 Welcome to another one of my doctors at their Chalk and Talk sessions where I explore questions or issues, comments, anything that's particularly provocative and could use a blackboard and being drawn out that come to me from a variety of sources. In this case, this is actually sort of a follow-up to one of my earlier doctors at their Chalk and Talk videos. They had to do with should we teach ethics in public schools? Should we teach ethics K through 12 as well as teaching ethics classes, singing in college? And the position that I took was, yeah, of course we should be, because you're learning ethics one way or the other and either you're learning it well or you're learning it in a distorted sort of way. That's not going to help that much. It will leave you vulnerable to manipulation, to being caught in all quandaries, to making bad decisions, other bad decisions, which lead to dilemmas. There was quite a bit of discussion back and forth on the comments section for that one. And one of the things that came up that I thought was particularly interesting was a suggestion was made. Well, I think that you ought to teach these models of different ethical systems or moral theories, however you want to put it. You ought to teach that in the schools, but that's really kind of static, isn't it? Don't you want to have something more dynamic for the students like maybe games theory, right? For those of you who don't know what games theory is, it's a development of a particular branch of mathematics, and it attempts to model strategic decision making. And strategic decision making is where you're not just sort of optimizing something within a process. You're trying to think about, well, what if that other person over there will also affect this process and will also mistake it? What if they go this way or this way and try to predict what they might do? You also treat them as being rational and you assume that they know that you're rational. So there's a lot of abstractions involved in games theory, but it can be kind of fun to play around with. And you can set up some of the games that would be interesting to teach people things fairly easily, like the prisoner's dilemma. Now, students do like that sort of thing. Students always enjoy exercises that get them engaged, that get them thinking, that allow them to interact a bit. But I think that it's a mistake to assume that because it works with models, and particularly since we work with text and we present things in a somewhat systematic way, that what we're doing in ethics is actually kind of boring, dry, abstract, you know, not dynamic. It's very static and the students just kind of learn their thing and then they go and play it. And so what I want to do first is contrast them, so I've got this big scheme up here. I want to contrast two different ways of understanding the interaction that could take place in a classroom. Two different models of how theory works. This doesn't necessarily even have to be in a classroom. This could be in a lot of other contexts as well. Think about apprenticeship programs. Think about teaching somebody how to cook. Think about teaching somebody martial arts. One common way of understanding education. And you see this already being sort of, you know, made fun of by Plato and Socrates already back in ancient Greece. This notion is sort of, you know, the instructor has the knowledge in their head and they just kind of pour it into the head of the student and now the student can apply it, right? So you have transfer of information, the instructor has the theory, whatever the body of theory consists of. And the theory is basically static. It's a bunch of propositions or, you know, maybe some skills or something like that. They pass it on to the student, godly knows how. There's a lot of different ways to do that. And then the students, you know, the real test of whether they understand it and can they apply it. And all they're doing then is sort of a mechanical process, applying the static knowledge that they have in their head and making it active and dynamic in real life situations. Okay, that's the way a lot of people do teach. I had professors who taught like that. I have to admit that when I first started teaching I'm willing to bet that a lot of my teaching was like that too. You know, explicitly on the material. Here's the main points, you know, this is what I want you to know and to memorize. Okay, that fits them. But a lot of what goes on in ethics classes, whether we bring in games theory or whether we design all sorts of other exercises, is something a bit more like this. To begin with, we're always in the realm of application. Especially for the ethics. I mean, if you're doing ethics, if you're talking about ethics and you're explaining plagiarism, you know, for the paper in the class, is that just a matter of theory or is that already a matter of application? That's a real life situation. How students treat each other in the class. How people interact with each other. What to do with your frustration when you don't understand material. That's already no longer just a matter of bare theory by itself, but theory tied in with application. And quite often, for some ethical approaches, some moral theories, you don't actually develop the theory without being involved in application. There's an iterative process going back and forth. Back and forth, you can call it dialectical, you can call it iterative, you can call it anything of like. Point is theory and practice are not so easily dissociable from each other in certain ethical theories. So that means that if you're going to teach those theories right, you probably can't just pour the knowledge out there for those students and say, ah, there you go. For instance, virtue ethics. If you're going to teach virtue ethics, well, there has to be some component of you actually engaging in it. But we'll get to that in a moment. So with this sort of thing, the instructor would show up and the instructor actually has embodied the theory, the instructor has it available to