about

goods, and so a moral conception which defines the good, rather than just the bad, is a

natural fit. Therefore, in the rest of this chapter I will consider moral conceptions which

involve conceptions of the good.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an obvious choice with which to begin, since it has classically

been the moral theory with the most to say about the good. This is because for

utilitarianism, all questions about which actions are right and which are wrong reduce to

questions about which actions produce the most good overall. According to

utilitarianism, the good consists in pleasure. Moral decision-making involves

determining which actions promote the good and avoid the bad. Of course, all of these

conceptions have been given very deep treatment by philosophers, but that is

utilitarianism's general outline.

This conception, simply understood, would mean evaluating teaching decisions

based on their contribution to overall happiness. Given utilitarianism's broad scope,

"overall happiness" refers to the happiness of all those affected by a teacher's decisions,

not just his or her students. This means that if a given decision results in more pleasure

or happiness overall, it is the right thing to do, even if it results in pain for one's students.

This version is not very plausible. More sophisticated versions of utilitarianism propose

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that there are two levels to moral thinking. Two level-theories make a distinction

between the kind of deliberation that should precede action and the kind of deliberation

that is involved in normative judgments. One classic example of a two-level theory is

rule utilitarianism, which proposes that ordinary decisions should be a matter of

following a set of moral rules rather than trying to maximize the good. The idea behind

the two levels is that in general, people following those moral rules just is the way to get

the most good overall, rather than people deliberating about how to do the most good.

The overall good is still the end of moral action, but it is not achieved when each person

directly aims at it.

There are many variations on the idea of a two-level theory, and many of these

use the idea of two levels to account for "special obligations," such as a person's

obligations to friends and family members. When parents make decisions about how to

treat their children, they do not try to maximize the overall good, but to do good for their

own children. The idea underlying this is that if each parent cares for his or her children

well, that is more likely to bring about the most good than if each tries to care for all

children. This kind of idea could work in the classroom if the relationship between

teacher and student engenders special obligations to a teacher's students.

There is one major reason to think that utilitarianism in general is not the best

moral conception for our purposes here. Utilitarianism, even in its sophisticated forms,

would have teachers evaluating their teaching goals based on what is likely to lead to

happiness and pleasure. This is in one way very narrow, and in another way very broad.

14 This view was first proposed by Hare. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

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In its narrowness, it does not account well for many teaching goals. For example,

consider a teacher trying to decide whether or not the year-long introductory course he or

she is teaching should include a unit on predicate logic. The other readings in the course

do not require an understanding of predicate logic, and many of those in the course are

non-majors. The analysis of this decision will vary depending on which conception of

utilitarianism he or she chooses to employ. At its base, however, it is a decision about

what will lead to the most happiness. However, it is not easy to justify teaching predicate

logic, or the history of philosophy, or any other subject that does not immediately affect

the way students live, on the basis of happiness. This is clearest once it is admitted that a

teacher cannot just argue that teaching predicate logic will lead to more happiness than

not, but that it will lead to more happiness as opposed to teaching anything else that

teacher is in a position to teach. It is also not going to line up well with the way many

teachers think about the value of logic, history, and philosophy. This is because these are

generally seen as valuable in themselves, rather than as means to happiness.

I argued that one problem with an entirely negative account of teaching ethics is

that it gives teachers no way to decide between two goods. Utilitarianism resolves this by

positing that the only thing that is good is happiness (or pleasure). Anything else that is

valued is valued only as a means to that end. This reduces possible teaching goods such

as knowledge or moral improvement to means rather than ends, for only happiness is a

true end. This is what makes utilitarianism a narrow view of ethics.

Utilitarianism is also very broad in establishing happiness as the end of action. If

a teacher's ultimate teaching goal is his or her students' happiness, then the permissible

range of action and goals can be quite wide. Since so many things contribute to

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happiness, such as health, wealth, and friendship, then when deciding what to do in

teaching, a teacher's goals could be to improve his or her students' physical health or

their ability to make friends.

Now, one way to respond to this apparent problem is to refer back to the idea of

two levels, and argue that happiness is best obtained overall when those in particular

roles stick to the tasks prescribed by those roles: philosophy teachers should teach

philosophy, not health or life skills. Just as parents should concern themselves with their

own children, so philosophers (and indeed any other university professor) should concern

themselves with their own sphere rather than with their students' happiness in general.

This may well be a good way to understand the role of philosophers. However,

what this does is to make it impossible for philosophers to use utilitarian thinking in their

deliberation about goals, for happiness has been consigned to the second level rather than

to the level of individual deliberation. In other words, this version of utilitarianism would

say that philosophers should not concern themselves with student happiness but with

teaching their material well, and that will in turn lead to the most student happiness

overall. The problem here is that this does not provide a moral framework for

philosophers to use when making teaching decisions. Utilitarianism thus suffers from the

same drawback as deontology does in this context: it does not enable reasoning about

teaching goals.

These considerations are good reasons to believe that utilitarianism is not the

optimal way of thinking about teaching ethics. This means that what is needed to avoid

the problems of both a negative theory of ethics and a utilitarian theory is a different

account of the good. The next section will explore one possible account.

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Knowledge as the Good of Teaching

I argued in the previous sections that what is needed in thinking about the ethics

of teaching is an account of the goods of teaching. That, beyond a list of actions or goals

which are prohibited, is what will allow teachers to deliberate about which goals they

should pursue in teaching ethics courses. I began by considering happiness or pleasure

rather than the more obvious candidate for the good of teaching, which is knowledge.

I call student knowledge a more obvious candidate for the good of teaching

because this is the way so much of teaching and learning is constructed. Most exams test

for student knowledge, and most course goals (as represented on syllabi) consist of

claims about what kinds of knowledge a student will gain. What that knowledge looks

like will depend upon a teacher's field of study, but in general the idea is that the student

will gain knowledge, either of facts or practical knowledge of skills. On this view of

teaching, teaching goals should either consist of student knowledge or be a means to

student knowledge.

There is no space here to canvass the many epistemological issues that arise for

such a conception: questions regarding what knowledge is, what counts as knowledge,

how knowledge can be transmitted, and so on. The conceptual issue that is most relevant

to our purposes here is that, as in the case of happiness, if there is only one teaching good

then all other goals and practices are means to that end. Choosing this moral conception

will mean that the only thing that counts, in the end, is whether or not students have

gained knowledge. Of course, there are moral constraints on how one may teach, which

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come from a basic code of ethics or something of the sort, but aside from that teachers are

only ever aiming at one thing: student knowledge.

Some may find this to be a virtue of this conception. Others, however, who value

other things aside from knowledge, such as insight, imagination, or moral sensitivity, will

find that these can only be means to an end. One way around this would be to stretch the

definition of knowledge so that it encompasses these things, but that would be stretching

it quite far, and it would be difficult for it still to count as one good rather than many.

Of course, it might be said that the mere fact that this conception will not line up

with the views of many teachers is not a good enough reason in itself to reject it. Indeed, I

have not given a knock-down argument for rejecting any of these views, but merely what

I have argued to be negative implications of following them. The major negative

implication of this view is that it contradicts the deeply held convictions of many

philosophy teachers that knowledge is not the only good of teaching. This points to the

need for a pluralistic account of teaching goods. In the next chapter I will develop such

an account, but before doing so I turn to the one moral theory that has been overlooked so

far: virtue ethics.

