Why philosophical ethics in school: implications for education in technology and in general

Abstract

In this article, we distinguish between three approaches to ethics in school, each giving an interpretation of the expression ‘ethics in school’: the descriptive facts about ethics approach, roughly consisting of teaching empirical facts about moral matters to students; the moral fostering approach, consisting of mediating a set of given values to students; and the philosophical ethics (PE) approach, consisting of critically discussing and evaluating moral issues with students. Thereafter, three influential arguments for why there ought to be ethics in school are discussed, and each argument is interpreted given each approach to ethics in school, respectively. Thereby, we evaluate which interpretation of ‘ethics in school’ produces the strongest arguments, and thus, which approach is best supported by these arguments. The conclusion is that there ought to be PE in school.

Keywords::

• ethics
• moral education
• technology
• critical thinking
• philosophy
• school

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

^2. Email: [email protected]

^3. We use the expression ‘ethics in school’ in a broad sense, meaning all those things in the educational aspects of school that regard ethics, such as activities in class, teachers’ lectures, students’ writing assignments, and so on. The approaches presented above are to be considered as regarding all of this. Hence, it does not directly follow anything about, for example, ways of structuring the teaching from any of those approaches in school. Therefore, we are not directly discussing in what pedagogical or didactical forms ethics should be dealt with, but rather what content should be in focus, and what fundamental approach to take with regard to this content.

^4. We are not making any substantial assumptions regarding what a good citizen would be. The only assumption regarding these matters, in order for the argument to be at all reasonable for consideration, is that it is meaningful to think of such a concept as good (and less good) citizens, better or worse citizens, or more or less well-functioning citizens, or something similar. We do not wish here to take a standpoint on which of these is more reasonable.

^5. Maybe this broad knowledge is connected to why the person does not contribute to society; he or she might spend all his or her time learning to memorize statistics about public life and opinions.

^6. Note that we are not making any substantial claims about what a better life would consist of. What merely needs to be assumed in order for this argument to be comprehensible is that there exist such things as a good life and a not-so-good life, or that lives could be compared to each other in terms of how good they are in some sense, or something similar to this. It does not necessarily have to be an interpersonal comparison; it is rather more intuitive, in this case, to think of an intrapersonal comparison, i.e. a comparison between the different possible lives of one person. One such way of ranking different lives would be to say that the person whose lives are to be compared would choose one rather than the other. To assume that such comparisons can be made seems fairly uncontroversial (cf. Parfit 1984; Rawls 1971).

^7. Once again, if one holds some kind of communitarianism, relativism or variant of naturalism where rightness is defined by, or depends on, the views of (some group of) people, this connection would be strong, given that the students also would choose to act in accordance with their beliefs about other people's moral judgments. But these are particular views on meta-ethics, upheld by some, and other meta-ethicists would disagree; hence, this connection cannot be taken to be strong, because it relies on these substantial claims in meta-ethics (at least until we are certain that these claims are correct would they be so).

^8. This, of course, hinges on some substantial assumptions on what it is to live a good life.

^9. This is the expression of a substantial assumption about what it is to be living a good life. However, it is a fairly uncontroversial one, we believe, since the only thing assumed here is that the possibility of making good choices (in some sense) in life benefits in making one's life good or better. If this assumption is questioned, then the whole paragraph is questioned, because it rests rather heavily on this assumption. However, the main point of this section does not depend solely on this paragraph.

^10. It should be pointed out that other subjects might also develop these abilities. However, as long as students are further benefited by dealing with ethics according to the PE approach, this is enough for our argument here and this condition seems met.