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Ethics Teaching in Higher Education for Principled Reasoning: A Gateway for Reconciling Scientific Practice with Ethical Deliberation

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Abstract

This paper proposes laying the groundwork for principled moral reasoning as a seminal goal of ethics interventions in higher education, and on this basis, makes a case for educating future specialists and professionals with a foundation in philosophical ethics. Identification of such a seminal goal is warranted by (1) the progressive dissociation of scientific practice and ethical deliberation since the onset of a problematic relationship between science and ethics around the mid-19th century, and (2) the extensive mistrust of integrating ethics in science and engineering curricula beyond its “applied,” “practical,” or “professional” implications. Although calls by international scientific and educational bodies to strengthen ethics teaching in scientific education over the past quarter century have brought about a notion of combining competence in a certain field with competence in ethics, this is neither entrenched in the academic community, nor fleshed out as regards its core or instruments to realize it. The legitimate goals of ethics teaching in higher education, almost settled since the 1980s, can be subsumed under the proposed seminal goal, and the latter also would safeguard content and methods of ethics interventions against the intrusion of indoctrinative approaches. In this paper, derivation of the proposed seminal goal rests on an interpretation of the Kohlbergian cognitive-developmental conception of moral adulthood consisting in autonomous principled moral reasoning. This interpretation involves, based on Kant’s conception of the virtuous person, integrating questions about the “good life” into the domain of principled reasoning.

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Notes

  1. We have discussed the mid-19th century breaking point in the interrelation between science and ethics, how this involved a claim to fully abrogate ethics in the name of science, and has culminated in scientists’ exclusive preoccupation with what it is possible to do with the help of science in Aközer and Aközer (2015).

  2. Opposition to civic and moral learning in higher education has its political underpinnings as well, which may be largely condensed to an “illiberal” drive to banish “learning to think critically and independently” (Parker 2014: 181) from academic studies. It must be added that this illiberal drive has both right- and left-wing strands. We cannot elaborate on this topic in this paper, but it certainly pertains to a contention over whether or not to equip students against the uncritical adoption of moral, religious, or political doctrines.

  3. Kohlberg eventually came to de-emphasize Stage 6 for lack of conclusive empirical confirmation of its being culturally universal (Kohlberg 1978). Nevertheless he remained determined in his effort to define Stage 6, as a “logical necessity,” as the developmental end point (Kohlberg et al. 1990 [1986]: 152).

  4. For two compelling interpretations of Kant’s ethics as primarily centered on the agent’s morally good, virtuous character see Sherman (1997) and Rivera (2006).

  5. Within the Kantian frame, the issue of giving particularity its due appears somewhat puzzling in the case of “perfect” duties, so called because they allow no latitude in their observance. For a discussion of this issue for its relevance to the debate on Kohlberg’s alleged neglect of contextual particularities, see Nunner-Winkler (1992). Here we can only note that observance of perfect duties, too, always requires assessment of concrete situational particularities. For a clarification of how these duties allow “exceptions” in face of such particularities, see Cholbi (2009).

  6. Han (2014) refers to the studies of neo-Kohlbergian scholars and Berkowitz’s work—which we have mentioned above—as efforts to integrate moral reasoning with moral emotion, moral sensibility, moral motivation, and character. Kristjánsson (2014) praises Narvaez, a non-Aristotelian, for having offered “[t]he most sustained discussion” of the topic of “the actual cultivation of phronesis,” and asks whether the “widespread and protracted lack of focus on the essential final end of Aristotelian moral education can be seen as an implicit reaction—a covert counterweight—to the Kohlbergian over-emphasis on faculties of moral reasoning” (p. 152).

  7. We have discussed in an earlier paper how a pretension in the name of natural sciences to the mandate to pass judgment on “life worth living,” the subject of ethics, has been decisive in the divorce between science and ethics (see Aközer and Aközer 2015).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments that encouraged us to elaborate further on several topics in the paper. Some of the ideas in this paper were first presented by the authors at the First International Higher Education Studies Conference (14–16 October 2015, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul).

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  1. Independent researcher and social sector consultant, Ankara, Turkey

    Mehmet Aközer

  2. Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

    Emel Aközer

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  1. Mehmet Aközer
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  2. Emel Aközer
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Correspondence to Emel Aközer.

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Aközer, M., Aközer, E. Ethics Teaching in Higher Education for Principled Reasoning: A Gateway for Reconciling Scientific Practice with Ethical Deliberation. Sci Eng Ethics 23, 825–860 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9813-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9813-y

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