Teaching Ethics to High School Students: Virtue Meets Economics.

When highly visible lapses in ethics occur, education gets some of the blame. Principals in the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the Enron scandal had been educated at Harvard and other elite business schools, where professional and moral ideals had arguably been replaced by a focus on profits at the expense of ethics. (1) A long-standing tradition in ethics education, however, holds that by college or graduate school it is “too late” to teach ethics. (2) A natural question arises: Can we teach ethics earlier, possibly at the high school level? This article reports on a curricular effort titled Teaching the Ethical Foundations of Economics by the National Council on Economic Education (NCEE) with just that goal. After several years of development and assessment, materials for teaching ethics in social studies classrooms have been prepared and tested. The early results suggest that in fact students can successfully be taught about ethical issues in economics and other social studies classes. The Templeton Project NCEE’s ethics project began with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation naming Jonathan B. Wight of the University of Richmond as principal investigator. “Infusing ethical and moral dimensions into economics cannot wait until students attend college,” the original 2004 grant proposal stated. A design and writing team met in 2005, consisting of a philosopher, a business ethicist, two economists, two university-level economic educators and a high school economic educator. The team developed a series of 10 lessons with visuals and activities. Lessons were class-tested in 2006 and revisions followed. The materials debuted at train-the-trainers institutes in 2007 and were published in 2007. An assessment of student learning was completed in 2008. The Lessons The lessons resulting from the NCEE project are suitable for social studies classrooms in general, with only one of them (Lesson 7 on organ transplantation) requiring knowledge of the basic supply and demand model. The other lessons would be suitable for a range of social studies classes including government, psychology, and sociology. The first lesson in the series is entitled “Does Science Need Ethics?” In this lesson, students examine how preconceptions affect observation and how ethical judgments affect economic analysis. In the second lesson, “What Is the Difference between Self-Interest and Greed?”, students make, accept, and reject ultimatum offers with candy pieces to distinguish healthy self-interest from greed. The opening lessons are followed by three lessons specifically concerning the operation of markets. In the first of these, “Do Markets Need Ethical Standards?”, students play the roles of doctors and patients to see how enlightened self-interest, duty, and virtue improve economic efficiency. Paired lessons then show the usefulness of markets in rewarding virtuous character traits and the moral limitations of markets for solving resource allocation problems. Two applied lessons then lead students through controversial social topics: “What Should We Do about Sweatshops?” and “Should We Allow a Market for Transplant Organs?” By the eighth lesson in the series, students are learning about efficiency as an ethical concept through role-playing involving the critical shortage of a life-saving serum. In the ninth lesson (reprinted in this issue), students debate the role of business in directly pursuing policies aimed at promoting social justice, the environment, and other causes. The final lesson, “What is Economic Justice?”, has students play a Veil of Ignorance game to reveal how altering people’s self-interest transforms their vision of economic justice and their positions on government policy issues. Assessment of Learning The 2008 learning assessment of the lessons employed a pre- and post-test design with a treatment group (those who used Ethical Foundations) and a control group (other students who did not participate).