(A
rejoinder to Meade and Weaver)
Robert Shaw
Senior Lecturer
School of Management
The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
Abstract
How socially responsible living relates to a moral / ethics education is not straightforward. The service learning curriculum of Meade and Weaver, entitled “The Ethical Life: Moral and Social Responsibility”, is assessed with regard to the goals it pursues, the methods used, and the justification for that form of moral education. The assessment draws upon British theorists who argue that moral autonomy is the goal of moral education (Peters), and that you must be clear about the form of the intellectual discipline of ethics before you teach the subject ethics (Wilson). The conclusion is that Meade and Weaver’s course is about moral autonomy and is thus in the English tradition of moral education. Its goals accord with the logical / structural form of the intellectual discipline of morality. But, greater specificity needs to be brought to the content of morality that appears in the course (moral principles), and the emotional components of moral decision-making are not adequately addressed. There is concern about how the institutional course requirements relate to the goals. Meade and Weaver’s views about the pedagogics of moral education appear consistent with those of other teachers, particularly with regards the strategy they use to motivate students.
Introduction
“We believe that, more than ever, ethics education has an obligation to engender ethical action and social responsibility in both students and teacher.”[1]
This provocative conclusion follows an example of alleged moral failure by the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann and a psychologist’s empirical conclusion that there is a “disparity between intellect and character”. [2]
The authors then set out the reasons why ethics teaching ought to engender ethical action and social responsibility, which are:
1. The call for action is consistent with the drive among colleges and universities to connect with their communities.
2. Education is to prepare students for life and work, and consequently theory alone is not adequate preparation for the practical world.
3. The primary goal of ethics education should be to develop a sense of moral agency, which Meade and Weaver define as “moral knowledge and a willingness and dedication to act upon it”.[3]
4. The teaching of moral theory is most effective when the theory is combined with on-going practical exposure to real problems and dilemmas.
The rest of the paper by Meade and Weaver describes their innovative adaptation of a North American service-learning course to teach ethical theory and thereby to pursue their goal of assisting students to become moral agents.
The authors raise most of the traditional questions that are posed to those of us who would teach ethics or moral education, particularly to younger students. In this paper, I proceed to examine the course goals and justification under two headings, and hence:
1. Examine the adequacy of each of the four reasons that Meade and Weaver say support their notion that ethics courses should engender ethical action and social responsibility (Meade and Weaver’s Four Reasons).
2. Provide an alternative account of the purposes of moral education; drawing upon the notion that morality is a distinct intellectual discipline and that the purpose of education is to initiate students into academic disciplines (Rationale for Moral Education).
Eichmann is the example selected, by Meade and Weaver, to show the conflict between moral knowledge and practical conclusions in a situation where we believe the contrast to be stark. As teachers, what is our responsibility when we set curricula, and deliver courses, to the young Eichmanns and bin Ladens of this world?[4]
Meade and Weaver’s Four Reasons
The expression “engender ethical action and social responsibility” admits of several meanings. However, it is clear that the authors do not intend any neutral account of that expression. They want their students to get out into the world and do things to assist with a particular social agenda. This can be seen in their description of the course they teach: “students engage in activities that address human and community needs…”[5] It may also be seen in the list of partnership organisations that take placement students: “Boys and Girls Club of Allentown, Habitat for Humanity, Great Valley Girl Scout Council, a retirement community, a shelter for battered women, a homeless shelter…”[6]
The drive for community connections influences Meade and Weaver’s views on their curriculum. The links between educational institutions and their communities are complex. They reflect circumstances such as economic imperatives, cultural heritage, and community needs. When considering the linkages, distinctions may need to be drawn for example between state funded institutions and private facilities that are paid for by their users, and also between the different grade levels of schooling.
Connections between institutions and communities may serve different purposes and result from various motivations. Some parents want to keep students out of the classroom when there is work to do on the farm or in the shop.[7] Some parents want to be in classrooms because they believe this can facilitate the learning of their children. Others in the community seek to be involved with schools to establish business links, often for the mutual benefit of schools and companies. These associations are positive contributions to schooling, herald cooperation and help advance communities, institutions, and learners.
However, they are not about the most important decisions that relate to colleges and universities. The most important issues are those about the curriculum – who decides the curriculum, on what assumptions, and for what purposes.
