Contemporary applied ethics, and by extension practical and professional ethics education, can be considered an offshoot of the broad philosophical doctrine of moral realism. Moral realism takes many forms but in broad outline it is an established meta-ethical position that emerged as a seemingly attractive alternative to another family of established philosophical positions that sometimes goes under the name of “expressivism”. Expressivism, again in rough terms, is the idea that ethical beliefs are mere expressions of subjective preferences, attitudes, emotions, and desires. Moral realists typically reject expressivism (as well as other forms of subjectivism in ethics) because the realist-sounding ordinary language with which moral views are debated and promoted is hard to square with the idea that moral beliefs are mere expressions of subjective preferences (cf. Darwall et al., 1992). People speak as if moral statements correspond to some real features of the world, features that exist independently of anyone’s opinions or preferences. Just as the statement “The cat is on the mat” can only be regarded as true if the cat is in fact lying on the mat, a moral judgement such as “Alain is generous” is true only if it is the case that Alain actually is generous. Moral statements, like statements about the material world, seem to report facts and this suggests that there is some discernible truth about moral matters. If the main claim of moral realism is the idea that the referents of moral language are fact-like, moral realism also tends to adopt, for the same reason, an internalist position on the question of moral motivation. Moral judgements, expressed seriously and in ordinary language, are not just descriptive. They are also prescriptive: when I judge, say, that it is morally preferable to eat the eggs of only free-range chickens, it implies that I, and perhaps everyone else as well, have a good reason to actually eat free-range eggs. That is to say, ordinary language supposes that judgements of moral rightness and wrongness come with a built-in or “internal” motivating reason to act in accordance with one’s moral judgements.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
For a detailed discussion of internalism, various versions thereof, and its opposing counterpart externalism, see, for example, Smith (1994).
See Annis (1992) for a brief but comprehensive account of the critical capacities and knowledge components that are explicitly or tacitly accepted as the cognitive aims proper to secular practical ethics education (pp. 189–191).
For a statement of this view, see Habermas (1993a), who argues that the question of why some people are morally responsible and others are not is not a philosophical question but is best handled by empirical psychology.
These findings seem to mirror Arendt’s (1961/1994) controversial postulate on the “banality of evil”, an idea she developed while observing Eichmann’s trial for war crimes. It was not, she concluded, that Eichmann had bad moral judgement. Nor was there any indication that he was motivated by hateful or diabolical ideas, as Arendt read him. He simply failed to engage in any kind of independent judgement at all (cf. esp. p. 288). For one recent discussion of this point see Todd (2007).
For a defence of the virtues at the core of professional expertise in teaching see Sockett (1993). In his reading of the situation, there are five moral excellences: honesty, courage, care, fairness, and practical wisdom.
In fact, in this section of Principles of biomedical ethics the term they use is “compassion” but later they use the two terms synonymously (cf. 374–375). Barnbaum (2001) also treats “empathy” and “compassion” as interchangeable in reference to role morality in health care.
See, for example, American Association of Medical Colleges Core Curriculum Working Group (2000) and Coulehan and Williams (2003) for a discussion of this trend.
For treatments of both these questions see Benbassat and Baumal (2004), Tong (1997), and various contributions to More and Milligan’s (1994) edited collection, The empathic practitioner.
For a similar assessment of empathy as a faculty of moral perception from the perspective of health care see also Tong (1997).
The term “feelings of judgement”, Urteilsgefühle, is Meinong’s (1894/1968).
In presenting these ideas, Coombs credits Bricker’s (1993) Aristotelian perspective on ethics for professionals in education.
Anscombe (1958), Geach (1956), and more recently Thomson (2001) provide elaborations of this view.
For statement of this conception of ethical naturalism see Hursthouse (1999), Foot (2001), and most recently McKinnon (2005).
See Cottingham (1983) and Nagel (1986) for comparable deployments of the naturalist strategy against the ideal of impartiality in normative ethics.
See Doris and Stich (2003) for a recent review of ways in which relevant and available empirical evidence, when in the hands of moral philosophers, has been put to use in order to suggest new directions vis-à-vis such intractable philosophical problems as the indeterminacy of moral character, the problem of moral motivation, and the possibility of convergence of opinion among fully rational moral agents. The conclusions reached in the examples of well-conducted empirically informed philosophical research they survey might not in every case be convincing but their case studies leave no doubt of the potential heuristic value for ethics of engagement with relevant empirical literature and forcefully make their point that, as these authors state it, “ethical theorizing should be an (in part) a posteriori inquiry richly informed by relevant empirical considerations” (p. 115).
For an in-depth discussion of this key point of Humean moral psychology see Smith (1994, p. 92ff).
The term is derived from a similar usage in Schläfli et al. (1985).
On the distinction between case-based and theory-based teaching, see, for example, Jonsen and Toulmin (1988).
The term is Barnbaum’s (2001).
Cf. especially Carr (2000, pp. 186ff).
For a similar assessment see the discussion of this point in Strike and Ternasky (1993).
In medicine as well explicit descriptions of the social, emotional, and moral competencies of professional expertise also seem to be becoming a standard feature of policy documents used in the accreditation process. See, for example, American Association of Medical Colleges Core Curriculum Working Group (2000). See Coulehan and Williams (2003) for a discussion of this trend.
For a development of this conception of professional ethics see Carr (2000 p. 149ff).
On this point see various contributions in Darwall (2002), Crisp (1998), and Crisp and Slote (1997).
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
(2008). Introduction. In: Professional Ethics Education: Studies in Compassionate Empathy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6889-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6889-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-6888-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-6889-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)