Teaching students to be good

What’s the point of teaching moral and political philosophy?

Ancient philosophers around the world would have thought the answer to this question was blindingly obvious: the point is to make students better – better as citizens, rulers, or just as human beings.

Yet today I suspect very few academics would defend this position, and most would find the idea of inculcating virtue among their students to be silly at best, dangerous at worst.

I think the ancients were right on this one. We should educate our students to make them better moral and political agents. And I don’t think this has to be scarily illiberal at all – at least, that’s what I’m going to argue here.

In short, my suggestion is that a very important part of what it means to be a good citizen (and indeed a good person) is to have an appropriately critical attitude, especially in morals and politics. Epistemic virtues are very important.

Here are some features of the kind of attitude I have in mind:

• Cognitivism – understanding morals and politics as things that one can actually reason about, rather than shrugging and saying that’s just like, your opinion, man
• Scepticism – demanding argument and evidence, not taking things on faith
• Open-mindedness – seriously examining a diversity of perspectives on a topic
• Civility – taking opponents seriously and trying to understand their positions charitably rather than strawmanning them

It’s relatively easy to give a reconstruction of many teaching practices considered as tools for these kinds of characteristics. The very idea of treating normative political theory as an object of serious study implicitly pushes a kind of cognitivism – one of the things my first year students often find hardest to get used to. Presenting arguments, asking students to interrogate those arguments, and then asking students to write essays presenting their own arguments, all promotes a certain kind of attitude towards truth claims. Even-handedly and sympathetically presenting students with a range of possible views on a topic encourages students to approach questions by considering a range of contrasting views. It also encourages taking one’s opponents seriously, something further communicated in seminar practice. Decolonising the curriculum communicates the idea that this open-mindedness should not stop at the borders of Europe.

I don’t mean to suggest this is easy. For example, there is a danger that teaching in this way might inadvertently encourage students to be ideological mercenaries who can come up with rationalisations for any given position. To counter this, one would want to put more emphasis on actually forming your own considered judgement on the questions we study. At the same time, this might encourage over-confidence about a topic they have only spent a week studying. It’s a difficult balance.

One might say that the kind of good citizenship I have in mind is good liberal citizenship (or perhaps good deliberative citizenship). If you don’t like liberalism, fair enough; but then you have even less reason not to try and teach virtue, whatever you think it is. If you do like liberalism, don’t be afraid of teaching students to be good – just teach them to be good liberals, in this very minimal sense.

That’s why, even though I’m trying to teach my students to be good, I don’t actually tell them what I think is the correct answer to the questions I get them to ponder.