Over five weeks, the Cornell Chronicle is examining the place of humanities studies at Cornell. In this week's edition, we look at two cross-disciplinary programs: Ethics and Public Life and the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines.
Moral questions such as how to combat evil without doing evil -- often not a part of academic conversations on most campuses -- are suddenly becoming more pertinent, post-Sept. 11.
It's those kinds of questions that also keep moral scholars like Michele Moody-Adams and Henry Shue awake at night -- and keep them striving to teach Cornell students how to reason beyond the latest sound bite.
Moody-Adams is director of Cornell's program on Ethics and Public Life (EPL) and teaches an undergraduate course also called Ethics and Public Life. Shue, who teaches the course Global Thinking, was director of the EPL program from its inception in 1987 until July 2000.
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| Professor Michele Moody-Adams, director of Cornell's program on Ethics and Public Life, leads a discussion in her undergraduate Ethics and Public Life course earlier this month. Robert Barker/University Photography |
The Hutchinson Professor of Ethics and Public Life as well as professor of philosophy, Moody-Adams wrote about the problem of moral disagreement and the flaws in moral relativism in her book Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1997). Academia is the ideal setting for rational reflection on such subjects, she says, because it offers "time, quiet, a place for reflective deliberation" and, most important, a respect for patient, lengthy reasoning processes.
Despite the difficulties of careful reasoning in a fast-track society, it is more important than ever to teach students how to reason morally, says Moody-Adams. "The social, economic and scientific environments that students go into in their careers raise questions of extraordinary moral complexity. Students need to be equipped with the tools to be responsible citizens, tools that will enable them to seek constructive solutions to complex moral problems."
Professor Isaac Kramnick, vice provost for undergraduate education, who was instrumental in establishing the EPL program 14 years ago, agrees. He says: "When EPL was founded, we wanted our students' undergraduate experience to include courses and seminars that explored ethical inquiry so that they could bring an ethical perspective to their role as citizens and professionals. That perspective seems even more important for today's students, who will enter a world where public service and concern for the common good seem less valued than in the past."
And while the EPL program remains small, with one director and only one affiliated faculty member currently on campus, its role -- to engage students and faculty in moral reasoning -- seems at the bull's-eye center of humanities study at Cornell.
In the course Ethics and Public Life, Moody-Adams had her students this fall look at the moral aspects of such writings as Henry David's Thoreau's classic treatise on civil disobedience, President Harry Truman's diary and personal papers on the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King's brilliant argument on the need to challenge unjust laws. The class also discussed such contemporary moral dilemmas as flag burning (why should it be protected as free speech?), surrogate motherhood (should it be permissible?) and, on one Tuesday this November, parental rights (when should they be regulated?). Clearly at home in such ethical complexity, an animated Moody-Adams alternately praised the students for their questions and challenged them to probe deeper and along different pathways.
After reading an article by Hugh LaFolette that proposed the licensing of biological parents, one student argued that such an action would interfere with the basic human right to reproduce.
"It's easy to assume that there's something so natural about procreation and parenting that the state should not be allowed to come in and regulate it," Moody-Adams assented, nodding her head, then added: "Yet even the most ardent defender of people's fundamental rights will concur that if others are likely to suffer harm as a result of one's exercise of those rights, it is appropriate to consider restricting them." She helped the class see the solid and soft points in LaFolette's case and pushed them to define what the state's view should be toward the parent-child relationship. The free-ranging discussion that followed touched on debates about the need for court-ordered contraception in the United States, China's one-child policy, the rights of biological versus adoptive parents, child labor exploitation and the 19th century view in the United States that children were a gift from God. One student quoted a Native American saying, "We borrow our children from the future," that sparked Moody-Adams to declare: "That's good. I'll have to remember that."
Shue, the author of Basic Rights (Princeton University Press, second paperback edition 1996), has his students in Global Thinking slog through such moral quagmires as developed nations' failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide and the military strikes by NATO in Kosovo to further a humanitarian mission. He also teaches a course, Global Climate and Global Justice, in which students look at the moral failings of worldwide pollution. "My emphasis is on what responsibilities we should have toward people outside our country," he says.
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| Professor Henry Shue takes part in the faculty teach-in Sept. 17 in Kennedy Hall in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography |
Katie Hurley, a senior double major in philosophy and government who took Global Thinking in spring 2000, said of the course: "I loved its focus on human rights and government responsibilities and duties. It taught us to think in new ways and analyze ... what is right and wrong and what people deserve." The class and others like it are essential, she says, because they demand "sustained thought and intense analysis of deeply personal and highly difficult issues." Hurley is now writing a senior thesis on whether developed countries' transactions with Third World workers can be construed as exploitative and morally questionable. Her choice of subject was influenced in part by Shue's course and writings. After she graduates, she plans to go on to law school, then work in human rights or public interest law.
