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D. Stephen Long

Can we, should we, teach ethics in the modern university? Teaching ethics differs from teaching other disciplines. Few students arrive at the university aware of Organic Chemistry and the importance of Grignard reactions. They most likely have not studied the causes, major dates, or key persons in the French Revolution. The means for teaching and evaluating students in these subjects can be relatively straightforward. Either one has success in the laboratory forming carbon-carbon bonds or one does not. One can give the dates for Robespierre’s life and describe his role in the revolution or one cannot. But what about ethics? Our assumptions about teaching ethics cannot be the same as they are for teaching Organic Chemistry or French History. On the one hand, we assume students already have some sense of ethics before they arrive, which is why we hold them accountable for their behavior from their first day on campus. No one can avoid being disciplined for a violation of an honor code by protesting, “But I have not yet had my ethics course!” We would not hold a student accountable for her ignorance of Grignard reactions or French history prior to receiving instruction in the field, but we do hold students accountable for their actions with or without a course in ethics. On the other hand, we also assume that students should reflect on ethics across the curriculum, and that assumes that ethics needs to and can be taught. How do we make sense of both these assumptions? (1) Students arrive capable of being held accountable for ethical behavior. (2) Students arrive in need of an education in ethics.

A cursory reading of these assumptions might find them to be contradictory. If students can be held accountable for ethical behavior without an ethics course, then why teach ethics? If students need an education in ethics, then why hold them accountable for ethical failure? This essay explores these two assumptions, noting why they are not contradictory, and why the teaching of ethics should depend and build on the ordinary formation with which students arrive on campus. Teaching ethics in the university will be most successful when it connects with students’ previous histories of doing good and avoiding evil in their everyday life, connects that to the university’s moral history, and points toward the ordinary events that will constitute their future endeavors. It is in these histories that teaching ethics makes best sense.

If the two assumptions of my opening paragraph are granted—first, we assume students arrive at the university with some understanding of ethical behavior so that we can hold them accountable for their actions even if they never had a course in ethics; second, we assume students should be taught ethics in their curriculum, including courses in ethics across the curriculum—then two possible objections arise based on the possible contradiction present in the assumptions. We could argue that students do not arrive at the university with a sufficient understanding of proper ethical behavior such that we should hold them accountable for their actions. This argument, however, would make the life of the university nearly impossible. Even if we cannot give convincing theoretical reasons why we hold the first assumption, living together in a complex space like the university requires that practically we assume students arrive with at least a tacit awareness of doing good and avoiding evil. We do not need to assume they all share the same ethical convictions, or that every student has the same level of ethical awareness, but the practice of everyday, university life assumes students (along with everyone else associated with the university) have some tacit ethical awareness.

Universities are composed of adults who have already been formed into ways of seeing the world and acting within it from a diversity of social forms of life. They are also composed of persons who should reflect on what virtuous human action is, for as Socrates said, “the unexamined life is a life not worth living.” If the two assumptions above are conceded, then the task of teaching ethics must address these two questions: (1) from whence does ethics come? and (2) to where should ethics go? The first question assists us with the first assumption that students and others arrive at the university with a tacit awareness of proper ethical behavior. The second question assists us with the second assumption that students (and others) benefit from examining and reflecting upon that tacit awareness to bring it to a fuller one that can assist them in living well. They can do so by confronting the question of what is a good human life? But as most people already know, and as we shall see, answers to this question are so contested that the question readily gets neglected or abandoned in the modern university for fear that the answers will produce too much conflict.

From whence does ethics come?

Ethics never begins in a vacuum. Ethics cannot be taught like a science experiment that seeks to remove the contingencies of everyday existence and create ideal conditions. Human action is too complex for such a possibility. Plato famously argued that to have a just city we would need drastic actions. We find ourselves already in the middle of preferences and injustices that prohibit the necessary harmony for justice to prevail. Plato proposed that to acquire justice we would need to start anew by exiling or killing everyone over the age of ten. Whether Plato was being ironic or conveying how difficult it is to bring about justice in a city has been debated and never fully answered, but he found the contingencies of human existence thwarting ethical pursuits. Unfortunately, some political leaders have attempted his experiment, trying to destroy everything that stands in the way of ideal conditions. Teaching ethics in the university can fall into the trap of assuming the university is an ideal condition in which students can now slough off everything that prevents them from adopting a putative ideal ethical theory. This assumption rejects the first assumption above that students arrive at the university with some measure of ethical formation, a formation that can be built upon but does not need to be destroyed. From whence does this ethical formation come?

It arises from diverse sources—family, friendships, attention to nature, participation in culture through a diversity of means such as novels, television, education, oral stories, worship, and everyday practices like athletics, music, theatre. These means are mediated through neighborhoods, local schools, urban, suburban or rural living, ethnic and racial identities, citizenship in nation-states, participation in civil society or in corporations and the market. Ethical formation takes place in religious institutions, churches, synagogues, mosques. Students who enter an ethics class already have a complex formation derived from these and other sources. Of course, student’s formations from these sources differ widely. Perhaps this complexity is why ethicists are tempted to reduce students to either autonomous, rational or self-interested individuals. It is easier and gives them something in common, but it is also similar to Plato’s odd counsel in that it takes the history of the student as something to overcome rather than build upon. It treats an ethics course as if it is a retraining camp in which everything the student has been taught to this point must be destroyed for the sake of making him or her anew.

