‘Raising moral issues in STEM’: An American teacher of Ethics shares his course experience
Editorial note: Dr. Piyush Mathur initiated an inquisitive conversation in early May with Christopher Giofreda regarding an Ethics course he had finished teaching in late April at the Virginia-based Old Dominion University. Via Gmail and Facebook Messenger, the conversation unfolded, somewhat recursively, through May 5-August 3 as a collection of Question-Answer sessions—whose composite text, very slightly edited (for house style), is published below for the benefit of Thoughtfox readers. (Full disclosure: Giofreda has published in Thoughtfox previously; he has also reviewed Dr. Mathur’s book that came out in 2017.)
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Mathur: So, earlier this year you taught a course titled 'Raising Moral Issues in STEM' at Old Dominion University. You have graciously shared with me your syllabus, course material, and assignments—which you put together yourself; the title of the course, however (as you told me), was mandated by the university. Your syllabus and related material would be mouth-watering for anybody hungry for knowledge and education—but the course title forces me to ask you this: Are people on the STEM planet any different from any other humans that are presumably inhabiting other planets? There is a hypothesis, you know, that says that physics might be different in some truly far away part of the universe; so, maybe people on the STEM planet are different, too, in terms of ethics and morality. Or maybe I have approached this whole thing wrongly? Enlighten me!
Giofreda: Thanks for writing to me. Most STEM students differentiate themselves from their peers at a later stage of development than when they take this course. Their professional ethos ordinarily arises through their continued success in very hard classes and the sure knowledge that the world is willing to pay the piper. You know the movie Malice (1993) with Alec Baldwin? There's a scene where Baldwin, a skilled but troubled surgeon, rhetorically asks some lawyers if they think he has a God complex. He then says, "I am God." Well, my students' "Malice moment" will happen later (quite fortunately). They still keep some self-doubt. But they have sort of a humanities scholar coronating them, so to speak, and saying, "Take this Aristotle. Take this Plato. Never let it go. Lead us well."
The framing of a stew
Mathur: Now, I tend to have difficulty with frames that apparently aspire to include something (say, 'moral issues') into something else ('STEM') when the mutual exclusion of those two presumed entities might itself have been a questionable premise. That's me, though—and that's a frame-level issue anyway. Nevertheless, given that your course's title was university-assigned, did it constrain or inspire you—or otherwise affect the development of your syllabus and course material?
Giofreda: It wasn't a huge deal, although it did prompt a discussion about expectations on the first day. This course was about rhetoric and philosophy in the context of the life of a STEM worker. There wasn't enough time to do this for each specific discipline in the room—and the material, if I did that, would not be applicable to people of other majors. I said that the advantage of a lack of specificity was that I could investigate commonalities between the philosophical structures of work, social relations, etc., that very specific normative treatments of the various fields (e.g. books on cyberethics) would not do. Invoking STEM rather than an individual field, say, nursing, allowed me to construct them as a social class.
One student did write in their end-of-semester feedback that they wanted more focus on STEM than philosophy.
Mathur: Well, my whole point is that the clustering of a range of disciplines into the label of STEM is itself unsupportable—if in part because science is a vague word rather than a theoretical concept (a theme that I have explored in my book, which you have reviewed). That word cannot, in all rigour, preclude either 'engineering' or any subject within what is, equally unrealistically from today's viewpoint, called 'Humanities' and 'Social Sciences' (and for that matter 'Arts'—which is how Humanities is also referred to and classified in many countries). This exclusivist classificatory label of STEM is thus also not resolved via a latter day label of STEAM (in which the A stands for ‘Arts’).
What all of I have said above might be another way to suggest that Ethics, as a sub-discipline of investigation and analysis, should not have been kept out of any notion of 'science' on the curricular level of classification; but inasmuch as it has been, we have the conditions for the existence of a course (titled) like yours. But to come back to your syllabus, it includes themes in 'Business'—which is great, of course; but it is charming to realize that 'Business' is just as much precluded from STEM, per se, as all the rest I mentioned. Doesn't that appear to suggest that the label of STEM (and the curricular classification that it seeks to identify) betrays a psychological preclusion of both the pecuniary ('Business') and the presumably idealistic ('Ethics')?