them. Then they put it in the center and now the students engage around it. And this can be done in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily have to be through games or group activities or things like that. That can be done through classroom discussions where you put something on the table and you actually, instead of just, you know, lecture, you can have lecture discussion. You talk for a little bit. What do you think about that? Can you think of any examples of that? Are those good examples? Already when you're doing that, you are taking the theory and putting it in the center of those students. You're not just lining them all up in their neat desks and laying the knowledge out there and hoping some of them will pick it up. Instead, if we want to continue the fish metaphor, you're trying to encourage something like a feeding frenzy. I don't know how much you know about fish, but one thing that fish do is they exhibit what's called a medic desire, which means that a fish, the desire that it has will often be triggered by seeing another fish getting something. So a fish sees another fish eating and then it says, I think I'd like to eat too. We do this as human beings. Works really great in bars. One person lights up a cigarette. Not everybody who's a smoker feels like they ought to smoke, right? Well, it works the same way with knowledge too. If you can get people engaged, if you can get them interested, if you can get them passionate, if you get one student talking about things, you might be able to get the rest of them interested in talking about it. Especially if you can tie it in constantly with applications. How does this fit into your life? That's one of the things I do constantly in my ethics classes. I try to connect the material to where my students are, and that produces dynamic learning. And I'm doing that not by, you might say, dumbing it down or skipping through the tough stuff and just going to the fun things, you know, the sexy sayings or things like that. We're doing the material, but we're doing it in a dynamic way. And I think there's a lot of professors out there actually doing that. I know that I had some, I didn't really think of it in those terms, but I had some who were doing that in their classes while I was in their classes, some of them in elementary school, some in high school, some in college, some in graduate school. So what I want to say before we move on to the other stuff, it's quite possible to have a model in which moral theories or models are not just static information thrown out there, which then has to be livened up by some sort of, you know, bells and whistles. If you're teaching the moral theory well, as a teacher doing what you ought to be doing, you're not just presenting content. And you don't necessarily have to have lesson plans to do this. Good teachers can do this on the spot with students. They can meet them where they are. You want to make it something that everybody is, or at least enough of the students, a critical mass are involved with, and which ties in with their concerns and their life. So now, let's think about some... That's the point that I was making here. If they're taught well, moral theories by themselves are dynamic. I mean, there's a reason why people have been reading Play-Doh and the Republic and all these other dialogues and reading Aristotle's were essentially lecture notes for generation after generation after generation. It's not just because we like classic works. It's because if you actually work your way through them and you know how to read those sort of texts, they are incredibly dynamic texts. They represent a clash of perspectives over and over and over again. There's conflict in them. There's, you might say, even narrative. You're not just talking about Play-Doh and his dialogues. There's narrative even in Aristotle, the clash of different viewpoints on things. And this person could say this and this person could say that. If you can actually get into that, then they become very dynamic. Now, the trouble is how do you get this across to students? That's, you know, like I said, if you can read them that way, we shouldn't automatically assume that students are going to read them that way. There's a lot of obstacles to that. And so we have to do the work as instructors to make that possible, which means, first off, we have to know that material inside and out and we have to be passionate about it and care about it. There's not an awful lot of point in trying to teach something and make it dynamic if you yourself don't care about it. Luckily, I think most people who teach this stuff actually do. What are some examples of things that, by their very nature, if you're teaching them with students who are at least, you know, engaged to some degree, are going to be interesting, dynamic. You can build all sorts of work around with all sorts of lessons around it. But I'll think about utilitarianism. Carrying out utilitarian calculation of any given scenario that you want to put in front of students, seeing how they would carry out and whether they do carry out utilitarian calculations in their day-to-day life, in deciding whether to go home for Christmas or not, in deciding whether to take this class or that class. Topics that are kind of sticky and messy where you can actually have students make partly right answers, partly right choices, and then partly wrong. And then you can build off of that and say, well, because with utilitarian calculations, one way people go partly wrong is by not including everybody whose pleasures and pains are affected by it, right? Utilitarian calculations are about pleasures and pains. Everybody gets that. So you start out by putting a situation in front of them. They get the idea that some people are affected this way, some people are affected this way. Now you widen that. You expand the time frame. You say, what about these people? What about these people? That's dynamic. That shows them the process of change right there as you're teaching them. Even value clarification. A