Ethics in a College Education
What we can and cannot teach
I’ve been pondering the opinion piece by Ezekiel Emanuel from the New York Times, “The Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education”, for a few weeks now. This is a belated response. From the start I will say that whilst I disagree with the piece, I take it seriously, and appreciate his grappling with a difficult question.
His essay was sparked by some student statements, made at elite universities, regarding the situation in Israel and Gaza. He was particularly offended by statements that held Israel fully at fault for the Hamas terrorist attack, and for criticisms of Israeli policy in the region (about which he recognizes there is much to be criticized) without giving any approbation at all to the actions of Hamas.
His concern is that somehow our universities are failing at teaching ethics, whether in the curriculum, or in the intellectual atmosphere of the campus generally.
Those of us who are university leaders and faculty are at fault. We may graduate our students, confer degrees that certify their qualifications as the best and brightest. But we have clearly failed to educate them. We have failed to give them the ethical foundation and moral compass to recognize the basics of humanity. …
Ethics are rarely either/or. It is possible to condemn the barbarism of Hamas and condemn the endless Israeli occupation of the West Bank. So, too, is it possible to condemn the treatment of women and the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Arab lands and the attempt by right-wing Israeli politicians to neuter Israel’s Supreme Court. But without the ability to distinguish between right and wrong and to recognize the fallacies of moral equivalence, students won’t be able to marshal the nuanced reasoning and careful assessment of responsibility required in times like these.
We in the academy need to look more deeply at how it is possible that so many undergraduates, graduate students, law students and faculty at our nation’s finest colleges and universities could have such moral blinders.
We need to ask ourselves: What is in our curriculums? What do we think it means to be well educated? What moral stands are we taking? The timidity of many university leaders in condemning the Hamas massacre and antisemitism more generally offers the wrong example. Leaders need to lead.
As a bioethicist, I support requiring students to take ethics classes. Some universities — mainly Catholic institutions, including Georgetown — still do. Having a two-course ethics requirement — one about general ethics and one about some specific area, such as military ethics, environmental and bioethics, ethics of technology, ethics of the market or political ethics — would be invaluable.
But ethics classes alone are insufficient to help students develop a clear moral compass so that they can rise above ideological catchphrases and wrestle intelligently with moral dilemmas.
Instead, colleges and universities need to be more self-critical and rethink what it means for students to be educated. For the past 50 years, with a few exceptions, higher education has been reducing requirements. At the same time, academia has become more hesitant: We often avoid challenging our students, avoid putting hard questions to them, avoid forcing them to articulate and justify their opinions. All opinions are equally valid, we argue. We are fearful of offending them.
This flies in the face of what a liberal education should be. Liberal education should be built around honing critical thinking skills and moral and logical reasoning so students can emerge as engaged citizens.
But missing from the article is exactly what is that moral reasoning we ought to teach.
I do teach moral theories in some of my courses: we consider the contemporary version of consequentialism and utilitarianism that underlies the economic approach to policy analysis, Rawlsian liberal theory, the communitarian critique, various approaches to egalitarianism, and so on. What I do not try to do is to use any of these methods to attempt to teach students how to be good. And if I were to try to do that, where would I start? The school in which I teach carries the (unfortunate) branding slogan “lead for the greater good”, but I don’t think anyone is meant to take it entirely seriously (I for one reject its Benthamite implications), and if they did there is no guarantee that our graduates would enter the world with ethical principles in any way superior to people who did not.
There never was a golden age where our college graduates, whether from the elite universities or from regional publics, graduated with greater ethical sense than those who did not. And it doesn’t matter whether there were texts in moral philosophy in the curriculum. Boris Johnson was educated first at Eton, and then read Classics at Balliol, only to end up as … Boris Johnson. We have members of our political and business leadership class, who attended our finest colleges well before they are supposed to have lost sight of their ethical mission, who are terribly, publicly, lacking in any ethical standards. Business schools now routinely include a course in “ethics” in their core curriculum, but there is little evidence that this has slowed their graduates’ aims, once launched in their careers, to follow Milton Friedman’s dictum that the business of business is to earn maximum profit, full stop. Which, we should remember, was an ethical argument by Friedman.
Colleges cannot teach how to be good. We can open students to possibilities, help them see the vastness of what we don’t know, and hope that four years of interacting with their peers gives them some life lessons on the consequences of how we treat one another. But we could assign every student in the land to write a report on Principia Ethica, and I’m not sure it would change the fact that just under one-half of adult Americans would like to see Donald Trump usher in an authoritarian state after the next election.
Ethics is a practical activity, where learning begins as soon as the infant can start to distinguish sensory data, and where young people are immersed in families and communities where it is made apparent what is and is not permitted. College can teach many things, including some knowledge of the history and geopolitics of the Middle East. But it cannot change the state of morals in this country.
Thoughtful, as always. An observation: in the ethics class that I teach, students haven’t built the muscles needed to express a point of view on the material. They seem convinced that their job is to spit back the “right”answer as I have defined it, which, of course, I haven’t done; having to come up with a personal point of view and then defend it is foreign. So while I agree with you about *what* college can or can’t teach, I wonder if we have some work to do with *how* we teach.
I think frequently attacks on colleges and universities for not responding to a "skills gap" or preparing students for the labor market are an attempt to divert attention from the failures of public and private actors to intervene in labor markets to make them fairer and more responsive (or even, perhaps, in some cases, to protect them on behalf of one's own citizens). Higher education has accepted being a scapegoat in that long-running discourse because until recently that has been a role for which we were heavily compensated--that it was our job to be blamed for the failure of other institutions. At this point, that has become an unfavorable bargain but it's an old habit.
I think much the same is going on in any attempt to say that we have failed to teach ethics or civics. (The right's version is that we are actively 'indoctrinating' the wrong ethics or civics.) This move is principally made by people who are operating within the vast ethical void that is public and commercial life today, produced primarily by people aged 50-80. If the lack of ethics originates from what colleges teach or do not teach, the colleges we should be blaming are those of 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Colleges cannot teach what their society does not otherwise uphold--this is no different than the clergymen of the late 19th and early 20th Century attributing all sorts of social changes to higher education in that moment, when the social changes they were responding to were the result of the preceding three or four decades. There is no teacher so charismatic and wise that they can teach a student to live within an ethics that the student can see being blatantly violated all around them.
It is as you say: people who follow some kind of ethical constraint usually do so according to lived-in, emotionally experienced wisdoms that don't require an education in ethics. What an education in ethics gives us, perhaps, is greater facility for speaking about and recognizing an ethical life when we encounter it, and perhaps therefore some greater probability of following that example. But that doesn't happen right there and then, in the classroom. It only happens by experience--including making mistakes. You're more likely to recognize the human advantages of following ethical guidelines if you've lived through situations where they're often breached, or breached them yourself. No morality has force when it's just a catechism memorized and dutifully repeated.