Christopher Giofreda teaches courses in Ethics at the US-based Old Dominion University.
GioFreda: Let me try to answer this question to your satisfaction before allowing myself to move onto the next. I see a few important strands. First is the one about the sclerotic conception of science that seems to stick in our social arteries. There is reason to hope that the battle for science(s) is going all right! We already know to object to a chemist doing surgery on us or a physician compounding our drugs. The distinctions among scientific pursuits are firm in our minds. But sometimes we do this rhetorical move where we circle the wagons when science(s) are under some kind of threat. STEM is the conch that the U.S. blows on when we feel like we lack prudence as a culture. But as soon as the concept of singular science is built, we start to realize, bit by bit, the strangeness of what we've assembled.
As to your point about the theme of business in my syllabus, we tried to use ideas from the book If Aristotle Ran General Motors (1998) to ask how it would be to put truth, beauty, wisdom, and goodness into our managerial lives. I let them know that they would naturally rise up to management roles within their respective businesses. It didn't make a ton of sense for me to create alienation there. When we criticized business we did so through the lens of moral combat, where one argues through one's social roles rather than through reason. Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1882) provides a few examples to be avoided. So we said, ‘Hey, this is business and everyone wants to make money. Aristotle hated greed, not money!’ So let them not get addicted to their social roles and they should be okay. Sidenote: Arguing through social roles is not inherently bad, right? It worked for Confucius in terms of the five relationships. However, it's often that we argue for self-interest through the mechanism of social roles. And that is what's dangerous.
As to your point about what to do with ethics in science(s)…
Mathur: More like Ethics is already a science—and the fact that it is precluded from STEM before being smuggled back in as an appendage is off-putting at the hustings!
Giofreda: There are popular criticisms of the academic field of Ethics. One complaint is that they learn only the ability to rationalize all activity, post facto, according to the major normative ethical systems. In this telling, which belongs to people like Mary Gentile, ethical models are used as rhetorical cover by managers. This is true enough, though it’s not sufficient evidence for a wholesale overhaul. My opinion is that society is widely considered to be in a period of decline. While I don’t really find this argument compelling, it is going to change the way moral examples in society are coded. What do students see when they see an Aaron Bushnell? Madness I think. Growing up, seeing my generation’s acts of defiance (e.g. Tiananmen Square), they were coded for political inspiration.
There are offerings like Engineering Ethics and Cyberethics, which apply the normative frameworks to case studies. These are different than what I teach. They have a certain advantage. If you have an industry professional teach a course, they have an ethos as an insider. I am always an interloper using induction to get to some kind of practical truth. People can say to me, “You weren’t really there, bub. Who says you could perform better?” They’re right, in a sense.
Mathur: I realize that the terms 'morality' and 'ethics' are often used interchangeably these days; I personally try not to do that. But in your course—and given its university-assigned title—did you, consciously or unconsciously, differentiate between 'moral' and 'ethical' matters or values within the context of this course?
Giofreda: I addressed this with them. Like Bernard Williams, I try to emphasize ethics over morality. Here is how he began Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (2011):
‘How should one live?’—the generality of one already stakes a claim. The Greek language does not even give us one: the formula is impersonal. The implication is that something relevant or useful can be said to anyone, in general, and this implies that something general can be said, something that embraces or shapes the individual ambitions each person may bring to the question ‘how should I live?’ (A larger implication can easily be found in this generality…
In other words, at first we are concerned with what is broadly applicable to humans. Only later should we consider the particulars that is oneself. The question of how I should live does get asked, but it's not the central theme.
We may as well start with the nobler question.
The assignments
Mathur: In one of your assignments, you point out that 'in general, ethical problems only interest us when we have to decide what good to sacrifice.' This essay-based assignment, involving applied classical rhetoric, is presented within the context of Aristotle, and it also refers to a 'Relative Utility Worksheet' as a handy tool to navigate the assignment. It made me wonder, though, how a contemporary STEM student, all too aware of (if not yet deeply conversant with) Big Data Analytics and algorithmic approaches to making choices, is persuaded to see value in these ancient philosophical frameworks. Did any of this come up in any form in reference to this assignment, section, or the course general
Giofreda: I wasn't challenged with that this term, but this is a great question that I did grapple with during course design. You are positing that the student comes into a workplace looking to use Aristotle and finds that the decisions are actually made by computers. Indeed, modern computing can be quite the antagonist. We need a nice term like Quantum Deontology for the type of bind we're describing here. How do we get out of it? Mostly we screw up and do damage mitigation. The life of Tinmit Gebru, the Ethiopian computer scientist, is interesting here. She's undoubtedly brilliant and socially conscious. However, at Google she ended up being a part of a team that developed facial recognition software that targets dark-skinned people. She'd make a good case study.
