The ethics of vicious examples in ethics

There’s an provocative essay on this UCSD-affiliated blog about the rather extreme and violent examples used frequently in ethics classes, and whether they might be doing more harm than good. The discussion following the essay is very good and interesting.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 11:02 am and is filed under Actual philosophical discussion!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The ethics of vicious examples in ethics”

  1. Vince says:
    July 17, 2007 at 12:39 am

    Do you have a class “Ethics for business majors”. I get the feeling that ‘business’ and ‘Ethics” are metaphors for oil and water.

    How about a vicious ethics situation for CEOs:

    You and 50 people are out in a boat and you have been elected to steer the boat while the others row. You see two places to point the boat. One will bring everyone in the boat to safe harbor where all can enjoy their lives in simple living. The other will bring you to a blissful land of great riches but all rowers will die to get you there. What do you do?

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  2. Brian Berkey says:
    July 17, 2007 at 3:34 am

    Hey Vince,

    So the example of the 50 people and the boat was actually mine, and I found your comment here after myself commenting on the post that’s linked to above, in which the author disparages the use of examples such as mine in moral philosophy.

    It’s interesting that you ask about business ethics, since I’m currently teaching for a class in business ethics, and attempting to introduce my students to the world of philosophical ethics. In my experience there’s not all that much difference in the character of the discussions of practical ethical issues between classes of business students and classes of philosophy students. Once I get the business students accustomed to thinking about issues from an ethical perspective (rather than a purely economic perspective), they’re able to engage in ethical reasoning just like my philosophy students.

    Of course this doesn’t mean that they won’t go out and make purely selfish decisions once they’ve landed their six figure jobs after graduation. In fact, many of them probably will. But then, again, so will a lot of the philosophy students.

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  3. Vince says:
    July 17, 2007 at 12:52 pm

    Brian,

    Your blogspot is filled with excellent topics for me to browse.

    I agree that business students and eventual CEOs are no more susceptible to unethical behavior than scientists (I’m a scientist). It is just that CEO misbehavior affects so many people (workers, investors, etc). I get more than a little perturbed that we embrace capitalistic freedom to the extent that unethical behavior of the few — pays so well and harms so many. SEC governance is never as vigorous as I would like to see.

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