The purpose of this paper is to outline an ethics development activity that uses scenarios in university classes to further the knowledge, engagement, and enhancement of the ethical actions of the students. By starting with a brief review of the objective and use of scenarios in ethics research, the paper progresses to explain the activity, debrief the activity, and finally to provide an analysis of the activity with examples. Included in this activity are ways to incorporate a discussion of Kant’s Categorical Imperative Theories, NCA Credo of Ethical Communication (or any professional codes of ethics), and the use of videos for Milgram’s Blind Obedience and Stanford’s Prison studies—thus making this activity useful across all disciplines.

Science fiction is gaining academic recognition as a tool for teaching ethics and engaging potentially resistant students in communication and critical thinking, but there are not many lesson plans available for how to implement science fiction in the classroom. I hope to address that gap by sharing a successful lesson plan I developed while teaching a first-year composition and ethics course at the Colorado School of Mines. “Stand Where You Stand on Omelas” combines writing, communication, and ethical decision making by asking students to defend what they would do as a citizen in Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” where a young child’s torment ensures the prosperity and happiness of society as a whole.

In this paper, we propose some ways in which teaching thought experiments in an ethics classroom may result in marginalizing or excluding students underrepresented in philosophy. Although thought experiments are designed to strip away details and pump intuitions, we argue that they may reinforce assumptions and stereotypes. As examples, we discuss several well-known thought experiments that may typically be included in undergraduate ethics courses, such as Bernard Williams’s Gauguin and Derek Parfit’s The Young Girl’s Child. We analyze the potential value and dangers or teaching these thought experiments. We conclude with some practical suggestions for how to teach thought experiments in ways that encourage students to expand their moral imaginations and think critically about their own assumptions and the assumptions built into thought experiments.

Over the past two years, the College of Business (COB) profiled in this article spent time reflecting on where it had been, what it was doing, and where it needed to go in terms of teaching ethics. Based on this analysis, the COB developed an initiative to teach ethics to students, faculty, business people, government employees and officials, and others across its state so all of key stakeholder groups would have a greater appreciation for the benefits of ethical decision-making, the need to exhibit ethical leadership, and the role that business and the free enterprise system can play in promoting the need to earn one’s reputation by doing the right thing. The current article discusses the process the COB followed to implement their ethics initiative.

Many introductory ethics courses focus narrowly on the cultivation of moral reasoning. A review of introductory ethics textbooks, for example, finds that most focus either on exploring moral theories and approaches in detail or on describing moral theories and then applying them to contemporary issues. I argue that these approaches fail to recognize humans as biologically driven, psychologically shaped, and sociologically constrained beings. I examine the factors influencing thinking and action in each of three areas—the role of emotion in moral decision-making, the problem of unconscious bias, and the influence of social structures—and argue for a broader approach to teaching introductory ethics that takes these factors into consideration. The article describes some classroom approaches for fostering understanding of these factors, as well as strategies students can use to act more effectively.

I argue that helping college students to hone their faculty for regret is key to at least three interrelated functions of critical engagement in moral education: 1) empathic unsettlement; 2) counterfactual thinking; and 3) anagnorisis, Aristotle’s term for a tragic and too-late turn in self-awareness. All three functions support an attitude of humility and self-reflection germane to rigorous moral reflection. Though it can be difficult to confront and assume, I argue that claiming regret can help students to catalyze thinking, curiosity, and responsiveness in ways that bear under-explored potential in moral learning. In what follows, I defend regret as a vital structure of moral life, and give several examples of how regret might work to advance moral imagination in the classroom.

Holistic ethics education in the professions is never fully served by a reliance on regulatory compliance alone. Data obtained from penalties due to corporate non-compliance in specific professions rarely describe the underlying ethical failures that are the foundation for “rule-breaking” in the professions. However, “violations” data may serve as a springboard for an educational discussion and approach that helps professionals (and those studying to become professionals) to understand the basic moral reasoning that underlies the “good” that is served by adhering to professional Codes of Conduct, Codes of Practice, Codes of Ethics, and the professional regulatory environment. We here use data obtained from the US FDA, US DOJ, and from Violations Tracker and compare these data with the IFPMA (International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Association) Ethos and guiding principles. These side-by-side linkages serve as a mechanism to help students assess which ethical principles are at the core of each such violation in the pharmaceutical industry. We further recommend that this approach be incorporated into ethics education, especially beginning at the undergraduate level, as prophylaxis to ethical lapses in later professional life.

The facility and rapidity with which we form groups—and that we often do so on the basis of manipulated and inconsequential features—highlights the fact that group identification, and hence in-group favoritism, is often arbitrary. I call the arbitrariness of in-group favoritism the “moral problem of group identity.” Focusing on helping behaviors, I argue that although the exposed arbitrariness of our motivations and actions is both surprising and discomforting, we can use knowledge of the moral problem of group identity as both a theoretical and a pedagogical tool.