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Title: Why include “consideration for others” in theoretical introductions to practical ethics courses?
Author: Bruce Maxwell
Contact information: Institut für Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft (I), Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Georgskommende 26, 48143 Münster, Deutschland, Tel.: 49.(0)251.83.24255, Fax.: 49.(0)251.83.24184, .
Paper presented at the Association for Moral Education Annual conference, Fribourg, Switzerland, 5 July 2006
Abstract: This paper suggests that theoretical preliminaries to courses in practical ethics should introduce “consideration for others” as an aspect of moral experience. The paper begins by observing that evidence from empirical research on moral development gives reason to be optimistic that the standard theoretical introduction to normative ethics in practical ethics courses contributes to the development of moral reasoning competency and, further, that a similar benefit may be derived from a comparable theoretical discussion of consideration for others. It is then argued that seeing moral problems as being constitutionally concerned with negotiating conflicting claims about how to best promote genuine well-being and avoid harm, the question “why be moral?” takes on a distinctively inter-subjective aspect. Finally, it is claimed that well-established empirical and conceptual links between empathy and motivation to help makes it a distinct possibility that people who tend to view moral motivation as the rational self-expression of a justified concern for others tend towards greater consistency between moral judgement and moral action.
1. Introduction
This paper argues that the usual theoretical preliminaries to courses in practical ethics should include a discussion of “consideration for others” as an aspect of moral experience. It also tries to specify what the educational value of doing this might be. This pedagogical suggestion follows, as I see it, from the findings of a larger conceptual study of empathy in practical ethics education. In the way of some background on this project, there is a clear sense across a broad spectrum of people who teach and think about practical ethics that the rather uncontroversial non plus ultra purpose of practical ethics education—i.e., the promotion and development of ethical behaviour and attitudes—is at present ill served. Standard approaches to teaching practical ethics seem to cater to the development of competency in moral reasoning. While this is naturally not a bad thing in itself it nevertheless seems to be naïve about what should by now be the obvious fact that moral reasoning is but one among several dimensions of moral development. Following Rest (1986, 1994), a minimal list of the components of moral development would include in addition to moral reasoning: (i) moral motivation or moral “responsibility”; (ii) moral character or moral disposition; (iii) and moral sensitivity or moral perception.[1] The suggestion that practical ethics education should be concerned with supporting empathic development is frequently if vaguely referred to in the practical ethics education literature (e.g., Bevis & Watson, 1989; Annis, 1992; Beauchamp & Childress, 1994; Scholz & Groarke, 1996; Tong, 1997; Combs, 1998). In this context, the compelling intuition behind the suggestion appears to be that the development of capacities of empathic response—essentially, involvement in others’ suffering as something to be alleviated and positive concern for their well-being—is of particular interest as a means of addressing some of the affective and motivational deficit accrued by judgement-focussed approaches because, as a moral-psychological construct, it has the very interesting surface feature of being, if you will, morally protean. Unlike the rival construct of the “moral self” or “moral identity”, widely appealed to as a means of accounting for the so-called “judgement-action gap in moral functioning” (cf. Blasi, 1980; Walker, 2004), empathy is not just strongly motivating but it is also a moral disposition and it is implicated in capacities of moral sensitivity. The larger work to which this paper is connected is a conceptual study of empathy and moral judgement with a view to considering how and whether the promotion of empathic development among young adults in the context of higher education might be ancillary to practical ethics education’s last goal of promoting ethical attitudes and behaviour.