Meade and Weaver set out a rationale, and thus a goal, for both institutions and the course they teach: “For the sake of social cohesion, colleges and universities are seeking partnerships with members of their communities, and also seeking to serve those in need in the community.”[8]
There may be an indirect way in which education serves “those in need in the community” and advances “social cohesion”, by training social workers perhaps; but, notions like “to serve those in need”, I argue, are not a part of any appropriate justification for an educational curriculum in the ethics or moral education.[9] Meade and Weaver are overly impressed by the needs of a particular section of the community and that appears to influence their curriculum decisions.
The concept of ‘need’ has been much used in the justification of curricula. Dearden said: “It was recognised that general injunctions about needs could conceivably have an important point to make, but they are more likely to be high-sounding platitudes”.[10] To establish a need in education three criteria must be met:
1. There is a norm or standard
2. The fact that the norm is not being achieved
3. The fact that what is said to be needed really is the relevant condition to achieving the norm.[11]
Meade and Weaver convince us that there is a norm that is not being achieved. It relates to what they perceive as social circumstances in their community. In the debate on curriculum, there are at least three major perspectives to consider. If we use the ‘needs’ terminology they are:
1. The needs of intellectual disciplines.
2. The needs of students.
3. The needs of society (the community).
Later in the present paper, I develop a rationale for moral / ethics education based on a notion of intellectual disciplines. This effectively avoids the problems that Meade and Weaver encounter when they emphasise the needs of society.
The claim is made that moral or ethics education ought to contribute to the practical decisions that students make later in life.
This focus on the needs of students is unlikely to be challenged by teachers. However, it does raise the question of what student needs we are to consider. This is particularly so when we consider non-main-stream curricula (by which I mean the innovative course that Meade and Weaver describe, and similar examples[12]).
Vocational courses, labelled as such, are well understood as a legitimate form of schooling directed at preparation for life and work. But vocational courses in ethics contrast with generic courses in ethics for two reasons:[13]
1 Because of the close relationship of the subject ethics to teachers and those we teach - its integral link to our personal decision-making and our identity as a person, and,
2 Because generic ethics courses do not have a practical link to a particular trade or profession. They relate to personal decision-making in all circumstances and in all vocations[14].
Hence, ethics courses present a particular challenge when the “preparation for life and work” rationale is developed for schooling. This will be considered further in the present paper after I describe how ethics education may be justified by reference to its being an academic discipline.
Character training is a traditional form of ethics “education”, particularly for young students and students in developing countries, and it is a form of preparation for life and work[15]. The strength of character training is that it brings forward particular values and is directed at practical actions. What character training does not have, which Meade and Weaver stress, is rational reflection on decisions, situations and actions.
3 The Goal of Ethics Education is to Develop a Sense of Moral Agency
The notion that the primary role of ethics education ought to be to develop a sense of moral agency is at the very heart of the debate about the purposes of ethics education. “We define moral agency as a fusion of moral knowledge with the willingness and dedication to act on it. We define moral knowledge as both knowledge of major moral principles and a deep understanding of and commitment to one’s own moral beliefs”.[16] “Moral agency”, in the Meade and Weaver account, follows Carter’s characterisation of integrity, which involves three components:
1 Discerning what is right and what is wrong
2 Acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and
3 Saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong.[17]
The derivation of this theory from Kant (two rational faculties, understanding and will) is made explicit. However, it would have been better to refer to writers on moral education in this tradition rather than Carter and his concept of ‘integrity’. Had they done so, they may have been more concerned to make explicit the moral principles that are an integral part of their activities as teachers, and the principles that they intended to be used in the reasoning of their students.
Compare Carter’s concept of ‘integrity’ with Peters’ account of moral autonomy, which also has three components:
1 Authenticity or genuineness (make your own decisions)
2 Rationality (ability to stand back and reflect on rules)
3 Strength of will (the ability to stick to a judgement or course of conduct in the face of counter inclinations)[18]
The congruence of Peters and Carter regarding mental decision-making and its necessary link to physical action is carried directly into Meade and Weaver’s course aims. Thus, they are specific about a major goal for moral education. There is also no disagreement that the individual student must work out their moral decisions themselves.
However, the looseness in Carter’s account of how the decisions are made, contrasts with the specificity of rationality in Peters’ account. Carter’s use of “discerning” suggests that there is a judgement already made and that the students’ task is to extract it from the alternatives.[19]
Meade and Weaver tell us their students act on principles “they have learned about”.[20] Ethical theory is taught (Rawls, Kant, utilitarians).They also note that the habit of “critical reflection” is a frequent result of service learning courses.[21] But, critical reflection is not necessarily the application of rationality.
