Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2009
Abstract
The point of this talk is not to school you in the practice of ethics, but to raise questions about the practice of ethics. There is a standard picture of the practice of ethics that goes like this:
Ethical theory is done in a classroom. It is divided into normative theory, meta-ethics, and descriptive ethics. Students learn to see how the ethics in their society and community works; they learn how to discover true ethical beliefs and sometimes discover them during class. Through meta-ethics, they understand what it is to have an ethical belief. Then –and here comes the practice part- they go out and practice ethics.
In this picture, the domain of ethics is the domain of everyday life, and academic life has the role of providing the theory of everyday life, in this case, the theory of ethics. The point, then, is to apply what you learn in the classroom. The school is the think-tank for your world.
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Recommended Citation
Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy, "The Practice of Ethics" (2009). Faculty Scholarship. 146.
https://commons.case.edu/facultyworks/146