Volume 3 • Number 1                    November 1995

INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

• SITUATION ETHICS: Radical or Old Hat?

• GENERAL EDUCATION?
 

• TEACHING AND WAIT-TIME: Response to Johnson

Stan Yake

Based on a reading of Hume, Jason Macauley (Thesis XII, issue 2.4) knowingly asks: "By what then, do we perceive moral pleasure and pain, and what is it we are perceiving?"

It seems to me that there are at least two initial problems that need to be dealt with before one could get to something, perhaps more substantive, regarding the intended subject matter of the question: (1) The idea of moral pain (or of moral pleasure) as opposed to pain (or pleasure), simpliciter, is not very clear; and (2) It is not clear that these are things we perceive.  I think these two problems are linked.

Arguably, one might legitimately assert that there is no such animal as "moral pain" or "moral pleasure."  Start with moral anger or moral outrage; that is, anger or outrage about an issue, judgment, action, event, policy, assumption, or implication that you take to have moral import.  You have the anger, in the sense that "being angry" is a descriptor of your state of mind.  What is it you are angry about -- about something you observed or apprehended in some way, or about something you concluded from such observation or apprehension?

Now, you can't observe what you can't observe!  And you can't conclude what can't be concluded!  For example, you perceive violent action against a disabled wheelchair-bound older person.  You don't perceive a judgment, you make a judgment that it is hurtful, that it is gratuitous and unjustified, etc., and you have positive attitudes (based on evaluations, judgments, conditioning, etc.) against such actions.  What you perceive, accompanied by your attitudinal state and your more or less well-articulated judgments, ignites a moral outrage against the perceived action or events.  The pain you may feel, then, could come either from empathy for the violated one or from the outrage itself.  In the latter case, I think, to call it "pain" is simply to rename the attitudinally-based outrage.  You either have the pain or your don't.  If you do, it is either instigated or ignited by the empathy, or it is perhaps the "interior face" of the janus-faced outrage, outrage at what you take to be morally unacceptable.  In either case, the pain is the pain.  It is not moral pain, in any meaningful sense, and it is not perceived.  Our psychic pain is "informed" by our understandings and judgments regarding what we perceive, and by our conditioned attitudes and sensibilities, but the pain is about the moral; it is itself non-moral.

Stan Yake teaches philosophy at North Adams Sate College

The Roots of Culture

Nicholas E. Hewitt

Perhaps the variety of human cultures that have branched across the planet are ultimately reducible to one seed.  That is not certain, of course, as cultures may  be the result of certain reproducible conditions.  They may proceed from the languages that are primary to them; and language, in turn, may be prone to follow the self-consciousness that is primary to it, which may rest on neurological conditions, which must have their causes, and so on.
 

However, it seems that Americans are often quick to label as foreign whatever they feel they must negate in order to affirm themselves.  How can Americans, especially, be culture-centric, when chances are that each one of us is multi-cultural?  How can we even define the culture many are fighting so hard to isolate?  Can we not at least agree that the variety of human culture is, in effect, a type of family?  So while we are on the topic of "family values," why not experiment with them universally, and at least try to imagine the tree that has spawned them all?  Why not welcome the ideas of cultures other than one's own as useful?  Perhaps an entirely new way to promote a good, or to foresee and bind an evil may be assimilated into the participating culture's store of knowledge and understanding.  As cultures exchange ideas, they each swell with  accomplishment, without diminishing or eclipsing the growth of each other, but constantly reforming and fortifying the tree that supports them all.

Nicholas E. Hewitt is a student at North Adams State College

Eric Moore

  In a recent issue of Free Inquiry, a journal devoted to the exploration of secular humanism, the philosopher Richard Taylor describes situation ethics as "not just one among many approaches to the resolution of ethical problems but a philosophy that replaces and thus renders irrelevant all the traditional approaches to ethics... (Vol. 15. 4, p. 47, italics added).  Quite a bold claim to make about any theory.  Indeed, a claim of the kind that one soon learns to recognize as a harbinger of bad philosophy.

