Pedagogical Minute   

A Weekly Service of the College of Arts & Sciences

Becoming Disciplinary: What Are Our Ethics? 

“Knowledge is knowing what to do;

Skill is knowing how to do it.

Virtue is doing it.” 

-David Starr Jordan 

I have been surprised to hear from some graduating seniors that they have never heard an ethical question raised in their major courses. In fact, I just don’t believe it’s so. It seems to me more likely, given the amount of information coming to an undergraduate from all directions and often, initially, without a framework to put it into, the discussion was not recognized as such. 

Consider making it part of your practice to raise an ethical question related to the practice of your discipline, to make sure that students know, explicitly, that what you’re engaging them in is an ethical issue. Consider making them in some way responsible/accountable for it – even if you don’t have class time or grading time, assign them a case study to read, and to write a reasoned response. Find a way for them to share their responses with one another, so as to get at the underlying principles for the decisions they make, and to understand that the ethics of a profession are community property (or, put another way, that in some measure they become part of the professional community as they assert their rights and obligations with regard to that shared territory).

It’s more important that they go through that thinking and conversation than that you read and grade it.  

Points to consider: 

-Genuine professional ethics is always about making costly choices. I remember an ethics talk I had in my undergraduate days, in which the single message we were given, and very consistently, was this: in the long run, ethical behavior is less risky and more profitable than non-ethical behavior. I found this profoundly unsatisfying. I did not at the time have the ability to formulate it thus, but I’d now say that this approach does not address an ethical issue at all; it just makes it go away, leaving self-interest in uncontested control of the field of action. It is only when a choice is risky and expensive that one has to count the cost, and therefore make genuine determinations of value. 

-Find some cases studies, talk to colleagues about thorny issues they’ve encountered or have heard of. Ideally, these should not be mere morality tales, where the choice was clear, and it was a simple matter of either doing it or not. 

-Does your field have a statement of ethics and principles, widely accepted if not officially binding? This would be a good thing to bring in and talk about.  

-Do your students know what the typical ethical challenges of the field are? For example, folklorists are concerned with protecting informants, and recent decades have seen a definite and explicit shift away from getting the data at all costs to protecting the source, even if it means foregoing the information.  

-For practitioners in your field, including your students, what are the consequences of doing our jobs poorly? Who suffers, and how?