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Teaching Virtue: Pedagogical Implications of Moral Psychology

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Abstract

Moral exemplar studies of computer and engineering professionals have led ethics teachers to expand their pedagogical aims beyond moral reasoning to include the skills of moral expertise. This paper frames this expanded moral curriculum in a psychologically informed virtue ethics. Moral psychology provides a description of character distributed across personality traits, integration of moral value into the self system, and moral skill sets. All of these elements play out on the stage of a social surround called a moral ecology. Expanding the practical and professional curriculum to cover the skills and competencies of moral expertise converts the classroom into a laboratory where students practice moral expertise under the guidance of their teachers. The good news is that this expanded pedagogical approach can be realized without revolutionizing existing methods of teaching ethics. What is required, instead, is a redeployment of existing pedagogical tools such as cases, professional codes, decision-making frameworks, and ethics tests. This essay begins with a summary of virtue ethics and informs this with recent research in moral psychology. After identifying pedagogical means for teaching ethics, it shows how these can be redeployed to meet a broader, skills based agenda. Finally, short module profiles offer concrete examples of the shape this redeployed pedagogical agenda would take in the practical and professional ethics classroom.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr. Charles Huff and Dr. José A Cruz-Cruz for reading earlier versions of this paper and for providing extensive and insightful feedback. He would also like to acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation through grants SES 0551779 (Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing of Best Practices) and SES 0629377 (Graduate Education in Research Ethics for Scientists and Engineers).

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  1. College of Business Administration, Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, Call Box 9000, Mayagüez, 00681-9000, Puerto Rico

    William J. Frey

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  1. William J. Frey
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Correspondence to William J. Frey.

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Frey, W.J. Teaching Virtue: Pedagogical Implications of Moral Psychology. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 611–628 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9164-z

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