Mearsheimer’s Mistakes: Why Colleges Should (and Inevitably Do) Provide Moral Guidance (original) (raw)

Should colleges be in the business of moral education? May college professors-including those who teach ethics courses-openly endorse and defend particular moral theories and values in class? In a much-discussed address and subsequent follow-up paper, John J. Mearsheimer, a distinguished political scientist at the University of Chicago, has answered both of these questions with an emphatic "No" (Mearsheimer 1998a). In this paper I shall argue against Mearsheimer's view. In particular, I shall defend three claims: (1) Colleges unavoidably provide certain forms of moral guidance to their students. (2) Colleges may and should seek to positively influence the moral characters and values of their students. (3) College professors may, and sometimes should, engage in classroom ethical advocacy, that is, expressly endorse and defend contestable ethical views. Why does Mearsheimer think that colleges should refrain from ethical guidance and advocacy? 1 His central argument can be summarized as follows. Today, elite universities like the University of Chicago, Measheimer argues, are "remarkably amoral" institutions. By this he doesn't mean that such institutions actively teach their students to be unethical. They are "amoral" (as opposed to "immoral) in the sense that they have no "moral agenda" (Mearsheimer 1998b, 195), make little effort to provide moral guidance, and are "largely mum on ethical issues" (Mearshiemer 1998a, 150). There are three ways, he says, that colleges could engage in the task of moral education. First, they could provide students with explicit moral guidance both in the classroom and in university publications that spell out acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior. Second, they could offer a wide array of classes where moral issues are discussed in detail and students are encouraged to make up their own minds about which views are most defensible. Third, professors can promote virtuous behavior in their students by serving as good ethical role models. None of these three forms of moral education is viable, Mearsheimer argues. Explicit moral guidance in classroom teaching or in university publications is unacceptable because it involves "preaching about values" (Mearsheimer 1998b, 194) and violates the most important mission of modern universities: to teach critical thinking. In fields such as ethics where there are no "approved solutions" (Mearsheimer, 1998a, 148), the role of faculty is not to tell students "what to think, but how to think" (Mearsheimer, 1998b, 196). The second option, offering classes in which students are invited to think critically and in depth about ethical issues would be great if a "scientific morality" were possible, but unfortunately efforts to develop such a rigorous, knowledge-based morality have "failed almost completely" (Mearsheimer 1998a, 150). As a result, present-day universities "operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between