Incorporating Philosophical Theory, Ethical Decision-Making Models, and Multidimensional Legitimacy into Practical Ethics Education

This paper explores how major work in contemporary practical and applied ethics can be incorporated into the teaching of ethics (including professional, business, and applied ethics) to enhance its practicality and relevance. It explores three areas. First, while ethics education often focusses on applying principles to fact situations, how and why practitioners in the real world will act morally also depends a quite different factor: legitimacy. Legitimacy refers to an entity’s moral status, and whether it warrants respect and support because of the presence of key qualities like efficacy, consent, deliberation, and democracy. Second, understanding ethical decision-making models can be valuable to future practitioners as it makes them aware of potential weak links in their attempts to act morally, and empowers them to think strategically about how these weaknesses may be combatted. Third, the use of philosophical theory in teaching practical ethics is a vexed question, involving issues of complexity, reductive-ness and indoctrination. However, explicitly confronting the range of epistemic states (beliefs and attitudes) that students can adopt helps show how these issues may be sensibly mitigated.