Virtue Ethics

In arguing for a broader conception of teaching ethics I am making a similar

argument to that which is made by many virtue ethicists: that rule-based approaches do

not take into account all of the moral life. Perhaps a good account of teaching ethics can

come out of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, with its focus on character and moral

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development, seems well suited to the context of education, especially moral education.

It does not focus on just one good, but on a good life in general.

I have argued throughout this chapter that what is needed in teaching ethics is an

account that enables reasoning about teaching goals. On a virtue ethics approach, a

teacher could ask him or herself whether he or she is being virtuous in the way in which

he or she is acting. Is a particular teaching goal the kind of goal that a virtuous person

would perform? Does it exhibit kindness, justice, and so on? The trouble here is that

these considerations do not translate in a straightforward way into answers to difficult

questions about teaching goals. This is partially because virtue ethics in general does not

specify which virtues should take priority for teachers in particular. Kindness and justice

may come into conflict, and in the context of teaching such a conflict will most likely be

resolved in a different way than it would in a personal context. Justice may be more

important than kindness in the teaching context but not in the context of friendship, for

example.

That said, the possibility exists that an account of teaching ethics could be

developed by virtue ethicists. It is not in principle impossible to resolve the questions I

have raised here. I argue in favour of the account I propose in the final chapter because it

comes with a conception of the good that enables reasoning about teaching goals in a

straightforward way.

Another way in which virtue ethics might enable reasoning about teaching is to

focus on the virtues in students. A teacher could ask of a particular teaching goal

whether it will contribute to or undermine students' virtue. This is, of course, what

concerned Plato: will expecting people to question their moral beliefs lead to a loss in

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virtue? This second approach assumes that teachers are in some way responsible for their

students' moral lives, either positively as contributors to their moral improvement, or

simply negatively as those who should not undermine moral improvement. In this way it

is subject to the same sorts of difficult issues that arose in the consideration of Locke,

Rousseau, Dewey and Aquinas: namely that basing teaching decisions on a conception of

virtue runs into trouble if one wants to emphasize autonomy. It is a consequentialist

approach, similar in some ways to the approach I propose in the next chapter. Where my

account is preferable is that it can respond to those difficult issues by taking pluralism

into account, as I shall argue.

5.3. What is Missing from These Accounts?

In this section I have laid out several possibilities for a conception of teaching

ethics. I argued earlier that the three characteristics that a good conception must possess

are: it must take into account the characteristics of the ethics classroom that I raised in

previous chapters, it must be able to address the questions I raised in the previous

chapters, and it must enable fruitful reasoning about teaching goals. Where these

accounts are flawed is either in their inability to adjudicate between competing goals in

teaching, and also in their focus on one good rather than a plurality of goods. In the next

chapter I will defend my own proposal for an ethics of teaching, and I will argue that

because it involves a plurality of goods, it is best suited for the context of the

undergraduate philosophy classroom.

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CHAPTER 6: THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH TO WELL-BEING

In the previous chapter I argued that what is needed in academic ethics is a richer

account of the ethics of teaching. In this chapter I propose and defend such an account.

Before I do that, however, I will lay out the general characteristics of a good account of

the ethics of teaching as they have arisen in the chapters above. Then, I will outline my

development of the capabilities approach for the teaching context, and show how it can

meet the challenges I set for it.

6.1. Desirable Characteristics of an Account of Teaching Ethics

I have brought many issues to light in previous chapters with regard to morality,

critical thinking, and the environments in which ethics is taught. In this section I will lay

out the three desirable characteristics of an account of teaching ethics that have emerged

from that analysis.

Enabling Reasoning about Goals

The first characteristic of a desirable account of teaching ethics is that it can

enable fruitful reasoning about teaching goals. This was the major shortcoming of the

accounts considered in the previous chapter. Because they either focused on only one

good, or because they were unable to adjudicate between goods, they failed to make

possible the kind of reasoning that is necessary when making teaching decisions. As I

argued at length, since even practical decisions in teaching must refer to goals, teachers

must be able to reason about goals in order to teach well. This means that an account of

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the goods of teaching is needed. As well, as I argued, such an account must involve a

plurality of goods.

Addressing Tough Moral Questions

In the previous chapters I outlined a series of difficult moral questions that arise in

the context of teaching ethics. In short form, these questions are: 1) Should ethics

teachers aim at moral improvement in their students? 2) Should teachers be neutral with

regard to their own moral, political and religious views, or does good teaching require

advocacy or at least disclosure of one's beliefs? 3) Should teachers try to undermine

student relativism and/or student fundamentalism? 4) Are teachers responsible for the

use to which students put the skills they have learned? 5) Should teachers try to change

their students' moral, political, and religious beliefs? As argued earlier, these questions

concern moral, political and religious considerations and are thus best addressed by

appeal to normative factors. A good account of the ethics of teaching will be able to

address these questions.

Taking Account of Situational Factors

In chapter four I laid out several important situational factors, or morally salient

features, of the undergraduate ethics classroom. These were, in brief: the disagreements

between philosophers about teaching goals for ethics courses, the existence of student

relativism in various forms, the influence of religious fundamentalism, and the

widespread fact of pluralism. These features, I argued, make teaching ethics a

complicated matter, since so much of what is discussed in ethics courses is subject to

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deep disagreement. Topics in ethics are emotionally, politically, and religiously charged,

perhaps more so than in most university courses.

My analysis of the morally salient features of environments in which ethics is

taught did not begin there, however, but began with my analysis of Plato's thought, and

in particular his worry that teaching young people to think critically about their moral

beliefs can run the risk of enabling them to dismantle their own belief systems in a

destructive way. His worry raises the possibility that there could be something harmful

about exposing a young person to dialectical questioning. Given that university students

are young and inexperienced (and sometimes, as Socrates' imitators were, privileged and

arrogant), philosophers may be engaging in risky behaviour when they give students tools

they can use to dismantle their belief systems or the belief systems of others.

This worry was not limited to Plato, but recurred in Locke's and Rousseau's

rejection of disputations and in several contemporary philosophers' writings about

teaching. The worry is that given the superior reasoning ability of teachers, and the

relative inexperience of students, there is a possibility that in the face of dialectical

questioning or even of studying the works of philosophers, students will feel unable to

find good enough reasons to hold on to their moral beliefs. Many university students,

especially first-year students, have never before been asked to think critically about their

most cherished beliefs. They have not been prepared for the kinds of sceptical assaults

they will encounter in some of the authors they are expected to read, and for the high

standards of justification they are expected to adhere to in writing papers and in

defending their opinion. Related to this is the worry often expressed by those who defend

advocacy, that students will see so many different belief systems defended and then

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undermined, and so will come to believe that no rational beliefs are possible in the field

of ethics. When students are taught to understand each philosophical system (Aristotle,

then Kant, then Mill and so on) and then to consider objections and move on to the next

system, the worry goes, they will develop scepticism about the ability of reason to get

them to truth, and even scepticism about truth itself. Thus one of the morally salient

features of the ethics classroom is the relative inexperience of students and the possible

fragility of their convictions.

In the works of Locke and Rousseau, a related issue emerged, and that was the

tension that existed for them between educating for virtue and educating for rationality.

Locke argued that educating for virtue meant instilling moral principles in children that

they will never question. These principles, according to Locke, will be instilled by their

parents, who will be seen as absolute moral authorities through the course of the young

person's life. Locke's insistence on the importance of intellectual autonomy, which

involves taking no belief as certain and investigating claims for oneself, is in tension with

this approach. As it was for Plato, Locke believed that a good moral character could only

be ensured if the young person did not have the opportunity to question his or her deeply

held moral principles. Though he is never explicit about it, this is an implicit rejection of

intellectual autonomy in the realm of morality.

