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Using the Economic Concept of a 'Merit Good' to Justify the Teaching of Ethics across the University Curriculum
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
  • Mark NOWACKI, Singapore Management University
  • Wilfried Ver Eecke, Georgetown University
Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
4-2004
Abstract

Philosophers often lament the limited role that philosophy plays in the intellectual formation of the average university student. Once central to university life—there was a time when the study of philosophy defined what it meant to be a student of the liberal arts—philosophy as a subject of study has become marginalized. It is a painful reality that in many universities philosophy has been reduced to the status of a fluffy elective, a course of study to be conscientiously avoided by the more "practical" and "hard nosed" students bent upon success in the pragmatic worlds of business and politics. Only classical studies has suffered a greater come-uppance. The situation is dire, but I don’t believe that we should give up hope yet. What follows in this paper is an argument that can be used to justify the introduction of philosophical, and specifically ethical, discourse into a wide range of university courses. The argument I advance is, I hope, both sufficiently formal to convince administrators, and sufficiently broad to convince students, of the practical importance that at least one area of philosophy has for the successful pursuit of even the most praxis-oriented career.

Discipline
Publisher
SMU Social Sciences and Humanities Working Paper Series, 3-2004
City or Country
Singapore
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Citation Information
Mark NOWACKI and Wilfried Ver Eecke. "Using the Economic Concept of a 'Merit Good' to Justify the Teaching of Ethics across the University Curriculum" (2004) p. 1 - 18
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/john_williams/70/