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I can't picture how you could teach ethics, actually. Meaning, if someone is already unethical, I can't see a way to make them ethical and in reverse - if you h

I can't picture how you could teach ethics, actually. Meaning, if someone is already unethical, I can't see a way to make them ethical and in reverse - if you have an ethical person, they don't need to be told to be ethical. Is it then mostly a class on reassuring already ethical people that they're behaving well?

wpietri 13y ago
Nah. Consider, for example, most of the people who participated in the mortgage bubble. Almost all of them thought they were behaving ethically. Most of them weren't, because the system was a) familiar enough that it didn't trip people's bad-situation triggers, and b) complicated enough that it was hard to see what the downstream ethical problems were. E.g., the nice person at the mortgage issuer said the loan was good for them, so they just signed what he told them. And the mortgage guy was just doing what his boss told him. And that boss was just following the incentive plan set up. And the people buying the mortgages in bulk seemed happy with them, as did the ratings agencies. But in my view, most or all of them acted unethically; one can't swim in the mud and come out clean. Or take a look at the content of a medical ethics class: http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.html http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.htm... Even if everybody wants to do the right thing, what the right thing is hard to figure out. Ethics classes force people to think things through. They can't make a sociopath healthy, but they can help everybody else to sort out right from wrong in complicated situations.
saraid216 13y ago
There isn't such a thing as an ethical person. There are situations and [un]ethical responses. Most people have no structured guidance on how to feel out a situation to categorize possible responses as ethical or unethical. Forming that structure would be the purpose of the class. To draw an analogy, most programmers can write code. But programming class isn't really about teaching a language's order of operations or explaining its particular grammar: the value of a programming class has to do with its explanations of modularity and data encapsulation, of structuring flow and conceptualizing objects. Then examples are provided that exercise these explanations so that you can apply them in future situations.

wpietri 13y ago

Nah. Consider, for example, most of the people who participated in the mortgage bubble. Almost all of them thought they were behaving ethically. Most of them weren't, because the system was a) familiar enough that it didn't trip people's bad-situation triggers, and b) complicated enough that it was hard to see what the downstream ethical problems were. E.g., the nice person at the mortgage issuer said the loan was good for them, so they just signed what he told them. And the mortgage guy was just doing what his boss told him. And that boss was just following the incentive plan set up. And the people buying the mortgages in bulk seemed happy with them, as did the ratings agencies. But in my view, most or all of them acted unethically; one can't swim in the mud and come out clean. Or take a look at the content of a medical ethics class: http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.html http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.htm... Even if everybody wants to do the right thing, what the right thing is hard to figure out. Ethics classes force people to think things through. They can't make a sociopath healthy, but they can help everybody else to sort out right from wrong in complicated situations.

saraid216 13y ago

There isn't such a thing as an ethical person. There are situations and [un]ethical responses. Most people have no structured guidance on how to feel out a situation to categorize possible responses as ethical or unethical. Forming that structure would be the purpose of the class. To draw an analogy, most programmers can write code. But programming class isn't really about teaching a language's order of operations or explaining its particular grammar: the value of a programming class has to do with its explanations of modularity and data encapsulation, of structuring flow and conceptualizing objects. Then examples are provided that exercise these explanations so that you can apply them in future situations.