Let’s briefly consider how we receive ethical formation from these diverse sources beginning with the family. For most of us, ethical formation begins with the care received from immediate or extended family located within neighborhoods. We learn practices before we learn any theory. I doubt few parents set their children down at a certain age, went over possible ethical theories by which they could live, and encouraged them to choose one and live consistently with it. John Mill, J. S. Mill’s father, approximated such an education with his son. J. S. Mill published an autobiography in which he tells of his father’s rigid educational instruction. He was taught Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight and had a complete course in political economy by thirteen. In 1822 at the age of sixteen he started a Utilitarian society, and when he turned twenty he had a nervous breakdown.1 Perhaps his strict education had no bearing upon his breakdown, but few of us are given a rigid ethical and political education as he was. Our ethical formation was less planned, less systematic and we are the better off for it.

How are we formed by our familial and neighborly relations? It usually occurs informally. Within them we learn to cooperate, to care for others, to eat appropriately so that others might be able to do so as well. We learn to take our turn, and ask for and give forgiveness. We learn by example, both positive and negative. Let me offer an example. My grandfather never returned from World War II. He did not die in the war; in fact, he was never deployed overseas. He betrayed my grandmother, took up with another woman and had children with her without my grandmother’s knowledge. It devastated her emotionally and financially. She had to raise five children by herself, my father being the oldest. They were so poor that he would be “farmed out” in summer to a local family who gave him shelter, food, and a stipend to work their farm. He remembers that time fondly, but he also taught his children and grandchildren that there were consequences to sexual and marital relations. We were not supposed to be like our grandfather, whom we never knew. Each family has narratives like mine that set forth positive and negative ethical exemplars that make possible the ethical projects that we find ourselves in the middle of, and that is why acknowledging students arrive at the university with an ethical formation matters—they are already in the middle of ethical projects of which they may or may not be aware.

Families and neighborhoods bring with them histories that make possible the exercise of virtues or vices; those virtues and vices will differ depending upon those histories. In his retrieval of an Aristotelian virtue ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, “What the good life is for a fifth-century Athenian general will not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun or a seventeenth-century farmer. But it is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone else’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what give my life its own moral particularity.”2 Mac­Intyre distances his virtue approach from individualism. An individualist approach to ethics falsely assumes each student emerges without moral particularity so that their histories do not matter. If we take their histories as moral starting points, then teaching ethics will connect more with their lives and become more complex. For instance, a white student from the US inherits ethical obligations arising from the long history of the slavocracy, Jim Crow, segregation and mass incarceration that will differ from a black student in the US. Someone with a Christian, Jewish, Islamic or secular history will also differ in their moral starting points.

Beginning with particular histories raises the question, But do we not have anything in common, anything we share by nature? The question is important. There is no reason that a focus on histories should reject the assumption that some of our ethical formation also comes from what we hold in common such as “nature.” Humans have a “nature,” which is why the term “human nature” makes sense. The term “nature,” like the term “culture” that we will examine momentarily, is a complex and difficult term, especially when it is appropriated for teaching ethics. The ancient Stoics founded ethics upon a “natural law.” The universe has a natural purpose amenable to the right use of reason. There are a variety of teachings about the natural law, but on the whole the natural law assumes this basic form: moral norms are present in nature and can be accessed by reason. Within that basic form, natural law teaching has great variation. Some interpret the natural law as a set of rules. Jean Porter contests this interpretation. Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas she suggests that the natural law is better “described as a capacity or power for moral discernment rather than as essentially or primarily a set of rules for right conduct.”3 As a capacity for moral discernment rather than a rigid set of rules, the natural law can be common—everyone has a sense that they should pursue the good and avoid evil—and at the same time what is common gains concreteness through our histories and actions. Vincent Lloyd’s work on Black Natural Law exemplifies this natural law approach. He cites Frederick Douglass’s emphasis on our common humanity made in the image of God as a basis for ethics. Douglass, like many others, professed that all humans share a similar human nature. Yet Douglass was born a slave and treated by his oppressors as if he had no nature in common with them. This disconnect between a common human nature and a history that denies it reveals that it is insufficient simply to appeal to nature; too many people miss what the natural law is. It, too, is only a starting point. For this reason, Lloyd argues that the history of Black suffering provides Blacks with an access to what this common humanity should be that is unavailable to others without a similar history.4 Everyone can and should learn from the history of those denied their common humanity to discover what it is. Our natures are historical so learning about what we have in common also requires discernment arising from our histories.

Students arriving at the university have already engaged with “nature” and learned from it. Take as an example something as trivial but morally significant as stopping at red lights. It is a form of natural knowledge in that laws intrinsic to being human are present in such a simple practice. One such law is that two automobiles cannot inhabit the same space at the same time and any attempt to force them to do so will have bad consequences. Yet how should we define the moral significance of the “natural law” that we learn from this practice? Is it self-preservation that causes us to honor this natural wisdom, or a desire to cooperate with others, or an instinct to do no harm? The practice itself is not self-interpreting, and when I use this example in teaching ethics I find students who will staunchly defend all the possibilities noted above. Although all might agree that stopping at red lights is ethically important, how they conceive of its ethical importance will have entailments for how they think about politics, economics, family life and much more. Are our relations within each of these based on virtue, grace, dignity, utility or caring? The answers we give affect how we inhabit forms of ordinary life.