Mathur: That is an interesting reference; I haven’t paid a close attention to her so far. I should follow up on it in the coming days.
But going further into your assignments, it becomes clear that rhetoric has an important status and function in your course. On one level, this prominent place for rhetoric reflects your own background; on another level, and given the breadth of your interdisciplinary investments and multi-sectoral professional accomplishments (of which I know well), it is also a choice you made as a teacher of ethics (or 'moral issues'). There is a lot in it; but in an exceedingly condensed, practical form, could you tell Thoughtfox readers why rhetoric deserves a prominent place in teaching ethics ('moral issues') to STEMsters?
-Enthymemes-
Giofreda: Thanks for the kind words. Moral communication can't proceed unless there is hope for some result. Otherwise we just get fatigued. We get the common situation where Person A thinks that Person B is intractable about some belief. But A wasn’t using all their resources, just a sort of list of facts. Person B will not be moved by them. That’s not in with the thinking of how minds change according to rhetoricians and moral psychologists. But if you take Rhetoric seriously, you can figure out how people can teach themselves to embrace the ideas you laid out for them. We make enthymemes for this purpose.
Mathur: Stop right there for a second! Ha-ha. Tell us first what is an enthymeme—which is pronounced as /ˈɛnθɪmiːm/! The Internet tells me that it is ‘an argument in which one premise is not explicitly stated’. I do see both the utility and inevitability of using enthymemes—and yet it would be nice to learn why not making transparent a particular premise in one’s argument would not be considered unethical.
Giofreda: Take this silly example where Pete steps on your foot:
Syllogism: We are taught that every man deserves forgiveness. Pete, who stepped on your foot is a man. Therefore Pete deserves forgiveness.
Bleh.
Enthymemic idea: Pete’s toddler punches him awake at 4:30 every morning.
The second formulation does very different work, especially since it completely ignores the major premise that every man deserves forgiveness. Not to mention that it humanizes Pete, makes him seem worse off than you, and implies that not all unpleasantness is inimical to love.
If you want to see the emotional power of enthymemes, go to the very cool site, based upon a book of the same title, called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. There you’ll find emotions that you’ve never encountered before. See if you can make someone feel one of these emotions they’ve never experienced before. You’ll find that only enthymemes serve the purpose. Making someone feel an emotion through syllogism is impossible. It is quite like commanding someone to be sad or happy. Good luck with that.
One assignment we did in class I called ‘The Sum of All Fears’. The students acted as consultants to this little town. You had people violating all of these privacy considerations and you had to figure out whether the wrongdoers were envious, fearful, angry, etc., and try to break through by changing the emotional situation. Enthymemes played a role in this. There were three different views of emotion in the ancient word, and this Aristotelian one seems to give us the most hope. Sorry about the lengthy answer here!
-Complementarity & inner work-
Mathur: There is one assignment in which you ask students to design a case study—say, some type of an ethical dilemma—for a fellow student, who is expected to resolve it. Your instructions there are very canny—and I really like how you have designed this assignment: Each student would literally have to complement the other, as a fellow ethicist, so to say, to get anywhere; in the process, the whole group would get somewhere. Did anything unexpected, striking, or memorable turn up in response to this assignment?
Giofreda: One surprise was that the least engaged person in the class did the best job on this out of anybody. It wasn’t even close. His ethical problem was precisely the right size. If you have a problem that’s too big, you have a tough time applying ethical paradigms to it. People get tempted by the law of iron in these cases. Well, I guess we’ve got to fight our way out of this mess! However, it’s actually the smaller problems that make us like we really can do something great.
Mathur: But do you suppose that his having been ‘least engaged’ had anything to do with his success in this complementary type of assignment? Or was it a lucky coincidence for him?
