Ka Ya Lee

This article focuses on the four-step schema introduced by Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift for operationalizing the Educational Goods Framework and making ‘value-led and data-informed’ decisions in education. The four steps are (1) identify the main values at play; (2) identify the key decisions relevant to those values; (3) assess the options in light of the values and evidence; and (4) establish what is the best policy overall in the circumstances. In this article, we point out the ambiguities in this four-step approach and argue that its lack of clarity carries the danger of causing ethical problems in certain real-world educational contexts. We demonstrate our points through two cases in El Salvador, a country with non-ideal features that render it challenging to implement Brighouse and Swift’s idealized vision of rational, impartial, and informed decision-making processes. We conclude with a call for adding normative guidance on collective decision-making as an addendum to the Educational Goods Framework and note its potential utility in contexts beyond El Salvador.

Higher education is seeing renewed calls for strengthening ethics education, yet there remains a dearth of research on the state of ethics education across undergraduate curricula. Research about ethics in higher education tends to be localized and often isolated to fields of graduate study. In contribution to a contemporary, landscape understanding of ethics education, we collected data on the placement and prevalence of ethics instruction within the general education curricula at 507 major U.S. colleges and universities. Our findings suggest that 1) most schools in our study’s population do not explicitly require ethics as a part of their general education curricula; and 2) a school’s religiosity and research status are positively associated with explicitly requiring ethics instruction for its undergraduate student body.

Contemporary virtue epistemologists who write about education have often failed to answer two rather fundamental questions: firstly, “Why cultivate intellectual virtues?” Secondly, and more fundamentally, “Why ought children to learn? That is, how should we conceive of the epistemic goal of education?” In addressing this latter question, I posit that cognitive flourishing is the comprehensive epistemic goal of education that can serve as the basis for virtue-focused epistemology of education. After establishing this point, I then argue that a well-grounded virtue-centered epistemology of education would be possible after addressing the following three questions: 1) what is a cognitively good life? 2) how does it relate to understanding? and 3) what is the relationship between understanding and intellectual virtues?