“The Moral Life” is a course in a series of seminars in Northwestern University’s Brady Scholars Program in Ethics and Civic Life. A cohort of about fifteen students are admitted their sophomore year to study ethics together for a year before a junior semester abroad, and they return to collaborate on a capstone project serving the Evanston community that reinvests their training in ethical theory and exposure to lived experience abroad. The seminars in ethics give students a theoretical foundation for Brady’s civic mission of a democratic, public-spirited, citizenry.
That civic orientation guides my rethinking of the value of the college essay in our discipline: who it’s written for, the skills it is meant to develop, and its role in assessing learning objectives. Students typically write with their instructor in mind as their primary audience, and by default write with the aim of displaying what they know. But collaborative scaffolding can make the essay an opportunity for students to sharpen a sense of their autonomy as thinkers when they develop an evaluative point of view they can adeptly stand behind before others. The content, assignments, and assessments are designed to position students to develop that autonomy in their reading, writing, and oral delivery. A sequence of assignments with an iterative structure cultivate this set of communication skills: a recorded media presentation for a class lecture series, a teach-back workshop, a class “Brady Scholarly Journal of Philosophy,” and finally an oral defense. Each assessment rehearses a stage of the next assessment, and explicitly shifts the target audience, from me to their peers, and from their peers to a wider public.
We open with a dialectical tension between care and respect that organizes the literature on moral responsibility to one another. While care draws us into relations of support, respect requires proper boundaries to honor each other’s separateness. The course traces what each demands in different domains, from promises to social roles, and across a span of relationships from distant strangers to intimates. The organizing tensions of the course unify debates of each unit into a narrative arc—respect for autonomy vs. care for well-being, the demandingness of morality vs. the determinacy of scope, and what we owe everyone vs. what we owe to our special relationships.
Students develop their work in close collaboration, reading, pitching, and critiquing each other’s arguments, but they must ultimately own a view of their own and defend it in an oral defense.
In choosing media presentation or paper topics, students identified an intervention within one of these debates from the standpoint of putting together a lecture series, or a special issue of a scholarly journal organized around the course’s literature as a whole. Each assignment asks students to take the teaching stance toward one another, to become specialists in their own view, so as to become a competent resource to their peers. Knowing that their competence in philosophy is assessed by how well they can teach and defend a view gives them a concrete way to structure how they read and write. Clusters of specialization on a set of authors emerged from their interests, but because that expertise was cultivated in conversation with the broader whole, students in the workshop were able to offer objections from the wider literature even when engaging each other as specialists within a narrower theme.
For the class lecture series, each project was presented as public facing scholarship in a five-to six minute media presentation as “trailers” for their final essay. In the teach-back workshop, partners read each other’s drafts and worked through a prep sheet to pitch their partner’s paper in three minutes. The class listened for missed moves in the argument, and considered the strongest objection that the author would need to address. Meanwhile, the author listened to determine what they would change about the pitch if they were teaching their own paper. Over the course of the workshop and critique, students recognized arguments in their territory, and found that the most useful question was what one paper was doing that another was not—the kind of consideration that guides the writing and design of a coherent special issue of a scholarly journal. Their final papers comprised articles for a printed zine of the “Brady Scholarly Journal of Philosophy,” to commemorate their intellectual collaboration. By the oral defense, most had already practiced addressing objections from their partner or in the workshop. They also seemed to surprise themselves with how much of the content they had internalized along the way while aiming at fluency in their own subject matter.
This structure made me rethink the value of the college essay and worries about generative AI. A paper prepared for a defense delivers first-hand, the value of equipping student to inhabit what they have learned, by communicating and defending it. But it also changes the way they undertake the writing process, addressing their argument to the space of public reason, and practicing defining their terms simply. If a student can explain each step of their argument in their own words and adeptly address objections from adjacent positions they did not write on specifically, they’ve learned the very skill that the essay traditionally assesses. Moreover, the educational virtues of the essay are preserved—slow thinking, argumentation, close reading for research, exegetical reconstruction, are all skills they must engage through the essay writing process and execute themselves if they are to adequately prepare for the defense. The oral defense substantiates prohibition against using LLMs because it shows students that philosophy is a skill, and like any skill, it requires practice in the process of reading, writing, critiquing, revising, and is properly assessed in finally performing that skill.
The obvious challenge with this format is scaling. My colleagues who have attempted the oral defense have found that the most salient objections and questions come much more quickly when reading essays without the labor of in-line comments. Moreover, the oral defense allows students to concretely see the gap between what they think they said and what they actually wrote. This is pedagogically much more effective than written comments because you can be sure they engage with the problem and can address any questions they might have in understanding the issue.
Another option to scale—I’d adapt the teach-back workshop and assign the reading and preparation as homework. Partners would prepare at home, leaving class time entirely to pitches and critique. For larger classes, I would devote two sessions to peer review, perhaps run as “editorial staff meetings” for the journal. The aim is to bring back a sense of play even in an academically rigorous exercise by transforming the classroom into a setting to “play at” a collaborative professional context.
While the direct learning objective of the course asks students to develop evaluative positions, I hope that what they walk away with is a sense of self-empowerment that comes with the intellectual habit of shaping their thinking so that it can be offered to, and tested by, a community of epistemic peers. That habit is the virtue that I think a civic education in ethics should impart. It is how they learn to think for themselves by thinking together. I’d be glad to share the assignments and the zine with anyone interested in the elements of this course and to hear how it might work in other settings.
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Yvonne Tam
Yvonne Tam is a postdoctoral faculty fellow at Northwestern University, and received her PhD from the University of California Riverside. She works in moral theory and its history and specializes in Kantian practical philosophy, especially moral psychology. Currently, her work is on moral emotions as exercises of autonomy in forging relationships.
