Ka Ya Lee

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?