Plugging The Ethical Literacy Gap

Editors' note: This essay is part of the 2025 Global Ethics Day online exclusive roundtable from Ethics & International Affairs. View the whole collection here.

Plugging The Ethical Literacy Gap

In a recent essay, Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal and former Fellow Wendell Wallach warn us that “ethics as we know it is gone” and that it is “time for ethics to be reenvisioned.”¹ In this short opinion piece, I offer some personal reflections on where we stand in the spirit of opening a wider discussion.

Rosenthal and Wallach are concerned with public and private discourse about ethics in the contemporary world. They highlight three deficiencies. All involve distortions in how we think and talk about ethics. Plausibly, each distortion manifests what I elsewhere call “moral corruption.”² Let me briefly recount and amplify these concerns.

The first form of distortion is “ethics washing”: roughly, the appropriation of ethical language by major actors in deceptive ways, usually to give a false impression of their achievements and their commitment to specific values.

The second form of distortion that concerns Rosenthal and Wallach involves deploying crude, manipulative appeals to “ethics” as a brute, rhetorical showstopper that blocks serious reflection on complex issues and rules out nuance from the start. I would add to this that often bashing one’s opponents with simplistic and superficial appeals to “ethics” aims to impose rigid divisions that box people into opposing camps, where a distorted form of loyalty to one’s camp—no matter what its members say or do—is the ultimate currency. This “ethics bashing” amounts to a form of intimidation that effectively bullies both sides. In doing so, it prevents serious deliberation, hinders sensible decision-making, and erodes mutual understanding. It also provides plenty of cover for bad behavior from those who control or police the “camps.” A hostile atmosphere in which participants in any meaningful discussion risk being cancelled or branded as “evil” concentrates power in the hands of those who control the messaging. This not only damages the cause of serious ethical reflection, it also breeds alienation from ethical discourse itself.

The third form of distortion in public discussions of ethics involves what we might call “ethics narrowing”: an implicit insistence on highly-constrained and stylized forms of ethical reasoning that arbitrarily limit how we can proceed. So, for example, Rosenthal and Wallach accuse the “real world” discourse about ethics of descending into binary and zero-sum thinking, of being prone to excessive perfectionism, and of shying away from difficult cases. They also warn that important discussions often become bogged down by vague slogans that initially seem attractive but are ultimately too easily co-opted by partisan interest groups in contentious ways. Arguably, “ethics narrowing” loads the dice against true ethical progress from the start.

The Hijacking of Ethics

I am sympathetic to Rosenthal and Wallach’s criticisms. Still, in my view the deficiencies they identify do not show that ethics itself is inadequate or needs to be reenvisioned. Instead, they are signs that, in many parts of our social and political life, ethical discourse has become corrupted in both its style and its substance. If this dysfunctional form of “real world” ethics is ethics at all, it is a highly simplistic, crude form of ethics. Importantly, it has little to do with the more sophisticated discussions in the academic literature on ethics, which has been developed over many decades, centuries, and sometimes millennia, across a broad range of traditions and cultures. The dysfunction in the real world is a warning sign that that the ethics agenda is easily hijacked.

Why is this? No doubt, there are many factors. I will concentrate here on the role of the educational system in perpetuating what I call a deep and wide gap in our understanding. One core problem is that so few people have much awareness even of the existence of the rich body of work on ethics, let alone a familiarity with it. Another core problem is that, without this familiarity, many people and institutions are ill-prepared to navigate the central role that ethical principles, concepts, and ideals play in our lives.

The Ethical Literacy Gap

Most of us come to contemporary social life with a very low level of literacy in ethics, which negatively impacts both our background knowledge and our specific skills in engaging with disagreement. In my view, plugging the ethical literacy gap should be a central mission of reenvisioning ethics.

Where should we look for ethics education? The disciplinary home of ethics is philosophy. In the Western tradition, Socrates famously asked, “With what should the person of even the slightest intelligence be more concerned with than this, the question of how one should live?”³ Many see Socrates as both stating the foundational question of ethics and signaling the status of ethics as preeminent for individual and public life.

Notably, Socrates also appears to be deliberately trying to unsettle us. He knows that most people are not very interested in or concerned about ethics, and he roundly condemns them for that. In effect, he accuses us of a kind of willful ignorance— ultimately, we might say, of not being “serious people.”

In the end, of course, his own society condemned him in return, executing him in part for being disruptive to the status quo by insisting that they take ethics more seriously and strive for virtue. From early on, then, it has been clear that promoting ethics can be a dangerous business. It should be no surprise that the endeavor often meets resistance, or that a pro-ethics agenda can quickly become distorted in hostile settings or in the wrong hands. Resistance, distortion and other manifestations of moral corruption are to be expected. The real question is how to respond. In my view, a key part of the answer is empowering people by getting serious about ethics literacy.

The Invisibility of Ethics

While the project of increasing ethics literacy may seem to some to be hopeless, this strikes me as overly pessimistic. In our time, ethics has had notable successes. Ethical ideals inform many of our basic social norms and conventions, at both the domestic and international levels. This is seen in fundamental principles, such as that all humans are entitled to basic respect as persons, and in the centrality of specific concepts such as well-being, rights, freedom, community, solidarity, and so on. Considerable work has been done to develop, interpret, and operationalize our understanding of these principles and concepts. Notably, much of this work is so widely accepted that it is typically taken for granted. As a result, ethics is often invisible to us, even as it is all around. This invisibility problem is dangerous: it can render us blind to the power and pervasiveness of ethical thinking, and to its essential roles in making social life possible and desirable.

