Tag: theory

Theoretical Commitments

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

I have long thought of myself as something of an agnostic on matters of moral theory.

From the beginning I have concerned myself with practical decision-making, first with environmental ethics and policy and more recently with engineering ethics. I am now mainly concerned with how best to teach ethics to undergraduate students in engineering degree programs. In those efforts, I have come to think of moral theories as resources for ordinary practical decision-making, lenses through which to see ordinary basic values of one kind or another.

I could, I have thought, go on using these frameworks, playing them one against the other in expanding and enriching the variety of values taken into account in any decision, without committing myself to any one of them. As a teacher, I have thought I could offer the frameworks to students with complete neutrality, allowing them to figure out for themselves how to balance one kind of value against another. It is not for me to indoctrinate them, after all.

As I am, after a quarter century, re-reading MacIntyre’s After Virtue, I begin to see that such a neutral perspectivism is untenable. In fact, telling myself I am neutral among perspectives is simply false: everything I do has a frame and a direction, based on a particular – though still developing – understanding of human cognition and of the ends of human life in the world. Continue reading “Theoretical Commitments” →

Darwinian Humanism

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

In honor of Darwin Day 2015, I would like to revisit an odd paper I had published in Environmental Values in 2007, titled “Darwinian Humanism: A Proposal for Environmental Ethics“. I would here like to offer a few – I hope tantalizing – excerpts from my final typescript.

In hindsight, it was an odd and audacious paper, but one the right of which helped me to sort out my thinking about some basic distinctions in ethical theory.

According to the abstract:

There are two distinct strands within modern philosophical ethics that are relevant to environmental philosophy: an empiricist strand that seeks a naturalist account of human conduct and a humanist strand rooted in a conception of transcendent human freedom. Each strand has its appeal, but each also raises both strategic and theoretical problems for environmental philosophers. Based on a reading of Kantʼs critical solution to the antinomy of freedom and nature, I recommend that environmental philosophers consider the possibility of a Darwinian humanism, through which moral agents are understood as both free and causally intertwined with the natural world.

Along the way, I devote some attention to Darwin’s treatment of “the moral sense,” especially in The Descent of Man. Here’s an extended excerpt: Continue reading “Darwinian Humanism” →

Knowing By Heart

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

I’m just back from a regular practice session with the Atlanta Open Band, a community contra-dance band of which I am the chief instigator and organizer. We ran later than usual because, just about the time we’d usually wrap up, I fell into teaching the band a new tune by ear.

After practice, one of the musicians said to me: “The only tunes I know by heart are the ones I learned by ear,” with the implication that she might have to re-teach herself by ear all the tunes she usually reads from the page.

Mulling that over, just now, it struck me that it might be another connection between music and ethics: I hope for my students that they might know ethics “by heart” in a sense precisely analogous to knowing a tune by heart.

To know a tune by heart is to be able to play it, and vary it, and improvise on it, and dig into the structure of it, and play counterpoint against it without having to read it off a page or follow someone else’s lead.

On the side of ethics, I was thinking particular of theory. It’s one thing to read the Categorical Imperative off a page, for example, and to memorize it in order to copy it down later; it’s something else altogether to learn to notice and respond to the autonomy and dignity of human beings by experiencing them in real time, in their concrete immediacy, in the pulsing ebb and flow of social life.

The question is how best to create an environment and to structure a set of activities that might guide students to such experiences, and to help them to understand what they are experiencing.

Reading Old Books with Engineers

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

In yesterday’s post I described an approach I developed for encouraging and helping students to read old books and, more to the point, to derive understanding from them.

In a political theory course, last semester, I tried something different. In the first half of the course, I set students to work together on understanding three texts in democratic theory: Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and Young’s Inclusion and Democracy.

I provided relatively little guidance, other than ideas on how to use books to develop understanding. After they had worked through each of the books, I set them an in-class, individual exercise I dubbed a distillation, in which they could use only the book and a pen or pencil in filling out a worksheet on which they were to set down an interpretation of the core ideas of the book.

I was impressed and encouraged by the way students took up the task. They would spend whole class sessions flipping back and forth, reading passages and debating their interpretation.

In the syllabus for that course, I described the distillation exercise as follows: Continue reading “Reading Old Books with Engineers” →

Reading Aristotle with Engineers

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

Since I switched to problem-based learning in my ethics classes, I’ve been experimenting with different ways of introducing my students to ethical theory as such and helping them to develop a working knowledge of a small handful of particular theories.

