 Hello, and welcome to another one of my Dr. Sandler-Chalking Talks. This one, I am responding to a question that came to me through VU today. A very good question. And I really like this question in part because it opens up a lot of different possibilities. This is something that I could actually use as a staging ground for the entire our course lecture if I was teaching an ethics class, which I may be doing soon. I also like it because it represents a starting point that is prevalence in our culture. This notion that who are we to teach morality, who are we to impose our morality on other people if we're teaching some sort of ethics in school, aren't we privileging some particular point of view over against others? So here is the question I was actually asked. Because we operate on a personal level in regards to moral value judgments, should ethics be taught in school? And my very short answer to that is yes, precisely because we operate on a personal level in regards to moral value judgments. Now that makes it a little paradoxical. Particularly if you're used to the notion that the personal is this kind of sacrosanct space and we must never interfere in other people's values. We must never push our morality into the sphere of other people's inferiority onto their consciences. But if you actually look at social life and you actually look at what we do in social settings, that falls apart as nonsense very quickly, doesn't it? Because as soon as somebody starts violating certain basic norms, you know, I'm not thinking of things like what you're wearing, but not hitting people, not stealing. You know, the things that all the great religions and all the great moral codes had something to say about, you know, not using violence against other people, not lying to other people or about other people, not slandering them, not losing your temper in very bad ways, not taking other people's things without permission. All of those sort of things we are tempted to do. And children tend to do them and children come up with justifications for why they do them. So do people who are at a fairly low level of moral development. Sometimes people who are at a higher level of moral development, too, when the moral reasoning gets screwed up and something goes haywire in the process. So what I would like to think about tonight is really two things. I want to look at this with a perspective of the individual and then I want to think about the social sector. Look at both of these. We realize that yes, in fact, not only can we teach ethics in school in the sense of it's a possibility, not only can we teach ethics in school in the sense of it is legitimate to do, it is permissible. I think that I should be, we arguably have a moral duty. That's a pretty strong thing. And I'm going to argue for that as time goes on. Think about moral development as it takes place in individuals. There are a lot of different scales of moral development, ranging from those in ancient philosophy already played on Aristotle's talk about this, the Stoics talk about this. Epicurean tradition actually has something along these lines and distinguishing between different types of goods and those who pursue these goods. And it's often not so much a question of how perfect are you, but how unscrupulous are you, how much have you actually realized human nature, the potentialities that we have for flourishing, for living the good life, for living a life that is not just good in the sense of being good in the eyes of other people, useful to them, not harmful to them. But good in that you're actually orienting yourself towards happiness, which includes your relationships with other people. It includes how you think about yourself, how you orient yourself. We also have all sorts of, you know, medieval philosophers and modern philosophers who have reflected on this. One very common way of talking about this, we bring up the notion of moral development. People think of Colbert and his scale, which at the low levels I do, I do have some concerns about the higher levels. I do quite a few other theorists that this has some problems with it for one reason. This first emphasis, like you're optimizing problems for other reasons, else you're back in time, there's other problems. But let's say we step aside from that. We just think of this basic intuition that there are certain levels of moral development and what evinces those levels of moral development. It's the basis on which a person carries out moral reasoning, on which they carry out their practical reasoning, what I to do, what may I do, what would be good for me to do, what would be bad for me to do. And at a very, very low level, it's based solely on notions of punishment and reward. And, you know, little children are like this at many times. Although, you know, children do, in most cases, also have a sense of apathy. That develops very quickly and you can harness. But some people remain at a very low level of pure punishment and reward their entire life. And it's not just movie villains. There are many people who remain like that in and out of the prison system. I taught a few of them. Interestingly, I didn't teach many of them. Many of them that I had discussions with about ethics around, you know, higher stages. But there are some people who are like that. And then you can move to higher stages. And actually, it is an advance to start caring about what other people think about you and to do things purely on the basis of pleasing other people. That is an advance beside beyond pure solipsistic, you know, narcissistic attitude of others or they are solely to serve me. And I will only do things that people think I want to do on the basis of punishment and reward. That's the case. And we can go higher and higher and higher. We can talk in terms of moral principles. We can talk in terms of recognizing the rights of others. We can talk in terms of having empathy or sympathy as a conscious. There are a lot of different ways in which we can speak about this. We can try about taking others into consideration and carrying out a sort of utilitarian calculation where we try to do what's best for the most people. And you know, if it ends up harming a few people, but it ends up benefiting the most people, sometimes that's the thing to do. That's higher up than just saying screw everybody else, I'm going to do what benefits me. It's not the highest level, but it is a higher level. So we have this variety of moral perspectives. And you know, when students come to a classroom, they have a variety. They don't all see things the same way. Here's where it gets interesting. One of the things that you want people to do is to, for a variety of reasons, is to rise and lower moral levels to higher moral levels. So from a purely self-interested perspective, do you want to live next to somebody who might kill you in the middle of the night if they feel it would be to their benefit? I don't think so. So do you want to, you know, turn out a generation of kids like that? Probably not. So you don't want them to have some level of moral development. This has been a part of education from the very beginning. It's really a bizarre thought and something peculiarly western, late modern to think of education as morally neutral or not inculcating values. Because every other notion of education that you're going to find out there in all the cultures, that's part of the point of education. How do people progress? How do they rise to different levels? Well, you know, you can smack them. You can say, if you don't do what I tell you, I'm going to knock the living, you know, tire out of you. How far is that going to get you? That