February 5, 2020
Ethics & the Public Sphere is a course with a complex evolutionary history. Through its many stages of development, it has remained true to a core objective: to explore with students the relevance of ethical thought and action to their lives and in their world. Ethics is applicable regardless of students’ career pathways, their particular interests and hobbies, and the specific social communities and interpersonal relationships to which they belong. We took our challenge as instructors to make vivid the many ways that ethics is already significant to our students, and to provide them with skills and understanding that would help them to reflect and act ethically.
We first conceived of Ethics & the Public Sphere as a team-taught, interdisciplinary, advanced undergraduate course. In response to a UF initiative to revise its common core programming, the course soon transformed into a freshman level, intensive general education class. Lastly, as we both became involved in a multi-disciplinary research-into-teaching project called Intersections, we re-envisioned the course with the help of partners from other disciplines and units on campus. In what follows we describe the central aims of the course and recount the important details of its evolution.
Envisioning the Course: Aims
Other courses at our institution take practical ethics as their subject matter, too, but we imagined our course offering something different. We wanted to develop an ethics class that would unique in at least three ways: its interdisciplinarity, its focus on ethical practice, and its focus on public issues.
We are two ethicists trained in two different fields—religion and philosophy. From the outset, we believed that drawing from different disciplinary perspectives in the classroom had the potential to communicate the value of understanding and harnessing ethical arguments from a variety of locations. Most courses in applied ethics are either largely informed by the methods and literatures of a single discipline—usually philosophy or religion—or they are organized around a single set of practical issues: professional ethics codes for Business or Medicine or Law, or the specific ethical problems that arise from emerging technologies, for example. We wanted to offer students a course that would expose them to the value of ethics across contexts and issues, and that would draw on multiple kinds of ethical arguments and claims. Students encounter ethical claims from a variety of places—from their religious leaders, from their friends, parents, and teachers, through their work environments and communities, and through their exposure to various forms of media. Sometimes these ethical claims are explicit, and at other times they are implicit. A goal was to enable students to realize the prevelence of ethical assumptions and arguments, and to offer them tools to identify, assess, and take responsible action on them. For us, this implied not only bringing our two disciplinary backgrounds to bear on our teaching methods and materials, but that we offer a widely diverse, multidisciplinary set of course readings, exercises, and experiences. From the beginning, we envisioned drawing upon readings from the academic fields of philosophy, religion, and the social sciences, as well as legal decisions, laws, papal encyclicals, pastoral letters, historical analyses, and news articles. The variety of instructional methods and materials constituted our course’s interdisciplinarity.
Second, we wanted to develop a course that emphasized the practice of ethical thinking and decision-making. Many practical ethics courses centralize the importance of ethical theory, and don’t explore what it means to act ethically with respect to difficult and confusing problems. Readings in the typical applied ethics course expose students to principles that they are then encouraged to apply to particular cases. For instance, the right action might be characterized as the one that brings about the best consequences, or conforms to moral action-types like ‘don’t harm the innocent’ or ‘help those in need.’ For the professions, codes of ethics take a similar form: ‘maximize shareholder profits’, ‘do no harm’, ‘advocate for the interests of your client over all others’. On this model of applied ethics, acting ethically is a matter of memorizing a rulebook, and then straightforwardly applying the rules to all manner of ethical conundrums. Ethical principles and professional codes of ethics have their place, and we certainly don’t want to argue against offering courses that promote the understanding of ethical theory. However, we wanted to offer students a course that would encourage them to connect theory to their lives in precise and tangible ways. We believe that solutions to ground-level moral problems cannot be derived axiomatically; good solutions demand interpretation, judgment, and creativity. In our experience, students crave guidance on how to make real progress on the contemporary ethical issues that they care about. They don’t merely want to know, for example, that Utilitarians approach climate change by emphasizing strategies that will promote the greatest good for the greatest amount of sentient life, long term. They want to know what they can do, in their lives and in their communities, to protect their water, air, and outdoor spaces. How sustainable should their lifestyle be? And in particular, how should they understand the ethics of their individual behaviors in a world chock full of social practices that rarely bend to the value of sustainability? We wanted to devise a course that would offer students ways to connect their passions about ethical issues in their private and public lives. We weren’t sure how we were going to accomplish this aim, and indeed our course is still struggling to connect ethical reflection to practice in a robust way. Nevertheless, it has been a central objective of the course and important to its developmental trajectory.
