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Teaching Ethics in an Age of Ambivalence
From forest management to fetal transplants, the “right” course of action is increasingly hard to identify. Faculty members across the disciplines seem united in believing that, with guidance, students can penetrate the moral gloom.
Summer 1996
by Bruce Fellman
Bill Clinton and Whitewater, Newt Gingrich and his book deal, Robert Packwood and his senatorial staff. In politics, as in much of the rest of life, Americans seem increasingly inured to a certain level of ethical shortfall. But must it always be that way? With better training, couldn’t we hope for a heightened sense of right and wrong in both public and private life?
A strikingly diverse number of Yale faculty members persist in thinking so. “One view is that by the time anyone reaches college, it’s too late for behavior modification,” says Shelly Kagan, the Luce Professor of Social Thought and Ethics. “However, another view is that by picking your curriculum properly, you can have an impact.”
The extent to which the latter belief is shared at the University is evident from the number of courses across the academic spectrum that touch on the subject—from “Religious Ethics and Modern Moral Issues,” to “Ethics, Politics, and Markets,” and “Law, Morality, and Politics.” The interest in the field extends well beyond the classroom to such extracurricular activities as the Yale Journal of Ethics, the Environmental Ethics Coalition, and forums like the Bioethics and Public Policy Seminar, sponsored by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Not surprisingly, many consider the Divinity School to be the University’s center of ethical education and scholarship, but the subject’s reach transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. “Ethics is a growth industry,” says Gene Outka, the Dwight Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics.
The major reason for the growth spurt, say ethicists, is the increasingly complicated nature of the issues, many of which are more about making difficult choices between right and right, rather than between right and wrong. In the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, for example, Professor Stephen Kellert teaches a course called “The Value of Nature,” which in part looks at the ethical implications of preserving the natural world. To bring the issues home to his students, he uses a variety of scenarios. “Let’s say that a large computer company has approached the New Haven city government with an idea for turning East Rock Park into an office complex,” Kellert suggests to his class. “What kind of valuation do we put on the land?”
One student responds by saying that, while the park may be a popular piece of open space, developing it could generate plenty of tax dollars—money the cash-strapped city could use. Another argues for the number of jobs such a project could bring in. A third points out that it could all be done at little cost to environmental health, because the computer industry is “pretty clean.”
At that point, one of their classmates pounces: “What about the loss of habitat and the loss of plant and animal species?” Here, Kellert joins in. “Every organism represents a well-crafted solution to the challenge of survival, and every one has potential benefits to people and society. Mindless, massive, irreversible destruction is unethical to present and future generations.” Not only is such destruction a violation of many religious traditions, explains Kellert, it also conflicts with humanity’s longterm self-interest.
Kellert’s explanation draws on his own scholarship, which has focused on a concept called “biophilia,” or the affection for nature many assert is an inborn requirement for survival. In a purely material sense, Kellert points out, humanity depends on a robust natural environment for essentials like medicine and agriculture, but the “biophilia hypothesis” suggests that people are also “emotionally and spiritually linked with nature—the connection is part of who we are genetically. We live a richer, more rewarding life if we maximize our contact with a healthy, vibrant, and diverse biosphere.”
Not content with such abstractions, another of Kellert’s students points to the appeal of the commercial development proposal in eliminating some of New Haven’s poverty, which, she points out, is itself spiritually debilitating. Visibly pleased that he has brought the debate to such a thoughtful level, Kellert replies: “There are no simple answers.”
Similar concepts are debated regularly in somewhat different terms at the Law School. This spring Anthony T. Kronman—legal philosopher, dean of the School, and the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law—led a class using scenarios similar to the ones Kellert uses at Forestry. “Imagine,” Kronman told his students, “that you’re a newly hired lawyer for XYZ Corporation, and one day the CEO comes to you with a problem.” The company, according to the president, had recently gotten into trouble with environmental authorities over illegal dumping practices, but it had admitted guilt, paid a fine, cleaned up its act, and now it had nothing to hide. “We were wrong,” said the CEO, “but we were also hoist on our own petard—we’ve been keeping records that document things in more detail than we need to, and though that’s where they found the smoking gun, I feel that our records also don’t necessarily tell the full story. So I think we should set up a regular program of record-cleansing. This would be less expensive and more efficient than simply saving everything, and it would be self-protective. Could you help me design a system?”