Related to “nature” is culture. Stopping at red lights conveys natural knowledge, but red lights are also cultural artifacts. We can easily imagine societies where the natural law that two bodies cannot inhabit the same space at the same time is present, but someone might learn it from something other than red lights. Perhaps it is a society without automobiles, or a society where every red light has been replaced with roundabouts. Nature is mediated to us through culture. “Culture” is as confusing a term as is nature. The two are usually set in contradiction to each other. Culture is human activity that transforms nature in some way. Nature is the “stuff” upon which culture works. Yet clearly delineating where nature ends and culture begins, as with the previous red light example, is not easily done. It is natural to eat, sleep, reproduce, reason, study, act and so on, and yet each of these natural activities only occurs within specific cultural contexts.

No student arrives on campus or in an ethics course without having already participated in some of these ethical sources. I hope the above brief discussion will convince the reader that students have ethical formations that should provide the university with confidence that they can abide by some basic norms. They share a nature, but that nature has been mediated through diverse cultural means. The diversity of their ethical formation, however, will be both a strength and a weakness in the classroom. It gives us enough in common to discuss and debate ethical matters, and differentiates us so that those discussions and debates have the potential to be lively, if not conflictual. Think of any ethical issue: abortion, sexuality, war, pacifism, torture, eating, economics, reproduction, euthanasia, technological enhancements, alcohol or drug use. Most students already have some intuitive sense of these issues based on the intersection of their histories, interaction with nature, and diverse cultural mediations. That mediation may have come through television or novels, through formal education or oral stories told around the dinner table. It may have come through worship or conversing with friends. That cultural mediation may have been profound or superficial. Students may have had a serious training in the virtues or they may be emotivists who think moral judgments are primarily subjective preferences. They arrive with a moral starting point from their histories that should be honored and built upon at the same time that it will be subjected to scrutiny, not in order to free them from it, but to assist them to inhabit it. A tacit assumption in teaching ethics is that students still have work to do; there is something that they should know or practice that they might not yet know or practice. It is insufficient simply to inform students that they already have an ethical formation. It must be subject to examination. This implies normative judgments, and here is where teaching ethics gets tricky. Whose and which normative judgments should prevail?

To where should ethics go?

Teaching students to be aware of their ethical formations is one thing. Teaching them to examine and build upon it is another; the latter assumes that not all ethical formations are the same; some are better than others. How is it possible to make normative judgments about deeply held ethical convictions? Take for instance the morality of obliteration bombing in World War II. Many of our relatives were involved in it, and it is the case that without it some of us might not be here. Directly targeting civilian populations may have brought that war to a quicker end and saved relatives who were soldiers preparing for invasion. To subject this event to moral scrutiny raises all kinds of questions, especially after the fact. And yet—this scrutiny is what a course in ethics must do, not so that we judge our forebears, but so that we might know how to own our histories and act morally given the times in which we live. According to both the Stoic natural law and Roman Catholic teaching, directly intending to kill the innocent, even if it reduces the amount of suffering in the world, is an evil that should be avoided. Questioning one’s country’s role in the bombing of London, the fire bombing of Dresden, dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be unsettling, as can reminding students that there were voices at the time who spoke out against these practices.5 Once a teacher points out that Roman Catholic and natural law teaching oppose them, some students will respond by noting that they are neither Roman Catholics nor natural lawyers so that they feel no moral compunction about those teachings. On what grounds then do they justify or reject directly targeting innocents? This example often demonstrates that most students are utilitarians or emotivists, who argue that no universal, objective moral norms exist.

A common experience in teaching ethics is dealing with students who are primarily emotivists. Emotivism is a theory of meaning in which moral statements are expressions of preference. To say directly killing the innocent is intrinsically evil is to assert that the one making the statement does not like directly killing the innocent; one expresses his or her emotional dislike. If another person disagrees and likes it, then no rational adjudication between them is possible. Of course, emotion is an important aspect of moral education. We rightly question the probity of someone who observes moral horrors such as genocide or lynching with emotional detachment. But the wrongness of moral horrors must be something more than individual preference. Upon a little reflection students can usually be dissuaded from an emotivist theory of moral meaning. They unanimously agree, in my experience, that genocide is morally objectionable. When asked why, some students give an emotivist answer: “I don’t like it,” or “It just feels wrong to me.” When you follow up by asking if they truly think that such a moral horror is wrong because of their feelings, many (although not all) acknowledge that there must be something more to its wrongness than the way they feel about it.

Where is its wrongness located? An important way to begin to answer this question is to ask students if they think there is a purpose to human existence and what that purpose is? The question assumes that there is an answer to the question, What is a well-lived life? or What does it mean to be human? but identifying a common answer provokes disagreement. One compelling reason for teaching ethics is to gain clarity on the broad disagreements that quickly arise when we seek to answer these important and basic questions. Some awareness of the discipline assists us in that clarity.

Ethics is both a practical and theoretical discipline; in fact, it is unique in that it combines practical and theoretical reason. Practical reason culminates in an action. Theoretical reason culminates in thought or contemplation. Let me provide a famous example from W. D. Ross (1871–1977) to illustrate the difference. Imagine you promised to meet a friend for lunch. You are on your way to keep the appointment when you come upon someone drowning, and being an expert swimmer you can save the drowning person. Immediately you jump into action by kicking off your shoes, diving into the water and saving the person. The result is that you were unable to keep your promise to your friend, but you saved another human being. You exercised your practical reason—you observed someone in trouble, knew that you had the ability to assist and concluded that you were obliged to act. You tacitly exercised theoretical reason as well. The action suggested that the immediate need to save someone overrode the obligation to keep a promise to meet someone for lunch. However, your consideration of the matter did not result in thought or contemplation alone. You did not sit down and ask yourself if this episode fell under Ross’s theory of prima facie duties—duties that should be kept other things being considered. Ross uses this example to help us think or contemplate about such an episode. His theory of prima facie duties states that we should keep our promises unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. In so far as we contemplate what we might do, we are engaged in theoretical reason. It may not lead to an action. For instance, in a classroom on ethics, teachers and students consider and discuss prima facie duties without the discussion concluding with an action. If they were holding class outside next to the lake on campus and saw a drowning person, one would not expect a theoretical discussion but an action to save the endangered person.

