Video Series - Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Immanuel Kant is one key thinkers I focus on in my classes.  I'm not by any means a "Kantian" - in fact I disagree with him on a number of matters - but he is someone whose works I very much appreciate, and even enjoy grappling with.  He is also someone whose thought tends to be very difficult for students approaching him for the first time - or even rereading his works! - and in my view, this difficulty stems from two main sources:  his academic terminology and style, one the one hand, and the systematic structure of his thought, on the other.

The first obstacle for students is figuring out what Kant is actually saying - and it is entirely understandable that they would encounter serious difficulties and frustrations when attempting to make sense out of what they see on the page!  Once they do understand just what all the jargon means, then there is the further difficulty involved in wrapping their minds around what Kant is proposing, arguing, criticizing, distinguishing.

If you've ever tackled Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals - or if you'd like to try your hand at one of the most important and influential works of Ethics - then I have something you might find very useful, a series of 21 short videos covering the entirety of that very work!

Originally, I created these core concept videos to assist my face-to-face and online college students get more out of their study of Kant's deontological moral theory in my classes.  Some of the early ones in this series were actually recorded in the classroom.  Then, I began producing additional ones in front of my chalkboard in our old apartment in New York. The last nine videos were shot and uploaded more recently.  So, you'll notice that the later ones have higher video and sound quality - but the content is all quite solid!

Violence Over Kant Interpretation?

The story from Rostov-on-Don last month is the sort of incongruous verging on comedy that, as the saying goes "you just can't make up" -- or at least not easily -- since nobody who has seriously studied the moral theory of Immanuel Kant would think to associate his work and thought with the sort of disagreement that would turn nakedly violent.  And yet, there they were, the headlines.

You've got the straightforward and succinct Reuter's story: Man shot in Russia in Argument over Kant.  The more cheeky Guardian story: Unreasonable critique of Kant leads to man being shot in Russian shop.  Time's wince-worthy pun: “You Kant Say That!” Philosophical Debate Leads to Shooting.  Huffington Post displays the alarmist anti-intellectualism always lurking just below their superficiality: Philosophy Is Dangerous! Immanuel Kant Debate In Russia Leads To Fist Fight, Ends In Gunshot.  We could go on multiplying examples.  I'd rather muse a bit about why this was and remains such an interestingly, even sublimely strange story.

Lessons from the EBEP Workshop (part 1 of 2)

I've delivered my last workshop as a Philosophy faculty member to educators in the School of Business and Economics (SoBE) at Fayetteville State University.  This finality is amicable in tone and tenor -- I'm simply leaving FSU in June for opportunities elsewhere (I'll say more in a future post), so if I return to provide further workshops, curriculum review, or assessment assistance, it will be  formally (rather than just functionally) as a consultant in Ethics pedagogy and assessment, rather than as a Philosophy prof.

It's certainly not the last workshop I'll be providing dealing with issues, programs, or initiatives in Ethics -- I intend to further develop and draw on the materials, bases, lessons, and collaborative model of the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP) which I co-founded with a Management professor, Beth Hogan, originally to assist SoBE in improving their Ethics assessment required for their specialized disciplinary accreditation with the Association to Advance College Schools of Business (AACSB)  It's not even the last workshop of the EBEP series -- later this month, we're bringing in a former FSU Philosophy prof, Michelle Darnell, who we lost to the Warrington School of Business (University of Florida) last year to give another workshop in Business Ethics pedagogy.  What becomes of EBEP at FSU after I leave depends largely on what the involved Business faculty choose to do with it and whether any of the remaining Philosophy faculty choose to step into the engaging space of dialogue we've created and take up the project.

I'm going to indulge in a little retrospective about what we've achieved with the collaborative project in its first year -- but put off fuller assessment for a followup post after Darnell's workshop -- and then discuss something very interesting, even humorous if you look at it in the right light, that occurred throughout the course of my last workshop, driving doubly home its lessons to me, if not to every one of the participants it was designed for and delivered to.

Crossing The Tracks: Ethics in Business Education

Or, why I enjoy working with the FSU Business faculty on Ethics education.

Today, over in the School of Business and Economics, we held a second workshop emerging from a fairly new, needed, and exciting partnership, the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP).  Since I provide the history and initial purposes of  the project on our website (which is still under construction), I'll skip over it here, other than to mention three things:

First, EBEP is a collaborative partnership between philosophers and businesspeople.  Second, the model of collaboration EBEP relies on and embodies involves philosophers, as subject matter experts in Ethics, assisting business faculty to develop high levels of competence and confidence in teaching Ethics and in assessing student learning and development in Ethics. Third, the project arose symbiotically both from needs perceived on the side of the businesspeople and from opportunities grasped on the side of the philosophers.

The first and most pressing specific project we saw the need to tackle was reviewing, then developing a better version of, a scoring rubric used for grading student essays responding to typical ethically problematic cases in Business. Again, the history of that process, including the developmental stages of the rubric, is summarized on the EBEP website, so rather than cover that same ground, I'd rather think and write about why this particular exercise took on importance for a philosopher and for business professors, and what took place between us in today's grading workshop.

There is a stock joking response to any mention of Business Ethics:  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" It reveals a common, longstanding, and doubtless not entirely unmerited perception of businesspeople, even Business faculty, as not knowledgeable about, as uninterested in, and as unmotivated by ethical principles, concerns, values, let alone theories, figures, and texts. 

The reality is that those involved in business have always had some sort of  interest in ethics.  Admittedly, this may well have often taken the form of explicitly worked out ethical stances which academics (particularly in the humanities) and the intelligentsia have found less than congenial.  There certainly have been many cases of businesspeople clearly and deliberately acting unethically.  Plenty have used moral language and concepts as window-dressing for what they wanted and aimed to do anyway.  It may well be that due to the nature of business and business education, there are some environments particularly corrosive to ethical standards and reasoning, more seductive in their temptations. . . .