What is it to live a good human life? How should you treat other human beings, other animals and the natural environment? How should we organize our diverse society politically to secure justice for all? Whom should you trust, and what makes for a good reason to believe something? Why make art? Why do anything other than make art?

For many of us, these questions and others like them have taken on increased urgency in recent weeks.
Reflection on such questions has always been an important aspect — arguably the very core — of a liberal arts education. But proposals that would de-emphasize these important questions, eliminating them from most students’ course of study altogether, are circulating in Weinberg College. Among other things, these proposals would abolish the Ethics and Values distribution area requirement for the Weinberg degree. The college should move in the opposite direction, ensuring that meaningful opportunities to think hard about ethical commitments are part of any Weinberg education.

The above questions are all distinctively normative questions. They ask not how things are, but how they should be and what you should do about it. This differs from any descriptive inquiry, including investigations into what some person or group thinks about ethics or values. Understanding what others think is important. It can help you empathize with them and so interact on better terms. And it can help you see commitments of your own that you may have been taking for granted, raising the possibility that you might change them or helping you see more clearly why you think what you do.

But learning what someone else thinks about how you should live cannot substitute for your own attempt to settle this and other normative questions for yourself. Of course these normative questions are extremely difficult. No one should expect, nor should we aim, to come to definitive answers over the course of a 10-week quarter. But courses in ethics can provide strong foundation and indispensable tools for this lifelong task. First, they can equip you with the conceptual resources you need to identify normative questions and to consider a range of possible solutions. Otherwise excellent high school education often fails to provide these resources. In his study “Lost in Transition,” sociologist Christian Smith documents this failure, finding that two-thirds of the students he interviewed couldn’t identify a single moral problem that they had faced. Some couldn’t answer at all. Others suggested problems that had no ethical aspect. One said he sometimes wonders whether he has enough quarters to feed the parking meter.

In addition to expanding your conceptual repertoire, ethics courses allow students time and space for, and crucial practice in, distinctively normative thinking, discussion and writing. Because knowing what someone else thinks is not the same as figuring out what you think, in one sense we all need to come to the answers to questions about ethics and value for ourselves. But this doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to discuss and reason together about them. Trying to say why you value what you do might offer insight to others, but making the attempt and seeing how others respond can also help you think more clearly about it yourself.

The Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life provides a model within the college of the kind of ethical education we should promote more widely. Brady’s website announces that “this program asks students to stop and think about what it means to be good.” The program provides a small group of Weinberg students with extended opportunities for normative reflection as well as action on their conclusions. But a mere 16 students can join the Brady program each year. The kind of inquiry that it emphasizes ought to be a prominent piece of every Weinberg student’s education.

In fact, normative questions are impossible to avoid. You will face them in every aspect of your life. You will have to figure out how to act as a citizen, in your professional and business contexts and in your personal relationships. You will have to figure out how to form your beliefs about the world. You will have to figure out what to value and by what ideals to live. The only question is whether you will be equipped to think about these problems well.

The ability to reflect intelligently on these central human questions is at least as essential to the sort of educated person that Weinberg should be sending out into the world as skills like speaking a second language or dealing with numbers. A revitalized Ethics and Values requirement would treat the opportunity to engage in meaningful normative inquiry as its defining feature. The college should strengthen rather than withdraw its commitment to this indispensable aspect of the liberal arts.

Kyla Ebels-Duggan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Interim Director of the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.