> Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.
The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis.
It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
Yeah. As much as a flaming atheist as I am, I regret that people aren't spending as much time getting an ethical education as they once did.
I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
Absolutely. That's roughly what philosophy courses are meant to do. They fire a shotgun round into the air to show you as much variance and disagreement between cogent and prominent thinkers and then ask, "So... what do you think?" (Speaking solely in terms of American education,) Literature classes also do this to a smaller extent. In elementary schools, more so but it's supposed to be done in social studies... which converts into history class later on.
These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible.
Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.
I took Ethics as an elective during my C.S. undergrad and I think it's still in the top 3 of the most-formative individual courses of study I've ever undertaken. I'd highly highly recommend people take ethics or philosophy classes, if only to see how even the simplest scenarios can have complex dilemmas.
I had a Philosophy of Ethics course during my C.S. undergrad that was actually taught by a former member of the Michigan House of Representatives. He would discuss the kind of things he had to make decisions on during his time there, regarding the different points of view he had to take into account from an ethics perspective, and then have an open dialog with the class to discuss the different facets of the subject. Was a very interesting class that gave some interesting perspective.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis.
It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.