Question Have any of you witnessed a student cheating in your very own ethics class? Did you just laugh at the situation? Have students tried to challenge why they were morally right for cheating? If you haven't caught a student cheating, what do you think of the situation in general and how would you react?

Accepted:
April 29, 2010

Comments

Ethics is not about teaching people about how to be good, so we should not be surprised that those both studying and teaching the subject are no better, and hopefully no worse, than anyone else. It is well known that librarians often complain to the philosophy faculty that books on ethics are the ones most stolen from the university library, as though they are also surprised, but we do know that people often teach and study a subject without being well organized enough to apply it to their own lives, or even see the need to do so. Students who cheat need to be punished whatever their subject of study, and the only difference here between a student of ethics and one of engineering is that the former might be expected to know something of the different theories that lie behind punishment, together with the nature of moral rules, whereas the latter might not.

Should we be surprised if a mathematician gives us the wrong change? Can a child psychologist produce dysfunctional offspring? Do home economists sometimes burn the pudding? Similarly, ethicists sometimes err morally and we should not regard this as a special sort of problem at all.