The Practical Value of
Studying Ethics in the Professions

(adapted from “How Ethics Was Specialized Away” by Karl D. Stephan, in Academic Questions, Fall 2003, 31-40)

Stephan points out that Aristotle regarded the study of ethics to be clearly practical. One does not study ethics simply in order to understand theories but in order to become a better person. Without such practical advantage, reasons Aristotle, there would be no point in studying ethics.

Though concepts in ethics cannot be proven with scientific experiments, their essential quality in the practice of science needs serious attention. Applied to a science such as engineering, one easily sees that ethical questions should be asked along side of or even ahead of technical questions. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger and the Columbia disaster have, for example, been traced to poor management decisions. An understanding of human motives and engineering ethics were required just as much as technical expertise.

Professor Stephan sees higher education today as being concerned only with producing the specialist who will fill a specific niche in a company. This emphasis has often swept aside an earlier idea that a search for truth, beauty, and right conduct formed the “nucleus” of the college.

Stephan challenges colleges and their administrators to develop “a united vision of a curriculum that puts all education, including professional education, into a moral context so that students realize that they are human beings first and professionals second.”

Although we must not exaggerate the ability of higher education to develop morally-aware human beings,  surely we can so something “systematic to help them do the right thing more and the wrong thing less.” We can, thus, do ethics.

This proposal is at variance with the trend now operating in higher education, says Stephan, where ethical incoherence is more the norm than a shared determination to practice right conduct. We need first to believe that our colleges exist not just to produce the professional or technician but also the integrated, moral human being.

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