We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.
We need to teach our students that the employment they take doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your choice of employee can impact not only yourself but the wider world. There's more to life than intellectual satisfaction.
The problem with leaving it to parents is that parents are not uniformly qualified or interested in doing so, and it’s in society’s best interests not to leave important things to chance.
> leave moral instruction to parents and other institutions like it should be.
Should be, according to what doctrine? It certainly sounds like you're attempting to establish institutional moral instruction by imposing limits on when and where morality can be discussed.
Why are we allowed to teach students astronomy but not morality? Go back further and we couldn't even freely teach astronomy. Do you remember Galileo's trial for heresy? Or Socrates' condemnation to death for "corrupting the youth"? This war for teaching the ability to capably assess ethics and morality has been waging before you, I, Hacker News, universities, the internet, the printing press...
If you don't think it was right to kill Socrates for simply spreading the message of critical thinking, then you have to accept that adults can organize to teach whatever they wish at universities, assuming it doesn't run afoul of Constitutional protections.
For the most part it's an accurate representation of how morals are appropriated into institutions like academia.
As important qualities like community and a shared notion of a common good in humanity are, the system as it stands will render them according to its own interests and students will exit none the wiser. Character becomes standardized into a set of "values" of an entirely different sort.
The problem is that Students inevitably become parents, and some inevitably branch out into "other institutions" professionally, espousing Moral Character® and we're left to figure out who contaminated what?
The baby or the bathwater?
I assume you've lived long enough to witness an internet stewarded by those who place ethics or morality above purely capitalistic motivation, vs. an internet stewarded by a generation of new-age, fake-ethical "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks" tech entrepreneurs.
Words have meanings and neither of the terms you used are appropriate for this context. It’s possible that there could be an issue with the way standards are formulated but that’d be specific to a particular situation rather than inherent to the concept.
It's all well and good to say that your chosen priest caste won't exert hierarchical control, pinky swear, but history and human nature disagrees with you.
It's also odd to suggest that we can teach a system of deriving ethics or morality. Philosophers have been hard at work on this for a long time and haven't gotten terribly far, and they disagree with each other quite strenuously.
That's a priestly caste. Of if, as you say, there may be a problem in the formulated standards, then the body that formulates the standards would be the priestly caste. I don't have a problem with the concept, actually, but it's best to call it what it is. Pretending that this would be perfectly neutral is daft.
They teach the different ethical frameworks, where they come from, and then get you to apply them to different situations. The classes don't tell you what's right and what's wrong, but rather, the different frameworks people can use to determine that.
Put another way, real engineers, doctors, scientists who work with human subjects, lawyers, finance people, etc. do not seem to have a conceptual hazard from professional ethics codes. Why would we expect software development to be so different?
In terms of parents not being qualified, who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to say who is and is not qualified to instruct their own in morality? It is an entirely subjective topic and certainly should not be given over to corrupted institutions. Moreover, do you really believe folks like Elizabeth Holmes, Jeff Skilling, SBF (whose mother is a legal ethicist!!), and all the nameless, white-shoed McKinsey criminals haven't received "ethical" instruction in their coursework? And how has that panned out? SBF is a particularly great example as his mother, who you would no doubt have deemed "qualified", reared one of the worst criminals of this generation.
Let the universities focus on the efficient discovery and dissemination of truth, and discard the wasteful, useless mis-education. Fire 90% of the admins, and tie student lending to financial outcomes of students. All of the grievance studies degrees that purport to provide ethical and moral training would vaporize overnight!
It isn't. Recall the big push on DEI initiatives, quite similar to the push to remove blacklist/whitelist or master/slave in the software world. Or the guardrails put onto LLMs so they don't become antisemitic or whatever. Why was it a good thing to do? Because the priestly caste said it was, and tolerated no questions about it. You seem to be unaware of the concept of institutional capture.
And, yes, all teaching involves some sort of bias. We haven't yet created the human that is free from bias.
In any event, the poster I replied to also included "morality" alongside "ethics", which is why I suggest it's not as cut and dried as you imply.
Parents can teach right and wrong, but they seldom teach about things like utilitarianism or hedonic treadmills.
That said, who did SBF largely derive his ethics from? His parents, at home, not at his mom's lectures. So all this does is illuminate why it's important for people to get exposed to a wider variety of opinions and ethical considerations.