lot of people are doing ethics most of the time. Value clarification, that's just garbage. Because basically what value clarification is, is figuring out what do you want, and it stops there. Well, you know, actually figuring out what you do in fact desire, that takes some work. And a lot of people think that they want certain things, and it turns out that some of them, they don't actually want them when they get them, because they wanted something else that came with it, or they thought came with it. And sometimes our deeper desires are a bit buried, and have to be brought to light. You can do all sorts of exercises with this, and you can reflect on it, and you can have students compare and contrast those to each other and say, why do you feel that? Why do you value this? Why don't you value that? Applying the categorical imperative, these are the first two formulations of it, which I don't know. Usually about as far as you get an ethics class, because the third one is kind of tricky. Being able to apply the criterion of can you universalize this action? Now there's more to the categorical imperative. That's a good starting point. Or by doing this sort of action, would you be treating somebody as a means to an end? Getting students to think about that, to look at determinate situations, also to look at their own lives. Are you using people as a means to an end? I always use this as an example. What about me in teaching you? I'm getting paid to teach you. Aren't I just using you as a means to an end? Already you're in a very dynamic conversation by doing that. When it comes to virtue ethics, figuring out whether an action or a person is actually virtuous or vicious, or something in between, perhaps, you know, self-control, lack of self-control, doing actions for which they're not entirely responsible, on the way to being virtuous, on the way to being vicious, in accordance with vice, in accordance with virtue. All these sorts of things, figuring out those, the nitty-gritty of it, actually looking at cases and saying, look, is this person a good person? Do they have good traits? What are they? How do you define those traits? What did Aristotle say about those traits? What did Augustine say about those traits? Do you buy what they're saying? Do you think they left something out? Which of these do you think is most important in evaluating the goodness or badness of a person or their actions? Who do we take as models? Already. You notice the questions just come spilling out. Very good. Working out norms by agreement. This would be something along the lines of doing games there, right? Contractarian ethics, and some other forms of ethics, have to do with working out norms by actually sitting down with people and saying, well, can we all get on board with this? Somebody makes an objection, and somebody else does. Good reasons for doing things this way. That's dynamic. You get students talking. You get them engaged. You get them thinking. You can do that again with the classroom. You can apply this to their own lives as students. You can apply this to their work lives. You can apply it to their family lives. Discovering the value of the person or of a relationship. Here we might be doing virtue ethics. We might be doing ethics of care. We might be doing personalist ethics, various sorts. Thinking about the people who we actually do love, or the people that we hate, what is it that we love about them? Are they just those qualities or actions or consequences that we love, or is there something beyond that? Is there a value in the relationship beyond just that of the two or more people involved in their relationship? And again, you have tons of stuff you can play off with students. You can get them talking about their own families and comparing them to each other. You can always get them talking about romantic relationships. What's going on with those? They're quite often quite happy to disclose. Finally, you know, one of the things that's going to be going on with all of this is exploring and trying to figure out what's the proper ordering of different goods or bad things in relation to each other. That's something that ethics is intimately concerned with. I think all of this could be taught to high school and to middle school students. And, you know, it doesn't have to be taught necessarily by making them read Aristotle and Kant and Mill. But I also think that that couldn't hurt either. The last thing I want to say has to do with moral theories. I said moral theories by themselves are dynamic. Very often, that gets sort of covered up by the way in which we present it with this theory of education where it's just packets of information that would pass on to each other. But moral theories, if they're properly understood, are extremely dynamic because they have to do with people's lives, how they shape them, how they make decisions, how they progress towards their good, what their good actually is, how they judge things. And what I want to say is theories are exemplified. They're embodied and they're endorsed by living human beings who we can point to and who actually get into dialogue with each other. So moral theories, in fact, come into dialogue with each other in our day-to-day situations. Again, it's like this. The theories, we could put several different theories here, give them a situation. This sort of thing happens. Can we evaluate this from three different perspectives, a virtue ethics perspective, a day ontological perspective, and a utilitarian perspective that's already asking quite a bit about it. But you get the point. How would these theories respond to each other in this case? Because they do respond to each other. Well, that's growth, to learn that sort of thing. So, very thankful for that comment and that suggestion that was given to me in my other Dr. Sather Chocolate talk about should ethics be taught in school. This is a follow-up from that. You might say this is a bit of cheerleading for how ethics could be taught dynamically in school and why it ought to be taught in that way.