Third, we aimed for this course to have an emphasis on issues of public concern. Partly, we wanted to address issues that all students would recognize as relevant in their daily lives. We planned to select topics discussed regularly in newspapers, magazines, blogs, television, and radio. We began with a long list of several such issues: reproductive rights, immigration, educational justice, the treatment of non-human animals, economic justice, free speech, and the #MeToo movement, for example. But further, given our country’s political polarization and the difficulties that many people report in discussing controversial moral problems, we wanted to design a course that would offer strategies for facing controversy with people who disagree. We imagined this would involve dismantling the common dilemmas and the dualistic ways of thinking that are prevalent in public discourse. We wanted to encourage nuanced and contextualized thinking in our students, revealing the relevance of good information, reasoned reflection, and meaningful engagement. Ideally, we hoped students would leave the course with both increased confidence and humility in the face of large-scale ethical challenges.
The Course we Proposed: A Team-Taught Humanities Course
We first sought funds from UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (CHPS) to develop and teach this class together. With the support of the Robert and Margaret Rothman Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Florida Honors Program, UF’s (CHPS) offers an interdisciplinary, team-teaching grant for humanities instructors. Our application to the CHPS team-teaching program proposed a seminar-style undergraduate course, heavily populated by upper-division honors students.
Our principal goal was to explore the ways in which the methods and traditions in the humanities provide resources for thinking about contemporary and public ethical matters. Our application indicated our desire to address the following big questions: What is the place of ethics in the public sphere, in relation to both individual and social action? How can students learn to identify, analyze, and assess the moral dimensions of contemporary political problems? How are moral claims expressed in law, policy, and public institutions? And perhaps most important, how can the scholarly discipline of ethics help us think about how to act morally, to become good people, and to create morally sound institutions, policies, and practices?
We explained that at the center of our exploration would be learning how to “do ethics” and think in more informed and critical ways about controversial topics of public interest. To this end we incorporated multidisciplinary resources that pursue timely ethical issues, and drew from the disciplines of religion, philosophy, law, journalism, women’s studies, environmental studies, and education. While we proposed investigating a number of issues and multidisciplinary sources, the seminar was to be unified around the methods that scholars in the humanities employ to analyze and evaluate ethical issues. The crucial skills emphasized included: identifying the moral dimensions of legal, political, and economic problems; critically evaluating traditions and perspectives; appreciating the diversity of perspectives on these controversial issues; thinking beyond one’s own interests; and approaching disagreement with open-mindedness and a willingness to be rationally persuaded.
For the proposal to the CHPS, we developed assignments designed to provide practice at ethical analysis: identifying the moral issues at stake and evaluating them with the help of diverse sources and methods. These were mainly short papers asking students to find and engage with news stories not discussed in class, in order to encourage original thinking. Assignments did not ask students to write in depth about others’ arguments per se, but rather asked them to develop their own well-considered positions on emergent issues. A final capstone project also offered students the opportunity to present their ethical analyses in a form of their choice: a video, podcast, or other non-written form.
We hoped the readings and assignments in the proposal would appeal to students from a wide-range of backgrounds, and from a diversity of majors. We anticipated that students interested in medicine, business, education, law, and the humanities would all find the course of interest. In the spring of 2018, we were grateful to win the team-teaching award.
Quest: Revising the Course for UF’s Core Curriculum
After winning the award from CHPS to team-teach the course, we became aware of UF’s pilot program for its new core curriculum, called Quest. The Quest program is a shared, sequential curriculum over all undergraduates’ careers: year 1 humanities core, year 2 social and natural science core, year 3 an experiential learning opportunity (such as study abroad), and an optional capstone course for year 4. Student and instructor choice motivates course development for the new core curriculum. Instructors have been encouraged to devise courses they would like to teach, and students are then free to select from any of those courses to satisfy their common core requirement. For the pilot program, instructors were asked to submit proposals for courses that would address one of five Quest 1 themes: The Examined Life, Identities, Justice & Power, Nature & Culture, and War & Peace. Introductory survey courses were discouraged, in favor of courses that would “apply humanistic modes of inquiry to a topic or theme in order to explore essential questions about the human condition.”[1] Instructors could propose a course on any topic they liked, so long as the course involved careful reading, critical thinking, experiential learning, and self-reflection on “an essential question”.
