The Twentieth-Century Crisis in the Teaching of Ethics / Sloan

During the thirties it became painfully apparent to ethical thinkers that the sciences, social and physical, rested on epistemological and methodological assumptions that threatened the very possibi[lity of rational ethical discourse and action. Increasingly, scientific method was being regarded as the only valid mode of knowing and the objects of science the only thing about which genuine knowledge could be obtained. . . .From the point of view of the physical sciences, value qualities, the very thing ethical statements were presumably about, simply did not exist. It would be a gross oversimplification to say that this was taken over wholesale and uncritically by the social sciences, and that there was no resistqance to it. The general trend of thought, nevertheless, moved overwhelmingly in this direction.

The growing prestige of behaviorism has already been noted. By explaining all human behavior as either expressions of genetic endowment or responses to environmental influences, behaviorism left no room for the autonomy, self-deliberation, and volitional activity on which the conception of man as a moral agent depends. The notion of a deliberating, deciding, and freely acting subject was often regarded as an unscientific myth, or at least as an imprecise designation for phenomena that could only be truly understood by breaking them down to their environmental and physiological components. . . . . .While ethical values could be asserted and affirmed, genuine knowledge and rational justification were possible only of the empiricaal data with which science dealt.. . . .Most social scientists. . . .held that ethical values themselves are expression of subjective preferences. Ethical values were seen as noncognitive, nonrational, frequently as mere epiphenomena of underlying biological, economic, and social forces.

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, . . .Wittgenstein. . .insisted that the chief function of language is to describe the structure of the empirical world, and that any nonempirical, nonverifiable language is also non-sense. This the positivist interpreted as bolstering both their own concern with the use of language aned also their view that only the empiriclly observable and verifible is real. . . .There are, the positivists argued, only two kinds of true or meaningful statements. One kind, exemplified in mathematics and logic, is true by definition and logical deduction but has no necessaary connection with the empirical world. The other kind of meaningful statement is that which can be tested by experiment and verified by sense experience. From the point of view of their radical empiricism all metaphysical, religious, poetic, and ethical concepts which are incapable of scientific verification were clearly meaningless. In the phrase of A.J.Ayer, whose 1935 book, Language, Truth, and Logic, was perhaps more influential than any other in setting forth most starkly the implications of logical positivism for ethics, ethical statements were "pseudo-concepts," they had no cognitive sigfnificance. Ethical statements served at most to express or arouse emotions of approval or disapproval.

In the final analysis ethical statements were subjectivistic, relativistic, and ultimately arbitrary because they could not be rationally validated or justified, only asserted.

There have been interesting critiques and reform proposals in American higher education.. . . .The two-year Contemporary Civilization and Humanities sequence at Columbia; the lower-college prescribed courses in humanities and the natural, physical, and social sciences at the University of Chicago under President Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, the so-called "Great Books Program" at St. John's in Annapolis, along with the many variations of these same programs. The major advocates of these experiments all indicate that their central concern is the moral education, the turning out of persons with the breadth of knowledge, intellectual discipline, and ethical sensitivity needed to grapple with the personal and social problems of the modern world. But what should be the integrating principle fo the curriculum?

Hutchins and Adler made metaphysics the basis for an integrated curriculum. In 1936 Hutchins published an essay, The Higher Learning in America, in which he effectively marshalled most of the current criticisms of American higher educdation, calling it to task for its commercialism, its vocationalism, its curricular confusion, it anti-intellectualism, and its ethical relativism. The fundamental problem for Hutchins, however, was the scepticism of scientific naturalism which made all talk about truth and value impossible. Hutchins said that only a thorough-going metaphysics - and Hutchins embraced the Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law tradition - could bring order to knowledge and provide a solid foundationand justification for ethical values.

Conant, of Harvard, agreed, saying: ". . .the education process must include at each level of maturity some continuing contact with those fields in which value judgments are of prime importance. Without this element, the project must fail."

The erosion of general eduation began in the late fifties and within little more than a decade the movement was nearing total collapse. . . . .The main problem that has continued to plague both the teaching of ethics and general education has been the modern tendency to regard only scientific knowledge as genuine, and to look upon other concerns as somewhat out of place in the university.

Today we are experiencing a rebirth of concern for moral philosophy and the teaching of ethics to an extent and magnitude perhaps unprecendented in modern Amnerican education. . . . The multiplicity and enormity of problems demanding moral decision and action confronting humankind today have become unavoidable.

Perhaps most important, across a broadening spectrum are to be glimpsed indications that some of the most fundamental theoretical problems underlying the teaching of ethics are once again being addressed.

From this last perspective comes the suggestion that a fundamental unity joins scientific, artistic, and moral insight, and that the vision of an ethical, intellectual, and integral curriculum may yet become a reality.