When Kronman confronted his class with the idea of “record-cleansing,” the first question was, given the academic environment, almost predictable: “Is it illegal?”
Not necessarily, Kronman replied, as the class began to discuss the matter.
“It would certainly make wrongdoing more difficult to trace,” another student noted.
“But wait,” said one. “Having this paper trail helps ensure compliance with environmental laws.”
“.And the law aside, this company has a social responsibility to preserve the environment,” another student interjected. “So shredding documents might mean that you’re knowingly condoning the possibility of misbehavior.”
“But the company isn’t doing anything wrong, so if you’re supposed to zealously represent your client, isn’t it your responsibility to participate?”
According to Kronman, such ethical debates are a standard teaching device throughout the School. “A consideration of ethics is an ingredient in everything we do,” he says. “Every case we talk about in class is used as a vehicle to contemplate a variety of different ethical points of view and to illustrate the conflicts of loyalty and obligation that lawyers confront all the time.” The most powerful thread linking them all, he continues, is the difficulty each group has in reaching a consensus. “In ethics generally, a case’s interest and its inconclusiveness go together,” says Kronman.
A similar lack of closure characterizes other exchanges at the schools of Medicine and Divinity. An example is a course called “Advanced Medical Ethics,” which was offered this spring by Robert J. Levine, professor of internal medicine, and Margaret Farley, the Stark Professor of Christian Ethics. The weekly seminar examined in detail the challenges posed in three broad areas: biomedical research, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia, and reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization. For one class, Levine and Farley passed out a synopsis of a case that attracted national attention a decade ago. In New Jersey in 1985, Mary Beth Whitehead had agreed to be artificially inseminated with sperm from William Stern and then serve as surrogate mother to a child who, upon delivery, would go home with Stern and his wife. But Whitehead would not give up “Baby M,” and the fight over the legality of the surrogacy contract continued for the next two years.
In presenting the still-contentious case to their students, Levine and Farley ask whether surrogate motherhood is an example of “commodification,” the turning of all or part of a human being into a marketable item, or simply a service, an entirely legitimate use of the body. What were the best interests of the child, and would they be served in a surrogacy arrangement? Did the use of a surrogate violate the marriage relationship? Would a child so conceived—a child who was genetically connected, in the case of Baby M., to her father, but not to his wife—be less loved than one who was biologically linked to both parents?
In the class, students supported their positions on surrogacy with material that ranged from the Old Testament to modern sociobiological theories about innate parenting drives. But aside from general agreement that the issue required the wisdom of a latter-day Solomon to resolve, no real consensus emerged.
Farley was hardly surprised. “Behind every ethical question lurks the notion of moral obligation,” she notes. “The operative word here is 'ought.' What ought we to do? What kind of people ought we to be? 'Ought' lies at the heart of what constitutes ethics.”
Her view of her field is remarkably like the ones Kellert and Kronman have of their own areas of study. “People often have this view that ethics is about answers, but that’s not what ethicists do,” says Farley. “We provide ways of thinking about problems.”
Reaching consensus in a theoretical setting is clearly difficult, and even, at times, impossible. But Robert Levine, an internist and pharmacologist who chairs the human investigations committee of the Yale–New Haven Medical Center, has considerable experience in how it can be done in practice. Levine came to the ethics field in 1974 as a result of what he describes as “on-the-job training” picked up as a special consultant to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Research Subjects. There, he was involved in studying the way patient-volunteers were treated in medical experimentation. “I developed background papers on topics such as informed consent and risk-benefit analysis,” he says. His conclusion, in simplest terms, was that doing the proper thing with people in research studies requires balancing an “ethics of strangers”—the right of a person to be left alone—with the “ethics of intimacy” governing the close relationship that often develops between a doctor and a patient.