When we learned of the Quest 1 pilot program, we knew our course would be a good fit for a “Justice & Power” course, given the alignment of our course’s aims with the aims of Quest 1. We had to re-purpose the class for a freshman audience, however, and more purposefully integrate Quest requirements for experiential learning and self-reflection. To make the syllabus more freshman friendly, we reduced the number of readings and the number of ethical issues we planned to tackle, and we replaced some more challenging readings with less challenging ones. This meant, for instance, removing some of the long court cases and difficult philosophy articles that appeared on our original syllabus. We also added sources from popular media, such as a podcast from This American Life and a chapter from a Margaret Drabble novel. The content was thus slightly revised so as to make it more familiar and accessible, and we slowed the pace at which we expected students to digest the material.
Secondly, we adjusted assignments and activities so as to better support the Quest initiatives. One important change we made was to incorporate more explicit self-reflection. We wanted more opportunities for students to be able to connect our course activities with their lives, and we wanted to encourage them to reflect on how their ideas were evolving over the semester. We approached this requirement in three ways: through small group discussion, in-class writing, and an end-of-term reflection paper. Please see our blog posts, “In Class Exercises” (LINK) and “Writing Like an Ethicist” (LINK), for elaboration on these activities and assignments. Another important change was to include more opportunities for experiential learning. We wanted to incorporate experiential elements that would demonstrate to students the ways in which ethical questions come alive in different walks of life. Possibilities included activities engaging the arts (the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, the Harn Museum of Art), with community activists and government officials, and with professionals (from medicine, education, or business, for instance). By the time our Quest application was due we were able to arrange a collaborative activity with the Harn Museum of Art (see below), and beyond that we gestured at the kinds of activities we planned to seek out during the semester in which the course would be taught.
Lastly, in compliance with UF General Education policy, we added rubrics for all assignments, including the three argumentative essays and the capstone project. For the argumentative essays, the rubrics emphasized the importance of discerning appropriate and credible news sources, faithful and complete explanation of an ethical issue, the crafting of a clear and concise thesis statement, and rigorous ethical analysis. The central idea of the capstone project was to have students research a contemporary moral issue on their own and to present their findings to the class. Originally, we had envisioned offering students a choice of media for their final presentations: an essay, a podcast, a video, a poster, etc. Because UF’s Gen Ed policy requires that each assignment be assessed according to the same rubric for each student, we had to revise our final project idea. Essays cannot be graded in the same manner as a podcast, for example. So, we decided to ask all students to create a poster presentation in addition to a reflection essay. Each element of the capstone project—poster, presentation, and essay—was graded according to its own rubric standards. This format had the benefit of permitting students to work in groups or independently on their capstone project, without the project grade relying too heavily on collaborative work. While all group members received the same grade for the group poster, the rubrics allowed for each member to be graded individually on their presentation and reflection paper.
With these changes to the syllabus, Ethics & the Public Sphere was approved by the Quest and General Education committees in the fall of 2018.
Spring 2019: Teaching the Course
Twenty-two honors students enrolled for our course. They represented a variety of career pathways: engineering, biochemistry, medicine, law, and the humanities. We also had a senior anthropology and philosophy double-major sitting in on the course. She had served as the student liaison to the Quest steering committee, and was working with one of us (Dr. Ahlberg) on an independent study project on the ethics of higher education. Her role was to observe the course, participate when appropriate, and offer feedback to instructors.
While we began with a complete course calendar, the course unfolded in unplanned ways as activities were added. We ended up partnering with faculty in the College of Journalism, the UF Libraries, the Brown Center for Leadership & Service, the Phillips Center for Performing Arts, and the Harn Museum of Art to develop the experiential components of our course. With collaborators from the College of Journalism, the Libraries and the Brown Center, we coordinated three panel discussions on three different themes: “Information Literacy: Finding and Learning from Information we can Trust”; “Ethical Reflection: Thinking and Talking Morally about Complex Public Issues”; “Advocacy: Building Relationships with Community to Work on Complex Public Issues”. Panelists came from a variety of places, including other UF colleges and units, community organizations like the United Way of Gainesville, and city government. The discussions were held in a different setting, to add some formality and encourage serious discussion. We opened the sessions to interested members of the public, though we did not widely publicize the events. Our hope was to put students into dialog with people whose livelihoods are deeply engaged with the themes of the course—information literacy, reflection, and action, as they relate to complicated ethical problems.
Our partnership with the Phillips Center involved our students attending the play Mercy Killers. The play’s sole writer, actor, and director, Michael Milligan, also visited our class and spoke with students about his thinking as he was writing the play, as well as how he incorporates advocacy into his professional activities (choosing what to write and in which productions and locations to act). Lastly, and as originally planned, our class visited the Harn to discuss the ethics of displaying art created by artists who have been accused of sexual harassment. Students heard from a museum curator, discussed the ethics of presenting a specific piece of art, and brainstormed an object label for an upcoming exhibition that was to include the piece.
