Sound Moral Psychology behind Ethics Education

Abstract

Ethics is a philosophical discipline.1 Nevertheless, ethics is often taughtespecially in armies and in civil life-by non-philosophers and to people with little training in philosophy. It is therefore not surprising that what is taught under the label "ethics" and how it is taught sometimes lacks the conceptual rigor and coherence characteristic of a philosophical discipline. A consequence of this is that in some courses views within and about ethics are taught which rest on dubious or even incoherent conceptual grounds. That is, however, not the only pitfall in ethics education. A second problem is that moral judgment is a complex phenomenon comprising different intuitive and conscious processes which are sensitive to social and other contextual constraints.2 It is therefore probable that a pure armchair approach in philosophy, which neglects state of the art moral psychology, soon finds itself tangled up in speculations too far removed from empirical facts to be applicable in the real world.