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2016 presidential address

1. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Deborah S. Mower

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The primary problem we face when educating for social justice involves making problems and issues ‘real’ in ways that enable deep comprehension of the nature of injustice, the effects of systemic and dynamic causes, and the interaction of structures and policies on the lives of individuals. To address this problem, I examine work from behavioral economics and moral psychology as theoretical resources. I argue that we can glean insights from the notions of behavioral nudges and virtue labeling and propose a new account of nudges, which I call experiential nudges. Experiential nudges provide an important mechanism in educating for social justice, in particular, and can be extended within moral education more broadly.

articles

2. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Allison Merrick, Rochelle Green, Thomas Cunningham, Leah Eisenberg, D. Micah Hester

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Responding to research indicating unsettling results with regard to the ability of University students to recognize and reflect on questions of morality, this paper aims to discuss these issues and to introduce a promising mode of ethics instruction for overcoming such challenges. The Curricular Ethics Bowl (CEB) is a method of ethics education and assessment for a wide range of students and is a descendent of the Medical Ethics Bowl (MEB) (Merrick et al., “Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl”). We seek in this article to show the similarities of CEB to MEB and to distinguish this model from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (ICEB) sponsored by the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics (Landenson 2001). The CEB institutionalizes this mode of ethics education at the program, rather than at the individual course level, and shows advantages over other ethics curricula.
3. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Ralph Didlake, Jo Anne Fordham

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Surgery is the most invasive intervention taken on behalf of health, but significant discrepancies exist between patient expectations and standard operating room practices, especially in teaching institutions. These discrepancies arise from the dual obligations of surgical faculty to present and future patients. On the one hand, in line with a patient’s autonomous election of a procedure and choice of a doctor, faculty are charged with treating patients to the utmost capacity of their knowledge and skill; on the other, in support of a critical community good, they must prepare novice physicians to treat those who will require at least this level of knowledge and skill in the future. Within a broad, contrasting framework of approaches to knowledge, judgment, experience, and nature as described by Hume and Kant, this article explores the complicated concepts of trust, loyalty, assessment, and communications that presently exist between surgical patients, faculty surgeons, and surgical trainees within academic medical centers.
4. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Wayne Henry, Mort Morehouse, Susan T. Gardner

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In his 2004 article “Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard: Pedagogy in the Consumer Society,” Trevor Norris bemoans the degree to which contemporary education’s focus can increasingly be described as primarily nurturing “consumers in training.” He goes on to add that the consequences of such “mindless” consumerism is that it “erodes democratic life, reduces education to the reproduction of private accumulation, prevents social resistance from expressing itself as anything other than political apathy, and transforms all human relations into commercial transactions of calculated exchange.” This, then, is the challenge of the age: to articulate the sort of education that might prompt our youngsters to imagine a genuine alternative to this consumer madness—a challenge that the authors of this paper attempt to tackle.
5. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Landon Frim

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The international relations (IR) curriculum has long presented a dichotomy between the so-called “realist” and “idealist” positions. Idealists seek to embody universal norms of justice in foreign policy. Realists, by contrast, see competition between states, the balance of power, and relative advantage as basic to international politics. Though considered polar opposites, both the realist and idealist affirm the primacy of the nation state as a sovereign political unit, and so neither embraces cosmopolitanism in the strongest sense, i.e., the transcendence of national divisions as such. Opening up the IR curriculum to such a radical possibility requires its reframing in terms of underlying, ethical worldviews. Under this lens, it becomes evident that the realist and idealist share far more in common than contemporary policy debates would suggest. It also points us toward the space for an alternate ethical worldview, provided by Stoic rationalism, which is more viable for grounding cosmopolitan thought.
6. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Stephen Kekoa Miller

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Recent events around the world point to the dire need to counter harmful unconscious bias. Reams of evidence now exists that literal pre-judgement in regards to race, sex, ethnicity, age and religion among other categories strongly affects our behaviour in ways that when we consciously contemplate it, we would condemn. Using Community of Inquiry methods in developing critical reasoning and empathy offer some possible remedies but also hold pitfalls. The dilemma concerns the fact that if harmful unconscious connotative representations are unconscious, then it’s terribly hard to spot and correct them. We need a better way of exploring our own poorly-arrived at beliefs: we need other people. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic understanding allows meaning to be created through the process of discussion. It gets particularly interesting when this idea combines with the notion of a “floating signifier.” This suggests that a discussion could then also alter the connotative value of words, signs and concepts through making what had been hidden overt. This paper explores the ways that the dilemma of damaging discourse could be altered and strategies for interrupting this, including the format of a Community of Inquiry. The promise offered by a Community of Inquiry is that connotative meanings can be made explicit. It also points to the challenge: unveiling hidden bias only becomes possible in a setting of great diversity. In the end, while a Community of Inquiry may not be able to solve the problem of unconscious bias, it may help combat the consequences.
7. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Timm Triplett