GioFreda: I’m guessing that he was very capable but not necessarily as quick as some others to say his first thought. That’s actually commendable, right? So in a participatory environment how do I emphasize this?
Please allow me a side tangent. As it happens, I was watching a Pete Buttigieg interview the other day. He is the person in America I would least want opposite to me in a heated argument. He can answer complex questions immediately and forcefully. But I find something is missing: Buttigieg’s flawless technique reveals none of the inner work. I think that this student of mine was afraid to be discursive because he’s not in the Buttigieg category. But this is fine, even grand. I’ve never considered myself to be a fluid speaker or writer. I hear a conclusion before I speak it and often find it to be discordant. I wonder if the student is hearing his own perceived inadequacy like some of us do.
-Institutional articulations of governing ethics-
Mathur: That was beautifully articulated, by the way. Now, there is another assignment, in which a student is expected to present a slideshow on some particular paradigmatic change that had to push itself through a wave of contemporary contestations within a professional field or specialization. One dimension of this assignment included a focus on how professional bodies or societies—say of chemical engineers—emerged through history and developed their own ethics. In response to this assignment, were there any submissions that convincingly questioned the ethics or moral agents that may have happened to triumph historically?
GioFreda: Fantastic question. Two cases come to mind. The first student was planning to work in forensic psychiatry. She found interesting developments as she traced the early DSM classifications. The first was in the mid-20th century, and a lot has changed. In a way, these books say as much about the clinicians and researchers as they do about patients. The second case had to do with the history of college athletics. The student was preparing for a career in athletics. He found just as much to dislike about the current Name, Image, Likeness rule as with the NCAA restrictions that preceded it.
I had genealogical methods in mind when I developed the assignment.
-Alienation & pretences-
Mathur: By ‘DSM classifications’—I need to clarify this for our global readers—you mean to refer to the psychological classifications articulated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; and by NCAA, you mean to refer to the National Collegiate Athletics Association of the United States.
Now, with your assignments being so well thought-out, I can't help but ask you about another one. This assignment asks the student to pick out a relevant, substantive podcast and have a 45-minute conversation with you analyzing its argument, topic. This is part of a section called 'Oral Argument'—and like all the rest of your assignments, it also has a very impressive, detailed rubric. But obviously, what gets the reader's immediate attention is your caution (if I may use that word) to your student that (s)he should expect to refute (you) and be refuted (by you). We can also see in the assignment description that 'Anger' and 'Respect' are two of the four topics that are supposed to be addressed in/through it. Well, my question here is this: What was your most memorable 45-minute session here—and why?
Giofreda: There was one session with a somewhat older student, one who was pretty far along in a business career. His degree was a bit of a formality to get a promotion. Anyhow, we discussed ideas like Agnes Callard’s idea of a respect tax and the necessity of social pretence (i.e., that we want the fiction of being equal to our social superiors even if we know they don’t believe it). The student happened to know a good many famous people—some of whom became successful after he had known them as a peer—and it was illuminating to talk about how their strategies to prevent alienation could also be used as he built his own pretences.
Mathur: By ‘strategies to prevent alienation’ you mean to refer to how these ‘social superiors’ sought to bridge the gap between themselves and this student? And how do you mean these strategies could be useful—to what ethical ends, if that’s what you meant?
Giofreda: Yes, that is precisely the gap I mean when I say ‘strategies to prevent alienation.’ Let me talk about the use of these strategies by first stating a truism: We are ‘both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with one another.’ What the literary critic Kenneth Burke was saying here was we can make two moves at any given time: minimize differences or amplify them. The strategies to avoid alienation seem like they’re actually a third move: They don’t amplify status differences or minimize them; they accept them as obligations.
As to the ethics of this, I want to recall the first time we spoke, via Skype, on April 12, 2019. You discussed the challenges of publishing humanities work outside the comforts of a traditional professorship. I quickly found that my professors were not willing to try on a pretence to be more accommodating to extramural sources. Perhaps a better strategic goal would have been for me to speak to my professors in the language of alienation.
Student response
Mathur: Are there any specific philosophers or ethical frameworks that you noticed resonated well with your students? Any guesses why?