Rousseau's views involved a similar tension. For Rousseau, the main aim of

education is to achieve happiness by keeping as close to nature as possible. Rousseau's

pupil Emile is to be kept away from the corrupting influence of society until his character

is almost fully formed. Like Locke, Rousseau places at the centre of the young person's

education the importance of learning to think for himself. However, as I argued in my

analysis of Rousseau, given the denouement of the book, it is clear that Emile's moral

education does not produce a virtuous and autonomous adult. While he is taught to

question all authority, he is perpetually submissive to his tutor's authority. Similarly to

Locke's, Rousseau's educational scheme, while it aims at both virtue and reason, fails to

achieve either goal.

The question to ask of this is how these issues in the writings of Locke and

Rousseau are relevant to the contemporary context. After all, what I have argued for is

not problems in the practical working-out of their views, but conceptual contradictions in

the views themselves. While it may be tempting to dismiss their views, in an effort to

learn from the mistakes of other philosophers, it is worth looking at what sorts of factors

brought about these contradictions, and whether or not these factors are an issue for those

teaching today.

At bottom what is at issue with both Locke and Rousseau is an inability to see a

way in which moral education could take place without indoctrination or deference to

authority. As well, neither is able to see how a young person, having been educated in

this fashion, could become a morally autonomous adult. This difficulty is not easy to

solve, and is relevant to the present day, because moral education often takes this type of

form. There have, of course, been many new approaches to moral education that have

arisen in the past few decades, but when one looks at how individual children are

educated, especially, though not exclusively, in religious contexts, many are still being

educated by means of appeals to authority. This means that a difficult issue for an ethics

teacher is to determine whether their role is to help such young people to reach moral

autonomy, and if so, what they can do to help them to do this. These questions are

related to the question about goals in ethics classrooms, but arise specifically from the

existence of students who have been educated in broadly similar ways to Locke's

program of indoctrination and Rousseau's program of deference to another's moral

authority - in Emile's case, his tutor. These issues are also related to issues of religious

fundamentalism, for they concern similar methods of education in the pre-university

years.

Morally salient features that are relevant to today's classroom arise in Dewey's

work as well. As I argued in chapter three, Dewey's educational goals involve teaching

students to take a practical view of all inquiry, and especially of moral inquiry.

Reflective thinking begins with doubt, and in this context it begins with doubt about a

particular social practice. One central claim that Dewey made with regard to teaching

reflective or critical thinking is that skills should not be taught without dispositions to

accompany them.' In other words, teaching critical thinking does not consist merely of

inculcating particular skills, but of inculcating particular attitudes toward those skills.

For those who teach critical thinking, should a teaching goal be to influence and change

their students' dispositions towards thinking, such as pushing students to be more open-

minded or individualistic? If so, which dispositions are to be inculcated?

These questions are difficult because of two related issues in the context of

teaching: the plurality of views about what constitutes good thinking, and in particular

good thinking dispositions, and the fact that many of the thinking dispositions already

possessed by students are ones that teachers seek to change. Teachers often set

themselves the goal of teaching their students to be more open-minded, more critical, and

1 John Dewey, "How We Think," in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 135.

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so on. This means that the students in the classroom have been judged to have

dispositions that are not optimally good. These issues relate to the questions I posed

above regarding the responsibility of teachers for the actions of their students. In the

previous chapter I argued that there is an important distinction between teaching students

how to do philosophy and teaching students to do philosophy. This distinction appears

again here. Given that many students arrive at university with thinking dispositions that

their teachers may find to be less than optimal, what should teaching goals be with regard

to these dispositions? Are teachers responsible not only for teaching thinking skills, but

for teaching particular dispositions so that students will use those skills in particular

ways?

While Dewey and Aquinas and his followers do not have a lot in common, one

belief they share is a rejection of the individualism that is so central to Locke's and

Rousseau's views of reason and morality. Neither Dewey nor any of the Thomists value

intellectual and moral autonomy in the way that Locke and Rousseau try to do; at least

they do not believe that tradition and inherited social practices should be rejected for the

sake of autonomy. If such an approach can be justified, then the question remains what

role teachers play with regard to that tradition, and with regard to determining which

practices should be questioned and which should not.

The Thomists especially maintain that learning morality involves learning moral

habits in a particular tradition, and then coming to learn how to reason about morality

once one has good moral habits. The implication of this is that for a thoroughgoing

Thomist it would only make sense for a student to study ethics at the undergraduate level

if that student has had a good moral education already, otherwise his or her judgment will

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be clouded by vice. The other way a Thomist might reason is that one of the goals of the

undergraduate classroom is to help those students who have not had a good moral

education to change their habits so that they might learn to reason truly. This is very

much the same issue as whether ethics courses should aim at student moral improvement,

but does bring to light the fact that students in ethics classrooms may have vastly

different moral conceptions and behaviours depending on how their moral education was

carried out. For example, a person who has been encouraged to develop his or her moral

imagination throughout his or her childhood and adolescence may be better at moral

reasoning than someone who has not. This is a simple example, but the many

complexities involved in moral education and their interaction with a person's

environment and personality make for a classroom full of students with very different

abilities with regard to moral reasoning and sensitivity.

This raises the broader issue of the variability of students and teaching contexts.

To talk of "the undergraduate ethics classroom" is to talk of many different classrooms,

filled with many different students. The makeup of a given classroom will vary based on

region, on the type of university or college, on the type of course, and so on. An ethics

course could be a professional ethics course designed for professionals studying part-

time, a general ethics course designed as an elective, a philosophical ethics course

designed for philosophy majors, or some combination of these types of courses. Students

come from families rich and poor, religious and non-religious, urban and rural. A student

might be the first in his or her family to attend post-secondary education, might be

attending thanks to government grants, or might be from another country on a study

permit. A given student might have just barely made the admissions criteria, or may be at

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the top of the class. These situational factors are perhaps what make teaching well such a

difficult task.

One final situational factor that has been in the background in these chapters but

never discussed in detail is the fact of deep disagreement between philosophers who are

teaching. Philosophers studying morality disagree about just about everything having to

do with morality, at the level of metaethics, normative ethics and practical ethics. I have

already discussed the varying beliefs about morality, religion and politics in society at

large, but it should now be emphasized that it is possible that the disagreements between

philosophers are even deeper than those of their students, because philosophers teaching

ethics have spent more time and energy thinking about moral concepts, and have thus

developed more beliefs about them.

A good account of the ethics of teaching should take this pluralism into account; it

must allow for reasonable disagreement between teachers. A completely successful

account of the ethics of teaching would transcend the deep disagreements between

philosophers and allow those of very different persuasions to agree about the

fundamentals of obligations and responsibilities toward students. Such an account is

probably not possible, but in what follows I will show how the capabilities approach can

come close to this kind of success, with regard to the existence of disagreements, and

with regard to the rest of the morally salient characteristics and features I have outlined in

this section.

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6.2. The Capabilities Approach to Well-Being

Philosophers who write about well-being are concerned with one central question:

what makes a person's life go well? In other words, what ingredients are necessary and

sufficient for a person's life to be described as going well? The answers to these

questions make up the various theories of well-being that are on offer.

