Ethical education

Here’s a nice question for an ethics exam: “ ‘Prostitution has been an effective friend to marriage’. Discuss.” If in school you have been taught Morals and Values, then you won’t have to devote much thought to this statement (taken from an essay on Love by the philosopher AC Grayling). Your answer, however padded, will boil down to one sentence: “Prostitution is wrong!” Which is the fundamental problem with making Morals and Values part of the education curriculum: such a course does not encourage thinking nor, for that matter, goodness.

A good teacher would modify the course in a rational manner, but most teachers will not and cannot do so. After all, this is a society where the Education Ministry has adopted a failed policy like abstinence-only to fight HIV and is actually planning to introduce superstitious nonsense like Transcendental Meditation to reduce school violence. I expect that teachers would instead teach some version of their religious beliefs, offering the students no rationale for adopting particular morals or values save that it will be good for them: and such circular logic can convince no youth who isn’t already so inclined.

This is why it is better to teach ethics than morals. But teaching morals and teaching ethics are two distinct, at times even contradictory, things. Ostensibly, both have the same goal: to teach an individual his rights and obligations vis-?-vis other persons. But moral teaching requires the students to accept whatever the teacher tells them. Ethical teaching requires the students to think for themselves, with the teacher acting as guide. So, in a class on morals, the teacher would most likely invoke the religious strictures against fornication and adultery in order to “prove” that prostitution is wrong. But this does not answer the question, nor does it foster analytical thought.

In a class on ethics, the teacher would raise questions. Since many men are inclined to philander, and since paying a prostitute is cheaper and less time-consuming than seduction, does prostitution help prevent a man leaving his wife? Why is the family unit so stable in a culture like Japan where prostitution is woven into the culture but dysfunctional in America where the official view of prostitution is influenced by Puritan mores? Why is domestic violence highest in countries, such as Islamic theocracies, where prostitution is punishable by death? Is prostitution wrong if a woman makes it her career choice or only if she is forced into it by circumstances?

The advantage of this approach is that it enables young people to decide for themselves what their moral standards should be. But this is exactly what moralists do not want youths to do (or other adults, for that matter). Religious believers almost invariably want to control others and, as history shows, are always willing to use force to do so. Such believer are also purveyors of ignorance and, even if there weren’t other factors, this alone should be sufficient reason to keep religious teachings out of schools. After all, what responsible parent would want Pastor Clive Dottin teaching their child that evolution, the cornerstone of biology, is “a Satanic theory”? Do you think your child can ever be truly educated if they learn at Pastor Cuffie’s Miracle Ministries High School that the Earth is only six thousand years old instead of four billion?

Is a child’s intellect not corrupted when pandit and UWI lecturer Prakash Persad suggests that Indian civilisation is 25,000 years old when historical anthropology says the first civilisations began no more than 10,000 years ago? Aren’t children misinformed when imams tell them that the Qu’ran has all the knowledge they need? Ethical teaching aims to produce citizens who will question those in authority at every turn. Moral teaching, by contrast, wants to produce citizens who will accept the status quo: indeed, Christianity and Hinduism have often been used to get the poor and oppressed to accept their unhappy lot in this world by promising rewards in the next. This raises a central problem of moral teaching: the tendency of persons who believe they are moral to feel themselves absolved from acting morally.

A recent BBC survey of ten countries found that the country with the highest level of religious belief is Nigeria. It is also, according to Transparency International’s 2002 survey, the second most corrupt country in the world. Journalist Robert Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, says, “…the feeling of moral ‘rightness’ is something natural selection created so that people would employ it selfishly. Morality, you could almost say, was designed to be misused by its own definition… Chronically, subjecting ourselves to a true and bracing moral scrutiny, and adjusting our behaviour accordingly, is not something we are designed for.” This is where morals and ethics part ways: morality depends on heteronomous principles which supposedly have some existence apart from human realities.

Ethics, however, are always based on desirable outcomes and what our limited knowledge, based on human nature and history, suggests are the best ways to achieve such outcomes. This is why teaching ethics is educational in a way the teaching of morality is not. Morality says certain principles and actions are good in themselves; ethics says right action must be based on reasons: what makes people better or worse off, and the logic that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. This is why ethics, properly taught, creates empathy in a way moral teaching does not.

We do not need religion to teach values. A moral principle, if it is solid, does not require the invocation of a Supreme Being to prove its worth. And ethnographic surveys show that all cultures embrace six core virtues: wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, spirituality and transcendence. In practice, the majority of religious believers usually fail to follow the first four. To prove this, let me end by posing another question for an ethics exam: “Should persons be appointed to high office on the basis of qualifications or on the basis of being married to the Prime Minister?”

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