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"Recently colleges and universities that had for many years distanced themselves from their students' growth as moral agents have begun taking this aspect of higher education very seriously. In this book they will find the issues laid out with admirable clarity and the fresh ideas and approaches they need to do the work well."--W. Robert Connor, Professor of Classics, Emeritus, Princeton University

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DEBATING MORAL EDUCATION

Duke University Press

Contents

FOREWORD Noah Pickus..........................................................................................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................................xiiiI Introduction: Why the Return to Ethics? Why Now?.............................................................................11 DEBATING MORAL EDUCATION: AN INTRODUCTION Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben.................................................32 THE CHANGING CONTOURS OF MORAL EDUCATION IN AMERICAN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES Julie A. Reuben..............................27II What Are Universities For?..................................................................................................553 AIM HIGH: A RESPONSE TO STANLEY FISH Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben......................................................574 I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT: A REPLY TO KISS AND EUBEN Stanley Fish.............................................................765 THE PATHOS OF THE UNIVERSITY: THE CASE OF STANLEY FISH Stanley Hauerwas.....................................................926 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF MORAL BADGES: A FEW WORRIES Elizabeth V. Spelman.....................................................1117 PLURALISM AND THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT Wilson Carey McWilliams and Susan Jane McWilliams.................................1258 MULTICULTURALISM AND MORAL EDUCATION Lawrence Blum..........................................................................1409 AGAINST CIVIC EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS James Bernard Murphy.....................................................................16210 EDUCATION, INDEPENDENCE, AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT Patchen Markell................................................................18611 THE POWER OF MORALITY George Shulman.......................................................................................20612 HUNGER, ETHICS, AND THE UNIVERSITY: A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC GOAD IN TEN PIECES Romand Coles...................................223IV Which Virtues? Whose Character?.............................................................................................24713 IS THERE AN ETHICIST IN THE HOUSE? HOW CAN WE TELL? David A. Hoekema.......................................................24914 THE POSSIBILITY OF MORAL EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY TODAY J. Donald Moon..................................................26715 IS HUMANISTIC EDUCATION HUMANIZING? Ruth W. Grant..........................................................................28316 PLAYERS AND SPECTATORS: SPORTS AND ETHICAL TRAINING IN THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY Michael Allen Gillespie.....................296BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................317CONTRIBUTORS...................................................................................................................337INDEX..........................................................................................................................341

Chapter One

DEBATING MORAL EDUCATION An Introduction

The past two decades have witnessed a substantial turn, or more precisely a return, to ethics in the American academy. While this trend remains incomplete and contested, it is visible in the recent establishment of over one hundred ethics centers and programs; the creation of numerous undergraduate and professional school courses in practical or applied ethics; and increased interest in normative questions in a variety of academic disciplines. New national associations have emerged that promote ethics in higher education, including the Association for Moral Education (founded in 1976), the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (founded in 1990), Campus Compact (founded in 1985), and the Center for Academic Integrity (founded in 1992). A small but growing number of schools have made the study of ethics part of their core curricula and have emphasized the ethical dimension of courses more generally.

Nor is the burgeoning interest in ethics confined to the classroom. Efforts to promote academic integrity, respect for diversity, and civic engagement reach beyond the classroom to encompass student life, campus policies, and university-community relations. A number of ethics centers, including one, Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics, with which we are or have been affiliated, pursue a broad university-wide mission that seeks to infuse ethical concerns and conversations across the curriculum, in everyday campus life, and in institutional practices and priorities.

This growing interest, and the educational vision that animates it, has not gone unchallenged. For example, when the distinguished political scientist John Mearsheimer delivered the annual "Aims of Education" address in 1997 to the incoming first-year class at the University of Chicago, he argued that the purpose of a university education is to help students think critically, to broaden their intellectual horizons, and to promote greater self-awareness. What the university does not do, he added, is "provide you with moral guidance. Indeed, it is a remarkably amoral institution." The university does not, and should not, offer courses "where you discuss ethics or morality in any detail," nor should it see it as part of its mission to help students "in sorting out" the ethical issues they will face in their lives.

As the essays in this book indicate, Mearsheimer is not alone. Many colleagues with very different political, methodological, and theoretical commitments are indifferent to, if not actively hostile to, the language of ethics and morals. To complicate matters further, they often mean different things by the terms "ethics" and "morals" and have very different conceptions of the relationships between ethics and morality, moral and civic education, or ethics and politics. For example, Bernard Williams insists on a clear distinction between ethics and morality, preserving the broader Greek meaning of the former from modern attempts at co-optation and linking the latter with what he regards as a peculiar, and fundamentally flawed, Western Enlightenment tradition of ethical thought focused on obligation. While Lawrence Hinman regards ethics as systematic reflection on moral issues, John Caputo is critical of both ethics and morality. In this volume, Patchen Markell, George Shulman, and Romand Coles are all leery about what is elided by the very language of morality and moral education. Markell argues that morality (probably unlike ethics) "risks flattening a rich field of questions about conduct into a single register of law, dutiful obedience, and righteous punishment," all of which risk reducing politics and citizenship to matters of individual virtue. Similarly, Shulman emphasizes the way practices of morality constitute forms of power, and Coles argues that ethical education as generally conceived and practiced in universities obscures urgent questions of systematic injustice. As to the idea of civic education, some regard its aim as civility while others draw on a more politically rigorous tradition of civic republicanism. We have not insisted that our contributors use these terms consistently, since their very inconsistencies attest to the underlying debates this book seeks to explore.

Even when there is...