The syllabus below is for the course Ethics at the University of Michigan. Although much of the material is pretty standard in courses in moral philosophy, how I structure it isn’t. I think this organization captures much better what moral thinking looks like, and how to improve it.
The standard approach in ethics, popularized in many prominent textbooks, sees ethics as being primarily about finding some criterion or criteria of right action. I understand the appeal of this approach, but I think it ends up misrepresenting the nature of moral thinking. It suggests that ethical thinking consists in accepting the right moral principle and then plugging in the empirical facts to yield an outcome.
But in my own experiences (and maybe in yours), even when general principles point toward a course of action, we often resist when it conflicts with what is good for us. Often we try to resolve this internal conflict by coming up with some rationalization, such that what is good for me is the right thing after all. Being morally conscientious means trying to catch ourselves before we do this, trying to do the right thing, and when we fail, trying to do better next time.
My ethics class is built around this conception of moral thinking. Most of the course consists of two major units: a unit on theories of well-being, and a unit on right action. Students don’t know as the course is going on that these two units are meant to bring up this internal tension. The unit on well-being gets students thinking about what kind of life they really want. Then the unit on right action includes some of the standard general theories, but also topics in applied ethics. These topics—giving money to charity, abstaining from factory-farmed meat, and adopting as an alternative to procreation—provide compelling arguments for doing things students are not at all inclined to do. The unit on right action ends up creating for students that internal conflict that is characteristic of so much moral thinking.
The quandary students find themselves in isn’t experienced privately—we talk about it explicitly in class. First, we recall our discussion of pragmatism in the unit on right action. It’s quite unusual to include pragmatism in an ethics course; the pragmatist approach gives up the search for a theory of right action in exchange for focusing on intelligently updating our moral beliefs. My colleague Elizabeth Anderson does a wonderful job, in the assigned article, of illustrating how to block or overcome biases in order to do this. Pragmatism helps us avoid the pitfall of resolving the tension by rationalizing that what is good for us really is right.
Second, I teach Aristotle’s account of virtue as a way of reconciling one’s good with the right. On this account—which I owe to my friend Joseph Stenberg—virtue ethics isn’t a theory of right action. Instead, it’s an account of what must be the case for what is good and what is right to not generally pull us in opposing directions. Aristotle’s account of the good does this in a fairly direct way, though of course, it’s quite controversial. A less contentious approach is in his theory of virtue: a virtuous person not only reliably does the right thing, but also wants to do the right thing and enjoy doing it. In short, becoming virtuous means becoming the kind of person who doesn’t so frequently face these tensions between their good and what is right. Of course, it takes a lot of work to get to this ideal, but Aristotle provides plenty of (in my opinion, very good) advice on how to get there. This is very much action-guiding, even Aristotle isn’t providing us with a criterion of right action.
There are a lot of areas of the syllabus that need improvement. Nonwestern philosophers need to be included, as well as more women and philosophers of color. I also wish there was some literature or even a biography that would make these issues more vivid and concrete. Finally, the writing assignments are pretty impersonal; I’m going to experiment with new assignments where students apply these ideas to their own lives.
Nevertheless, my hope is that the general approach here gives students a greater appreciation of what it is to think about morality in a serious, committed, and critical way. It is a very ambitious goal to want students not just to learn, but to want to become a better person. No doubt the course falls short of this goal, but I think the general approach is one worth sharing.
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Dan Lowe
Dan Lowe is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He specializes in social and political philosophy, ethics, and moral epistemology.
