Volume 38, Issue 3, September 2015
Court D. Lewis
Pages 273-288
Engaging Student Aversions to Moral Obligations
This essay examines why some introductory ethics students are averse to any sort of moral requirement (i.e., moral obligation). It provides a series of descriptions and techniques to help teachers recognize, diagnose, and engage such students. After discussing the nature of student aversions to moral obligations, I discuss three causes and several ways to engage each: 1) Student Relativism; 2) student fears and misunderstandings of obligations; and 3) the phenomenon of what I call fetishized liberty, which leads to the “liberty paradox”—where students actively fight for liberties, yet actively give up or fail to use the ones they currently have.