actually, you know, may jake them, make them dissent to a lower level. That's appropriate for those who can only be handled in such ways. There are people who can only be handled in such ways. But it's not going to teach them a lot. It's going to elevate them very much. What about teaching? Well, you know, if you're actually teaching people things, you're teaching others. If you're teaching them that they should behave in this way, or even if you're teaching them you ought to take this moral theory, which I'm not pushing out of you, but you ought to at least take it seriously enough so that you can pass a test where I ask you about what the utilitarian is. Or what is a formulation of Kant's categorical imperative? Or what is a virtue? You're teaching them. And that may in fact result in these aha moments that students have. They're very unpredictable, but we love to see them as educators. Unflict is also an important part. This is something where I think Colbert actually was really onto something. He saw that if you want to develop from lower levels to higher levels, you can't just push people. You can't just tell them, here's a scale of levels. Get from here to here. They need to experience conflict. They need to actually experience seeing other people's perspectives that don't jive with their own and having that cognitive dissonance. And then that preps up sometimes from being able to be jarred out of a lower position to the beginnings of an upper position. And then you can start working with that. Also very key models. This is part of why I'm going to discipline you into respecting level five or something like that. I'm going to discipline you into respecting conscience. I'm going to discipline you into being a good person. Not that effective. Because what sort of way are you actually modeling? You're teaching something. You're teaching people that you can use violence as a tool to get them to conform. Models are those that actually embody certain moral values or certain moral theories who have virtues. Actually, if you want somebody to learn the conscient perspective, find somebody who's a conscient and actually lives it out, you can do very mundane things as well. It doesn't have to be high level theory. Because we have all sorts of ethics that we live up. Let's think about the social setting. Let's say you try to make the classroom a morality free zone, a morality control zone. Does that work? I mean some people enjoy it. Those who want to impress others or tease them or bully them love that sort of thing. Because once you introduce that sort of morality free zone, you no longer have any way to criticize it. And even if posing some sort of discipline, even if it's purely arbitrary, it is already adopting a moral standard. This is okay. This is not okay. I will punish you for this and I won't punish you for that. You're sending messages no matter what you do. If you're allowing all sorts of things to go on, you're sending a message that's okay. If you refuse to teach ethics because you consider it to be something absolutely sacred sand or something, so beyond the pale you can't be, you can't teach it, you're actually sending a message about right or wrong in doing so. You're sending a message that's usually pretty incoherent to the students that are encountering it. And sometimes educators feel like they're liberating students. When really if you ask those students, they do not feel liberated at all. They actually feel somewhat oppressed by it. So it is important to think about what moral messages you're sending. Why not send an actual coherent moral message? Adopt a thoughtful attitude towards ethics. Teach it. Don't teach it as, here's the one ethic that you have to adopt. This is the only one. All the others are terrible or reducible to it. Teach a whole bunch of them, but teach them. Actually adopt those positions and argue for them and make students apply them in cases and make the students engage in conflict with each other and argue with each other. That's how you have students grow. That's how you thoughtfully do this. Bring subject matter experts, philosophers. There's plenty of other people in other fields who do ethics as well, but I think philosophers are really at the core of it. And I think actually that in people who have a historical background, not just doing metaethics or something like that or some of the most true state, but actually have studied the history of ethics so they know a lot about the systems. Teaching students how to develop and grow. How do you teach them? The core of it is by learning by doing. Again, that's where these things come in. Model it for them. Bring them into conflict with each other. Not conflict where they're punching each other in the nose, but where they actually have to provide justifications, arguments, claims, information sources, where they have to engage each other. Where somebody adopts a terrible position, the other people will hold them accountable and say, that's an awful thing to say. Why are you saying that? That's teaching them actually how to develop or provide them with resources. Show them where they can go if they want to know more about virtue ethics. Show them where in the library they can find books about this. There's an incredible hunger out there. I'm finding this among young people who as generations have been effectively deprived of the opportunity to react against some sort of system that would be imposed from above and would actually give them some meat that they could chew up and then spit out. They've also been deprived of the opportunity to talk about these things because there's been, for so many people, kind of a ban on bringing these things up. But younger people do want to talk about these. They want to think about it. But they can't think about it effectively if they don't grow, if they don't develop. If nobody teaches them how to do this in a thoughtful way. If we don't do that, we're effectively sending them a message. Let's just do things from a major perspective and then say we agree to disagree and let the chips fall where they may. And that does not really help anyone. The other thing that I think is really key is to introduce them to this understanding of super individual goods. That there are certain things that go beyond the individual and cannot be just in an individual but are also important for the flourishing of individuals. Order itself as a good. This is a notion that is really, this was at the core of ancient, medieval, even a lot of modern ethical theory and political philosophy. And it has dropped out of our discourse. Harmony, the notion of harmony or conform. What does that actually mean? Does that mean we all just get along or is it something more substantive? What does it require? That's something we should be talking about and teaching about. What does it mean to actually create fields of opportunity for other people? Is it just so simple as to say back off and let them do whatever they want? Or does it require something? Now that's a super individual good that benefits individuals but that goes beyond that. Social life itself. We are social beings. We are not beings meant to exist in the vacuum and our good development requires that. The one thing that I do live with that I didn't put on the blackboard that I always like to do with a question are there some activities? Are there some goods? Are there some practices that cannot be enjoyed by yourself as an individual but yet contribute to a full, even life that can be part of something that would be recognized by our levels of normal development? There are, and I leave it up to you to think about that question.