Philosophers have proposed several theories of well-being, of which four major

types have emerged. Utilitarian accounts postulate that an individual's well-being

consists of his or her happiness. Desire-fulfillment accounts explain well-being in terms

of the fulfillment of an individual's desires. These two kinds of theories are subjective in

that they depend entirely on the subjective experience of the individual concerned.

Objective-list accounts of well-being involve a list of basic ingredients which can be

present in an individual's life and by which that person's well-being is measured.

Finally, the capabilities approach to well-being is the idea that the possession of certain

capabilities is what makes up well-being. The capabilities approach can involve a list as

well, but the list is made up of capabilities; for example, the capability to love rather than

the experience of loving. Both the objective-list accounts and the capabilities approach

are objective accounts, because a person's well-being can be defined by external criteria

rather than by an individual's subjective experience.

The two main proponents of the capabilities approach to well-being are Martha

Nussbaum3 and Amartya Sen.4 Both of these theorists have developed their accounts of

2 For a brief outline of the distinctions between types of views of well-being, see Derek Parfit, "What Makes Someone's Life Go Best," in Reasons and Persons, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). For a more detailed look, including arguments for and against several views, see James Griffin, Well-being: Its Meaning, Measurement and Moral Importance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 3 Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999).

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well-being in the context of international development. Each is searching for a way to

measure development, and argues that human capabilities, rather than gross national

product, or other economic indicators, are what should count. In other words, the way to

know that a nation is doing well is to look at whether or not its citizens possess particular

capabilities.

In this chapter I am defending the capabilities approach in the context of

education. In doing so I will be developing the approach in a context quite different from

the context in which it was originally developed. Both Nussbaum and Sen conceive of

capabilities as the starting point for decisions in the political realm. That is, they use a

conception of well-being as a foundation for political deliberation. In my development of

this approach, I use the capabilities as a foundation for moral deliberation. This means

that the capabilities play a different role on my account than they do on either

Nussbaum's account or Sen's account. In my framework, the capabilities act as a

foundation for teaching goals, rather than for political rights. This means that I will have

less to say about thresholds for capabilities and about equality, and more to say about

how particular capabilities can be developed in particular contexts such as the

undergraduate classroom. That said, there are many political issues surrounding

education that could be addressed very well on the capabilities approach. However, I will

not be taking up these issues here, but focusing only on the way in which the approach

can be used in the context of moral deliberation.

The focus on a multi-faceted list of capabilities is what distinguishes the

capabilities approach from a more general utilitarianism. The way in which I deploy the

capabilities approach, however, is consequentialist in nature. I argue that the capabilities

perform the role of goods or goals at which teachers should aim. This should not be

surprising, given that in the previous chapter I argued that what is necessary for a rich

account of teaching ethics is an account that will define the goods of teaching in such a

way as to enable moral deliberation about goals.

The main difference between Nussbaum's account of well-being and Sen's

account is Nussbaum's inclusion of a list5 of capabilities that are central to well-being.

Sen does not propose such a list, and rejects the idea that such a list should be developed.

He argues6 that theorists should not develop such lists because they cannot possibly take

into account all of the various situational factors. Nussbaum, on the other hand, argues

that her list is broad and revisable, and can be endorsed by overlapping consensus by

those who choose many different ways of life.7 This possibility, which is based on the

emphasis on capability rather than on the ways in which those capabilities are used, is

what separates the capabilities account from perfectionist accounts. The disagreement

between Nussbaum and Sen is ongoing and I do not propose to settle it here. However, I

will adopt Nussbaum's perspective because the existence of a list, however revisable,

makes possible moral deliberation about particular cases, as I will argue below.

Broadly, Nussbaum's ten capabilities can be divided into three categories. First,

there are the capabilities that concern physical well-being, which are life, bodily health,

and bodily integrity. Second, there are the capabilities that concern intellectual well­

being: senses, imagination, and thought, emotions, and practical reason. Third, there are

5 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, 78-80. 6 Amartya Sen, "Capabilities, Lists and Public Reason: Continuing the Conversation," Feminist Economics 10, no. 3 (2004). 7 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, 74. 8 Martha Nussbaum, "Aristotle, Politics and Human Capabilities: A Response to Antony, Arneson, Charlesworth and Mulgan," Ethics 111 (2000), 128.

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the capabilities that concern social well-being. These are: affiliation with other human

beings, relations with other species, play, and political and material control over one's

environment. The first and third categories of capabilities are somewhat relevant to the

teaching context; a student's safety, for example, is of concern to any good teacher.

However, in the university classroom the second category is the most relevant.

While teachers can promote their students' well-being in many ways, they are in a unique

position given their role as teachers to promote intellectual well-being: that is, the

capability of students to think, feel, reason, imagine, and to make their decisions about

their beliefs and their life goals and plans. One more capability should be added to this.

Part of Nussbaum's capability for affiliation with other human beings is that one be able

"to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation." This can

certainly be counted as part of a person's intellectual capabilities. Given this "intellectual

well-being," using the capabilities account of well-being to understand the obligations of

university ethics teachers would mean asking of a given practice or goal what

relationship it has to the intellectual well-being of the students concerned.

In Women and Human Development, Nussbaum claims that education can be

addressed within the context of the capabilities approach, though she does not further

discuss it.10 Nussbaum's earlier book, Cultivating Humanity, is devoted to defending

reforms in higher education and thus examines the idea of education in more detail.

That work provides insights into how her conception of intellectual well-being fits into

9 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, 79. 10 Ibid., xiii. 11 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). She reaffirms the three goals in higher education in Martha Nussbaum, "Education for Citizenship in an Era of Global Connection," Studies in Philosophy and Education 21 (2002).

her conception of higher education, for she argues that there are three central intellectual

capacities which are necessary for democratic citizenship. The goal of higher education,

according to Nussbaum, should be to create world citizens who are able to participate

well in democracies and to be fully human.

The first and most important of these capacities is the "the capacity for critical

examination of oneself and one's traditions, for living what, following Socrates, we may

call 'the examined life'." The examined life is a life which questions all beliefs,

arguments, and statements and only accepts those that survive the demands of reason.

The second capacity is that to be effective citizens people need "an ability to see

themselves as not simply citizens of some local region or group, but also, and above all,

as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern."14

In other words, higher education should develop "world citizens." This means learning

about the lives of others in different countries and within multicultural societies. The

third capacity is the narrative imagination. This means "the ability to think what it might

be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of

that person's story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone

so placed might have."15

Cultivating Humanity is a detailed proposal for changes to higher education. As

amplification of her conception of intellectual well-being, however, it fails. The trouble

is that it is too detailed; her educational goals involve too many contentious normative

claims. In chapter four I discussed her first goal in detail, and so here I will just highlight

Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Ibid., 10. 15 Ibid., 10-11.

1

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the fact that Nussbaum is setting a very high standard for the examined life. If one sets

the bar for rationality that high, then the capacity for faith is undermined. This is in

conflict with Nussbaum's claim in Women and Human Development that the capacity for

a religious life is one of the central human capabilities.16

In general, if we want to generate a universal list of central capabilities, it cannot

include such strong claims about the nature of the good life. Otherwise, it will be

impossible for the list to be affirmed in an overlapping consensus, as Nussbaum claims it

can be. For this reason, in developing an account of how the list of capabilities can be

used in the educational context, I will not make reference to her detailed proposals in

Cultivating Humanity, but only to her general framework in Women and Human

Development. This general framework is that intellectual capability consists of the

capability to think, feel, reason, imagine, and to make decisions about one's beliefs, goals

and plans.