Giofreda: They seemed to enjoy our brief forays into the humanities. Martha Nussbaum’s book Love’s Knowledge (1990) was the basis for this. The work of art is a closed world that you can attempt to know fully. Standard philosophical prose, good as it is, has its limits. Nussbaum even thinks we can build faculties of perception through literature. We want people to be alert, grasping for particulars. Lastly, literature is a place where different perspectives fully add up to coherence. You rarely get that kind of pluralism within a single philosophical text because its job is to carry a single argument. So when we did a lesson on, say, bureaucracy, it was important to talk about David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka, etc.
Mathur: How would you characterize, overall, the students' response to your course? Are there any instances where a student's perspective or project stood out to you?
Giofreda: I’m still a novice, so I would say that the material was a level higher than my ability to discharge it. One perspective stands out as generalizable. For the first few weeks I really struggled to get the engagement of this one student. I had not built trust yet, and there were some moments when my explanations didn’t connect. What I got to see was that the negative framing of ethics (i.e. thou shalt not) did not really work for her. But when she got to be the one at the center of the ethical operation, she was much happier. That’s a lesson learned. Up to that point it wasn’t clear that the material could help her resolve the various conflicts she faced.
Mathur: Do you suppose that the lesson that was learnt (by you, as the teacher) was about her as a student or about pedagogical choices regarding how to teach a course in Ethics (as in, maybe you concluded that a pro-active, positive mandate to engage, encourage ethical behaviours has more going for it, quite generally, than a prohibitive one regarding unethical behaviours)?
Giofreda: Both, I believe. The student was used to working within a existing course-management structure that my own training did not mention. For instance, she was thrown off by my mass emails to the class, as it was apparently a norm for professors to use the LMS’s announcement feature. At first I failed to use the LMS technology in the spirit in which it was intended, and so the app was cluttered like a recluse’s basement. What was needed was addition by subtraction! More generally, I do think that the prohibitive idea is directly against the tone I want. Telling someone that an idea doesn’t work runs against the idea that it does, in fact, do some things, if not others. I should just try to just point to edge cases where the old ideas will be found wanting. Then the professor can hope that the chance use of a new theory will become habitual.
The tea leaves
Mathur: The syllabus briefly mentions the influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the writing process; your instruction to your students is calibrated in this regard. In an assignment description, you even suggest that Claude AI could be useful to the student in determining the level of difficulty of an ethical problem that (s)he would have articulated as part of the assignment (given that you want the presented problem to be of 'moderate difficulty'). At the same time, neither the syllabus nor the assignments specifically focus on AI—or any emerging tool, for that matter. Nothing wrong with that—and I have all the justification for that kind of an approach—but I was wondering what you might have to say in this regard.
Giofreda: I’m still trying to find out if and how AI can help these young men and women in the long-term. I’m as lost as the next person on any of this. If chess is an analog, AI exposure is likely to change not just the content we choose to keep in our brains but how we think. You can show me a master-level game score and I will be able to tell you confidently whether it’s of this century or one before it. I want students to be very careful how much and for what purposes they use this powerful tool.
Mathur: Are there any emerging ethical issues or trends that you believe will become increasingly important for future professionals to address?
Giofreda: One trend that’s taking over is Giving Voice to Values [GVV]. It’s a large business ethics module that can support a whole ethics and/or argument course. It is defined by optimism and moral realism. The basis, as the developer points out, is interdisciplinary (even kinesiology, as the course focuses on morals as self-defense.) I’m not fully bought-in, but I do chop it up and use a few ideas. One thing the model does well—and I endorse this—is to get people to accept that they have been good moral agents in the past. Also, they’ve failed too. Understanding what led to this is a good place to begin a course.
Mathur: Sounds promising! Well, it was great to have this conversation with you, Christopher (if i may)! Our readers will benefit from the details that this interview has brought about an excellent teaching module prepared by a very dedicated, creative teacher.
Giofreda: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my experiences as a course designer and teacher. Our conversation allowed me to clarify some thoughts and find out the points where they needed more development.
Dr. Piyush Mathur is the author of the book Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).
If you liked this interview, then you might also be interested in Professor Viacheslav Kudashov’s ‘The case for Siberian philosophy’, and Dr. Mathur’s ‘How to become a multi-perspective thinker: The 7 essentials’
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