Peters makes the proposed method clear: rationality, meaning attending to relevant facts, giving reasons, attending to logic, and so on. These ideas come directly from Kant and Piaget. In the context of moral education they entail specification of the moral principles used in decision-making and the justification of those principles.
Meade and Weaver face another problem in so far as their theory does not appear to be sufficiently consistent with their practice.
If a student decides to subscribe to an emotivist theory of ethics, or to practical anarchy, they may not complete the course requirements, and the decision on their grade will challenge Meade and Weaver.
What happens if their experience in community institutions convinces them that Eichmann was right? “We instruct our students that they must not create an administrative burden for the agencies…. They must conform to the agencies’ policies on dress, conduct, and the like.”[22]
Not only are there concerns about the practice of rationality, but also the practice of authenticity becomes a problem when so much is prescribed in course requirements[23]. The personal cost Carter identifies in his concept of integrity might appear as the acceptance of a “fail” grade. When Wilson was asked “what are you frightened of most in moral education?” he replied that it is “people thinking the way in which you morally educate people is first to set up a particular set of values and then you play it out”.[24] Teachers cannot prescribe that students will volunteer for service in selected agencies, in the name of moral education.
Meade and Weaver claim the teaching of moral theory is most effective when the theory is combined with on-going practical exposure to real problems and dilemmas.
My experience as a teacher supports their conclusion. Teachers adopt one of two basic approaches when they teach ethics. They either start with practical examples (moral dilemmas, topics of concern, experience in situations) and then, from a consideration of these problems, introduce the theory of ethics; or, they teach the theory of ethics and then apply it to practical problems.
Meade and Weaver have the best of both these methods by having an ongoing close relationship between theory and practical requirements. First, they send their students out into the world and then they have them reflect on their experience. Then, they have them do more practical work.[25] Their approach is likely to motivate students because they see the reality of moral choice.
From time-to-time, communities or teachers conclude that education should contribute more to address perceived problems in society. Those who promote initiatives in schools that are well-intentioned responses to such concerns must take particular care to ensure they are sound in terms of the purposes of education.
In this section of the present paper, I set out some examples of initiatives in moral education that were the result of community concerns (under the heading Society’s expectations), and then sketch the distinctive features of ethics / moral education (The discipline of ethics. The logical structure of morality. Content of morality). The approach taken builds upon my earlier comments about autonomy. Finally, under the heading Meade and Weaver and the discipline of ethics, I list my conclusions about their course, based on the concepts developed here.
Americans must judge the extent to which Meade and Weaver are responding to a rational consensus of opinion in their community. The call for schools and universities to become more involved in moral education appears from intermittently. In New Zealand we had such a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[26] Within a decade it was forgotten. Some new interest in these matters in the South Pacific has a focus on “citizenship” and echoes of the old calls for liberal (meaning broad and practically oriented) education.[27]
In Australia and New Zealand, moral education does not appear in state funded school curricula, except as an optional offering sometimes provided because of the enthusiasm or special interest of teachers such as Meade and Weaver. The result is that students proceed to university, or to the life of employment, without an adequate intellectual framework to assist them to address the moral issues that of necessity they must confront.[28]
In Britain in the 1960s, the impetus was there for moral education to be introduced into schools because of concerns about the behaviour of the young. The Farmington Trust funded a 10-year multi-disciplinary programme at Oxford University to develop research on the topic of moral education. Their work provides us with a framework against which we can judge curricula in moral education.[29] Their stance was that the cause of ethics or moral education in colleges would be advanced if there were greater understanding about the intellectual discipline of ethics and what the teaching of morality entails.
When we use the word ‘ethics’ in relation to education we refer to the intellectual discipline of ethics, in the same way that the words ‘science’ and ‘mathematics’ may refer to intellectual disciplines when they appear in curriculum statements. The purpose of education, broadly speaking, is to initiate students into the various intellectual disciplines of human kind.[30] The intellectual disciplines embrace humankind’s best collective effort to address profound perplexities.
