A Short Review: "What Is Character? Virtue Ethics In Education"

For the last week and a half, I've been participating in a MOOC focused on Character Education and Virtue Ethics -- What Is Character? Virtue Ethics In Education, developed by the University of Birmingham (specifically, by the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues), and hosted on the FutureLearn Platform.  I'd been looking forward to this relatively short course (only 2 weeks) for some time -- it's enjoyable from time to time to slip back into the role of student rather than professor, and let someone else do the course design and teaching.

I've been idly kicking around the idea of reviewing virtue-, character-, and more general ethics-focused books, courses, and other resources on this blog, and the invitation to reflect upon the course built in near the end of it presented me with an occasion to to precisely that.  So, here it goes.  Overall, I'd award it a solid B- , but that grade is partly due to the fact that it's free of charge.  I'd recommend taking it to most people interested in the subject-matters covered.

Does Virtue Help Make Us Aware of Our Vices?

Some time back -- while I was grading some student essays from the Spring 2014 semester -- I posted an insight one of my students had expressed, but not entirely developed, on my Facebook page.  It then spurred a short but very pregnant discussion with one interlocutor, one which I decided I ought to keep, file away, and then return to think out more later on.

It's now later on -- time to revisit this interesting original remark, "virtue works in ways that makes non-virtuous people aware of their viciousness," as well as the comments and questions by my interlocutor, and my own off the cuff remarks.  But first, let's take a look -- and give a read to -- the conversation under discussion:

Honor and Ethics: Some Initial Reflections

A friend and colleague of mine, Bruce Weinstein, raised a provocative question, tapping the expertise and sounding the sentiments of his many Facebook friends:   

"What do you think of "Live Honorably" as my proposed slogan? I'd use it as a way to let people know how they would benefit from my talks, training, books, and consultations."
It sparked a conversation revealing -- and reflective of -- quite a few different viewpoints on the relationship between honor and ethics.  He also proposed that I weigh in on the matter, so that's precisely what I intend to do here.

Are the Virtues Already In Us?

In my Ethics classes, one type of assessment and exercise I routinely require my students to engage in is what I call an Application Assignment.  I provide them with a complex, morally ambiguous, problematic scenario, which they then have to analyze along various lines.  I'll write more about those parameters in a follow-up post, and discuss just how the assignments work to foster student learning at several different levels.  For now, what I'd like to focus on is one very interesting, common, and revealing mistake I see some students make semester after semester.

A key component of the assignment is competently applying three of the moral theories we've been studying to the case in question.  This requires that the students do a bit of explaining about the key concepts of the theory, and then go on to particularize these to the characters of the narrative.  Students do all right with Egoism, with the authoritarian Might-Makes-Right theory, and often enough with Utilitarianism.  Many of them run into problems with Virtue Ethics, and there are a variety of distinct misunderstandings and misapplications.  I'm particularly interested in one recurring way students get matters wrong.  Some students interpret Virtue Ethics as asserting that the virtues lie within each and every person, ready to be used when situations call for them.

Emotivism in Contemporary Culture

My Ethics classes -- a staple course for me since grad school days -- generally start out with exploring some features the culture we inhabit and a few common obstacles or impediments to doing any serious work in Ethics.  So, we very quickly get into reading and discussing a few selections from the work of a contemporary proponent of (and convert to) Virtue Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre -- not a lot, certainly not as much as I'd like to, or as much as my students could use -- but if my aim is to cover enough material and moral theories over the course of an-always-too-short semester, we can't afford too much time to anyone (just for comparison, Bentham and Mill get 2 class sessions each, Plato, Kant, and Aquinas 3 sessions, and Aristotle lucks out with a total of 5). 

