Cynthia Jones article.fm

Anyone who has taught an introductory ethics course or a professional ethics class has likely heard students writing off ethics and ethics instruction as unimportant, offering as evidence some type of moral relativism. Even if the instructor is sympathetic towards a particular version of moral relativism, students’ relativist claims can be disconcerting and can seriously detract from their willingness to learn the subject matter. A discussion of claims like “Morality is just a matter of opinion” or “It may be wrong for you but it’s not wrong for me” or “Other cultures have different morals than we do and we can’t judge them” is unavoidable in these courses.1 Despite my efforts to address variations of moral relativism at the beginning of a semester, I routinely found many of my students espousing virtually the same simplistic relativist views at the end of the term as they had at the beginning of the term. I would consistently receive final exam essays with statements like: “But this is all a matter of opinion” or “It’s really just up to the individual” or “There are really no right or wrong answers.” I began to wonder whether it was possible to teach students to be prepared to face ethical decisions in their future professions while demonstrating that ethical relativism is unconstructive. In an effort to address this problem, and to facilitate achieving the goals for my professional ethics classes, I have crafted an approach to teaching professional ethics which borrows from critical thinking instruction, the recognition of multiple cultural identities, and cooperative learning pedagogical techniques. In this paper, I will discuss this combined pedagogical method, which I have found to be somewhat successful in mitigating the impact of moral relativism and even more successful as a means for achieving the important goal of equipping students with the tools for making reasoned ethical decisions in their future professional lives. I will begin with an overview of the particular problem of moral relativism along with a brief description of the university where I teach and