All of these activities were designed to expose students to the many locations in which ethical issues arise—on campus, in local government, in art, in institutions like public museums—and the different ways in which actors think and act on those issues.
Future Directions: Engagement in Addition to Reflection
In the spring of 2018 we were fortunate to co-convene a UF Intersections team on the same theme of our course, Ethic & the Public Sphere. The Intersections program is funded by a $400,000 grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by UF’s Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere. Each Intersections group brings faculty, staff, and graduate students together to address a grand challenge question through research and teaching programs. Our group is tackling the question: How can we engage ethical issues in public life? In addition to the two of us, the group includes Dr. Kim Walsh-Childers (College of Journalism), April Hines (UF Libraries), Stella Kim (Brown Center for Leadership and Service), Rachel Grant (Journalism), Chris Lomelin (Graduate Student, Religion), and Vickie Machado (Graduate Student, Religion). Elaine Giles, formerly of the Brown Center, was also a member for our first year. While the group has been busy developing shared research projects and building programs to engage in ethical inquiry across campus and beyond, we were also tasked with developing a course that would introduce students to the importance and relevance of our topic. We have been fortunate in that our entire, multidisciplinary Intersections group has collaborated in thinking about how the Ethics & the Public Sphere course might best achieve its aims.
There is no question that the Intersections collaboration has enhanced the interdisciplinarity of the course, and has enabled us to better link the course’s motivating themes: information, reflection, and action. The both of us are very comfortable thinking and teaching about ethical reflection, but our group members contributed a great deal to enhancing the themes of information literacy and ethical action. Our colleagues from the College of Journalism and the UF Libraries contributed readings, a lecture, and a panel discussion on the importance of information to discussing controversial public issues. April Hines, for instance, gave students examples of how misinformation spreads online, presented seven types of mis- and dis-information, and explored strategies for responsible internet searching and reading. We re-enforced these lessons by asking students to research their own ethical issues for their short papers and capstone projects, and the use of appropriate sources was a part of their assignment grade. Moving forward, we would like to emphasize the significance of information literacy to ethics early in the course, and explicitly return to the lessons from Ms. Hines’s Information Literacy lecture by way of assignment rubrics and assessment.
Our colleague from the Brown Center, Ms. Giles, contributed readings on ethical service, and helped us to put together the panel discussion on advocacy. This panel featured participants that have made concrete contributions to their communities through the development of trust, the exercise of patience, and the realization that real change involves dedicated activity. Confronting controversial ethical problems can be daunting, and there is a real risk that students will develop a sense of futility in the face of large-scale problems. This panel helped to combat futility by showcasing success stories, and by communicating the lesson that “small” victories really aren’t that small when they amount to real improvement in people’s lives. Nevertheless, we have found the development of the “action” component the most difficult aspect of course to build. Moving forward, we plan to develop this component even more. We would like to offer concrete pathways to connect students to local service opportunities, and ask them to participate and reflect on their service as part of the course. Experiences of ethical engagement would ideally encourage students to reflect on the importance of ethics to their own lives in deeper ways, and perhaps offer them new perspectives on social problems faced by their communities.
In our highly politicized, 24-hour-news-cycle world, guidance on how to understand, think about, and act on the controversial ethical issues of the day is not easy to offer. It takes keeping up on the news, being open to learning from students about their perspectives on the changing world, and careful consideration about rapidly emerging issues. Guiding students also involves tailoring the ethics curriculum, in some way or other, to their particular interests. That involves knowing something about each student, offering a variety of readings, assignments, and activities, and paying attention to what sparks their attention. We think a freshman level common core course on practical ethics has the potential to deliver these goods, within limits. Our course was small (22 students), and it is probably the case that instructors of small classes will have more success at achieving these aims. In our experience, multidisciplinary collaboration on course design introduced pedagogical content we wouldn’t have devised on our own. And engagement with partners outside the classroom, too, was essential to breathing life into our course content. We suspect that the course aims would be best met by a series of courses, and by interaction across different courses, in order to offer variations on the central themes and reinforce critical reflective and practical skills. To explore this, our next steps include the development of an Ethics & the Public Sphere course cluster, with common activities linking member courses.
-Jaime Ahlberg (Philosophy) and Anna Peterson (Religion)
[1] http://undergrad.aa.ufl.edu/uf-quest/uf-quests-story/quest-1/