The most important ethical questions are not the narrowly ethical ones
I was once in a meeting in which faculty and students were discussing sexism and everyone was chiming in ad nauseam about how sexism is bad/wrong/harmful/etc. I waited for a while and then made the following point:
I agree that sexism is morally wrong but I don't think that there's anyone in this meeting that disagrees with that. For that matter, even people who some of us here would describe as "sexist" or "misogynist" would not disagree with the statement that "misogyny is morally wrong." The most important question here is not whether sexism is morally right or wrong. That's not really in dispute. Rather, the most important question is: which things are/aren't sexist? That is a question on which there will be lots of disagreement and it is the much more important question to answer. It will be messy and there will be disgreement, but if ethics is an important discipline then it is because of its willingness to engage such messy questions--questions on which there can be reasonable disagreement.
After teaching ethics courses every semester for over a decade, it occurs to me that I make a similar mistake (and I don't believe that I am alone). More precisely, I think that many ethics courses (taught within the broadly "analytic" tradition) make the mistake to putting too much emphasis on normative ethics and not nearly enough on the factual and conceptual issues that makes real-world ethics fraught. That is, philosophers tend to spend a lot of time (I spend a third of the semester) teaching different "normative ethical traditions" (consequentialism, Kantianism, contractarianism) and not enough time on the messier factual and conceptual issues that are much more often at the heart of ethical disputes within in our fractured public discourse.
From whichever normative ethical tradition you'd like, it follows that sexism and racism are morally impermissible. But none of this helps us determine the much more important question of which things are sexist/racist/etc.? For a couple of years now I have been trying to better address these factual-conceptual disputes in a section of my ethics course on racism. I have been teaching a section of the course on "Race in America" in which I set up a definition of race and racism (largely following Sally Haslanger's), consider historical explanations of what accounts for the existing racial disparities in the U.S. (such as redlining and the war on drugs), and engage with contemporary ideas and movements like Black Lives Matter. It is a challenge to do this and sometimes it makes students uncomfortable but I firmly believe that engaging these fraught factual-conceptual issues is a moral duty I have as a philosopher in our current cultural context. I may not always do it well and I have a lot to learn, but attempt itself carries moral significance, even when it fails.
I sometimes wonder why I didn't do this earlier and I think that at least in my case there is a simple explanation. Philosophers, especially those who are just beginning their teaching career, often gravitate towards materials and issues that they can present in a neat and tidy, black and white way. (Perhaps this is particularly true of philosophers trained in the analytic tradition of philosophical ethics as compared with more continental ways of approaching ethics.) I'll admit, I enjoy being able to present things clearly in an ethics course. In part I think that the reason I enjoy doing it is because I want to dispel common misconceptions of students in my courses that ethics is "all subjective" and that whatever you think is right/wrong is just your opinion. In short, I want to show them that ethics can be just as objective as other disciplines. But to retreat to the safety of teaching materials that don't raise the profoundly difficult questions in contemporary ethical discourse seems to me to be shirking an ethical obligation that we (teaching philosophers) have. And from a self-interested perspective, if a philosopher can't engage the hard questions that students taking an ethics course may be wanting to engage, then you leave your students feeling dissatisfied and thinking that philosophy is mostly just pedantic bullshit.
I agree that sexism is morally wrong but I don't think that there's anyone in this meeting that disagrees with that. For that matter, even people who some of us here would describe as "sexist" or "misogynist" would not disagree with the statement that "misogyny is morally wrong." The most important question here is not whether sexism is morally right or wrong. That's not really in dispute. Rather, the most important question is: which things are/aren't sexist? That is a question on which there will be lots of disagreement and it is the much more important question to answer. It will be messy and there will be disgreement, but if ethics is an important discipline then it is because of its willingness to engage such messy questions--questions on which there can be reasonable disagreement.
After teaching ethics courses every semester for over a decade, it occurs to me that I make a similar mistake (and I don't believe that I am alone). More precisely, I think that many ethics courses (taught within the broadly "analytic" tradition) make the mistake to putting too much emphasis on normative ethics and not nearly enough on the factual and conceptual issues that makes real-world ethics fraught. That is, philosophers tend to spend a lot of time (I spend a third of the semester) teaching different "normative ethical traditions" (consequentialism, Kantianism, contractarianism) and not enough time on the messier factual and conceptual issues that are much more often at the heart of ethical disputes within in our fractured public discourse.
From whichever normative ethical tradition you'd like, it follows that sexism and racism are morally impermissible. But none of this helps us determine the much more important question of which things are sexist/racist/etc.? For a couple of years now I have been trying to better address these factual-conceptual disputes in a section of my ethics course on racism. I have been teaching a section of the course on "Race in America" in which I set up a definition of race and racism (largely following Sally Haslanger's), consider historical explanations of what accounts for the existing racial disparities in the U.S. (such as redlining and the war on drugs), and engage with contemporary ideas and movements like Black Lives Matter. It is a challenge to do this and sometimes it makes students uncomfortable but I firmly believe that engaging these fraught factual-conceptual issues is a moral duty I have as a philosopher in our current cultural context. I may not always do it well and I have a lot to learn, but attempt itself carries moral significance, even when it fails.
I sometimes wonder why I didn't do this earlier and I think that at least in my case there is a simple explanation. Philosophers, especially those who are just beginning their teaching career, often gravitate towards materials and issues that they can present in a neat and tidy, black and white way. (Perhaps this is particularly true of philosophers trained in the analytic tradition of philosophical ethics as compared with more continental ways of approaching ethics.) I'll admit, I enjoy being able to present things clearly in an ethics course. In part I think that the reason I enjoy doing it is because I want to dispel common misconceptions of students in my courses that ethics is "all subjective" and that whatever you think is right/wrong is just your opinion. In short, I want to show them that ethics can be just as objective as other disciplines. But to retreat to the safety of teaching materials that don't raise the profoundly difficult questions in contemporary ethical discourse seems to me to be shirking an ethical obligation that we (teaching philosophers) have. And from a self-interested perspective, if a philosopher can't engage the hard questions that students taking an ethics course may be wanting to engage, then you leave your students feeling dissatisfied and thinking that philosophy is mostly just pedantic bullshit.
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