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Bernard Gert’s account of morality is straightforward, clear and, in its essentials, easily grasped. As such, it offers rich pedagogical resources for teaching morality, not just in undergraduate courses but also in pre-college philosophy classes or workshops, including those offered during the elementary school years. Gert’s account, properly calibrated to the age group in question, can provide a unified framework for students to think about morality, clarify their understanding of it, and engage in discussions with each other about it. After summarizing Gert’s account, I illustrate several ways in which it can be applied in the classroom, beginning with applications at the elementary school level and working up to pedagogy appropriate to high school and college. I conclude by considering and responding to some possible objections to this approach.
8. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Deirdra Preis

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Though public schools are charged with promoting democratic values, they rarely explicitly teach students how to analyze issues from ethical perspectives. Lack of teacher training, competition for time and overestimation of students’ abilities to independently discern the ethical considerations of complex situations may explain its absence from many social sciences curricula. While the ability to consider actions from an ethical lens is critical to the democratic process, class discussions about controversial issues can unravel quickly when self-serving or emotional dynamics dominate an activity. To plan for a more constructive outcome, teachers must first instruct students in the use of universal ethical criteria as the basis for healthy and productive argumentation and provide ongoing opportunities for practicing ethical argumentation. This article describes how such a framework was successfully introduced into a high school health course to encourage deeper and more respectful group analysis of complex issues from various ethical viewpoints.

book review

9. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Nathan Nobis

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keynote address

10. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Leslie Francis

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articles

11. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Matthew Hayden

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This article revisits John Wilson’s “first steps” in moral education—a conceptual analysis of morality—and what he calls an education in morality. Education in morality focuses on morality as a form of life with a specific domain in which it aims to initiate students, and on education as a growth-oriented, progressive activity. Arendt’s conception of natality in education is then used to show how it provides a catalyst for growth, discovery, and tradition-trumping newness, and acts as a stepping-stone to public action as morality and recognition of the plurality of human life. It becomes clear that the inherent sociability of morality forces the consideration of it as a public and social act. Education in morality must preserve the potential for the capacity to contribute to the development of morality and concurrently develop that capacity through the production of plurality that follows and the negotiations necessary for its preservation. Morality, then, must not be taught as a static set of immutable principles, but rather as an inclusive, adaptive process by and through which groups govern their associations.
12. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Thomas Cooper

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This report includes 1) the previously unpublished findings of a current (2015–16) study (part 2) about the teaching of ethics at leading English-speaking institutions in the Pacific region, 2) a comparison of those findings with a companion study (part 1) conducted at leading institutions in the Atlantic region in 2008, and 3) the aggregate findings of the two studies considered as parts of a single research project. The purpose of the research was to determine how ethics is taught at selected leading English-speaking institutions of higher education, the challenges their ethics teachers and students face, how individual faculty members enhance their ethics teaching effectiveness over time, in what senses of the word “ethics” can ethics be successfully taught, what types of creative pedagogical tools have these faculty developed, whether the ethics professor should “take a stand” or be “unbiased,” and related questions. In both studies most participants stated that a passion for the subject matter, for teaching, and for assisting students was more important than new technologies, teacher training, teaching video recordings, and working with mentors.

special section on teaching ethics through literature

13. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Felicia Nimue Ackerman

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Fiction can help make students better thinkers about some philosophical issues, but this does not mean it will make them morally better people.
14. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Michael Boylan

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This essay seeks to outline a way of understanding literature as philosophy as a justification for using fictive narrative to teach ethics. Some brief theoretical points are set out as well as two classroom examples.
15. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Wanda Teays

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In this essay I offer some suggestions for integrating film in an Ethics classes and reaching your goals in terms of learning and student outcomes. You can easily adapt them to other areas of Philosophy— not just Ethics. Starting with Aristotle’s Poetics as a tool for deconstructing movies, I set out five strategies for teaching Ethics through film: start with a film or ethical theory; start with a real-world case or an ethics code; then use any of these four in combination to allow for a more in-depth analysis. Each strategy is discussed with example exercises to illustrate how this approach can create an engaging class while achieving your goals.

book reviews

16. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Shaun Miller

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17. Teaching Ethics: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
W. Scott Clifton

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