2. Moral theory in practical ethics education
As teachers of practical ethics know, the ubiquitous courses in practical ethics traditionally begin with a unit which overviews “approaches to ethics”. Until just a few years ago, this duty required the instructor to present only deontologism and consequenitalism but it has, in response to significant recent developments in normative ethics, been latterly extended to virtue ethics. The educational utility of this exercise apparently depends on the kind of course that is to follow. In academic courses, courses which proceed by studying a selection of philosophical essays which typically defend a position vis-à-vis one or another “contemporary moral issue”—i.e., self-regarding suicide, capital punishment, vivisection, and the like—the intention of the theoretical introduction seems to be to provide an analytical framework with which to comprehend and categorize various types of justificatory appeals one inevitably encounters while reading such texts. Where a more “hands-on” case-study based course is in order, it is usually presented as providing different and possibly incompatible “perspectives” from which all moral problems can be viewed. It is not uncommon for students to be informed that the correct procedure for generating a justified position vis-à-vis a particular moral problem is to straightforwardly apply one or all of these perspectives to the position in question. Deborah Barnbaum (2001) has referred to this approach to teaching practical ethics as the “plug-and-play” method. She didn’t meant it as a complement.
A parallel yet far less prevalent theoretical introduction to practical ethics courses might be drawn from developmental psychology rather than normative ethics. In this case, students would be encouraged to learn about Kohlberg’s theory in addition to or possibly instead of the usual approaches to normative ethics (cf. discussion in Schrader, 1993). The main interest of this, apart from being a bit neglected in mainstream practical ethics education, is that the question of whether such a theoretical introduction plays a role in strengthening moral reasoning capabilities has actually been empirically studied. This research modestly supports the tradition of a theoretical introduction in practical ethics. In an ageing but still widely cited meta-analysis of moral education intervention studies using the DIT, Schläfli, Rest & Thoma (1985) found that study participants who were not asked to learn about Kohlberg’s theory typically made about half the gain in terms of a positive effect on moral reasoning as did those to whom the theory was taught. I take from this result merely that it suggests interestingly that there might indeed be a kernel of wisdom in the habit of including some relevant aspects of moral theory as part of the content of practical ethics courses.
This claim, however, seems open to two objections. First, and against the evidence that learning about Kohlberg’s theory improves DIT scores itself, obviously, one might claim, far from being indicative of any structural-cognitive changes, the teacher has simply “taught to the test”. In effect, by introducing the students to Kohlberg’s theory she just gave the students the right answers to the DIT. This objection loses much of its force, however, when one considers that it has become part of the standard explanation for why higher stages of moral development are not just different but “better” than lower stages to point out that while it is easy for anyone to identify considerations that represent stages of moral judgement lower than one’s own stage—that is to say, to “fake down”—efforts to “fake up” almost invariably fail (cf. Rest, Turiel & Kohlberg, 1969; McGeorge, 1975; and Rest, 1994). But even if we accept that registered increases in post-test scores in these cases is not the result of clever manipulation on the part of the test subjects but a true indication of development, one could go on, what is true of the theory of cognitive developmentalism might not be true of the theory of normative ethics. Consequentialism and deontologism are typically categorized as post-conventional or Level III modes of moral thinking (Rest, Edwards & Thoma, 1997). According to the Blatt-effect, with which I will assume intimate familiarity, the theoretical discussion of these approaches would be all but incomprehensible to every student except those who would score on the upper conventional range of Level II. To the rest it would be of little educational value from the point of view of cognitive moral development. Lucky thing for teachers of practical ethics in higher education, then, that demographically speaking the achievement of stage 4 happens not to be atypical of their constituency (cf. Rest & Narváez, 1994).
Undaunted by these objections, I therefore repeat that the results recorded in Schläfli, Rest & Thoma (1985) provide some modest confirmation of what I take to be most instructors’ have suspected all along: that the standard theoretical introduction to practical ethics courses not only improves general philosophical culture. It also contributes in a meaningful way to the development of practical wisdom. These considerations suggest to me that, mutatis mutandis, a similar benefit may be derived from a theoretical introduction to consideration for others as an aspect of moral experience.