I argued in this and the previous chapter that what is needed is a framework for an

ethics teacher's moral reasoning. I argued that this framework must include an account

of the good, and that account must involve a plurality of goods. In this section I have laid

out an account of the goods of teaching: the capabilities of students. The next section

will show how this account can facilitate moral reasoning about teaching.

6.3. The Approach in Practice

I argued at the beginning of this chapter that a rich account of teaching ethics

should have three desirable characteristics. In what follows I will show how the

Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, 179.

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capabilities account can enable reasoning about teaching goals and address difficult

moral questions, and take situational factors into account.

Enabling Reasoning about Goals

In deliberating about teaching goals, one is really deliberating about what goods

to aim at. The capabilities in Nussbaum's list, in particular those capabilities that are

intellectual capabilities, constitute the list of teaching goods upon which deliberation can

be based.

There are several levels at which reasoning about goals can take place. A teacher

can reason about individual teaching goals within a course, about a course's goals in the

context of a program, about a course's goals in the context of the university experience,

and so on. What this means is that courses do not need to aim to promote every good. In

general terms a course on logic is well-suited to promoting students' capability for

reasoning, but a literature courses is better suited to promoting student's capability to

imagine. It does not have to be the case that the list of capabilities should constitute each

teacher's list of goals. However, these goods must be in the background: teachers should

either see their teaching as contributing to some sub-set of the goods, or as contributing to

some or all of them indirectly. In determining teaching goals, the list of teaching goods

(the capabilities) should be the basis for a teacher's reasoning, and the justification for

those teaching goals.

A few straightforward examples will help, here. Critical thinking courses

normally aim at improving reasoning directly: that is, by teaching students reasoning

skills. To put this in the terms I have been using here, teachers in critical thinking

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courses are promoting students' capability to reason. This is an instance in which a

particular teaching practice is aiming directly at one of the goods in the list of central

capabilities. Other courses do not aim so directly. An upper-year seminar on Kant aims

to improve student thinking, not by assigning exercises in critical reasoning, but

indirectly. Students who learn to read and interpret Kant are not only achieving the goal

of deeper understanding of a particular philosopher, but are developing their intellectual

capabilities as well. A course in a discipline outside of philosophy, such as an art course,

may not be aiming at students' reason at all, but at their capacity for imagination and

creativity. Of course, it is not as easy as this, for the various capabilities are related to

one another, and a course that promotes one as its focus may be promoting others in less

direct ways. A critical thinking course might aim at promoting reasoning directly, but

could end up promoting students' imaginations by encouraging them to think in new

ways. In general, what should be noted is that there are a plurality of goods which can be

aimed at in more or less direct ways depending on a teacher's context.

There are three questions that must be asked in order to make sense of how moral

reasoning about teaching goals would go within this framework. One, are these

considerations (the capabilities) ultimately the only considerations upon which reasoning

about teaching goals should take place? Two, on what basis do teachers decide which

goods or goals should be chosen for a particular context? Three, how do these goals

inform particular teaching decisions?

To address the first question is to return to the things I have flagged along the way

in this and the previous chapter as being intrinsically valuable to particular philosophers

who are teaching ethics. These were: the history of philosophy, the moral imagination,

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and moral sensitivity. I also argued, especially in the context of showing the

shortcomings of other views, that to see these sorts of things as merely instrumentally

valuable is to reject the viewpoints of those who view them as intrinsically valuable. So,

what should be avoided now is just that: viewing these things as merely instrumentally

valuable. Two choices remain. Either these three things can be accounted for on my

approach without being given second-class status, or they exist as important goals outside

the capabilities framework.

Teaching students to develop their moral imagination and their moral sensitivity

can easily be seen as part of Nussbaum's list of central capabilities. For Nussbaum, the

senses, the imagination, and thought are all part of the intellectual capabilities. These are

therefore intrinsically valuable on the capabilities view.

The history question works itself out a bit differently. What is necessary in order

to answer it well is to dig a little deeper into why philosophers value history. One answer

that I have already rejected as plausible is the view that pro-history philosophers all

believe that the more knowledge one has, the better. There are many good reasons to

value history: it broadens cultural awareness and a person's view of the world; it sharpens

reading and interpretive skills, and so on. It is quite likely that not all pro-history

philosophers value it for the same reasons. Given the remarkable diversity in

philosophical viewpoints, this is almost certain. Here is the trouble, though. Once one

starts to give the kinds of reasons I have given here, it looks like giving history a kind of

second-class status by making history instrumentally rather than intrinsically valuable.

Understanding history to be instrumentally valuable in the sense I have just

described is both unavoidable and unproblematic. It does not give history second-class

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status. What it does is put learning history on the same level as any other subject which

does not involve learning skills directly. Learning history is one way to develop one's

capabilities, just as the study of great literature is another, or the study of art another

again. Thus history is not intrinsically valuable, only because on the capabilities

approach, nothing in teaching is intrinsically valuable, except the capabilities themselves.

History, on this view, is only instrumentally valuable because almost everything is.

Does this mean that I must rescind my objection to utilitarianism, to the

"knowledge only" view, and to the "argument only" view? After all, one of my

objections to those views was that they gave history, the moral imagination, and moral

sensitivity second-class status. No. The moral imagination and moral sensitivity are

intrinsically valuable as capabilities. As for history, while it is true that it is only

instrumentally valuable, it is valuable in more ways on the capabilities account than it is

on those other accounts. Only on the capabilities account is its true value recognized,

because instead of being a means to learning to argue, or to be happy, or to know as much

as possible, it is a means to greater understanding, moral sensitivity, cultural awareness,

and so on. The reasons that pro-history philosophers can give for valuing history are

reasons the capabilities account can give as well. Thus, the trouble turns out to be not

that history is instrumentally valuable, but that utilitarianism and the knowledge-only

view can only see history as valuable for reasons that pro-history philosophers may

reject: its usefulness to happiness, or its contribution to knowledge.

For these reasons the capabilities account furnishes all the normative material

needed for reasoning about teaching goals. The list of capabilities is the list of teaching

goods, and when a teacher is deliberating about goals, he or she should refer to teaching

goods. This means that ultimately the only way in which a particular teaching practice

can be justified is by reference to a teaching goal, which itself must be a teaching good or

a means to some teaching good. Of course, this normative material must be

supplemented by knowledge of situational factors. It is in explaining this that the second

question arises: on what basis does a teacher decide which goods or goals should be

chosen for a particular context? In more general terms, how do departments or

universities decide which courses should be in the curriculum, and for what reasons?

This is the heart of where moral reasoning will take place on the capabilities

approach. I argued in the previous chapter that a good account will enable reasoning

especially for individual teachers, but also for departments and committees as well.

Given a list of potential capabilities, how is one to adjudicate between them and to

determine which will be the focus of a particular course?

In general terms, the answer is straightforward. One looks at the possible goods,

which are the capabilities in general, and the intellectual capabilities in particular. Then,

one looks at the situational factors and determines which of the goods are best aimed at

given the resources at one's disposal. For the individual teacher who is given a course

description, this will be more constrained than a department committee that is

determining what the course descriptions should look like; however, the general approach

is the same for both. Of course, this does not allow teachers to teach just anything. A

philosophy teacher cannot just decide to teach chemistry because he or she thinks it is a

better fit for his or her students' nascent capabilities. Here what can be said is that

philosophers (like all other academics) are teaching within a certain field of expertise.

There are many ways to teach philosophy, but the capabilities approach does not allow

for anyone to just teach anything they like. Situational factors include the fact that one is

teaching in a philosophy department and that one is expected to teach philosophy rather

than something else, as well as the fact that a philosophy teacher's expertise is in

philosophy, not chemistry or something else.

What should become immediately apparent is that the capabilities approach will

not generate just one answer for what an ethics course should look like. It may not even

give just one answer to what a particular ethics course should look like. Teachers using

this approach will not find that the approach will give them an absolute answer as to what

goals they should have in teaching. What they will find is a list of teaching goods, and

the requirement that they think about what resources they have at their disposal, what

kinds of students they have, and so on, and determine what goods they are best able to

promote. Though the list is broad, it is a list of a particular kind of things, and is a much

narrower account of teaching goods than (say) "happiness" or "knowledge." As well, in

discussing teaching matters with other philosophers, teachers may find they disagree

about which capability is most important in a given context, and so on, but can find

common ground in affirming the capabilities as the general teaching goods. This will be

discussed further below.

The third question that I asked above is how a teacher's reasoning about teaching

goals in the context of the capabilities approach can inform particular teaching decisions.

This follows in much the same way as what I have just outlined. Once a teacher has

determined, given a sufficient understanding of the context in which he or she teaches,

which goods to pursue, teaching decisions are made through practical reasoning. This is

means-end reasoning that is best performed by those with knowledge and experience, but

of course can be performed by new teachers as well. As I argued in the previous chapter,

practical reasoning can account for teaching practices so long as teaching goals are in

place.

That said, this view is not the view that I rejected in chapter five; that is, that a

good teacher obeys the rules and deliberates carefully about teaching practices. That

view did not have an account of the goods of teaching, but merely a requirement that

teachers reason carefully about whatever goals they do end up pursuing. On my view, it

is not that a teacher may aim at anything he or she has thought carefully about. The

account enables reasoning about goals by providing a basis for that reasoning, and that is

what I argued was missing from the accounts in chapter five. Though experience is

crucial to reasoning about teaching, what I am defending is still a normative account.

I have discussed in this section how the capabilities approach enables reasoning

about teaching goals. In the next section, I will show how it fulfills the second

requirement for a good account of academic ethics: it can address tough moral questions.

Addressing Tough Moral Questions

At the beginning of this chapter I listed five tough moral questions. In short form,

these questions are: 1) Should ethics teachers aim at moral improvement in their

students? 2) Should teachers be neutral with regard to their own moral, political and

religious views, or does good teaching require advocacy or at least disclosure of one's

beliefs? 3) Should teachers try to undermine student relativism and/or student

fundamentalism? 4) Are teachers responsible for the use to which students put the skills

they learned? 5) Should teachers try to change their students' moral, political, and

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religious beliefs? What I say here will not provide complete or fully determinate

answers, but will show how such questions can be addressed on the capabilities approach.

Moral theories generally specify two types of moral obligation. First, there are

those obligations that arise from the good, whatever that good is. So, in utilitarian moral

theory, one's obligation is to promote happiness. In Kantian theory, one's obligations

toward the good are the imperfect duties: to help others, and to develop one's talents. In

any case these obligations involve trying to bring about some good in the world. On my

development of the capabilities approach, the obligations that apply to those occupying

the role of philosophy teacher arise from the goods of teaching, that is, student

capabilities. This means that one's obligation as teacher is to promote the capabilities of

one's students.

The second type of moral obligation concerns what one may and may not do in

pursuit of the good. If a theory only specifies the first type of obligation, then it is

permissible to go about promoting that good in whatever way one likes. So, on classical

utilitarianism, if we can make the majority happy by torturing some small minority then

this is a permissible (even obligatory) course of action. In the language of contemporary

moral theory, this second type of obligation is called a "side constraint."17 Side

constraints are rules that may not be broken in one's pursuit of the good, no matter how

good the results. On Kantian theory it is impermissible to violate the perfect duty to treat

all humans as ends. On a rights-based moral theory, the existence of side-constraints

forbids a moral agent from violating the rights of others in the pursuit of some overall

good.

17 Robert Nozick first developed this notion explicitly. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 28-33.

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Some strict consequentialists reject the idea of side constraints and maintain that

one should always promote the good no matter what. They argue that it is always best to

achieve the most good overall, and that the existence of constraints can prevent bringing

about the most good. At the other end of the spectrum, a strict deontological view

(perhaps best called a libertarian view) only concerns itself with side-constraints and not

with promoting the good. On this view, morality consists merely in a set of rules that

must not be broken, but when one is acting within the bounds of those rules morality has

nothing more to say. These are two kinds of monist moral theories that stand at either

extreme of the theoretical landscape. Standing between these two extremes is any theory

that includes both the obligation to promote the good and the obligation not to violate

constraints.

The "code of ethics" view of teaching ethics concerns itself only with constraints.

It concerns only what one may not do in pursuit of one's goals, whatever those goals may

be. I argued in chapter five that this view of ethics is too narrow: teaching ethics, if it is

to give answers to tough moral questions, must also concern the good; that is, what one is

aiming at within side-constraints.

The capabilities approach is this kind of theory, for it includes a conception of the

good (the capabilities). This good is what is aimed at within the constraints of the code

of ethics, which constitute the constraints. The code of ethics limits what teachers may

do in the pursuit of teaching goods: they may not physically harm their students, harass

them, and so on. On the capabilities approach, a teacher's reasoning concerns how to

promote the good, within the side-constraints (the code of ethics). As in the case of any

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account that includes the obligation to promote the good, much of that reasoning will be

practical reasoning about how best to do so.

In this way, the capabilities approach is a moderate deontological theory, but only

in the sense that all theories which include both types of obligation are moderate

deontological theories. It is not moderate deontology in the stricter sense in which the

term is often used, where the term refers only to those theories in which constraints can

be overridden in order to promote a large enough good.

The tough questions raised in previous chapters are not answered by the code of

ethics. This means that they are not about side-constraints, but about goals. The

capabilities approach in my formulation requires that any teaching practices be justified

by reference to teaching goals, and that those goals are justified by reference to the goods

of teaching, that is, the intellectual capabilities. Within the bounds of the code of ethics,

it provides the normative material needed for deliberations about teaching practices and

goals, as I shall argue below.

I will begin with the idea of moral improvement. On the capabilities approach,

this question is actually relatively straightforward. If the conception of moral

improvement in question involves changed behaviour, then the answer is clear: teachers

acting within the capabilities approach should not aim at moral improvement itself. If

teachers are aiming moral improvement, or even happiness or fulfillment, then they must

have some idea as to what happiness, fulfillment, or moral improvement consists in.

Further, there would have to be some agreement between teachers what this would

consist in, or each teacher would be aiming to make his or her students good on his or her

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own view of goodness. Instead, teachers should aim to promote the capabilities students

need in order to make their own decisions about goodness.

Not only is it unlikely that teachers will agree about what happiness or goodness

consist in, an approach which aimed at fostering happiness or goodness in this way is not

an appropriate stance to take in the face of widespread pluralism in society at large. The

capabilities approach, however, allows for agreement between teachers on capacities that

are necessary for achieving happiness or goodness on many diverging views of what

happiness or goodness consists in. For example, while ethics teachers will not agree

about whether someone would be better to be a vegetarian or not, they can agree that it is

instrumentally valuable to any conception of goodness that a person be able to reason

about practical matters and to imaginatively identify with others. With regard to religion,

while there will be a plurality of views, there can be agreement about the usefulness of

reasoning and emotion in coming to understand one's own religion and to make decisions

i o

about one's religious observance.