In the case of ‘ethics’, in the English speaking / Western tradition at least, we have over 2,500 years of erratic, but nevertheless cumulative, effort to answer questions about how human beings ought to behave. The questions may be posed on a grand scale (for example, ‘what is the good life’), or they may be very specific (‘ought John to take this money’). However statements are cast, the discipline of ethics seeks to prescribe and justify human beings’ practical decision-making and physical action.
When we teach ethics in a university, the lecturer’s job is to advance the student’s understanding of the discipline and ultimately to contribute to the discipline itself. When moral education (to use the British term) or ethics education (to use the American term) appears in the pre-university curricula of schools and colleges, there is often debate about the fundamental purpose of the course as well as the methods of teaching.[31]
You “do morality” when you attempt to address moral questions using the moral form of thought and subsequently proceed to moral action based on your thinking. Hence, we need to be clear about this form of thought, what connects it to action, and what actions count as moral actions. Education in morality or ethics is thus (1) initiation into the form of thought and (2) the development of the motivation necessary to have people use the form of thought and (3) the development of the skills necessary to make practical the decisions taken, and (4) the development of the strength of will necessary to engender action based on ideas.
Wilson sets out the area of morality, defined by logical, as opposed to empirical, criteria, and defined in a content free way.[32]
Morality entails rationality, judgement and the strength of will to oppose inclinations, and produce action. It is moral autonomy as “discovered” by Piaget and Kohlberg, and developed as a concept by Peters.[33]
Children cannot demonstrate moral autonomy because they need to develop concepts, judgement, and the ability to act for rational reasons. Somewhere from childhood to adulthood these things should be learnt. There is clearly a role for teachers here.
According to Wilson, to behave morally a person must:
(a) Have concepts that can be used (eg honesty, honour, trust)
(b) Think they ought to use some such selected concepts when they make a decision that involves other persons
(c) Have feelings or emotions that support their belief that they ought to use a particular concept
(d) Have knowledge or awareness of surrounding circumstances that structure the situation that calls for the moral decision. This is knowledge of facts that are relevant to the decision.
(e) Have the social skills or other know-how to implement any decision that might be taken.
(f) Have the strength of will (including independence) necessary to implement any decision that they take.[34]
Whether a person brings to bear the above, and thus demonstrates moral behaviour, will depend on whether they:
(a) recognise a set of circumstances as requiring a moral decision/action.
(b) make use of principles and knowledge to reach a conclusion in a rational manner (reason giving, with logic and so on).
(a) draw upon sufficient feelings or emotions to be motivated to act in accordance with the conclusion drawn in (b) above.[35]
The territory of moral education or ethics education in the pre-university years has now been charted. Useful courses will pursue the development of any of these things, but a comprehensive course in moral education will need to address every aspect of the discipline. Courses that genuinely set out to alter the behaviour of people in a permanent way will need to be comprehensive. Teachers’ thinking on these matters is sharpened when they consider how moral education courses should be assessed.[36]
Having the structure of morality sketched, we now face the problem of content. What particular concepts are we to insert into teaching programmes?[37]
Programmes in different places at different times have used different concepts. Concepts that have been used include the concepts of a ‘person’ and ‘concern for other persons’. Whatever the concepts are, they need to be explicit if they are to be used with young people. Ethics educators should avoid accusations of indoctrination and subversiveness.
Equally, it needs to be set out who is to select the concepts and how they are do this. With students capable of rational abstract thought, we might say that they can select their own principles. However, this makes it difficult to teach moral education courses, for students in a class choose different principles and there are practical problems in the classroom when you attempt to justify too many principles at the same time. Ultimately, students will choose their own concepts and work on these, both inside and outside the classroom.
“You ought to act so as to be socially responsible”, the preferred principle of Meade and Weaver, is an acceptable starting point. But, it does include substantial conceptual problems. For example, what do we understand by “socially responsible”. When you teach moral education, and use such concepts, you find that your course focuses on language and conceptual analysis. This emphasises an aspect of the form of morality we are pursuing (namely that it is rational and based in language) but it is not very motivating for some students, particularly those less academically inclined.
Their course to a large extent conforms to the requirements for moral education as sketched above. They want to pursue moral autonomy for their students. The list below identifies specific matters that may repay attention.
1 The purpose of the community service course component needs to be carefully defined. As a source of issues for consideration in class, or as a means to motivate students, it appears reasonable. However, how can students exercise moral autonomy if the fieldwork is compulsory? If compulsion is there to assist with the development of good habits (which is clearly what some associated with service-learning intend), the form of morality being pursued is heteronomy, and this conflicts with the stated goal of moral autonomy.