Situation ethics is a theory developed by Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991) in his book, Situation Ethics.  I do not claim that Taylor's interpretation is standard, especially since he claims that everyone else has misinterpreted Fletcher's theory.  Here is Taylor's view:

What Fletcher accomplished was the complete reorientation of ethics away from the concepts of right and wrong, substituting for these the single consideration of what is most likely to advance human well-being.  This he never defines, correctly so.  It cannot be defined, nor can any rule of morality --even the utilitarian rule of promoting human well-being -- be derived from it.

Let us be absolutely clear here.  Taylor does not think that in a given situation we can find out what is morally right by consulting situation ethics.  He thinks the concepts of right and wrong must be discarded:

Therefore it is no fault of situation ethics that it sometimes -- indeed, of necessity always -- fails as a guide to what is morally right.  Nothing can do that.  The concept [of moral rightness (?)] itself is inapplicable to any situation that is in any way unique.

These passages from Taylor contain two startling theses.  (1) The proper way to evaluate actions is to forget about right and wrong.  (2) Situation ethics is not equivalent to any sort of utilitarian theory.  Thesis (1) is most radical, since accepting it means losing our vocabulary for discussing action-guiding theories.  We can no longer speak of the right thing to do.  Taylor comments that this is nearly psychologically impossible.  What an understatement!  It is, in fact, plainly impossible.  If we lose the term rightness, then we also lose the concepts of obligation and permission, because they are inter-defined.  To say that action a is permissible is to say that it is not obligatory to refrain from doing a.  Right action is permissible action.  So if we cannot say what is right, neither can we say what one (morally) ought to do.  Indeed, the question "What ought I to do?" becomes meaningless.

In fact, Taylor does think that situation ethics is action guiding.  For instance, he considers the following situation.  A person with Parkinson's disease may be helped by the transplant of very young, living brain tissue.  Is it morally permissable to use tissue from an aborted fetus?  Taylor says that thought our conventional moral principles say "no," situation ethics answers (correctly, he says), "yes."  But this is, despite Taylor's above protestation, a case where situation ethics does guide us to the morally right.  Situation ethics is thus not so unique as first appeared.

Once we realize that the concept of right action cannot be dispensed with, situation ethics becomes little more than a species of utilitarianism.  Below is a standard version of hedonistic act-utilitarianism, followed by the main thesis of situation ethics (re-stated using our customary concept of rightness).

HAU: Action a is morally right if and only if no alternative act has greater hedonic value than a.  (A "hedon" is a unit of pleasure).

SE: Action a is morally right if and only if no alternative act is more likely to advance human well-being.

Both HAU and SE are fundamentally consequentialist.  They evaluate an action's rightness by calculating the value of the consequences of that action.  The differences between them are: (1) SE is cast in terms of the value of expected consequences, while HAU uses the value of the actual consequences of an act; and (2) SE considers human well-being the value to maximize, while HAU considers pleasure as the value to maximize.  Regarding the first difference, there is a long-standing dispute among utilitarians about whether the expected or actual consequences of an action are of importance, and SE is not the first theory to use expected-consequences terminology.  As for the second difference, SE's maximization of some value other than pleasure is not new.  G. E. Moore, in his Principia Ethica (1903), rejected pleasure as the only value worth maximizing.  Perhaps human well-being is a unique concept, but it is hard to tell exactly what it is, since Taylor claims that it "properly" cannot be defined.  Even if the concept is not defined, more needs to be said -- enough so that we can at least apply it consistently to different situations.  Otherwise, the theory is empty.

Situation ethics is not a radical new theory.  It is no more than a new twist on an old theory; and it remains to be seen if this is an improvement.

Eric Moore teaches philosophy at North Adams State College

Jason Macauley

It is my contention that general education requirements can be an unjustified violation of a student's right to exercise his or her autonomy.  General education requirements assume three things:  that it is for the students' own good, that those who are imposing the requirements are in a better position to judge what is good for students than the students themselves, and that, therefore, those educators are justified in overriding the autonomy of those students.

To begin, let us first look at what is meant by "good" in this context.  The good appears to be a goal-oriented good; meaning that anything that furthers your attempt to obtain a particular goal is good, while anything that would inhibit your obtaining a particular goal is bad.  So, in order for one to make a judgment about what actions would be good in a particular case, one would first have to identify the goal and then decide what actions would best help achieve that goal.

