Ideology-critique in the classroom

Over the last few weeks, I have been marking exams for the economic ethics course I taught this year. The experience has not been particularly joyful. Admittedly, marking rarely is, but it gets worse when one develops a feeling of uselessness and failure, as I experienced on this occasion.

The source of this feeling was the realization of the grip of inegalitarian ideologies on my students. Since most of them were studying business, I should maybe have expected it, but I naïvely hoped that their ethics course might have led them to somewhat question their inegalitarian beliefs. And perhaps it has. It would take a combination of anonymous ex-ante and ex-post opinion surveys to measure it.

Whether it would be ethical to conduct such a survey is an interesting question (your opinions are welcome), but not the one I wanted to discuss in this post. The one I am concerned with is whether it would be acceptable, from an ethics of teaching perspective, to engage more straightforwardly in ideology-critique in my course, in the future.

Ideology in the classroom

In a very useful article on ideology, Tommie Shelby distinguishes between a non-evaluative and an evaluative use of “ideology”, and offers an analytical reconstruction of the Marxist understanding of ideology as an evaluative concept. From this reconstructed Marxist perspective, an ideology is a belief or set of beliefs that usually has the following features:

• Epistemically speaking, it is false, distorted, or biased in some ways.
• People are either ignorant of or self-deceived about the real motives for why they hold it.
• It plays a role in establishing or reinforcing relations of inequality or oppression.

The examples discussed by Shelby in his article are racist ideologies. Since the question I asked my students was focused on economic debates (what one should think, from a utilitarian perspective, about the idea of introducing a 2% tax on net wealth above 5 million euros), racism was not apparent. What I took as ideological were the following kinds of claims:

• The people targeted by the tax have [presumably all] worked particularly hard to get there
• The tax would force [sic] them to move to another country
• The tax would necessarily result in tax evasion, cancelling all the expected benefits
• The most compelling utilitarian reason to introduce such a tax is to reduce public debt

Since these claims are simply false (or largely implausible), the solution may seem easy: to avoid answers of that sort next year, I should just make sure to debunk these beliefs (I thought I had). But my doubts come from the fact that ideology runs deeper than false factual beliefs.

Critique in the classroom

What I am more uncertain about is how far I can go in ideology-critique. It seems to me that several theories of justice I teach in my course have ideological aspects. Nozick’s libertarianism is probably the clearest example of a sophisticated justification of inequality by someone who might have a strong interest in preserving existing privileges. Sufficientarianism can play an ideological role when the sufficiency threshold is set relatively low and the main claim is that inequality, as such, does not matter. Even Rawls’ difference principle could be seen as ideological in its attempt to naturalize or legitimize the contingent fact that the most talented need incentives to stay productive.

But I don’t tell this to my students, because I want to fairly and charitably introduce the different theories and to preserve their autonomy in choosing the one they find the most compelling. Now, when reading their exams, I thought I might be too naïve. By avoiding any kind of ideology critique in the classroom, I might fail to play a part in my role as a teacher: challenging dominant ideologies. And this may make me complicit in the reproduction of social injustice.

Critique and autonomy

The solution I am considering, to leave more room to ideology-critique while respecting my students’ intellectual autonomy, is 1) to keep introducing the different theories of justice fairly and charitably, but 2) to spend more time on the Marxist critique of ideology, and 3) to explain in more detail why Marxists may claim that other theories are ideological.

I doubt that this is the most efficient way to tackle ideology, because students who do not identify or sympathize with Marxism (the wide majority in business studies) will not give a lot of credit to this Marxist claim. However, it seems the most ethical way to proceed. Or do you see a better option? Thanks for your input!