2 In moral decision-making the principles used have to be explicit and justified. They are the content of an ethics course. Frequently in ethics education courses, decisions on the principles are extracted from the students by dialectical means, and then examined. It has been this author’s experience that undergraduate students gravitate to the ethical premises of the ancient Greeks. Thus, hedonism, stoicism, cynicism are well used in practice and also Christian pastoral ethics are common. The theories of Rawls, the utilitarians and Kant are usually best taught later and then applied to examples.[38]
3 The role of rules is not sufficiently accentuated in Meade and Weaver’s account of their course. The transition from heteronomy to autonomy requires and understanding that there are rules (moral principles, concepts, moral content), that these must be justified, and that morally autonomous people must do this work themselves.[39]
4 There appears to be a lack of specificity about the development of commitment to moral action. It is clear that Meade and Weaver see this as extremely important, but what do they actually do (apart from the compulsory work which is a form of extrinsic motivation for the course not for the students’ rationally derived principles) to educate in the area of emotions?[40]
There is reasonable consistency between Meade and Weaver’s account of ethics education and that developed by John Wilson and his team at Oxford University. Both emphasise the need to link moral decision-making to moral action, and both pursue a concept of moral autonomy for students. In the pursuit of moral autonomy Meade and Weaver are consistent with Peters (in the tradition of the prescriptivist philosophers) and the psychologists Piaget and Kohlberg.
Many of the observations made by Meade and Weaver about the pedagogics of moral education are confirmed by this author’s experience teaching ethics courses in Australia and New Zealand over a period of 30 years.
However, Meade and Weaver are not explicit enough about the process of decision-making apart from saying that it is to be reflective and the students are to do this work themselves. By associating themselves with Carter and his concept of ‘integrity’ they lose their focus on moral autonomy. ‘Integrity’, as Carter sets it out, is but one example of moral autonomy. Perhaps we can understand how Carter came to be influential when we reflect on the service learning context of the course.
When this weakness regarding the course’s goal is associated with Meade and Weaver’s strong preference for certain kinds of moral action, it raises a concern that their service learning course is too closely associated with the teachers’ moral preferences and unspecified moral principles.
[1] Meade, Elizabeth and
Weaver, Suzanne. “Ethics Education: Connecting Learning to Socially Responsible
Living”, Professional Ethics Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 51 – 62, 2001.
[2] Coles, Robert. “The
Disparity Between Intellect and Character”, The Chronicle of Higher
Education Volume 42, September 22, 1995.
[3] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 52.
[4] It is difficult to write on
ethics and education at this time, without reference to the world events
initiated on September 11, 2001. From that day the moral challenge to Western
leadership has been intense. Equally, the challenge to the community-at-large
has become extreme. Hence, for both leaders and for ordinary people the quality
of moral reasoning, and the execution of moral action, have been of paramount
importance. The present paper is dedicated to the memory of those who lost
their lives on September 11, 2001
[5] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 53.
[6] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 58.
[7] When the pattern of terms
in the school year was first set for New Zealand, a major consideration was the
need to have students at home on the farm when lambs and calves were born.
[8] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 52.
[9] My colleague Vanessa
Scholes says “perhaps these two goals are also indirect goals in the negative
(and self-serving) sense that a lack of these things is not good for
educational institutions – that is, a certain level of social cohesion is
probably necessary for educational institutions to be able to function well,
and educational institutions will want to ensure their policies and practices do
not prevent the able amongst the needy from pursuing high-level education (they
should be serving, educationally speaking, the needy as well as the
rich)” (personal communication).
[10] Dearden, R F. “Needs in
education”, in Dearden RF, Hirst PH and Peters RS A critique of current
educational aims, Part 1 of Education and the Development of Reason, page
60, 1972.
[11] Dearden ibid, page
48 –62.
[12] In the 1970s’ at Hillary
College in Auckland, New Zealand, I produced a course for 16-year-old students
entitled Ethics. This was accepted by the New Zealand Education Department as
an accredited course, but it was in a category “local courses” and did not have
the status of a “national course”.
[13] “Generic” courses are those
that teach ethics without being tied to a specific vocational purpose. Examples
of courses tied to specific vocational purposes include medical ethics,
business ethics, ethics for teachers.
