John Dewey wrote of moral education as growth from impulsive behavior to a “reflective morality,” involving the pursuit of ends-in-view identified through practices of critical reflection and social interaction. The essays in this section explore a variety of such practices as a philosophical approach to K–12 ethics education. The essays draw on, and contribute to three educational movements that aim for particular kinds of reflective consciousness and agency. Socratic Pedagogy engages students in problematizing the status quo, inquiry to identify truth, and self-correction. Critical Pedagogy utilizes school subjects to raise students’ political awareness and as methods of political inquiry and agency. Contemplative Pedagogy introduces practices of mindfulness to help students cultivate curiosity and attention and to bring personal insight to bear on their studies. Teaching ethics as a series of philosophical practices helps students and teachers become more sensitive to ethical meaning and skillful in ethical inquiry and agency.

This paper is about the meaning(s) of situationism. Philosophers have drawn various conclusions about situationism, some more favourable than others. Moreover, there is a difference between public reception of situationism, which has been very enthusiastic, and scholarly reception, which has been more cynical. In this paper, I outline what I take to be four key implications of situationism, based on careful scrutiny of the literature. Some situationist accounts, it turns out, are inconsistent with others, or incongruous with the logic of situationist psychology. If we are to teach students about situationism, we must first strive for relative consensus amongst experts, and then disseminate the results to philosophical educators in various fields.

Should professors engage in classroom advocacy? One argument against such advocacy is the autonomy argument offered by Joel Kupperman. Advocacy, in the sense that Kupperman is concerned with, undermines a student’s making informed decisions about important issues. This paper seeks to do three things. First, it seeks to clarify Kupperman’s autonomy argument.Second, this paper extends the argument against advocacy by buttressing the autonomy argument with an argument from citizenship. This will strengthen Kupperman’s general rule against advocacy by expanding beyond concerns merely with individuals to cases where the concern is with groups, at least where the groups are composed of citizens.Last, while the autonomy argument provides a general prohibition against advocacy, it might permit exceptions, as does the citizenship argument. Thus, final part of this paper considers business ethics courses as a possible example for where exceptions might take place.

In this essay, I propose an update to a well-known pedagogical device many ethics professors utilize—the “Trolley Car” problem. I argue that by substituting older scenarios with ones from cutting edge and emerging technology the professor is better positioned to more fully engage today’s college students. Google’s self-driving car provides not only a fine substitution for the Trolley Car; it also acts as a mini-introduction to many of the other issues an introductory class on ethics will cover. Although it has typically been used to delineate consequentialist and anti-consequentialist moral reasoning, the Google car also can also be helpful to explore feminist ethical reasoning, planetary issues, the nature of justice, wealth distribution, and the limits of individual liberty.

Ethics, as basic to liberal education, is often overly abstracted in philosophy departments, laboring under an unexamined assumption that ethics consists in construction and application of the one best theory. In professionally oriented programs it often becomes relativistic or merely procedural. Centered on the essentially ineffable quality of good or right action, this essay offers a suggestion as to the design and pedagogy of an interdisciplinary ethics course suited to the global age. Components include: consideration of the alternative positions on cases; ongoing inquiry into the nature of good action; examination of the philosophical perspectives (or “theories”) which inform positions people take in particular cases/situations; experience of dialogue/deliberation, as the practice through which we can cultivate ever expanded ethical awareness; and appreciative recognition of ethical maturity as it is articulated in the great traditions, for example, as practical wisdom (phronesis) or “action of non-action” (wu wei).

The paper takes its cue from the emergence in our society of a new view of the adolescent, which a branch of the psychological literature has spelled out in terms of a passage from Oedipus to Narcissus. It is argued that pre-college ethics education should engage with this passage by deploying educational strategies modelled according to the Care of the Self paradigm (as theorized by Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot) but revisiting it through Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition. The latter prevents that paradigm from fostering a sort of aestheticization of ethical life and allows us to mobilize it in ethics education. Against this backdrop two pedagogical methods—autobiographical writing and essay writing—are discussed as possible tools for a Care-of-the-Self-oriented education.

In our local school district some teachers have chosen to use fables as a way of integrating character education into their 4th and 5th grade curriculum. This paper about fables and philosophy illustrates how to employ philosophical inquiry to discuss the moral virtues. Aristotle’s remarks about the particular moral virtue of friendliness is a paradigmatic example for writing philosophy discussion plans that cultivate ethical judgment—one component of educating for moral character. However, the methodology I recommend can be generalized to stories that are not fables, and also can be made appropriate for different grade levels. Included here is a lesson plan for Arnold Lobel’s fable “The Lobster and the Crab,” used in a 4th grade classroom. Also included is a short transcript of the students’ dialogue.