3. Moral judgement and consideration for others
We cannot do justice to the many complex questions that this suggestion raises so I will say simply this. It is hard to explain why some people are motivated to act for moral reasons unless one posits that such people are disposed to be concerned with furthering general human well-being and avoiding harm. This is not an empirical claim, nor is it a prescriptive claim as such but a conceptual claim about the category of the “moral” and the origin of moral value: bothering about morality is of a piece with something like responding to the recognition of others’ vulnerability with concern for their weal and woe. To this extent, moral wisdom necessarily draws on insight into others’ perspectives, assessing their demands, and (most important for present purposes) taking those demands seriously in the sense of regarding them as carrying normative weight.[2] That this is almost never brought to the attention of students of practical ethics is attributable at least in part, I think, to persistent dualistic thinking about reason and emotion. Challenging this dualism has, of course, been such a hot topic in the recent philosophical discourse in moral education and normative ethics that saying anything here in defence of the possibility of rational emotions would seem superfluous.
So what? To this I would reply that a pernicious holdover of the dualism between reason and emotion in ethics is a common tendency, as clear as it is apparently misguided, to view the problem of moral motivation as a problem of self-mastery or self-control. A choice to act in accordance with one’s best moral judgement, in other words, is thought to be controlled by rather than imbued with reason. This gives the false impression that the decision to act in a way that one has come to regard, possibly after a period of rational reflection, as morally best is an internal matter or an entirely personal affair. However, when faced with the choice, in a particular set of circumstances, of acting either the way one regards as being morally best or according to one or another countervailing hypothetical motivation like material interest, fear of social sanction or the promotion of a particular social ethos, a person who conceives of what is at stake in a moral problem as being human weal and woe at least has a clear-sighted comprehension what the choice is between: that is to say, and to adopt Vetlesen’s (1994) formulation, the decision is over whether or not to support the social institution of morality and its constitutional aim of protecting individuals in their natural vulnerability (cf., e.g., pp. 312-315). From this perspective, the problem of moral motivation appears as an inter- rather than as an intra-subjective problem, a thoroughgoingly evaluative question of the quality of one’s relations with one’s co-subjects. It is a (probably untestable) empirical question and remains to be seen whether people who interpret moral problems as problems of how to best further well-being and avoid harm—as opposed, say, to interpreting moral problems as turning on the ethical-existential question of “What kind of person am I?” (Walker, 2004) or the practical-rational problem of determining whether the moral reasons relevant to a particular problem are sufficiently compelling to be will-determining in the face of countervailing hypothetical reasons (Habermas, 1993)—tend towards greater consistency between moral judgement and moral motivation. The moral psychology of consideration for others, or empathy, seem to suggest that they just might: there is an internal conceptual connection between consideration for others and motivation in that empathy just is an emotion characterised as a regard for others present or perspective suffering as something to be alleviated or avoided (cf. Blum, 1980), a connection, moreover, that 30 years of research in social psychology on empathy and pro-social and helping behaviour bears out (see assessments in Hoffman, 2000; Batson, 1991; Davis, 1994; Eisenberg & Miller, 1987).
In conclusion, I would like to point out that I am emphatically not sugesting that one should expect framing moral problems as being significantly concerned with negotiating conflicting claims about how to best promote genuine well-being and avoid harm in a situation to have any straightforward effect on the moral reasoning skills. Viewing moral problems in this way shouldn’t, I suspect, correlate with any measurable competence gains in generating convincing moral arguments or, in the manner of Kohlberg’s theory, preferences for higher quality moral reasons or their consistent spontaneous generation.[3] Moral maturity, in this sense, seems to suppose at most the cognitive mastery of various and in all likelihood incommensurable categories of harm (e.g., pain, embarrassment, tragedy, humiliation, injustice, death, destitution, disappointment, etc.) and well-being (e.g., dignity, happiness, fairness, flourishing, care, respect, life, freedom) but it doesn’t seem to imply caring about avoiding them or promoting them among actual human beings.[4] As a teacher of practical ethics, what one can realistically hope is that such insight would provide is greater lucidity about the normativity of moral judgements—that is, the reason why moral reasons should be motivationally compelling or what it actually means to act in accordance with a moral reason. Christine Korsgaard said it best. Morality’s motives are familiar: “they are people, and the other animals” (1996, p. 166).