Ethics then assumes practical reason and students arrive having already been formed to some degree by practices of everyday life that have already required actions from them, actions that ended in moral failure or success. They most likely have also contemplated what was the proper course of action and thus engaged in theoretical reason. Both assume that the subject of ethics is human action either directed to the good (or right) and/or away from evil. “To do good and avoid evil,” wrote the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, is the first principle of the practical reason. This first principle should resonate with Southern Methodist University because the first two rules of the original Methodist societies, rules that remain in theory binding on all Methodists to this day, are first “do no harm, avoiding evil of every kind,” and second “do good.” (There is a third rule to attend upon the ordinances of God.) These first two rules restate the first principle of practical reason. It is, however, only a beginning point that assumes, on the whole, people in the course of their life try to do good and avoid evil. There may be persons who are sociopaths who seek evil and avoid good, but ordinary life would not be possible if they were the norm. Whether out of self-preservation or concern for others, most people do not drive willy-nilly through red lights. Why is this true? Is it because we seek to be (1) virtuous citizens, (2) faithful creatures before God, (3) moral agents who treat others as we desire to be treated, (4) individuals who maximize utility, or (5) agents who have been cared for by others and seek to extend that caring to others? Each of these options offers a theoretical response to the practical question of ethics. They describe how we go about being ethical and they prescribe how we should act. They also bring out five important moments in the history of ethics. One reason for the need to teach ethics is to know how those who came before us thought about ethics.

(1) Aristotle’s Virtuous Citizen

Perhaps we refuse to run through red lights because we have been trained in virtues that make us good citizens in our cities and neighborhoods. This would be the reason given by one of the earliest philosophers who taught ethics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC). Although much has changed in the twenty-four hundred years since he lectured and wrote on ethics, his work is still widely used to help us understand what ethics is. Aristotle identified five “virtues of thought” that assist us in knowing what is true: craft (techne), scientific knowledge (episteme), practical wisdom (phronesis), wisdom (sophia), and understanding (nous). Craft is concerned with production similar to what builders, engineers and manufacturers make. The end product is external to the one who makes it so this kind of knowledge does not necessary produce virtue. For instance, one could be a morally compromised person and an excellent surgeon or car mechanic. It would be better if a surgeon were virtuous, but it is not necessary for her or his specific craft. Scientific knowledge is “demonstrative.” It discovers universals either through deduction or induction. Deduction begins with premises that are universally true and argues from them to conclusions that will also be universally true. Inductive reasoning begins with particular observations or probable premises and argues to conclusions that will be sound albeit not necessarily true. Understanding begins with principles that are undeniable; they are intrinsically known. Understanding provides the first principles for scientific knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to use understanding and scientific knowledge to arrive at conclusions that are “the same in every case.” Aristotle distinguished this from practical wisdom; its conclusions are actions that are not the same in every case. For instance, you should stop at red lights, but if you are driving your injured child to the hospital in the middle of the night, the light is red, and you clearly see there are no cars coming, practical wisdom would tell you to run the red light.

For Aristotle, ethics is not a “speculative” discipline that provides necessary knowledge like mathematics, but a practical discipline whose knowledge can be other. That is to say, ethics cannot create a method, or a computer program, where we input an ethical dilemma and if everything works properly it concludes with a necessary result that would fit anyone in any context with any kind of education, formation or knowledge. Ethics is not a deductive science that is “demonstrative” and known universally. It is about “particulars,” contingent features of everyday life. How we see, define and act on those particulars will always be a matter of judgment made possible by our character. For this reason, practical wisdom is not productive in the same way that a craft is. It affects who the agent is more profoundly than a craft. Practical wisdom is the cultivation of virtue over time within a community that allows a moral agent to see well what is going on in a situation and, in turn, act virtuously. Ethics is as much about vision as it is about action because what we are unable to see excludes proper action. It is also about friendship and happiness or eudaimonia. The latter term translates as happiness or flourishing. For Aristotle, all action has a purpose, end or telos; it aims at a particular end—happiness. It alone contributes to human flourishing. Wealth, honor, status, health, or pleasure are not ends in themselves because even if we have them we want them for something other than themselves. They are means to some end, an end he identifies as eudaimonia.

Aristotle’s ethics depends on the formation of character that requires “habituation.” It is the education resulting from practices that forms young boys into virtuous men. For Aristotle, ethical formation primarily occurred within the Athenian city by free males who had the leisure to pursue their flourishing. Ethics was not available to anyone, and for that reason contingency resided at the basis of ethics. Did a person have the right birth at the right time in the right place that would let him pursue those goods that made for human flourishing? Aristotle’s discrimination against women and slaves is no longer acceptable. His understanding of the ethics of virtue has, however, been translated into contemporary practices that remove these discriminations. Aristotle took as the paradigm for his ethics “the great souled man” who did not depend on anyone else while he himself had many who depended upon him. Few contemporary virtue theorists adopt the “great souled man” as a moral exemplar. Aristotle also argued that friendship was necessary for ethics; many contemporary virtue theorists adopt friendship as an essential aspect for virtuous living. Ethics is not accomplished by an isolated individual, but by a person with friends who assist him or her in the cultivation of virtue.