Let us now consider the notion of restricting, for a student's own good, the student's right to choose.  This assumes both that you can know the student's goals and that you are better able to judge what actions will achieve those goals than the student.  I am willing to allow that it is possible that one can know the goals of a particular student and, consequently, design a curriculum that will allow that student to best achieve those goals.  However, what I will not grant is that it is possible to create a curriculum that will allow a student best to achieve their goals without first knowing what those goals are.

The question that now arises is:  What are the major goals of college students? There seems to be two schools of thought on this:  to obtain personal enlightenment or to obtain the necessary skills to get a job after college.  The former can be further broken down by areas of interest or inquest which would mean that each of these people could have different goals.  The latter is more of a matter of seeking a type of programming or commodification of the student, such that once again each student could have a different goal; in this case, whatever might make the student the most marketable in their particular field.

If we consider the second type of student, those in college for its instrumental value only, then we might say that the well-rounded nature  of general education requirements improves students' post-college employment prospects.  However, can the same case be made for the student seeking mostly personal enlightenment?  The first case is believable because the educators have: (1) knowledge of the goal; and (2) knowledge of the steps necessary to achieve that goal.  The same is not true in this second case.  A student seeking personal enlightenment is attempting to achieve a goal that is internally formulated.  Consequently, without asking that student, no one can know what that goal is; and without knowing the goal, it is impossible to formulate steps necessary to achieve that goal.

It is obvious that those educators who formulate the general education requirements do not and cannot take into account the personal goals of particular students, but rather, attempt to amalgamate the educational desires of all students.  The consequences of this attempt is a curriculum that addresses the desires of some students, while frustrating the desires of others.  Furthermore, since students who are seeking mostly personal enlightenment are demonstrating a genuine will to learn, it follows that this appetite for knowledge will lead them to diversify themselves intellectually, making an enforced schedule of courses unnecessary and consequently unwarranted.

Since my basic objection to general education requirements is that they attempt to serve the good of all students without taking into account the good of particular students, I submit that the core curriculum of students should be determined by a joint venture between faculty (advisors) and students.  This process would result in curricula that would both address the goals of particular students and make use of the faculty's greater store of experience.

Jason Macauley is a student at North Adams State College

Matt Silliman

I am in substantial agreement with David Johnson's (Thesis XII, issue 2.2) understanding of the relationship between wait-time and effective teaching.  I also got a chuckle out of his description of the lecturer who teaches to an imaginary student, modeled on the professor's own understanding of the subject.  To "teach" students manufactured from one's own imagination would be the ultimate constructivist triumph -- though I'm afraid I can just imagine the paycheck as well.

I do want to quibble, however, with the tendency of some educational theorists to put Descartes before the horse, as we philosophers say, or mistake an effect for a cause.  I am inclined to view wait-time and its ilk as probable resultants of good teaching, neither necessarily connected to it nor notably causative of it.  If one is attending thoughtfully to one's students (and there are many ways to do this), one's wait-time will tend to be longer, other things being equal.  If, on the other hand, one is contemptuous of one's students, all the wait-time in the world will not make for good teaching.

I will not discount entirely the possibility that the technique of working on one's wait-time could help, in certain cases, to improve a teacher's attentiveness, but I am concerned that if it becomes an end in itself, which so often happens when an idea becomes a buzzword, the point may be missed.  By analogy, we certainly hope for a good rate of retention of students at the College, but we will misdirect a lot of energy if we strive for retention per se, rather than attending to what makes a college a valuable and appealing place to remain.  Moreover, to achieve 100% retention at the cost of insensitivity to individual students' needs and growth would be foolish; some students really do belong elsewhere, and it is a part of our job to help them to find that out, and encourage them to go when they do.

Some good teaching is attentive and inspiring to students without much wait-time, and our discussions of wait-time need to remember that.  I agree that wait-time is an interesting tool; it is not, however, the structure we are building.

Matt Silliman teaches philosophy at North Adams State College