Rather than referring to “minorities,” “members of minority groups” or “underrepresented minorities,” we should refer to such individuals as “minoritized.” Using “minoritized” makes it clear that being minoritized is about power and equity not numbers, connects racial oppression to the oppression of women, and gives us an easy way to conceive of intersectionality as being a minoritized member of a minoritized group. The term “minoritized” reveals the fact that white males and other dominant groups minoritize members of subordinated groups rather than obscuring this agency, describes microaggressions better than the term ‘microaggressions,’ and helps explain the need for solidarity within minoritized groups. It gives us a powerful way to promote racial justice by appealing to the common experience of being excluded. While using “minoritized” risks creating a false equivalence that sees all instances of being minoritized as equal and discounting unique forms of oppression by subsuming them under a single term, using this term carefully can ensure that its advantages outweigh these risks.

Since the concept of race is scientifically nonreferential, it is tempting to think that we can simply eliminate it right away from our lexicon, from our statistical categories, from our lives. But those of us who are eliminativists about race in the long run need to take a more roundabout path in killing off this concept. Through the painstaking work of teaching our students that race, though biologically nonreferential, remains part of various systems of oppression, and engaging in open dialogue and political organization in order to make racial categories economically and politically irrelevant, the concept of race must die a slow and painful death.

Taking seriously the notion that diversifying our philosophical pedagogy is of both intrinsic and instrumental importance, this paper offers a defense of, and model for, a pedagogical approach aimed at making canonical philosophical texts more appealing—and more useful—for diverse students. Specifically, taking Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a case study, this paper considers how we might make this text more engaging for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. It does so by offering a five-step model, which involves: situating the text in its historical context; acknowledging and addressing problematic content in the text; drawing out novel or underexplored themes and questions from the text; bringing the text into dialogue with diverse and contemporary philosophical approaches and issues (e.g., feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and non-Western philosophies); and applying issues, themes, and concepts from the text to contemporary matters or current events as much as possible. Specific examples are offered regarding how to achieve each of these steps when teaching the Nicomachean Ethics.

This essay takes Nietzsche’s remarks on ethics as springboards for developing a method of diversifying the teaching of ethics to confront twenty-first century existential crises. Prompted by Darwin’s research, Nietzsche envisioned humanity’s self-extinction through science and technology unchecked by philosophy. A curriculum for teaching ethics to confront that catastrophe includes all the intellectual disciplines and focuses on the evolution of ethics over time. The curriculum’s primary objective is to stimulate students to create new values appropriate to their changing circumstances. After focusing on Nietzsche’s early efforts to define philosophy’s role with respect to art and science, the essay advances a rationale and methodology for diversifying ethics across the curriculum. The essay then describes African American and African proposals that have the promise of transforming Nietzsche’s remarks on promoting diversity in ethics into practical instruments for guaranteeing life’s future.

In this paper, I respond to one aspect of Elizabeth Barnes’s argument in The Minority Body: a Theory of Disability. To do this, I first explain her argument as it applies towards children: in order to have a genuine “mere-difference” view of disability, one may not cause nor remove disability. The consequence of this theory is that it is impermissible for parents to choose to remove their child’s disability. I argue this is incorrect. Barnes’s assumption relies on a non-interference framework, which is inappropriate when applied to children. When we use an interest-protection framework instead, it becomes at least permissible for parents, and in some situations obligatory, to choose to remove their child’s disability. Because the permissibility or obligation is situationally dependent, this view is consistent with Barnes’s overall argument for the mere-difference view of disability.

In the spring 2020 semester six students enrolled in a topics course in the philosophy department at my institution titled, “The Poverty Game.” We created this article by collaboration based on fourteen weeks of writing assignments and class discussions. All of us participated in an on-campus poverty simulation “game” sponsored by the Teacher Resource Center. Our objectives in the course were to critically analyze the game by asking questions and challenging assumptions about goals, rules, narrative profiles, and solutions to poverty that were implied by the simulation. We then set about to revise the game. Our suggested revisions highlighted structural conditions as part of an explanation about why populations and subgroups are poor. Identifying these inequities positioned us to recommend justice solutions to poverty and, further, to empower players of the simulation to become agents of change.

There are striking points of affinity between Hannah Arendt’s concept of a politico-moral variety of allusive thinking, and Stanley Cavell’s concept of aversive thinking characteristic of Emersonian Moral Perfectionism (EMP). Although both Arendt and Cavell’s EMP are pessimistic if not hostile to the suggestion of the redemption of a vibrant public sphere, their thought suggests possible moves toward a practical politico-moral philosophy—political philosophy as provocative moral practice recognizable in Socrates and Diogenes of Sinope. The paper teases out threads of thought in Arendt and Cavell toward an account of a quasi-public perfectionist philosophical practice—call it moral friendship—supportive of political-moral judgment in response to social conditions of its repression. Moral friendship is ultimately the cultivation of moral taste that enables one to notice moral phenomena susceptible to one’s judgment whose failure to be noticed is an occasion for regret.

In order to effectively prepare students for medical decisions with complex, ethical disagreements and value-laden conflicts, a progression from simpler case analysis to multi-layered conflicts is often helpful. Presented here is a unique case of pregnancy in a true hermaphrodite from recent medical literature. The case is artificially layered with additional, medical and discoverable contextual issues to help analyze three distinct questions in medical ethics: 1) Is it ethically permissible to perform an elective termination of pregnancy (ETOP) on a minor, 2) Is it ethically permissible to keep this information from the parents, and 3) are additional and complicating medical features included in confidentiality agreements involving minors? The pedagogical goals include introducing and effectively utilizing the Orr-Shelton, four box method of clinical ethics assessment, demonstrating the need to uncover/discover important contextual (cultural, religious, family, etc.) features not usually incorporated fully into patient charts, to prepare medical students to research and become familiar with the local legal environment, and to illustrate that what appears to be a single a single ethical dilemma is likely far more complex requiring a multi-focused assessment.

Our research addressed an increase of unethical practices in professional settings identified in the literature, and this increase coincides with a shift in U.S. culture from principle-based ethics to one trending toward moral relativism. We discovered many programs lack comprehensiveness to deal with the complexities of culture in graduate education. The purpose of this instrumental case study was to explore and develop a conceptual framework for a comprehensive teaching model targeting graduate-level educators, administrators, and educational boards across disciplines. Data were collected over 13 years from a doctoral professional ethics course at a private, faith-based university in South Texas. Using a Design Based Research process following Reeves’ (2006) guidelines, we developed a multi-disciplinary graduate theoretical teaching model for ethics: Comprehensive Professional Ethics Teaching Model (CPET model), grounded in our data analysis and findings. Recommendations include implementing and testing the efficacy of the CPET model in subsequent studies.