Ame Jo Brewster, a government major who took Global Thinking as a sophomore, says: "I see a value to including ethical reasoning in undergraduate courses. In fact, I think ethics should be a greater focus than it presently is at the undergraduate level. The course was my first real introduction to ethical reasoning and its application to empirical cases. It greatly increased my understanding of the problems involved in humanitarian intervention and helped me direct my undergraduate career." The class looked at the NATO bombing of Kosovo, a subject Brewster is revisiting for her senior thesis. Following graduation, she hopes to study democratization in Croatia and do doctoral studies in public policy and international relations, with an emphasis on conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction.
The EPL program supports other units at Cornell that are developing courses on genomics, new biological developments and their ethical, legal and social implications. EPL also invites young scholars in moral philosophy to come to campus and discuss their research with seasoned faculty from around the world. In addition, EPL has run workshops for a broad range of Cornell faculty, offering instruction on how to include an ethics component in their courses. Faculty members who took part in the early years of this program, supported by a now-defunct Exxon grant, are still using what they learned. Plans to develop new faculty workshops in relevant areas of ethics are currently under way.
Jennifer Gerner, professor and associate dean in the College of Human Ecology, says: "Initially I incorporated ethics in my income distribution course. Later I used it in my family policy course. Now I teach Introduction to Public Policy, and there are some ethics pieces in that." She believes Cornell students would welcome more exposure to ethics in the classroom. "In my experience, they often become extremely engaged in discussion about applied ethical issues and frequently raise ethical dimensions in major policy papers." She called the EPL training she received "valuable" for its systematic approach as well as for the chance to discuss the teaching of ethics with faculty from different fields and perspectives.
Another alumnus of the EPL summer course, Michael Gold, associate professor of collective bargaining, labor law and labor history in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, offers two courses, Ethics at Work and Liberty and Justice for All, that provide a basic understanding of ethical thinking. His students begin with the classic moral philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Mill, before moving on to discuss ethical issues that arise in the workplace and society. EPL's summer course was useful, he says, in that it exposed him to literature in the field, spurred him to discuss ethical issues and, he says, "fortified my resolution to teach undergraduates about ethics." In the future he would like to teach his course on labor law in tandem with a Cornell faculty member whose primary field is moral philosophy and have students look at law through the lens of ethics.
Moody-Adams would like to see the program develop a full-fledged undergraduate concentration, with the Ethics and Public Life course as the gateway, required course and the option to choose four additional ones from a menu of courses in the humanities, sciences and social sciences. She also wants the EPL program to sponsor a yearly competition for the best undergraduate thesis that explores the moral dimensions of a public issue. A monetary stipend might be given to both the student winners and the academic departments that aid their research.
A long-range goal -- one Moody-Adams describes as "still a pipe dream" -- is to offer a series of small-group seminars in a range of areas, such as the ethics of public service, ethics and science policy, ethics and law, ethics and national policy and international ethics, as part of the living-and-learning environment now being planned for Cornell's West Campus. And way out there in the realm of dreams, she says, is a residential scholars program, modeled on Cornell's Society for the Humanities, with a few visiting scholars whose work in ethics spans the disciplines, including the natural sciences.
Beyond course work, just being able to call on faculty whose research examines the moral aspects of human actions can enrich the campus climate. For example, Moody-Adams, as a guest lecturer this fall in English Professor Dan Schwarz's Imagining the Holocaust seminar, discussed whether freed prisoners' seemingly vengeful acts against their former jailers could be justified under moral law. And in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she and Shue joined a handful of Cornell scholars in a teach-in Sept. 17 organized by Kramnick. Their presence was important to students like Umair Khan, an undergraduate major in government and Near Eastern studies, who says: "Following the attacks, many people's emotions were running high. As a Muslim, I felt that people were scapegoating Islam and failing to realize the diversity within the 1.2 billion Muslims around the world." He praised participants for bringing rational thinking to a tension-filled environment and championing the need for greater understanding.
The very act of looking at the world's events through a moral framework can seem discouraging to some, because it reveals civilization's failure to halt bloodshed. Nevertheless, Moody-Adams believes that moral progress is possible: "Often, it's two steps forward, one step back or sideways. But sometimes a hopeful moral promise -- the late 20th century consensus on the importance of human rights, for example -- emerges out of a period of great horror. Where we've made moral progress, we need to hold onto that."