Now, I argued in chapter four that the term "moral improvement" has many

possible referents. If what one means by "moral improvement" is simply an increase in

moral reasoning skills, or in the capacity for moral imagination, or moral sensitivity, then

we can say that a teacher working within the capabilities approach may (and possibly

should) aim at moral improvement in ethics courses. So, in addressing this question it is

crucial that the terms be carefully understood.

The second moral question concerns advocacy and neutrality. It is a particularly

tough issue in the ethics classroom because of the deep disagreements between 18 Nussbaum herself claims that the capabilities approach is by no means an account of the "good life" in its entirety. It is a moral account used for political purposes, and in my case, for educational purposes. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, 77.

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philosophers about the nature and content of moral judgments and concepts, and even the

place of moral reasoning in the moral life. While philosophers may share many ideas

about right and wrong, when it comes to theorizing about ethics there is no agreed upon

set of beliefs or ideas that should be taught to students. Almost everything is open to

discussion. Thus, those who believe that ethics teachers should advocate their own beliefs

in class do so at least in part because they believe that the course should have some

substantive content - that students should come away having added to their beliefs rather

than simply questioned them. So, how might the capabilities approach address such a

question?

In my analysis of reasoning about teaching, I have stressed that there are always

(at least) two levels of reasoning. Teachers reason about teaching goals, and about how,

practically, to achieve those goals. Of course, these levels interact: one sometimes

discovers through trial and error that a particular goal is just not realistic for a particular

classroom. On the capabilities approach, the question to ask about advocacy is: can

advocacy be justified by reference to promoting capabilities? The other side of the

question is: must teachers be neutral in order to promote capabilities?

In my discussion of the history of philosophy I argued that some teaching goals

are not the capabilities themselves but means to those capabilities. An ethics teacher

might reason that, for example, the capability for moral imagination requires the belief

that other human beings are worthy of respect. This would be a reason to think that to

aim at students' acquiring certain beliefs is a legitimate aim on the capabilities approach.

However, this line of reasoning can only take us so far in terms of advocacy and

neutrality. Certainly, the idea of equal respect for others is viewed as important among

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philosophers teaching ethics, just as the concept of the periodic table is widely viewed as

crucial for chemists. However, these are not the sort of beliefs that those concerned

about neutrality are normally worried about. "People are worthy of equal respect" is not

very contentious as it stands, but once we attempt to define what it means to be a person,

what is meant by "respect," and so on, we are in the realm of substantive positions about

which philosophers disagree. So, when trying to determine whether some beliefs are

necessary for particular capabilities, we must tread very carefully.

On the whole, what the capabilities approach suggests about advocacy and

neutrality is that the practice of advocacy - or of neutrality - must be justified by

reference to the capabilities. This rules out other justifications for advocacy such as

political or social change, or moral improvement. In the end, this means that the

advocacy question should be addressed at least in part on a practical level. This is the

reasoning I have described above: considering one's situation and the situation of one's

students, determining which capabilities are best promoted in that context, and

determining how those capabilities are best promoted. An experienced teacher may find

that for his or her students advocacy is the most effective way to promote their critical

reasoning, and another teacher may find that for his or her students a stance of careful

neutrality is best. Either way, it is the promotion of capabilities that is the central focus.

The third tough question is: should teachers try to undermine student relativism

and/or student fundamentalism? As it turns out, the capabilities approach as I have

applied it addresses this question in much the same way as it does the advocacy and

neutrality issue. The question must be asked at both levels of reasoning: at the level of

goal-setting and at the level of practical reasoning.

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At the level of practical reasoning, it is a matter of determining whether or not

trying to undermine such beliefs is a good way to promote the capabilities of one's

students, and whether or not doing so undermines any capabilities. Perhaps it promotes

the students' capability to reason at the expense of their capability to feel, or to be part of

a social group. These kinds of decisions have to be made given all of the complexities of

the situation.

The other level of reasoning about fundamentalism and relativism is at the level

of goals: is it a justifiable goal that students reject fundamentalism and/or relativism?

Here I refer back to what I claimed earlier: such questions must concern the promotion of

capabilities. This means that in order to justify the goal of eliminating student relativism

or fundamentalism, one must argue that such a goal is in the service of promoting student

capabilities. As above, situational factors must be taken into account, and the possibility

that attempts to eliminate student fundamentalism may have problematic effects in terms

of other capabilities, such as the capability for religious affiliation and faith.

What this brings up is the fact that a goal's being in the service of a particular

capability is a necessary but not sufficient reason for it to be adopted by a good teacher.

If that goal promotes one capability at the expense of other capabilities, then one is not

promoting teaching goods overall. This means that deliberations about goals must

concern any capabilities affected by teaching decisions, not just those capabilities that are

affected in a positive way. While it is not necessary to aim at promoting all of the

capabilities, it is necessary to take all of those affected into account.

What emerges from all of this analysis is the student-centredness of the

capabilities approach as it applies to education. A teacher cannot aim at eradicating

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religious fundamentalism in general by undermining it in the classroom, because that

teacher must only consider the impact on students' well-being. In other words, teaching

decisions should not be political in that the classroom is not a place for social change, but

for individual change. Teachers may hope that the individual change will lead to social

change, but may not aim at it.

The fourth tough moral question asks whether teachers are responsible for the use

toward which their students put their learning. This question arose in the previous

chapter, and it has two components. The first is what arises from one of Dewey's claims

in the third chapter. One central claim that Dewey made with regard to teaching thinking

is that skills should not be taught without dispositions to accompany them.19 In other

words, teaching critical thinking does not consist merely of inculcating particular skills,

but of inculcating particular attitudes toward those skills. In more recent discussions

concerning critical thinking this is an issue about which there is some dispute. Should

teachers of critical thinking be aiming at influencing and changing their students'

dispositions towards thinking, such as pushing students to be more open-minded or

individualistic? If so, which dispositions are to be inculcated?

The most evident way in which the capabilities account can help here is to keep

the focus on the capability for critical thinking rather than the exercise of that capability.

In other words, a teacher's responsibility is to promote students' capability for reasoning

rather than students' use of that capability.

This is a little too easy, however. A proponent of inculcating dispositions could

very well argue that the only way in which students will be capable of using their

thinking skills is if they possess certain dispositions. A student who defers excessively to

19 Dewey, "How We Think," 135.

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authority, for example, may not be psychologically capable of exercising his or her

thinking skills in the real world, even if he or she has acquired them in the classroom.

Framing the dispute in terms of capabilities does not rule out the possibility that teaching

dispositions is necessary, but requires that if such dispositions are to be taught it must be

because doing so is necessary for promoting students' capability for reason. To aim at

promoting students' use of reason is to go too far.

This is where the second component of the question emerges. In aiming at

promoting students' use of reason, and thus their behaviour, one is taking responsibility

for the behaviour of those students. The capabilities approach focuses on capabilities,

and thus would say that teachers should teach their students how to think. In this way

teachers are not actually responsible for whether or not their students actually think, but

whether or not their students are able to do so. Otherwise, what one is doing is taking

responsibility for the behaviour of other moral agents. The capabilities approach explains

quite well why this is not necessary.

The fifth and final question concerned whether or not teachers should aim to

change their students' moral, political and religious beliefs. I do not need to say anything

further, here, as this has been fully addressed in the sections concerning advocacy and

neutrality.

