Daniel E. Wueste

The piece argues that there is a connection between academic integrity (AI) and teaching ethics across the curriculum (EAC) that extends beyond shared terminology in a practical and purposeful way, i.e., in a way that is responsive to a challenge in practical and professional ethics. The twofold purpose of the essay is (a) to explain how linking AI and EAC is responsive to this challenge and (b) to make the case for the approach it involves. Two large questions are addressed. The first is about how EAC should be done, if it is connected to AI. The second (two-part) question is (a) What would success look like? and (b) How would we know that it had been achieved—how would it (success) be measured? The first concern receives the lion’s share of attention and involves taking cues from Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionism and writing about logic and the law by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and, in particular, John Dewey. Several considerations that argue for the connection are discussed before the two-part question about success is addressed in the conclusion.

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded.

Perfectionism is the name for a moral theory grounded in an ideal of the good life defined in terms of human nature. The historical significance of perfectionism is obvious. For Thomas Hurka, however, the reason for studying it is moral: the central aim of the book is to provide a "descriptive account of the best perfectionism," because "understood properly and in its most defensible version, perfectionism is an important moral option today". There is an historical dimension to his study, and for good reason, namely, that the theory has often been inadequately formulated and it has been associated with dubious concepts and doctrines--Hurka calls them "accretions"--that need to be identified and discussed, so that, somewhat like diseased tissue, they can be cut away.

The question of why legal norms are authoritative is a time-honored and troublesome one. It is especially troublesome in the context of adjudication. That is to say, why are a judge's pronouncements authoritative? This question is the central inquiry of the dissertation. ;I begin by discussing the classical forms of the two jurisprudential theories that have competed for favor in the tradition--natural law theory and legal positivism. The pervasive themes of content-justification and factual provenience, associated with classical natural law theory and legal positivism respectively, receive special attention. ;Turning to modern theories, I contrast Hans Kelsen's normativism with reductionistic legal positivism . Then, focusing attention on adjudication and the judicial task of interpreting the law, I point to some difficulties in Kelsen's doctrine of normative alternatives. ;Taking notice of the fact that Kelsen steers a course between two extremes, namely, the brooding-omnipresence-in-the-sky species of natural law theory and the law-is-what-the-judge-says-it-is species of American legal realism, I suggest, taking our cues from Lon L. Fuller, that we can pick up where Kelsen leaves off. Fuller steers the same course. Moreover, like Kelsen, he holds that law-application is law-creation and that the law regulates its own creation. These points emerge in the penultimate chapter where it is shown that the centerpiece of Fuller's theory is the concept of role responsibility. ;In the final chapter, I discuss the fundamental issue of interpretation in the adjudicative process. In view of the difficulties in Kelsen's doctrine of normative alternatives, I argue that the authoritative status of judicial pronouncements turns on the integrity of the legal process of adjudication which, in turn, marks the fulfillment of the role responsibilities of the parties to the process. In short, the key is the commitment to the internal principles of the legal process of adjudication by the parties themselves