There are a number of different ways of teaching ethics, and there is ample room for a number of different ways of teaching ethics. I am sure that there is no one way that is right, but I am also sure that there are a number of ways, some of them in widespread use, that are wrong. It is wrong, for example, to teach ethics by simply presenting and discussing a number of ethical theories, in isolation from the actual or imagined problems of morality that these theories were developed in response to. It is wrong, in other words, to present ethics as a series or collection of disembodied abstractions. It is also a mistake to attempt to teach ethics simply by presenting the history of the subject, because this still presents the subject as consisting in the unregulated combat of a number of rival theories, and from this one's students can get no idea of what the problems are with which these theories were attempting to deal, or even whether they were all attempting to deal with the same problems. Yet this is better, if only because the early and important moral philosophers almost all had a very lively sense of what the problems were with which they were attempting to deal, and a careful reading of their works will bring these out. The move to higher and higher orders of abstraction started in the ninteenth century, and has reached its peak, apparently, in this one.
(Marcus G. Singer, "The Teaching of Introductory Ethics," The Monist 58 [October 1974]: 616-29, at 616)
Note from KBJ: Professor Singer's department must have had only one ethics course (or perhaps only one course in normative ethics). My department has two ethics courses: Contemporary Moral Problems (PHIL 1304) and Ethics (PHIL 2312). The former is a course in practical normative ethics; the latter is a course in theoretical normative ethics. When I teach Ethics, I do precisely what Singer says it is wrong to do, namely, "presenting and discussing a number of ethical theories, in isolation from the actual or imagined problems of morality that these theories were developed in response to." If I were to try to do more than this, I would end up giving the students only a superficial view of the theories. I tell my Ethics students on the first day of class that if they want to study particular moral problems, such as abortion and euthanasia, they should take Contemporary Moral Problems.
