The Significance of Ethics and Ethics Education in Daily Life | Michael D. Burroughs | TEDxPSU

just consider it for a moment you feel pressure regarding your class grade and have an opportunity to turn in work there's not your own to get ahead you can tell a friend an important truth which also might end the friendship you recognize that the continued use of fossil fuels and cars and planes contribute to climate change and yet you want to get where you need to go you want about the implications of placing your child in a new charter school with higher testing scores as opposed to supporting your own neighborhood school where you see an

interaction at a party between a man and a woman that seems off and you wonder whether you should intervene we face challenges the life large and small and if we listen closely ask ethical questions of us what are my principles what are my values what do I stand for these questions asks us to consider our obligations to ourselves and to others the required decisions and actions and turn these decisions and actions form a part of who we are or our character is ethical persons but how well-equipped are we respond to these challenges on what basis

do we tell a friend a painful truth as opposed to engaging in deceit or decide to intervene to someone help someone in need more generally how do we know what it means to live a good life as a philosopher Ephesus and educator I'm interested in how we recognize these questions but also how we learn to respond to them well so you're probably familiar with what an educator is right one who teaches and perhaps you've met a philosopher before two other were exotic species of some kind right but the ones who ask big questions we might

be wondering what is an ethicist well there's many kinds of us so there are business ethicists who consider the place of ethics in the workplace in coping and financial sectors there are research ethicists who discuss the importance of integrity and research practices and consider the broader implications of the research we produce and they're a bioethicists consider the ethical implications of biomedical research stem-cell research for example or human impacts on the environment just through GMOs but at his or her core the emphasis is one who cares and thinks deeply about matters of right and wrong and

how we can choose ethically better as opposed to ethically problematic courses of action in life so when I refer to the ethicist I'm not referring to some magical person or saint who always knows and does and can tell others the good no am i referring to an exclusive class of people licensed by university hospital or business to practice ethics rather the ethicist or the everyday ethicist as I refer to it can be found in our homes in our streets and in our schools the everyday ethicist can be a friend family member acquaintance or stranger the

everyday ethicist is all of us installers we recognize and counter and respond to the ethical issues that arise in our own lives now one doesn't need a doctorate in moral philosophy to recognize this many of you will probably already have considered the everydayness of ethics in your own life and I'm consulted with by undergraduate students on a regular basis regarding ethical issues that they face in their life just some recent examples just a discussion with a student about conflict that she was experienced about respecting the wishes of her parents and choosing her own course of

study at here at Penn State another student was conflicted about loyalty through his partner and the desire to end a long term relationship and another student who's concerned about Penn State's investment in fossil fuels and how to pushpin state towards investment in cleaner energy but my point is not just that ethical issues are prevalent in our lives many of us probably have already thought about that but that take your step further it's possible to develop better or worse answers to these challenges and questions right we can act unethically so in ways that perhaps we regrets

and hopefully we learn from and we can act ethically and in ways that promote the good and although there's no single answer to to deciding between those two options one way to respond is to cultivate our own ethical awareness and to develop the skills needed to act ethically now ideally school which is one of the most significant socializing experiences we have would play a useful role in helping us to respond to ethical challenges right we go to school at least in part to prepare us for adulthood there's a variety of skills academic social personal that

allow us to understand our world and ourselves - the same we get training in a variety of academic subjects and an informal curriculum of extracurricular activities clubs sports and so on but what we dearly don't receive is training an ethics education nor in an era of maxed out curricula and standardized testing do we really even leave open space for frank and honest discussion about the ethical issues that we face in life now this lack of attention to ethics has implications now in the book lost in transition the dark side of emerging adulthood Christian Smith who's

a sociologist from the University of Notre Dame discusses the results of thousands of survey interviews and hundreds of in-person interviews that he conducted with emerging adults ages 13 to 23 regarding their understanding of ethics and two things became clear from these interviews one that children and adolescents often do raise ethical questions in class write about the issues they face in the hallway their own lives the quicken their being taught but these questions often sidestepped and avoid it in the classroom by teachers and administrators in order to try and avoid controversy thus Smith notes that the