This time around, in addition to his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Theory," my students are studying chapters 2 and 3 of MacIntyre's landmark work, After Virtue. I've used the first piece because in it, he shows how moral theory connects up with our ordinary lives, decisions, and concerns.  He also provides an introduction to three moral standpoints commonly adopted in our culture and contrasts them to the sort of standpoint articulated by Virtue Ethics.  Many people in our culture do effectively operate more or less along the lines of Utilitarianism -- determining whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, depending on its consequences for those concerned -- or Deontology -- determining the morality by the conformity of actions or motives to rules and duties.  A third possibility is to hold that moral matters -- and our judgements about them -- really boil down to our subjective preferences, to our non-rational emotions, to "criterionless choice" -- that is, to Emotivism.

Ethics Course Materials: Aristotle on Justice

A few entries back (here and here), I posted some materials I'd developed and uploaded into the course management system of which I make heavy use for both my online and my face-to-face Ethics classes.  This semester, because of all the work I'd put into creating modules on the specific lessons, texts, ideas, and thinkers last semester, much of what I've been doing has been tweaking and improving the modules I'd already designed. 

Still, there was some room for creating a few new modules from the ground up -- either filling in gaps I'd left last semester, or leading my students through texts newly added this semester.  One of those, which I teach is Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics book 5 -- the place where he most intensely and intensively examines the virtue of Justice and its corresponding vice of Injustice -- and I thought it might be of some interest or value to share. So, here are -- admittedly a bit longer than my usual posts -- portions of that module:

Teaching (Virtue) Ethics: Goods and Practical Reasoning

In an earlier post, I provided a peek into some of the introductory materials I provide my face-to-face or online students currently taking Ethics classes with me through Marist College.  This is the really basic, cover-in-the-first-week kind of stuff, but one of the things I like most about the discipline and the texts of Ethics is that you can keep going back to these key distinctions, concepts, objects and experiences -- because moral life is, after all rooted in the rest of our lives, and provides, you might say, the dimension without which that life would be less than human, impoverished in intelligibility, lacking a certain depth of meaning.

To push the metaphor -- which like other analogies will of course eventually exhibit its disappointing limits --  of dimension and depth, I suggest that Ethics or Moral Theory ( a great deal of which gets done outside of academic philosophy, by the way) provides the third dimension to what would otherwise be only two-dimensional, flat, restricted by its own planarity.  That not to say that everything needs to have and exhibit -- even have tacked upon it -- such a dimension of depth.  some things, like blueprints, are perfectly fine in two dimensions.  Paintings, photographs, even cartoons, though -- don't they possess the illusion of depth?  Yes -- by relying on a transfer from experienced depth and perspective -- which they don't posses but which they can mimetically evoke or represent precisely because of our experiences of that dimension in other settings.  Studying Ethics explicitly, deliberately, systematically, means devoting sustained attention -- alas for all too short an apprenticeship -- to the contours, the concealments, the criteria, even in some cases the charlatanry of those who work and warp and weft in this vital dimension of human experience. 

Teaching (Virtue) Ethics: Goods and Values

Last semester, I started teaching Ethics classes for Marist College, and continued it this semester, even picking up an online Ethics class as well, which started in earnest today.  I have to say that, after three years at my previous position confined to teaching mainly just slews of Critical Thinking sections, occasionally punctuated with an "upper-level" (even Intro to Philosophy was dubiously granted that title) class, if it made enrollment -- tough to do with no actual major in Philosophy -- where one of the older profs had staked out Ethics as "her" class, it's really refreshing to be teaching and designing Ethics courses again.

My teaching career actually began more than a decade ago with Ethics, and it was a staple course for me at every other place I taught besides FSU -- a big state university,  a small community college, an extension campus, a struggling 4-year liberal arts college, a prison degree program.  At one time, I worried about being confined to the "Ethics Ghetto" -- not getting to teach what, at the time, seemed more interesting and exotic courses, where I'd have interested philosophy majors rather than students struggling through a required course.  Now, my outlook is very different.  There's nothing like being sent down yet further to make one appreciate what one previously took for granted -- but at FSU, I finally grasped the importance of teaching non-majors in core Philosophy classes, and also incidentally learned how to do it fairly well.