(2) Thomas Aquinas’s Faithful Disciple

Perhaps we do not run red lights because we seek to be faithful creatures before God, and doing harm to other creatures would at the same time be an offense to God in whose image they are made? However, despite our best efforts we find ourselves not doing the good we think we should do. We look for assistance, for something outside of us given by grace that causes us to do good works in the world. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was a Christian theologian and a member of the religious order known as the Order of Preachers who may have given this kind of answer. He accepted much of Aristotle’s teaching on ethics, but transformed it with theology. Like Aristotle, friendship was of central ethical importance, but Aquinas taught that the true end of the ethical life is found in friendship with God. For Aristotle, friends were primarily friends with others of a similar stature so the differences between God and humans ruled out the possibility that they could be friends. For Aquinas, friendship with God was not something that could be achieved on one’s own; it comes as a gift. Aristotle taught that virtues were acquired; they were habits that we achieve through proper habituation. Like many before him, he stated that the most important virtues were the “cardinal” virtues, from the Latin cardus, meaning “hinge”; they are the “hinge” that allows one to live well. Aquinas taught that friendship with God required something more than the acquired virtues; it required “infused” virtues that came from the Holy Spirit. They are “faith, hope and love,” and direct us to both God and our neighbor because to love God and neighbor fulfills the two tablets of the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses. To love God we must participate in God’s own love, and that participation makes possible infused virtues.

(3) Immanuel Kant’s Autonomous Reasoner

Although both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas’s ethical teachings are still present in practice and theory today, they are not often the dominant ethical theories used in the modern university. They are considered too parochial. Modern ethical thinking originated with two seminal thinkers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and J. S. Mill (1806–73). Perhaps we do not run red lights because if we lived by such a rule—I will willy-nilly run red lights—we could not will that everyone act by the same rule. Driving would be impossible.

For Kant, the only truly good thing in the world is a good will. Ethics was not about contingency, habituation, happiness, or friendship; it was about the rational, autonomous individual willing an action that could be done by anyone in any circumstances at any time. This gave rise to what is referred to as the “universalizability” thesis. Unlike Aristotle and Aquinas, ethics did not depend upon a community like the Athenian city or the Christian Church, it was available to anyone who was willing to do his or her duty. Accomplishing one’s duty consists of obeying commands or imperatives. Kant taught that there were two kinds of imperatives—hypothetical or categorical. Both are forms of practical reasoning. In the hypothetical imperative, an action is performed not for its own sake but for the sake of something else, for instance that it makes one happy or righteous in the eyes of God, one’s family, city or nation. In the categorical imperative, an action is performed for its own sake. Kant gave several versions of the categorical imperative. One version is to always treat others as ends and not as means. Our action, if it is to be moral, must always honor the dignity of another individual. Another version stated, “act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it be a universal law.” A maxim is a rule one adopts to live by. It should be adopted freely by the ethical agent and not because anyone else, parents, teachers, rulers or priests, told you to adopt it. Ethics is about autonomous actions that arise out of one’s own individual thought and will, and not the thought or will of another.

Simply adopting a maxim does not make it moral. We could always imagine an immoral maxim one might live by such as “always steal when you can get away with it.” What makes an action moral, what fulfills the categorical imperative, is that the maxim you live by can be made a universal law. The categorical imperative asks that if you are on the receiving end of a maxim, could you will it? In other words, if someone steals your goods because they can do so with impunity, would you be willing to adopt that maxim as a universal law? Reasonable people would refuse to make such a maxim into a universal law so it fails the categorical imperative. Kant’s ethics, then, are an extension of the adage to treat others the way you would want to be treated. His ethics began a tradition of ethical thinking known as “deontology” from the Greek word deontos, which means “binding.” Ethics is doing your duty because it is your duty whether you benefit from it or not.

(4) J. S. Mill’s Utility Maximizer

Perhaps we refuse to run red lights because it increases the utility to our lives, that is to say it increases pleasure or diminishes pain. John Stuart Mill was a trained economist like his father John Mill who taught utilitarian ethics. He was part of a radical group of thinkers in the nineteenth century who challenged how we think about ethics. Like Kant, ethics is about action, but Mill built on his predecessor Jeremy Bentham’s work that took pleasure or utility as central for ethics. He, too, started a tradition that has developed and grown into a variety of theories, but what the tradition has in common was best expressed in three articles Mill published in 1861 that were collected into a small book in 1863 known as Utilitarianism. Mill wrote, “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”6 This statement sounds similar to Aristotle or Aquinas’s eudaimonia; ethics seeks its end in happiness, but what is meant here by happiness has shifted. Happiness is the “intended pleasure and the absence of pain.” There is no sanction for it except the desire each has for his or her own happiness. Ethics is about increasing utility and/or diminishing disutility. For Kant, utilitarianism commands a hypothetical imperative in that it tells us to follow a rule not because of the rule itself but because of its consequences, either in making us or the greatest number happy.

