LLinE Lifelong Learning in Europe

abstract Ruben Apressyan

The Place of Ethics in Higher Education

Ruben Apressyan
Institute of Philosophy (Moscow)
Russian Academy of Sciences
apressyan@mail.ru

During the last four-five decades Ethics has altered a great deal as a university discipline. It has ceased to be exclusively a philosophical discipline and a part of philosophical education. In its applied versions Ethics has been more and more becoming a corporate component of professional education.

The increasing and even dominating share of Applied Ethics in various modes of teaching Ethics reflects the results of postmodern turn, which can be rendered, for instance, as a shift from the ethics of categorical imperative to the ethics of discourse or from the ethic of personal dignity to the ethic of institutional and communal loyalty. Professional correctness has become not only technical and functional category, but an ethical one, as well.

As one can discover from the Internet, most of the curricula in Applied Ethics give the professional or field problems their full concentration based on brief and formal philosophical preamble. Preserving the applied character of Ethics as higher education discipline today, it is important to restore the role of Ethics as an element (integral or dispersed) of liberal education, aimed to develop students’ general culture of normative thinking and, broader, their moral and civil awareness.

Reference: The Teaching of Ethics (The UNESCO World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, August 2003): http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php@URL_ID=3568&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

The presentation is going to be published in LLinE 4/2004