I have argued in this section that the capabilities account can address several

tough moral questions that arise for ethics teachers, and that I have outlined in chapter

four. In this way it fulfills the second requirement I set out for a good theory of academic

ethics. The third and final requirement is that the account be able to take account of the

189

various situational factors I have outlined in this and previous chapters. It is to this that I

now turn.

Taking Account of Situational Factors

It should be evident by now that a central feature of my development of the

capabilities approach is that when a teacher is deliberating about what to do, an

understanding of context is crucial. In order to make a good decision about which

capabilities to promote in which courses, a teacher needs to know the backgrounds of his

or her students as well as the general cultural milieu. While in one context it might make

sense to foster the capacity for abstract reasoning, in another it may be more appropriate

to foster the capacity for practical reasoning, or to stimulate the moral imagination. This

plurality of goods is what makes the capabilities approach so well-suited to a context in

which many factors are at play.

At the beginning of this chapter I outlined several situational factors that a good

account of teaching ethics should take into account. These were:

$• the disagreements between philosophers about teaching goals

$• the existence of student relativism

$• the influence of religious fundamentalism

$• the widespread fact of pluralism

& the relative inexperience of students and the possible fragility of their convictions

•& the variation in student ability and background

190

One final situational factor should be added here, and that is the variation in class

size. An ethics course might have twenty students, or two hundred, or anything in

between.

The first four of these have already been explicitly addressed; that is, the

disagreements between philosophers about teaching goals, the existence of student

relativism, the influence of religious fundamentalism, and the fact of pluralism. That

leaves three to consider here.

The worry about the fragility of student convictions is the worry I traced through

Plato, Locke and Rousseau. How should ethics teachers respond to the fact that students

may use arguments on their own beliefs in a destructive rather than a constructive way?

That is, what should teachers do given the possibility that students may reject the

reasonableness of morality or the majority of their moral beliefs?

In many ways, these questions are similar to those questions that arise in the

context of the issues of student relativism and religious fundamentalism, and about

teaching goals in ethics courses. In the end, the question of whether a particular student

is likely to become a relativist or a moral sceptic as a result of learning to think critically

about ethics is a question that only teaching experience, or empirical research, can

answer. Ethics courses are also not the only types of courses that could have this effect

on particular students: courses about evolution, or about the history of religion, or any

course that promotes the examination of received tradition, could have this effect as well.

The capabilities approach can take this issue into account in two ways. The first it

that it emphasizes the consideration of students' characteristics, and the context in which

one is teaching, in one's decisions about which capabilities to promote and how to

promote them. This emphasis is not necessarily limited to the capabilities approach,

however, and so the second is more important in this context. The second way in which

the capabilities approach addresses this is to keep the focus on student capabilities: on

promoting them in general (especially intellectual capability) and on noticing if one is

promoting one capability at the expense of another. A teacher's method or goal could

promote the capability for reason at the risk of undermining the capability for religious

affiliation, or the capability to relate to others. If this is the case, then that method or goal

should be re-evaluated in light of what is likely to produce the most good. It may be that

the benefits outweigh the risks, or it may be that teachers can alter their methods so as to

reduce the risks.

In the end a central factor in addressing this is the fact that not all of a teacher's

students are the same; a class of two hundred or often will have many different students,

of varying abilities, and learning to reason critically will affect them in various ways.

Unless a teacher is teaching one student at a time, then he or she cannot tailor teaching

goals and practices to a particular student's abilities and background. One student could

be a fundamentalist whose beliefs need to be shaken up in order for him or her to be able

to think critically about them; another a cynical relativist who needs to be inspired in

order to learn to develop moral convictions.

What the capabilities approach provides is a list of the goods of teaching, not a

manual for how to reach those goods. A teacher's goals might be very general in a large

class. A teacher might find him or herself teaching a class of two hundred students from

very similar backgrounds, or a class often from varied backgrounds. In either case the

overall goal is the promotion of capabilities, and the teacher reasons as best as he or she

192

can about how to promote them given the particularities of the teaching situation. This is,

in the end, practical reasoning. In this way the capabilities approach does not provide all

of the answers a priori, but then neither will any student-centred account. As soon as a

teacher focuses on how his or her teaching will affect students, and bases decisions on

that, then he or she runs into complicated decisions about how to teach many students at

once, and even how to teach one student at a time.

In the end, however, the student-centredness of the account is its strength, even if

it does not solve every teaching issue a priori. An account of the ethics of teaching

which purported to do so would have to ignore just how complicated teaching is and how

much of it is based on experience.

I do not wish to understate my case, here. Setting out the goods of teaching, as I

have done, is necessary for reasoning about teaching goals, even though one's reasoning

about teaching goals will also involve practical considerations. The capabilities, more

than the idea of moral improvement or knowledge transmission, are the kind of goods

that can be promoted in many contexts and with many different kinds of students, even if

they are promoted in different ways. The capabilities approach is thus well-suited to

complicated teaching situations and to taking into account the varying situational factors I

have outlined in these chapters.

In this analysis I have emphasized two major features of the capabilities approach

to well-being: its plurality of goods, and its focus on obligations to promote the

capabilities of others rather than the achievements of others. These two features are what

enables the capabilities approach to take account of the morally salient features above,

and what distinguishes it from the other approaches considered in the chapter five. In

193

other words, they are what make the capabilities approach so well-suited to the

educational context.

6.4. Conclusions

In my promotion of the capabilities approach I do not mean to have solved any

and all problems with applying it to the context of education. All of the tough questions I

have raised throughout these chapters point to the need for careful study of the ethics of

teaching. My development of the capabilities approach provides a starting point for this

study by developing an account of the goods of teaching. In further developing this

account, there will be disagreements about what exactly each capability consists in, how

to balance the promotion of some capabilities with other capabilities, or even which

capabilities are significant in the teaching context. I am not suggesting that unanimous

agreement is even possible. What I am suggesting is that agreement can be more

widespread when it concerns instrumentally valuable capabilities rather than substantive

issues of happiness, goodness, or knowledge. Widespread agreement about basic

capabilities can form a background of shared values within which discussions of teaching

goals and practices can take place. In the end, this is the most important feature of the

account.

194

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VITA

Sarah Patricia Lublink

Ph.D., Philosophy, The University of Western Ontario, 2009 M.A., Philosophy, York University, Ontario, 2004 B.A. (Hons.), Philosophy, York University, Ontario, 2003 B.R.S., Arts/Theology, Tyndale University College, Ontario, 2000

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, 2007-2008

Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2003-2004, 2004-2005, 2005-2006

Mary Routledge Fellowship, 2007, 2008

Western Graduate Thesis Research Award, 2007, 2008

Harold Johnson Memorial Scholarship in Medieval Philosophy, 2006

Canadian Society for the Study of Practical Ethics Graduate Student Essay Prize, 2006

Entrance Scholarship, York University, 2003

Sarah Lublink Daley, "Who May Live the Examined Life? Plato's Rejection of Socratic Practices in Republic VII." British Journal for the History of Philosophy, forthcoming 2010.

Adjunct Professor, Tyndale University College, 2008-2009

Limited Duties Faculty, The University of Western Ontario, 2008­2009

Research Assistant, Teaching Support Centre, The University of Western Ontario, 2008

Instructor, The University of Western Ontario, 2005-2007

Teaching Assistant, The University of Western Ontario, 2004­2005, 2007-2008