key: cord-0066838-dr5mp1ry
authors: ten Have, Henk
title: Ethics teaching as an infectious activity
date: 2021-08-20
journal: International Journal of Ethics Education
DOI: 10.1007/s40889-021-00131-5
sha: c09a01d549a70240ed13782bae396a97800b5521
doc_id: 66838
cord_uid: dr5mp1ry

nan

teaching has evolved during the last decade. Certainly, the study is limited: it concerns only one large university in the United States, and does not focus on the quality and content of teaching programs. Nonetheless, it offers an exemplar of exposition: how and where students are exposed to ethics. Like an archaeologist excavating a particular site, the data are limited and localized but provide some ideas about the civilization to which the site belongs. The authors experience that it is difficult to get an exact overview of existing ethics courses (since it is not always clear what should count as an 'ethics course'), and that it is even more difficult to acquire information about course content (since ethics can be embedded in other courses, or is not clearly marked in course syllabi). Given these limitations, the findings are striking. First, the ethics component is small; only 2% of the offered 4000 undergraduate courses had an ethics component, while only more than half of these courses were actually taught. Second, there is no increase of ethics courses over ten years since 2008. These findings are remarkable because, as the authors notice, during this period the public and scientific debates on ethical issues have intensified, and professional codes of ethics and statements on responsible research conduct have multiplied. The third finding is even more striking: ethics teaching is very unevenly distributed among colleges, with hardly any ethics courses in the College of Nursing and the College of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. The conclusion is that ethics is not a very infectious activity; it has limited distribution, thus a low reproduction number. The authors of the study modify this conclusion in suggesting that ethics has become an implicit component in many practices, particularly in nursing. Because it has become 'endemic,' it is not visible within course work. But the drawback is that for students the ethical dimension of their future profession is less identifiable. This is of course an hypothesis, and will require more detailed examination of courses themselves.

This interesting research calls for other studies in different institutions across the globe. While it is often reiterated that ethics should be a component of contemporary academic education, what precisely is its 'epidemiology' in university education?

Where is ethics taught: An institutional epidemiology

A common faith

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