February 20, 2004

Before Teaching Ethics, Stop Kidding Yourself

By GORDON MARINO

Socrates used to wonder whether virtue could be taught. But his concerns would have seemed priggish to most people today -- certainly to most academics. Of course virtue and ethics can be taught. Everyone is ready to lead ethics classes and workshops -- even undergraduates. One of mine recently asked me if I would agree to supervise an independent study in which she planned to design an ethics curriculum for middle-school and high-school students. "Maybe we could even take it down