The Teaching of Ethics and Moral Values in Teaching. Some Contemporary Confusions.

Ethics has become fashionable. The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of ethics courses and workshops in public and professional schools. Institutes and professional societies now regularly sponsor meetings, study groups, and journals in ethics. Two Presidential Commissions have labored over the ethics of research in biomedicine and the social sciences. Despite this moral self-consciousness in America, some basic misunderstandings about ethics, moral values, and higher education are still current. Indeed, the fact that so many people are talking and writing about ethics may have contributed to and supported these misconceptions. One of the most frequently voiced misconceptions concerns the relation (if any) of the teaching of ethics courses to the ways students actually make choices and conduct their lives. An interesting and typical example of this is an essay by Harvard President Derek Bok entitled "Can Ethics Be Taught?" [3]. The response Bok gives to this question forms the polemical setting for this article, so I will examine his reasoning and his assumptions in some detail. It is because his approach is both clearly stated and a part of the current moral orthodoxy that it merits this analysis. The response Bok gives to this question rests on a number of conventional assumptions. He argues that, in the strict sense, courses in ethics cannot realistically claim to make people morally better. Yet, he continues, the teaching of ethics does serve an important function. "Unless