Part of my struggle in the past has been with trying to have them start using three different theories at once, at least so far as to be able to make distinctions among the good, the right, and virtue. For this, I used Anthony Weston’s 21st Century Ethical Toolbox (Oxford), especially the chapters on families of moral values and subsequent chapters on theories.

Since the courses were arranged as a kind of spiral, and because ours was to be a practical engagement with theory, all they needed at first was a broad approximation, with further refinements coming along later as we dug more deeply into more complex problem situations. Continue reading “Reading Aristotle with Engineers” →

Greeting

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

Recent posts have turned my attention back to the role in ethical experience of recognition between people, and from this has emerged a new theme I’d like to explore: How we greet one another.

The possible importance of greeting came out in the story of the toddler in the farmers market:

“I’m here! I’m here!”

But I thought, yes, child, you are here!

Here you are! Welcome!

It also figured in my thoughts on encountering human drivers as distinct from self-driving cars: Continue reading “Greeting” →

Saving St. Aldo

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

There is a long-running debate in the field of environmental ethics between Bryan Norton and J. Baird Callicott over the meaning and the legacy of the works of Aldo Leopold.

I have been a near observer of one side of this debate, as Bryan’s office was, until his retirement last year, just around the corner from mine.

To throw around a lot of technical jargon, while Callicott reads Leopold as a moral monist espousing a form of ecocentrism, Norton reads Leopold as instead seeking to foster a pluralistic pragmatism that is compatible with or encompasses the more generous varieties of anthropocentrism.

In more ordinary terms, Callicott thinks environmental ethics needs to produce a single, compelling moral theory (that’s “monism”) that includes acknowledgement that non-human living things, and especially, ecological systems have value in themselves (that’s “ecocentrism”). Continue reading “Saving St. Aldo” →

Ethics Lesson

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

A new term begins next week. I’ll be spending some time today going over my syllabi, making sure my new course design is as ready as I can make it.

I’ll have more to say about the new design in the coming weeks, especially as I begin to see its various failure modes, and so begin the next round of revisions and mid-course corrections.

In honor of the new term, I thought I’d post something I wrote over the summer.

I found myself alone at home for a few weeks, while my wife and daughters were traveling. One Sunday evening, I decided to attend a spoken-word open-mic at a nearby coffee shop.

The next Sunday, I put my name on the list and, when called, stood up to do my bit. Continue reading “Ethics Lesson” →

A Field Guide: A First Sketch

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

This blog grew out of an idea I had, sometime last year, to write a Field Guide to Basic Values for use in my ethics courses, building on the idea of attuned awareness to which I referred in my previous post.

I once used this analogy with students:

There are no doubt some people who can walk outside on a morning in spring and simply not notice that birds are singing. Others might notice, but it might seem to them an undifferentiated sound to be filed under the general heading, “bird song.” A few, if they have any practice at all in birding – observing and identifying birds – will pick out the songs of individual birds, identify them by species, or even by variant, and note the ones they can’t identify just now. When I hear the call or the song of an unfamiliar bird, I immediately long for my binoculars and field guide.

I suggested that, as a matter of lived experience, ethics is much the same. Continue reading “A Field Guide: A First Sketch” →

Feral Philosophers!

~ Robert Kirkman ~ Leave a comment

Something noteworthy from The New York Times, this morning: a call by Steve Neuman, a self-described philosophy journalist, to “Free the Philosophical Beast.”

I have nothing much to add to it, but wish simply to point out a few highlights.

One concerns the reason it is so difficult to engage in meaningful philosophical work in the context of a research university:

But I think the key difference between science and philosophy is that we need the results of science more than we need everyone in the body politic “doing science.” By contrast, we need everyone “doing philosophy” more than we need the results of philosophy. In other words, we don’t need to know or understand how the scientist has gone from the minute molecular intricacies of DNA to a public good like genetic counseling. On the other hand, the emulation of the critical thinking and logical argument of a philosopher is a virtue that can be applied to any area of life — from where you stand on the most important social and political issues of the day to how best to spend the rest of your days on this planet.

Another highlight is the closing passage, which resonates with me in my current ventures in ethics education and in the very conception of this blog as a set of “field notes”:

So “powerful, soft strides” toward the reintroduction of the philosophical beast are being made outside the academy, but I would like to see even more philosophers become feral. Being feral is different from being wild, of course — the philosophical beast that still calls the academy its home just needs a wider space in which to roam, and maybe venture more often outside its walls.

Just let me put on some sturdier shoes.