How to properly learn and teach ethics?

[Mthomas9s]

Title

[Boydstun]

Do you have an answer to the question? I'd be pleased to hear it.

To answer the question, my first move would be to first settle what we mean by "ethics". Various thinkers have given various answers to that. And the question could really be posed for each of those sorts of knowledge or by determination that only one of the conceptions of ethics is correct. Secondly, I'd find out how people have in fact learned ethics, how it is learned in individual development from early childhood to high school and beyond and when and how ethics appeared in the human species and why. Ayn Rand mentioned at least partial answers to each of those specifics, and for this forum, I'd include those as part of the fullest answer which would be mainly in terms of research to this time on the preceding questions of origins. There are parents here who can also recall when and how their children learned what things in ethics, who can give important insights. For my own input for now, I'll only say that only when one has addressed all of the questions in this paragraph has one gotten into the possibility of seriously answering the title question.

Have you known any people who have significantly changed their ethics in your sense of what counts as ethics?

[DavidOdden]

Some analogous questions are “how should one properly teach and learn {digital signal processing; bear-hunting; international finance; knitting}”. At a certain point, the answers diverge depending on the particular subject matter, but let’s focus on the stage where these questions have essentially identical answers. The very first sub-question raised is “what is the difference between proper vs. improper teaching and learning”, in other words, you have to have an understanding of purpose. The second sub-question implied here is, what is the relationship between teaching versus learning – what do those actions imply? There are huge numbers of possible methods implied by your question, at what point are or should one be satisfied by a particular choice.

This seemingly-pointless very meta stage of defining terms is absolutely question number 1 that shapes a response to the question that you “really” are interested in. Alas, in the teaching profession, this kind of ground-level introspection is typically neglected, until reality asserts itself and there is some kind of disaster. I propose that the meta-analysis implied by the above questions presupposes knowledge of the following matters. Indentation represents awareness of other questions, implied by answering the superordinate question:

            How do you personally learn?

                        What does it mean to learn?

            How do others personally learn?

            Why does an individual learn?

            What constitutes success in learning?

                        Is learning success a continuous scale or an absolute category?

The answers to these questions bear on what I believe is your immediate interest, some form of curriculum design w.r.t. ethics. Your question here have focused on the practical application of Objectivist ethics in a political context, in particular “how can we address this mess?”. That’s why I think curriculum design is your underlying interest.

Here is my answer to my top-level questions. First, teaching is causing others to learn, therefore you must first understand what it means to learn.  (Assignment: explain what it means to “learn”). Second, “proper” as applied to the domain of learning means actually causing others to learn. Turns out, a lot of the answer reduces to understanding what it means to learn. A certain about also reduces to an understanding of “causing”. And, before you leave the domain of meta-questions, you should understand that there is a difference between proper learning of bear hunting and learning of proper bear hunting. This distinction is particularly important when applied to ethics.

Notice that I’m beating around the bush focusing on questions that logically precede Stephen Boydstun’s response. My question about purpose goes directly to his suggestion to settle on what we mean by ethics, and the fact that various thinkers have given different answers to the question. I say, contrarily, that there is one answer and we don’t care about various previous thinkers: I bake “proper ethics” into the curriculum, I presuppose a different goal in teaching. My methods are proper for my goal, his methods are proper for his goal. See: it helps to do some prior meta analysis! I won’t attempt to paraphrase Stephen’s underlying metatheory of teaching, I can tell you that my metatheory is centered around causing students to understand methods of analysis. Not to “critically evaluate competing methods of analysis”, rather “to comprehend the proper method of analysis”. There is an existential presupposition there which I assume you can see. After you know that method to the point that you can actually perform an analysis, then it is possible to compare different methods.

Comparison implies a standard of success. How can you evaluate the success of a particular method of digital signal processing or bear-hunting if you do not understand those particular methods of digital signal processing or bear-hunting? Theory-comparison is built on a foundation of theory-comprehension.

Teaching is a life-long career, based mainly on trial and error augmented by bits of professional communication. My observation is that the greatest degree of disagreement among teachers comes from fundamental disagreements over those earlier defining questions. As far as I know, there is relatively little disagreement over the real-world meaning of DSP concepts. In my own discipline, the fundamental unaddressed question is “what real-world thing are we actually addressing” (one answer is “nothing, there are just different methods and no ‘real-world thing’”). My practical suggestion is to posit on your own, not based on historical research what the definition of “morality” is. Then compare that to the SEP article.

 

[Boydstun]

One more thing. It is a common view stated by education-theorists generally, and philosophy professors in particular, that they want to teach, much as this is possible, the student to be able to think independently. Objectivists and many others regard that as desirable; they regard it indeed as a moral virtue, and in the Objectivist case, they state reasons for why it is a virtue. So "teaching" of the skill of being able to think for oneself is implicitly some teaching of morality, even though a teacher might not have in her sights teaching of morality.

Kant held to such a goal among the goals of education, and so did Dewey. I don't know about Dewey's ethics, but I know about Kant's. The aim of Kant's ethics (besides the undercover one Rand noticed, which is correct, which was attempting to shield Christian morality from rational criticism and replacement) was for the sound exercise of one's own psyche but also for good relations in treatment with others. Overwhelmingly today ethics is seen as proper treatment of others. That is what is looked for as first-ethics in anthropology and in developmental psychology. Plato, Aristotle, and Rand had a different idea of what is ethics and its purpose. Theirs concerned the good shape of the life and directing character of the agent. These are two quite different conceptions of what is the arena of ethics, two quite different conceptions of the aim in the skill that is ethics. 

There is, however, something common to both of them in their concerns, though usually it is not made explicit. That is where I come in (and Nozick 1981 less simply). It is only this element that is the true fundamental concern of ethics: The responsiveness and treatment of human selves as human selves. This area, as with the two other, more traditional foci of ethics, is wrought on an underlying view of human nature (philosophical anthropology, that is usually called). My own interest in looking at how to properly teach and learn ethics would be on how to properly teach and learn that right responsiveness and treatment of human selves as human selves. Excerpt:

The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.

Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.

The explication of my third compass of what is ethics, the only fully correct compass is here. 

Edited September 6 by Boydstun