Recent research in ethics education shows a potentially problematic variation in content, curricular materials, and instruction. While ethics instruction is now widespread, studies have identified significant variation in both the goals and methods of ethics education, leaving researchers to conclude that many approaches may be inappropriately paired with goals that are unachievable. This paper speaks to these concerns by demonstrating the importance of aligning classroom-based assessments to clear ethical learning objectives in order to help students and instructors track their progress (...) toward meeting those objectives. Two studies at two different universities demonstrate the usefulness of classroom-based, formative assessments for improving the quality of students’ case responses in computational modeling and research ethics. (shrink)

Both of us have been involved with helping professions, especially new scientific or technological professions, develop ethics programs—for undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners. By “ethics program”, we mean any strategy for teaching ethics, including developing materials. Our purpose here is to generalize from that experience to identify the chief elements needed to get an ethics program started in a new profession. We are focusing on new professions for two reasons. First, all the older professions, both in the US and in most (...) other countries, now have ethics programs of some sort. They do not need our advice to get started. Second, new professions face special problems just because they are new—everything from deciding who belongs to the profession to formalizing ethical standards so that they can be taught. Our purpose in this paper is to generalize from our experience and to identify some of the fundamentals for getting an ethics program started in a new profession. We present our recommendations in the form of response to 6 questions anyone designing an ethics program for a new profession should ask. We realize that our brief discussion does not provide a complete treatment of the subject. Our purpose has been to point in the right direction those considering an ethics program for new profession. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of new research on moral thinking informed by evolutionary theory. The new findings have emanated from a wide variety of fields. While there is no shortage of theoretical models that attempt to account for specific research findings, Matthew Keefer's goals in this essay are more general. First, he examines the strength of the evolutionary approach to understanding morality and moral emotions as adaptations to cooperation. Second, he considers the importance of unconscious processing (...) for generating ethical (or unethical) behavior and the complex relation among moral emotions, intuitions, and conscious moral reasoning. Third, he underscores the importance of understanding self-deception and self-serving biases in moral thinking and behavior. Keefer ends the essay with a discussion of some implications of these considerations for professional ethics and moral education. (shrink)