(5) A Feminist Ethics of Caring

Much modern ethical thinking pits deontology against utilitarianism and defends some version of one or the other. But not all ethicists are happy with this situation. Feminists, in particular, find it wanting. Perhaps the reason we do not run red lights is because we have been nurtured by caring others who pass on to us a desire also to care. Neither a universal categorical imperative, nor a desire to increase utility, explains our ethical actions. Ethics is more local, more grounded in relationships of trust. Some feminists argue that the deontological/utilitarian binary is little more than a debate within dominant forms of masculinity. Virginia Held suggests that these two forms of ethical theory assume a male agent fit for liberal political or economic theory; deontology assumes the person as rational autonomous agent and utilitarianism as a self-interested individual. They are based on capacities putatively intrinsic to maleness, but ones that overlook capacities that women possess, one of which is “the capacity to give birth to new human beings.”7 Based on this and other capacities, Held develops an “ethics of caring” that draws upon “the universal experience of care.” Every person, she claims, has been cared for or cares for others at some point in his or her life. This universal experience makes more sense of our ethical practice, and can lead to a better ethical theory. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, it has a place for something more than autonomous reason. It emphasizes neglected aspects of being human—desire, passion, emotion. Unlike them, it is not found in only some communities, religious or otherwise, so it can satisfy the universalizability premise. It is modern without privileging the autonomous rational or self-interested individual.

The five ethical theories above do not exhaust the diverse ways philosophers and theologians think about ethics, but they suffice for demonstrating some of that diversity. They help us see why no single answer can be given to a perceived need to teach ethics. If in response to discovering that someone teaches ethics, a person responds that we need more of it, it would be appropriate to ask them, what do you think we need more of—acquired virtue, infused virtue, binding imperatives, maximizing utility, care? Some of these answers might overlap, but they also have different conceptions of what the purpose of ethics is, and they assume different social contexts in which it makes sense. All five assume that they are telling us how the common person (if there is such an entity) thinks about morality, and how the common person should think about it. Yet there is an interesting correlation that should not be missed in these diverse theories. Each of them privileges some underlying social context that renders them intelligible. Aristotle’s ethics assumes a small, manageable city and a moral agency fitting its citizens. Aquinas’s ethics assumes a church and a moral agency fitting disciples; Kant’s a nation-state securing the dignity of autonomous rational individuals through rights; Mill’s a market where self-interested individuals trade and barter; and Held’s an extended family where persons relate to each other as caregivers and receivers. What this demonstrates is something that the contemporary Aristotelian moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued—every ethics implies a sociology. Ethics cannot be abstracted from the social and political contexts that both make it possible and which it then in turn serves. Ethics done well will require us to consider the social orders which we think human actions should serve, orders such as nations, the state, the market, a city, a neighborhood of friends, family, a church or other religious institutions like a mosque or synagogue. Any teaching of ethics that does not attend to the correlation between social orders and ethics does students a disservice by inviting them to conceive of their lives in terms of such orders without giving them the tools to acknowledge that they are doing so.

Now we find teaching ethics, especially in a diverse context, to be veering into precarious territory; ethics has become inseparable from politics. When we ask students what is a well-lived life, they may give a diversity of answers, but with those answers also comes a tacit affirmation of the goodness of social orders and their arrangements. Students might suggest that the good life is one that pursues and achieves, wealth, honor, pleasure, or health. Thus, anything that discourages or impedes this pursuit is evil and anything that enhances it is good. From Aristotle to Aquinas, however, the pursuit of wealth, honor, pleasure or health was insufficient as an answer to what it means to be human because it could not lead to human flourishing. If students gave such an answer, they stood in need of correction. Perhaps Aristotle and Aquinas could make such a claim because they lived in societies in which there was a common conception of what human flourishing is. We do not, and for that reason making judgments on students’ answers to the question “what is a well-lived life?” is often perceived as inappropriate. How are we to proceed?

One way to do so is to let each student define his or her own answer to the question “What is a well-lived life?” without subjecting it to examination. Then the purpose of an ethics course is to encourage them to find the right means to achieve their end no matter what that end might be. This procedure is to my mind deeply flawed. Although it might appear to honor each student’s particular history and refuse to impose moral norms on them, it actually does the reverse. The assumption that ethics is about an autonomous decision to choose your own way of life and pursue it consistently is one ethical option among others. To assume that a course should proceed along these lines is to narrow down ethical possibilities, not expand them. It also neglects the inevitable link between ethics and politics. The answer to the question of a well-lived life will assume some underlying social formation that is worthy of our lives.

Normative ethical judgments should not be imposed on students, but how one teaches them without imposition—implicit or explicit—is exceedingly difficult. I once had an ethics teacher who was well known for beginning his course by stating, “In this class you do not have minds to make up for yourself about ethics. Your purpose is to think like me.” Most students were immediately appalled and raised their resistance to whatever he said next. His purpose was to challenge the default position of emotivism that he found among students, as if whatever they felt or thought about ethics was somehow in itself sufficient to the task. He did not say that students were to arrive at the same normative judgments that he did, although I think he hoped they would. He stated that they should follow a way of thought that he had inherited from others in order to think better about ethics. Part of that way of thought was to recognize that living one’s life for wealth, pleasure, honor, or health was insufficient for human flourishing, and to trust those forms of social life whose end was wealth, pleasure, honor or health alone were insufficient for one’s loyalty. Another part was to dissuade students that ethics was a pursuit of individual preference. These two parts are, however, negative. They tell us what should not to be done, not what should be done. Can we do more than this?

What is a well-lived life? What is human flourishing? What is the purpose for human existence? If ethics is to become more than a description of the diverse ethical sources student already have, and engage the normative task present in the second assumption, then it cannot avoid these questions. No single answer to the purpose for ethics suffices in the university, but below are ten well-known possible answers.

1.The purpose of ethics is to maximize utility.

2.The purpose of ethics is to honor and respect the dignity of every individual.

3.The purpose of ethics is to cultivate virtue in order to be a loyal citizen.

4.The purpose of ethics is happiness, learned within a context of friends.

5.The purpose of ethics is to obey Torah.

6.The purpose of ethics is to submit to Allah.

7.The purpose of ethics is to love the Blessed Trinity, enjoy God forever and in so doing love one’s neighbors and enemies.

8.Ethics has no purpose. It only expresses subjective values or preferences of approbation or disapproval.

9.Ethics is a practical skill to match means to ends whatever end one chooses for one’s self.

10.Ethics is nothing but a disguised form of power by which the privileged take advantage of those without privilege.

Let me offer a brief commentary on each of these possible answers. The first two are the dominant forms ethics takes in the modern university. They assume an isolated individual as the basic subject of ethical action, and provide a formal, putatively universal account of ethics. They tend to be reductive. The first answer makes individuals into utility maximizers, but no discrimination is made about the content of utility. The second also assumes the basic subject for ethics is the individual, but rather than a utility maximizer, the individual is now a rights bearing entity whose rights should be respected by all other rights bearing entities. It too is formal in that it does not attempt to give content to those rights. The first option is an ethics for the marketplace; the second for modern democratic nation-states. Both options do not take a person’s history as her or his moral starting point, but abstract from it by reducing persons to individuals.

The third and fourth answers take a more manageable political entity or small association of friends as the subject of ethics. We would need to know the content of the political entity in which the person is a citizen or friend to know what virtues matter. Large modern nation-states have a difficult time offering this kind of content because they are too big to facilitate the encounters necessary for the cultivation of virtue. Smaller units such as cities, villages, parishes or neighborhoods would provide the proper size, but they would need to have venues for political engagement with each other to determine what a good citizen is in specific contexts. Broad based community organizing is one place where virtuous citizenship is cultivated.8 Association of friends is an even more manageable size for the cultivation of virtue. It assumes that one’s ethical possibilities will in part depend upon the character of one’s friends and the common objects of love that they share. For instance, friendships determined by a shared passion for drug use will inevitably be vicious. Friendships determined by a shared passion to assist the poor, or to bring aesthetic joy to others bear great potential for virtue.

The fifth through the seventh answers obviously place the ethical life within religious institutions. There are well defined disciplines of Christian, Jewish and Islamic ethics. To police them out of any ethical conversation is to make the secular the default position. While a secular ethic has its advantages, it should not simply be assumed as the norm without some attempt to explain why it is preferable to religious ethics. One such attempt, one that has been discredited in practice and theory, is that a secular ethics is not as violent as religious ethics.9 Religions have, undoubtedly and unfortunately, contributed to violence. As the twentieth century amply demonstrated, secular polities did so as well. So what is the advantage to a secular ethic over a religious one? Anyone who argues for it will need to explain what the secular is and why it is preferable to religion. One common answer is known as the “subtraction thesis.” The secular is what remains once superstition is removed and only reason remains. Here the secular is a narrative of inevitable progress in which “secular reason” is primarily understood as negative. It is what you have once the world is disenchanted from all religious influence. Both the first and second answers could be forms of a secular ethic; God or religion is not necessary for them. Nor are they a priori opposed to God, which leads to a second definition of “secular,” one put forward by Charles Taylor. The secular is not what remains once religious influence is removed, but religion becomes a private preference individuals choose. It is one option among others.10 This secular ethics is another form of emotivism or expressivism. A third account of the “secular” arises from Christian theology, especially from St. Augustine (354–430). The secular is the time between Christ’s first and second advents in which religious and non-religious people must learn to live together in harmony. They will share common objects of love such as peace, health, basic services like food, shelter and protection, but they will also differ in objects of worship.

To this point, I have not made a case for a religious ethic, whether it be Jewish, Christian or Islamic, but only attempted to question if a secular ethic should be given the default position as it often is in the modern university. Like religious ethics, it too should have to give an account of itself—tell us what it is, what purpose it serves, and why it will let us flourish as human beings more so than other kinds of ethics. What account might a religious ethics give for itself? At a minimal level, anyone who seeks to be conversant with the ethics of the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants should at least be aware of the ethical teachings among the world’s religions. Because each religion has contested teachings on ethics, it would behoove us to encourage the religious persons with whom we inhabit this world to be the best representatives of that religion’s teachings. For instance, I think it is preferable to encourage the world’s religions at least to take seriously their just war traditions over holy crusades. For that matter, a secular war ethics would benefit from the practical wisdom of the just war tradition.

Beyond this minimal reason for teaching religious ethics is the important ethical question of whether or not God exists, and what it matters in everyday life. For if there is a God, and a God like the transcendent deity at least in part shared among the Abrahamic faiths, then God is not one more object in the world. God’s existence will change everything, especially concerning the ethical life. What difference God would make to ethics as that knowledge is mediated through religions should be part of any quest for moral purpose. To police it out a priori is to force secular conversions upon the ethical conversation. A third important reason to make space for religious ethics is an important point made by Alasdair MacIntyre about the basic subject of ethics. To this point I have agreed with most ethical theories that the basic form ethics takes is action. As noted above, practical wisdom culminates in it. MacIntyre, however, has made the point that action per se is not the basic form of ethics but intelligible action. To act is not an isolated event, but one that arises from an ability to see and construe the world in specific ways. Ethics is as much about vision and narrative as it is about action. Narratives provide a vision by which we can see a situation that allows us to act within it. Part of the ethical task will be to get students to clarify the narratives that provide them with a vision to act in the world, and then ask if those narratives are worthy of their life? Religions offer narrative construals that render actions intelligible, but the same of course is true of secular visions.

