Abstract

Philosophy courses are now regularly under fire from educators, administrators, politicians, and financially overextended students and parents demanding shorter and more economically fruitful college degree programs in a climate of economic austerity. Yet, perhaps in the face of a number of high- profile ethical violations in the business and professional world, many of these groups have been calling for more, and more effective, pre- and professional ethics education. This paradoxical call for more ethics and less philosophy is finding unlikely support from a number of academic philosophers who ar- gue that traditional forms of ethics education, which emphasize reflection on abstract normative theories and principles, ought to be replaced with more practical ethics courses that emphasize real-world moral training and which focus on shaping character and behavioral dispositions. I examine this trend toward practical ethics education and argue that it wrongly decouples rational- ity and moral motivation, threatens to erode a crucial distinction between ethics and policy, and contributes to widespread misunderstanding of the nature of ethics.