Cultivating Virtues: Snapshots of Students

One of the shorter assignments my students tackled this semester required them to carry out some reflection on virtues and vices in their own lives and characters, aided by study of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (as well as many other discussions of virtue, vice, and dispositions earlier in the semester), building on some of our in-class lectures and discussions (for example, this one, this one, and this one).  I asked them to consider three questions:

• Which of the virtues which Aristotle discusses do you think you most fully possess?  Explain why Aristotle would say you do possess that virtue.  
• Which of the virtues Aristotle discusses do you think you most need to work on at the present time?  Why?
• Do you fit the descriptions of any of the vices?  Which ones? 

As I read through the responses of 41 students, I started to see some interesting patterns developing, and I was struck by the self-disclosure, reflective insight, and honest appraisals many of the students put down on paper.

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:

Attention Literacy for Today's Students?

A serious suggestion floated last month near to the end of a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, Class Resentment -- managing to mix together both senses of that qualifier, the actual classroom and its dynamics, and the economic stratification -- shocked me at first, then got me to thinking.  To the indeed-needed cultural literacy, religious literacy, and information literacy (all of which I'm strongly for), it's being proposed that what our college and university students now need us educators to start inculcating "attention literacy."

The author, Laurie Essig, recounts her experience and reasons for ire arising during an incident in a colleague's class:

I was struck by three things. One, he was giving a brilliant lecture. Really beautifully prepared, interesting stories, using images, props, writing on the board, and inviting student participation. Two, about one-third of his students couldn’t be bothered to notice.  And three, it makes me really, really angry to see a talented teacher treated like background noise. 

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. 

Self-Promotion from a Virtue Ethics Perspective

Over the last several months, I've written a series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) on Orexis Dianoētikē motivated originally by a Chronicle of Higher Education post, The Art and Science of Academic Self-Promotion.  The issue originally raised was one which is particularly pressing in contemporary academia, where stiff competition for more and more scarce resources is rapidly becoming the "new normal," relatively new social media open up interesting new opportunities for publicizing or promoting one's legitimate achievements, academia remains beset by the radically uneven lighting of its own self-replicating class and tier system  - and yet many people remain chary of engaging in self-promotion, unsure of themselves, noticeably uneasy with the efforts of less restrained colleagues and coworkers.  Still, as in every time and place, some people definitely do cross the lines.

How should one draw the lines, though -- that's a question not so easily answered.  Egregious violations of good taste, collegiality, reciprocity, those we can all get behind, or rather against, forming some kind of consensus.  Practicing a parsimony of publicity -- meeting only whatever requirements of reporting come down from one's chair, or dean, tenure committee, provost -- entering the data supposedly comprising one's career into whatever digital (or God forbid, still paper!) portfolio one's school demands -- that seems the safe route.  But it is the sagacious course to adopt?  It's hard to say, because there seem to be no real rules, except those of rather ad hoc compilations reminding one more of unintentionally stuffy etiquette lists, or prudential "how to make friends and influence. . . " bulletpoint blocks.

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.

Virtues and Supplemental Instruction

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to carry out what I sometimes jokingly refer to as "Virtue Ethics evangelism."  I'd been invited to submit a workshop proposal for a one-day conference held down at City University of New York (CUNY)-Lehman, focused specifically on Supplemental Instruction, bringing together educators from many different disciplines and schools, mainly from across the CUNY system schools but including a scattering of others from upstate schools -- and me, a philosopher, virtue ethicist, representing my fledgling consulting company, ReasonIO.

At my last academic position, at Fayetteville State University, where I'd focused heavily on teaching and improving the core Critical Thinking classes, I recruited -- or at least attempted to, since the better candidates were nearly always courted by other programs -- and worked with, student Supplemental Instruction leaders.  I'd given some thought to the successes and failures we'd encountered in semester after semester of classes assisted by SI, and now provided with an opportunity to reflect on those matters in the somewhat more sustained, systematic, and rigorous ways that producing a conference presentation requires, I proposed a session linking Virtue Ethics with Supplemental Instruction, arguing the need or at least usefulness of the former in thinking about and doing the latter well.

Big Think: Chess Life, or Why Getting Beaten Can Be Good

In a recent interview with the Big Think, chess-player Maurice Ashley, celebrated as the first African-American grandmaster, briefly narrates his development in the game of chess, from novice to master.  His recollections and reflections are interesting from a Virtue Ethics perspective for several reasons.

The game of Chess is in fact one the very practices examined by contemporary virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue.  He didn’t pick chess by chance or whim — chess does in certain ways exemplify the sort of practices that bear important and educative analogies to traditions of moral inquiry, like those of Virtue Ethics.   A practice, in the way MacIntyre famously reconfigures the term, denotes: