Applied Ethics

Posted by Robert Sharp Sep 21, 2006

I teach applied ethics, so I write from personal experience. If you do ethics, this is one of the most sought after qualifications for becoming a teacher at most colleges and universities. EVERY department needs applied ethics. It justifies the department in many ways, by crosslisting philosophy courses with requirements in business, computer sciences, engineering, and medicine. You can create an applied ethics course in any of those areas, and more.

So what are these courses? Essentially, they are a way to make sure everyone in the school is being taught ethics, and taught them in a way that relates to their profession. They get the basics of ethical systems, and then learn how those basics are applied to their chosen field. For many, these classes are considered boring, necessary evils on the road to a degree. But our society seems to need these classes more and more, for some reason.

We've all heard the scandals. Government contract companies are poaching information by poaching employees from their competitors. Politicians are accepting money from interest groups and awarding contracts accordingly. Programmers are building personal backdoors into their security programs, keeping them unsafe. Doctors are taking advantage of their positions. The problems are ubiquitous, but they are NOT new. They've been around forever. So why is ethics becoming so important now?

One reason is that the media has made the scandals more open and obvious. The problem is usually ethical, meaning people are doing something that society disapproves of, something that betrays our core values and principles. The hope is that by taking a class, even one class, we might produce more ethical members of society who will be less likely to succumb to the temptation to be immoral. Is it working? That's hard to say. There seem to be just as many scandals, but we can't really say whether some violations were stopped by good educations. Still, the role of such classes is definitely important. It's also critical if you wish to do ethics in today's academic environment.