Timothy Chambers, "Ethics and Integrity" [letter] 2010

(Winter 2010)

  ETHICS AND INTEGRITY The issues pursued in Professor Sternberg’s thought-provoking article (“Liars, Cheats, & Scoundrels … and What to Do About Them,” Fall 2009)—how we might sharpen students’ ability to “apply abstract ethical principles in real life”—are both a timely and timeless concern. I was most riveted by Dr. Sternberg’s account of (falsely) telling his students that he’d “double dipped” by billing twice for reimbursement on a single set of expenses. He then “waited for the firestorm … [that] didn’t happen.”

Why didn’t it? The silent students in Sternberg’s seminar fell into two types. The first did not recognize any moral issue. However, the problem isn’t with these students’ ethical reasoning skills but with their bedrock moral endowments.

The students who did recognize the moral problem lacked the conviction to raise their voices in protest. These students’ deficit lies not in their ethical reasoning skills but in their store of courage. Courage isn’t a virtue likely to be enhanced by classroom discussion.

Immanuel Kant declared that two things “fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” It required revolutions in physics before we could engineer probes to touch the face of the former. I’m inclined to think that changing the face of the latter might also call for revolutions in psychology—and pedagogy.
TIMOTHY CHAMBERS, G95
ADJUNCT FACULTY IN PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD