Motivating a Productive Discussion of Normative Issues Through Debates

Abstract

In this article, the author presents a way of using in-class debates to discuss contentious issues and help students develop critical thinking skills. Three elements were incorporated into an undergraduate public finance course: a presentation of ethical approaches in order to formally discuss normative issues, class debates which required students to work in groups and imaginatively occupy a perspective with which they were not personally comfortable, and individual reflection which forced students to reconcile their beliefs with academic evidence. The results show that even if students did not change their perspectives on economic policy, the reasons why they have those perspectives did change to be based in academic theory and evidence and not their blind adherence to specific political platforms.

Keywords:

• critical thinking
• debates
• undergraduate economics

JEL code:

• A22

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks the editor, associate editor KimMarie McGoldrick, and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments on this article. The author also thanks Carmela Epright, Erik Anderson, David Gandolfo, and the Piper Ethics Seminar for their comments and feedback on how to integrate a discussion of ethics into the economics classroom as well as participants at the 2013 AEA Conference on Teaching and Research on Economic Education for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹ Nussbaum (2000) argued that cost-benefit analyses may be helpful in answering the “obvious questions” that look for an answer of what is better than what; these types of analyses are not helpful in answering the “tragic questions” where none of the alternatives are good, moral outcomes.

² I chose topics that I thought were going to be discussed in the course of the 2012 presidential election. Classroom debates were also timed to occur at the same time as the actual presidential debates. The scheduling created an even stronger connection for students to realize how important it was to be informed on the issues, and how much logical reasoning and empirical evidence helped strengthen one's argument. They were also able to see how much assumptions matter in actual political debates: People can disagree about anticipated effects of a policy change because their analyses use different assumptions.

³ In order to compare pre- and post-debate opinions, only students who completed a reaction paper are included in table 1.