Why Bother With Ethics?

This post was co-written by Sharon K. Anderson, PhD, who writes the Ethical Therapist blog.

When we tell new instructors that it's important to learn how to be an ethical teacher, their comments do not reflect unbridled enthusiasm. We get responses like, "Ethics in teaching? Hey, I think I got it down. After all, I'm a nice person, and I've been a student too." Or, "I care about my students. I know my subject matter. What more do I need to be an ethical teacher?" We typically think of flip answers to these common responses, like: "Does being a patient who had her appendix out prepare her to be a surgeon?" Or, "Can you fix your car because you know how to drive?" Usually we don't say those flip answers out loud—we like our colleagues. Rather, we spend lots of time explaining two basic answers to the question, "Why bother with ethics?" Today you're in luck... We'll give you the short version.

The first answer is that knowing about ethics may keep instructors out of trouble. Being a nice person and a former student is a good start towards ethical awareness, but the decisions professors have to make are way more numerous and more complex than students realize. Teaching is more than standing in front of a classroom and spewing everything you know: At a minimum, it involves decisions about what material to present to students, how to deliver it, what skills students need to practice, how to evaluate what they do, and why all these things are being done. And it involves exercising lots of power—either for good or harm, either purposefully or inadvertently.

When we became professors it didn't take us long to learn that our own experience as students was not enough preparation for all these decisions and the power we held. For example:

• How do we avoid students contending (and complaining to the Department Chair) that we're being unfair because another student got to hand in an assignment late?
• What do we say to the attractive student who asks, "What can I do to get an A?"
• How do we justify assigning extra credit so a student in our introductory course can get a passing grade and go on to the next level without the appropriate background?
• How do we determine when we've crossed the line between having a student do us a favor and exploiting a student for our own benefit?

Relying on our experience as students won't suffice. Let's face it: Most of us professors were pretty good students (at least after a while). We weren't the ones begging for special considerations like extensions for papers and project assignments. We weren't the ones asking for that extra point to move us from a C- to a C so the course would count for the major. Not us. We were the ones going to the library over spring break to write papers that weren't due until May 15th. (Is this too much information about how nerdy we were?) Most of our students are different from how we were as students, so we may not know how they feel. As students we didn't know the variety of complex decisions our professors faced. Being able to talk about the questions above (and these are some of the easy ones!) from the perspective of ethics can help us prevent difficult situations from escalating into impossible ones.

Preventing problems is reason enough to "bother" with ethics. But wait—there's more! Here's our second answer: There are ways to think about ethics that not only keep us out of trouble, but make us better teachers, keep us motivated, and make teaching more fun! How? By using ethics proactively to keep us in tune with our highest ethical and professional values rather than just following rules. We (including our colleagues Samuel Knapp and Michael Gottlieb) have called this approach positive ethics.

In workshops on positive ethics, we ask our colleagues (and the professors reading this can ask themselves): What did you write on your graduate school applications? Was it something like: "I want to be a college professor so I can stay out of trouble, give grades, sign withdrawal forms, go to committee meetings, not get complained against, and feel exasperated when students actually show up during my office hours when I'm trying to get a grant written."? We don't think so. So why not try to actualize what you did write?

We're going to be blogging a lot about this, but for now, suffice it to say that positive ethics means using ethical ideas (like integrity, respect for autonomy, and prudence) to help us become excellent, not just to avoid problems. For example, when a student comes into our office we can think something like, "How can I get this student out as quickly as possible but still make her think I'm doing my job so she doesn't complain?" Or, we could think more positively:

• How can I make this interaction as respectful as possible?
• What would I have wanted my professor to be like on my worst day?
• What would I do if I were the kind of professor I want my students to think I am?

Questions such as these keep us motivated even after many years of teaching—so motivated that we write a blog to tell you about it.

Sharon Anderson and Mitch Handelsman are both college professors, and the authors of Ethics for Psychotherapists: A Proactive Approach.