The eighth through the tenth answers slightly differ in content, but are similar in kind. The eighth depends on the “emotivist” theory of meaning for ethics. Although it was once popular among scholars, and still has a resonance with popular culture, I find it misguided for the reasons already noted. Faced with horrible moral failure few people find it adequate to say “x is wrong because I don’t like it.” The ninth answer is one based on managerial expertise, a peculiarly modern form of instrumental reasoning that claims to be able to match means with ends without making judgments about the worthiness of those ends. Ends should matter; it avoids the reason for teaching ethics altogether. The tenth answer is less deceptive than the instrumental reasoning present in putative managerial expertise. It denies that we have purpose at all and thus claims to be “beyond good and evil.” This is the fascinating position of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) who claimed that morality was a “soporific appliance.”

Nietzsche wrote, “I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances—and that ‘virtue,’ in my opinion, has been MORE injured by the TEDIOUSNESS of its advocates than by anything else; at the same time, however, I would not wish to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting!”11 Moral philosophy as a “soporific appliance” induces sleep in order to numb patients so that an operation can be performed on them without their knowledge. Moral philosophy masks what is really going on. There is no good or evil, no up or down, no purpose to life. We are on a little blue ball spinning aimlessly through the universe and the most we can do is what Nietzsche called the “artistic taming of the horrible.” Take the horrors of life and using aesthetic means make it as beautiful as it can be. Moral philosophy, like religion, soothes immature minds who cannot look upon our horrifying reality and affirm it for what it is. Answers eight and nine inevitably lead to ten when we look with the utmost seriousness at what they are suggesting because, in the end, they conceive of ethics as nothing but a will to power.

These ten answers are not the only answers to the question of moral purpose; others can be found. The difficulty in teaching normative ethics is the step that comes after presenting these possible answers. As I noted earlier, if we tell students to “choose” a moral purpose and live consistently with it, we are not giving them independence but imposing something like answer nine upon them. Such an answer will tacitly assume that the role of the bureaucrat-manager is the normative role for ethical practice and theory. We cannot divorce the teaching of ethics from proposing some form of good life within a social context.

Conclusion

So what should be done in teaching ethics? The first task is to take seriously the ethical formations students already bring with them into the class room, and help them gain the practical and theoretical wisdom to be able to name them. The second task is to have them subject it to scrutiny through an examination of human flourishing by attending to the question, What is a well-lived life? But if the answer to this question is not simply to be emotivist, it must be something more than subjective preference. Here is where not only the student’s history, but the history and tradition of the university should come into play. Students and teachers are not the only ones who have histories, so do universities. They exist in specific locations and have traditions of practical reasoning present through their ceremonies, architecture, monuments, mission statements, etc. They help us answer the question, What does this university stand for? Where does it want to take you ethically? Is it primarily to gain wealth, status, health, virtue, faith, abandon faith? What does it think a well-lived life is? If it has no answer to this question, then perhaps ethics courses will be unintelligible. Those answers are usually present and can be found, for better and worse, in those mission statements, monuments, and architectural structures. For instance, the motto at Southern Methodist University is Veritas liberabit vos (“The truth will make you free”). This motto is found throughout its history and marks significant moments and monuments of SMU’s life and architecture. It comes from Christian Scripture, John 8:32, and bears traces of SMU’s Methodist heritage.

This heritage is worth considering as an answer to the question, What is a well-lived life? The mission statement in the university’s strategic plan makes this explicit: “Among its faculty, students, and staff, the university will cultivate principled thought, develop intellectual skills, and promote an environment emphasizing individual dignity and worth. SMU affirms its historical commitment to academic freedom and open inquiry, to moral and ethical values, and to its United Methodist heritage.” Some debate and discussion about what that heritage is, and how it helps us answer the question of moral purpose should be noncontroversial. It can be done without assuming everyone must join the United Methodist church, sign some confessional document, or even have faith in God.

The university is a complex space where no single authority should define it. It has relations with many other “spaces”—the market, government, the military, church, other religious and civic institutions, but it also has its own identity. While it must have relations with each of these other “spaces,” it must also keep an arm’s length distance from them so that it can engage in free inquiry about the purposes of each. The university is not a church, but nor is it a nation state, corporation or military institution. It should seek to engage all these forms of social life by exploring assumptions, finding connections and by subjecting them to the “universitas” the whole that should render our common endeavor intelligible if it is not to be fragmented into competing “colleges” without any overarching purpose. How that “whole” gets defined is exceedingly complex, but it can only be found if we continue to ask the question, What is a well-lived life? Or additionally, What is a life worth living? We must connect those questions both to the histories students bring to the university, the history of that university, and where we think we are headed into the future.

1. Mill, Autobiography, 94, 97, 112, 118.

2. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 220.

3. Porter, Nature as Reason, 4.

4. Lloyd, Black Natural Law, 4.

5. Ford, “Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” 261–309.

6. Mill, Utilitarianism, 7.

7. Held, Ethics of Care, 60.

8. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized.

9. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence.

10. Taylor, Secular Age.

11. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 578.