more pedagogy of most middle and high schools or many middle and high schools it seems to be avoid ignore and pretend the issues will go away but the flip side of this avoidance is the failure to engage in useful ethics education opportunities right to educate and have teachers and children realized that is possible with critically and respectfully engage in dialogue about ethical issues and that just as we develop skills in other areas in school we can develop skills say reasoning and empathic skills that can help us to develop as ethical persons and second and related

to the first it became clear that many of the interviewees didn't possess the tools to adequately address the ethical issues that they were facing in their life so in discussion of issues ranging from cheating on a test to obligations to help others in need over 60% of the interviewees discuss ethics as in what's right or wrong as entirely up to each individual now personal beliefs opinions and intuitions are vitally important in motivating us to act ethically in the world and in developing our own ethical understanding but to think of all ethics and all matters are

right and wrong as completely up to each individual can be challenging when it comes to taking an ethical stand as a community right not just as individuals it gets things that actually are ethically wrong so here I'm thinking about assessing and taking that people stand against sexual assault against terrorism against institutional racism and so on so what I'm arguing here is not that personal opinions and beliefs are important because they're vitally important and support to respect those differences but it's also important to think about and think deeply about certain ethical foundations those based in basic

human rights right or care and compassion for others for example that allow us to make basic assessments of right and wrong and allow us to make moral judgments in this sense of judgments and there's multiple senses of the term is not based in self-righteous castigation of another person or community it's based on a desire to understand discuss and evaluate ethical believes and do the sometimes hard work required to make good ethical decisions but this distinction can be lost without any attention to ethics education so what i'ma do cating for here is not a universal set

of ethical beliefs for all people nor a map that solves all ethical problems because no such map exists what I am arguing is that it would be important for us to educate our children and adolescents to respect the many ethical beliefs and values that are in the world to be properly humble about their place in our broader community but also to be willing to recognize and stand up for their own ethical convention there are ethical convictions so what I also want to note here is that if we're worried about the controversy of introducing ethics into

schools well do well to recognize that children to our everyday ethicists that is when we're talking ethics with kids we're not introducing something wholly new right if we're doing a work well we're recognizing the ethical concerns that children already have and we're building from those concerns to help them develop as ethical people so in a project that I run called philosophical ethics and early childhood where the peach project we're very happy about how the acronym turned out right we spent a lot of time talking ethics with three four and five-year-olds and we use children's literature

artwork and games to motivate those discussions and what I find in that work my colleagues find as well is that from a young age children possess ethical convictions and ethical ideas they have ideas about fairness about inclusion and exclusion about what's right what's right and wrong right so to give you an example in a recent discussion I had with a young girl age 4 in the class I was working with I just about why she would would not include a new child into her playgroup it was a hypothetical girl named Christina she said she would

include this go on a playgroup because she knew would make her feel good and so it was the right thing for her to do and she went on to draw a picture of what this would look like for her right and not only is it just a beautiful picture so it's just worth it for that and it's also clear that she's here expressing the sense of community that she's trying to build and watch think it's important to include this girl into her friend or her friend group good so what can clear to me from this

discussion and many others is that children possess a sharp ethical awareness this is evident historically for example in children of the civil rights movement who participated in school desegregation and tremendously brave ways and in many ways that adults failed to do but it's also evident in our you know more common daily conversations with kids when we use children's literature such as frog and toad in the giving tree' in children raise questions and insights about issues of fairness honesty loyalty respect and many other ethical values but one of children's greatest strengths in these conversations that adults

often lack actually is the ability to be imaginative ly present to care about the story in a way in which they they almost talked with the characters and to care about the outcome in a vital way in this sense ethics doesn't need to be a mere exercise or a separate discipline for children give me an outgrowth of their imagination and their daily present concerns so what I am advocating for you today is that we think about the presence of other concerns in our life and the possibility of ethics education as being a positive and helping

us to address and think more deeply about those concerns and hopefully redouble our efforts to build an ethical community both within and beyond our schools thanks very much you