[14] It is a feature of the
service-learning course in ethics described by Meade and Weaver that it is
“generic”. That is, it is not directed at the needs of any particular workplace
or vocation. There are many non-generic ethics courses directed at the needs of
professional groups. I have taught ethics courses to vocationally oriented
students of engineering, education, computer studies, business and public
policy.
[15] Character training attempts
to instil in people moral habits such as honesty, punctuality and cleanliness.
[16] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 52.
[17] Carter, Stephen L. Integrity.
NY: Basic Books, 1996.
[18] Peters, Richard Stanley.
Moral Development and Moral Learning. The Monist, Vol. 58, No. 4 ,
October 1974. Reprinted in Peters, R.S. Psychology and Ethical Development,
London: Unwin University Books, pp. 360 – 385, 1974
[19] This “looseness” is clear
in Carter’s book, for example in “Discernment Revisited” he says: “For me as a
Christian, a belief in discernment rests crucially on the belief in God and the
duty of obedience to God’s law”. This is not the ‘rationality’ of the
prescriptivest philosophers that is the tradition of Peters and the advocates
of moral autonomy.
[20] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 55.
[21] Meade and Weaver, ibid,
page 54.
[22] My emphasis. Meade and Weaver, ibid, page 59. A genuine
course that pursues moral autonomy will probably encourage students to question
such requirements, regardless of whether the teacher seeks this outcome.
[23] Authenticity is an
essential part of the concept of moral autonomy, which is discussed later in
the present paper.
[24] Halstead, Mark and
McLaughlin, Terence H. “An interview with John Wilson”, Journal of Moral
Education. Vol. 29, No 3, p. 274, September 2000.
[25] In my experience, students
destined to be engineers, business managers, computer specialists and teachers are
frequently sceptical of what their ethics course has to offer. It can be very
useful to describe the place of ethics as an academic discipline that contrasts
with science, mathematics, aesthetics, and technology.
[26] Shaw, Robert K. New
Zealand’s Recent Concern with Moral Education. Journal of Moral Education,
Vol. 9, No. 1, pp 23 – 35.
[27] Heath, Pamela. “Education
as Citizenship: appropriating a new social space”. Higher Education Research
& Development. Volume 19, No. 1, pp. 43 – 51, 2000.
[28] The exceptions are those
students who attend New Zealand church schools (predominantly Roman Catholic)
that are in large part funded by the state and choose to teach moral education
as an adjunct to religious studies.
[29] The Farmington Trust team
were concerned first to define what moral education was, and then to provide a
framework for the assessment of morality. They did not particularly address the
development of curricula.
[30] Peter, R S. Ethics and
Education. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966.
[31] For example, parents with pro-life
views may object to classroom debate about abortion if they believe the teacher
supports abortion on demand, or if they take the view that moral issues are a
matter for the home and not the province for school instruction or discussion.
[32] Wilson, John. The
Assessment of Morality. Windsor: NFER Publishing Company, 1973.
[33] Piaget and Kohlberg
“discovered” through empirical work what is a conceptual truth.
[34] Wilson, ibid.
[35] Adapted from Wilson, ibid.
[36] Shaw, Robert. Assessing
Components of Morality. Master in Philosophy thesis, University of
Auckland, 1976.
[37] Wilson uses the word
‘concept’ when others might use ‘moral/ethical principles’, and the
psychologists prefer ‘rules’. ‘Concept’ covers a bit more than ‘ethical
statements’, which is what is usually meant by both ‘principles’ and ‘rules’.
The essence of ‘ethical statements’ is that they can conform to the form “X
ought to Y”.
[38] The Business Ethics course
taught to undergraduate business students at the Open Polytechnic of New
Zealand has this same pedagogic problem (That course prescribes some theorists
and the students use these for their analysis, regardless of whether the
students actually relate well to the theorists ideas. Thus, the other
components of moral education cannot be developed in an integrated way. This
need not concern us if the purpose of the course is simply to teach an academic
discipline, but the claim is made that the course is about practical
decision-making and action in the workplace. Courses taught under the
prescription for Ethics and Professionalism in New Zealand’s national diploma
for computer studies, do not have this problem, perhaps because a diploma
course is at a lower level than a degree course and thus further away from
academia”.
[39] In other words, the
developmental perspective is not being sufficiently considered. Piaget and
Kohlberg have set this out and teachers must not ignore it.