What Do Students and Teachers Deserve?

Down the years, and more recently than in my earlier career, I've had the happy experience of being thanked and acknowledged in various ways by the students who I've taught in my classes.  When you consider the alternatives -- and they are most definitely live, often-experienced and -witnessed alternatives, ranging from being entirely ignored until a student wants something (a grade, an explanation, an exception, what's going to be on the exam), through suspicious arms-length-maintenance, or wariness of instructional idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, even malevolence, all the way to the outright contempt displayed in some settings -- the exhibition by students of a grateful and gracious attitude becomes deeply gratifying to any instructor who understands the value and process of education in which they are involved.

I have to admit at times feeling a bit bewildered by my students' responses to and admissions about my teaching and how it affects them -- and that, I suppose, is due to a remnant of the pedant still within me -- the part of myself which far more attentive to all that has been left out by a student's robust but still rudimentary presentation or reflections upon some item or idea of study than gladdened by just how much distance has been traversed, how much potential has been brought to actuality and consolidated within the mind, the soul, the memory, even the heart, of the young man or woman charged to learn with me for the space of a semester.  That competent but sterile, and in some sense dense or tone-deaf, part of myself responds all too easily by raising all sorts of other related matters, at risk of contextualizing away whatever spark of excitement, whatever haven for learning, whatever inertia newly-directed along a path of ongoing reflection that the way I structure and run my classes has afforded my students.

Does MacIntyre get Emotivism Right?

Last month, I discussed a criticism of contemporary culture made by a thinker with whom I like to begin my Ethics courses -- Alasdair MacIntyre, who in After Virtue (as well as certain of his other works), maintains that we now inhabit a culture in which, like it or not, true as a moral theory or not, Emotivism has become the predominant framework within which moral discussion, and particularly disagreement, occur -- and this is bad, overall, for a number of reasons.

But it's worth asking -- particularly given the importance he accords to a moral theory attempting to get rival theories correct -- is MacIntyre himself right about Emotivism as a moral theory?  Is he representing it -- particularly in its self-conscious, explicitly philosophical form -- accurately, for instance when he claims that while "Emotivism has been presented by its most sophisticated proponents . . . as a theory about the meaning of sentences which are used to make moral judgements," if we look at it more closely, what its proponents failed to see is that it is "a cogent theory of use" of moral language, "rather than a false theory of meaning"?  In order to answer this, we have to compare MacIntyre's views on Emotivism in After Virtue against a few of Emotivism's "sophisticated proponents."

Boasting, Desire, and Truth about Oneself

Once again, the always expanding human capacities of natural science and technology, coupled with the queries and questions of psychologists (and other social scientists) reopen questions long ago addressed, thought not entirely resolved -- by those working in the older humanistic disciplines, particularly philosophy and theology.  This time, the news about the results and interpretation of brain scans and surveys have to do with an eminently human preoccupation -- talking about ourselves.  Apparently, talking about oneself -- that's the way the majority of the stories run -- actives the same pleasure centers in the brain as other activities, for instance  having sex.

A study by Harvard researchers concludes that found written or verbal expression about oneself -- "self-disclosure" holds “intrinsic value” for the person engaging in it, providing pleasure to them.  The study got reported, along with a lot of very interesting speculation naturally flowing from the topic, in the Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal among other places, and then spread through the internet.  Interestingly, sites and networks have highlighted different aspects of the study and its implications, some focusing on the written (generally social media) type of expression, others on self-expression in verbal communication. The tone of many has been along the lines of more or less positive "aha!  well, that's no surprise, but glad we know it now," but there have been some exceptions, for instance, Shouts From The Abyss' interpretation of the study as bearing on a phenomenon of "conversational masturbation."  On the other extreme would be the Royal Society for Public Health's conclusion that talking about oneself is a vital component of one's well being.   So, what should we make of this new research?

How Do We Get It Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways

One of the important aspects of a genuine Virtue Ethics approach that does not get as much discussion or examination -- and often isn't taught in Ethics courses -- is determining what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons one has gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.  All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices -- which, to be sure, is good, a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life than those oriented by other moral theories -- tending to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social arrangements.

But, whether our goal is to fully understand the rich intellectual resources contained in the classic texts of Virtue Ethics, or to progressively develop and employ a coherent practical approach adequate to the complexities and demands of concrete moral life as we actually live it out, what is required is a well-differentiated grasp of how we go wrong, how we get things wrong, the range, differing seriousness, and types of moral failures.