Ethics Courses and Unethical Behavior: Do They Rehabilitate or Simply Facilitate?
Recently I put up a blog thread providing resource information regarding courses in bioethics. The courses are worthwhile for providing bioethics background and methods to those in the medical, legal, social work or spiritual care backgrounds and for those who are participating in hospital ethics committees. In a Comment on that thread, I mentioned that medical license boards in the United States have their physicians who professionally misbehaved take an approved ethics course as part of their rehabilitation. I would like to extend discussion on the matter of whether bioethics courses can actually contribute to the rehabilitation of a person who is unethical or demonstrated unethical behavior. Such a discussion would also involve whether bioethicists themselves, with their education and experience are ethical persons or how does their ethics and philosophy education affect and to what extent, their ethical behavior.
Here is a posting recently on a bioethics listserv that takes one view of the value of the ethics course and teaching.
This from a recent article by Carla Keirns and colleagues:
"We know of a philosophy professor who, on the first day of his ethics class, announces to his students that Satan could easily get an ‘A’ in his course - his way of pointing out that rigorous study of moral theory and thorough deliberation on specific ethical dilemmas will do nothing to make one an ethical person. Our professor friend goes on to tell his students that in-depth understanding of moral philosophy may, in fact, equip students to be less ethical, providing them with a way to rationalize unethical behaviour. This idea – that one cannot teach others to be moral – has long been the fly in the ointment of ethics education, oft-used to resist the introduction of courses on ethics in professional schools and graduate programs."
"Bioethics and Medical Education: Lessons from the United States"
In C. Brosnan and B. Turner, (eds.) Handbook of the Sociology of Medical Education. London: Routledge. 2009.
I would hope some teachers of ethics would come to my blog and present their view of this concept: ethics courses don’t rehabilitate they just facilitate unethical behavior. ..Maurice.