Emotional responsibility and teaching ethics: student empowerment

Abstract

‘This class is so [insert expletive] depressing.’ I overheard a student communicating this to a friend upon exiting one of my ethics courses and I wondered how my classes could generate a sense of empowerment rather than depression, a sense of hope rather than despair. Drawing from David Hume's and Martin Hoffman's work on the psychology of empathy and sympathy, I contend that dominant Western philosophical pedagogy is inadequate for facilitating morally empowered students. Moreover, I stipulate that an adequate analysis of the role emotion should play in pedagogy requires tending to the politics of emotional expression and how oppression functions. I argue that ethical educators have a moral responsibility to facilitate not only critical moral thinking but critical moral agency. Part of ethical education should involve the provision of tools for effective citizen engagement, and reasoning alone is insufficient for this goal. The role of emotion in ethical decision-making and action remains devalued and under-analyzed. Approaches that fail to adequately recognize the role of emotion in ethical education are to the detriment of effective ethical pedagogy. I recommend a number of methods for remedying this omission so as to provide tools for moral action.

Keywords::

• responsibility
• ethics
• emotion
• education
• action
• political engagement

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude for input from multiple audiences; namely, attendees at the Fourteenth Annual Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum in 2012, the Cognitive and Neural Sciences Research Group at the University of Evansville in 2013, the invited talk at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John in 2013, the Atlantic Region Philosopher's Association Conference in 2013, and The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Annual Meeting in 2014. I would also like to thank the University of Evansville for their institutional support. Rachel Campbell has contributed significantly to my thoughts on this topic – our conversations, which now cross State lines, have been a gift. Additionally, I wish to acknowledge the generous role of two blind reviewers, whose recommendations greatly enhanced the clarity of the paper. This manuscript benefited immensely from the editorial encouragement of Dr Paul Smeyers. Last, I want to acknowledge my continuing gratitude to Michelle Willms, David Kretz, and Randy Sciba for their loving editorial and emotional support.

Notes

^1. When I say ‘reason stripped bare of emotional richness,’ I mean reason divorced from emotion insofar as possible. It will become apparent in what follows that I take the two to be necessarily connected.

^2. To clarify, my focus is less on teaching students how to feel/what is appropriate to feel and more on recognizing students as emotional beings with emotional needs in the classroom setting – needs that often fail to be met. Importantly, I contend, they fail to be met in ways that can facilitate moral action.

^3. Moreover, my focus is not on professional programs such nursing, medicine, teacher education, and social work, which would require a different sort of analysis.

^4. For example, in Verducci's (2000) paper ‘A conceptual history of empathy and a question it raises for moral education,’ she sketches a history of varied conceptualizations in multiple domains. Nussbaum (1996) likewise gives a nuanced historical analysis of compassion in ‘Compassion: the basic social emotion.’ Although space does not allow for a robust consideration of the multiplicity of conceptual distinctions that can be made, I will, however, address Boler's worry about a form of passive empathy articulated through Nussbaum's account shortly.

^5. What Hoffman (2000, 205–206) refers to as ‘habituation’ I think better to conceptualize as indifference, as it indicates an indifferent response to witnessing the harm of others.

^6. I recommend thinking of what Hoffman calls empathetic bias in terms of empathic orientation or inclination, as bias has an implicitly negative connotation that begs the question of whether such human traits will in fact prove to be important to preserve and reflect in moral accounts of how to, in a healthy way, care for others.

^7. In support, Goralnik and Nelson (2011, 188) cite the work of D'Arcangelo (2000), Weiss (2000), Sylwester (1994), and McCuen and Shah (2007).

^8. Warren refers here to the work of Goleman (2005) who highlights the limitations of IQ tests that focus solely on rationality and recommends emotional intelligence be taken seriously as a complementary capacity. Goleman's account is far from being uncontentious. For example Boler (1999, 61, 75) worries, correctly, about a failure to address the influences of gender, race, and social class in the formation and interpretation of attempts at emotional expression. I am not advocating an uncritical adoption of Goleman's view but rather use it to illustrate the import of attending to dimensions of intelligence in the sphere of emotion.

^9. For a non-exhaustive list of evidence attesting to a disjunction between, for example, environmental knowledge/attitude and reflective environmental behavior see Bickman 1972; Costanzo et al. 1986; Finger 1994; Geller 1981; Gellar, Erickson, and Buttram 1983; Hsu 2004; Hungerford and Volk 1990; Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; McKenzie-Mohr 2000; Sia, Hungerford, and Tomera 1985–86. Although the focus of the above studies pertains to environmental knowledge and action, such studies at minimum problematize the more general assumption that moral knowledge, of necessity, leads to action reflecting this knowledge.

^10. My thanks to the anonymous reviewers for requesting that these considerations be made explicit.

^11. Hironimus-Wendt and Wallace (2009, 80) go on to specify in a footnote that pity and compassion are insufficient given that students can feel such things without simultaneously feeling the compulsion to act on these feelings. Whether either of these emotions is sufficient for motivating related moral action is an open question – but Hironimus-Wendt and Wallace's concerns about instigating emotional engagement adequate for supporting the move to behavior remain key.

^12. My thanks to one of the blind reviewers who encouraged making explicit this precise worry.