To determine where that balance point might be, Levine and other practicing ethicists often employ a tactic that resembles a medieval church practice called casuistry. “We ask, 'how did we figure this out the last time we were confronted with a similar problem? Do we have a paradigm case, and does the situation conform closely enough to this case that we can use it to guide our thinking?' That’s how casuistry works,” he says. “But there are currently many issues before us that are radically different from the paradigms. Sometimes these days we’re not on ground we consider particularly stable.”
A case in point involves Parkinson’s disease. The affliction results from the loss of brain cells responsible for secreting chemicals critical to a person’s movement. One promising treatment for the ailment depends on the transplantation of the missing cells. But here lies the ethical dilemma, for the best source of the necessary tissue is the brain of an aborted fetus. And while most people would agree that attempting to cure a deadly disease is a worthwhile endeavor, the same people might not agree that a lofty end justifies the means by which the tissue must be obtained.
In coming up with a position on the question, Levine and Yale–New Haven Hospital’s institutional review board framed a strategy that sidestepped the entire issue of the morality of abortion. Terminating a pregnancy was, then and now, legal. Nonetheless, the reviewers focused on developing a protocol that removed any incentive to have an abortion. Women were asked to consider allowing the use of fetal tissue only after they'd already made up their minds to end their pregnancies. They would not be paid, they would not know precisely what the tissue might be used for (there were other important studies going on besides the Parkinson’s work), and, until the research was actually carried out, they were free at any time to change their minds. The result is that enough women have consented to donate tissue to allow the research to proceed, and there is now cause for cautious optimism about its future applicability.
Bringing such real-world cases into the classroom makes education come alive, says Margaret Farley. “The issues we confront are not on the margins of our students' experiences,” she says. For an increasing number of people, medical technology is making dying almost optional, Farley continues, “and with reproduction no longer in the hands of God, it’s clear that we have a lot of homework to do. But there are no algorithms in ethics. It isn’t a matter of getting the right software or finding the proper formulas.” As she sees it, learning and doing ethics is a matter of “thinking through the questions, and, despite the current moral and religious pluralism, respecting other people’s thought processes. Clearly, we can’t go on without some degree of moral consensus, and I have some hope of finding common ground.”
If successful, that search should have general, as well as specific, clinical results. “Part of our aspiration is to create better citizens,” says Ian Shapiro, professor of political science and director of Yale’s Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics (EP&E), an undergraduate major created in 1988 that has strong appeal to students interested in public service careers. But Shapiro acknowledges that teaching students to be ethical, rather than simply expert at finding a way to defend whatever path they happen to take, is a “difficult thing to do. We hope that by studying the subject they will acquire a more sophisticated understanding of what goes into making an ethical decision, but the risk is that by spending all this time examining the defects of every system, you wind up encouraging skepticism.”
To counter this possibility, Shapiro and his colleagues have designed a course called “Moral Lives,” which will concentrate on such individuals as Thomas More, Vaclav Havel, and Mahatma Gandhi, along with corporate whistleblowers, Christians who hid Jews from the Nazis, and others who have made hard—and, many people would agree—right, choices. Shapiro hopes that this focus on positive role models may encourage the upcoming generation to behave more ethically than its predecessors.
Although it is too early to determine how EP&E graduates will fare as a result of their training, at least one recent student, Graham Duncan '96, believes that making ethics an integral part of his education “forces a creative questioning of assumptions” that might keep pricking his conscience throughout his career. A fellow EP&E major, Naveed Rahman '96, concurs. “I hope that if we’re asking these hard questions now,” he says, “we’ll be asking them in 10 or 20 years.”  |
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