There are also real successes in robust philosophical discussion of less-settled ethical issues. This continues at a pace across a broad range of subjects, in serious venues such as the Carnegie Council’s journal, Ethics & International Affairs. These discussions enrich and refine our understanding of what is at stake. Often, they reveal that even some of the most heated ethical disputes turn less on fundamental clashes of values than on disagreements about the facts and whether they align with the ethics. Indeed, one of the most common ways to distort the public discourse is to deny the facts but then dress up this denial as being about radically incommensurable values instead.

More importantly, we must not lose track of the fact that navigating disagreement is already a central topic in ethical theory and political philosophy. Much of the focus of contemporary academic ethics is on how to accommodate divergent views, the appropriate understanding of toleration and its limits in public life, and how best to aid people in developing their own judgments on issues that most centrally affect them. Indeed, it is plausible to say that even the most vocal philosophical critics of how ethical concepts are currently deployed are typically aiming to reorient and reconfigure contemporary discussions rather than repudiate the whole enterprise of ethics. For example, many ethicists call for the inclusion of a wider range of voices and for respect to be paid to those voices. As well as increasing mutual understanding, studying these debates in an academic way builds skills for productive engagement in the real world.

One of the several areas in which meaningful progress in ethical thinking has been made is medicine. Medical ethics is by now a well-established subfield in philosophy, medicine, and related disciplines. It has transformed the landscape of conventional medicine internationally. A key example is how attention to ethics has moved the medical system from one of strict hierarchy to an arena where patient rights and the need for informed consent inform basic practices at all levels. Moreover, on more contentious issues, medical ethics provides robust literatures and insights. In doing so, it provides one model for how to make moral progress.

Notably, ethical literacy is widely recognized as necessary in the medical profession. There is broad consensus that there is much to be known, as well as more work to be done. Consequently, there are numerous educational settings in which one can develop real competence and expertise. Countless courses, programs, and centers already exist, and medical ethics is well-integrated into the educational, vocational, and policy worlds. It is utterly mainstream. No one thinks this is particularly surprising, controversial, or even remarkable. Instead, it is widely accepted that this is the way things should be in an ethically serious domain such as medicine.

The “Optional Plus Casual” Approach

Unfortunately, many other areas are lagging behind medicine when it comes to taking ethics education seriously. In public life and in substantial parts of the academy, ethics literacy is much more limited. In this last section, I speculate about some reasons for this, based on my own experiences and those of colleagues. Obviously a more rigorous analysis would be helpful, and there is a relevant literature.⁴ Pursuing deeper analyses might be a first step in pursuing reform.

In my view, one cause of low ethics literacy is that, whereas foundational courses in STEM fields or in economics are increasingly assumed to be required as part of a basic education, robust ethics training is typically treated as something optional, a luxury at best. For instance, serious, theoretically-grounded academic courses in ethics are not standard in high schools, nor are they a priority at most institutions of higher education.⁵ While notable exceptions can, of course, be found—such as in many liberal arts colleges and in the Jesuit tradition—these are the kinds of exceptions that prove the rule.

A second cause of the ethical literacy gap, I worry, is a casualness about ethics education sometimes found outside of philosophy and political theory. This casualness manifests itself in numerous ways. Let me offer three examples.

First, in some settings the teaching of ethics appears to be treated very differently from other subjects. One example is that, as Kim et al. point out, “The absence of an ethics commitment in general education fundamentally suggests that the university as a unifying educational body does not think of ethics in the same way it thinks of other general education requirements it has in place.”⁶

For instance, in parts of the academy, those responsible for leading ethics courses appear not to have advanced training in ethics. It is as if ethics education, even in the universities, is seen by some as primarily the realm of the “enthusiastic amateur,” where the background assumption is that most of what is needed is technical disciplinary knowledge and whatever needs to be known about ethics specifically is easy enough to pick up “on the side.” Thus, for example, we see articles with titles like “Is it time to reclaim the ‘ethics’ in business ethics education?,” which include recommendations such as “business school administrations need to actively recruit and thoroughly train specialist and non-specialist faculty members to increase their knowledge and understanding of business ethics concepts.”⁷ Surely we would regard the enthusiastic amateur model as cavalier, even scandalous, in most other areas of scholarship or public importance. Why treat ethics differently? To do so is fair neither to the instructors placed in such an awkward position nor to their students. It also encourages misperceptions of the status and rigor of serious ethical inquiry.

A second example of the casual approach is the proliferation of primarily descriptive courses on ethics that focus mainly on confronting students with intriguing real-world cases of ethical failure (typically, severe injustices) but tend to neglect normative theorizing or treat it only superficially. As a result, it is easy for students to assume that we have few theoretical resources and little history to draw on in exploring the normative questions that most concern them. Again, this serves to discredit ethics as a subject area. While good descriptive work in ethics has its place, it is only one small part of building ethics literacy, and not the most important. Normative ethics ought to be at the center.

A third example of casualness can be found at the level of research and public policy. Sadly, when high-level teams are put together on important emerging ethical topics (such as the ethics of AI or environmental justice) it is not uncommon to find that, while they are stacked with valuable technical expertise from the sciences, they do not emphasize (and sometimes fail even to include) experts in normative ethics, such as those with advanced degrees in ethics or publication records in the relevant area of ethics. Thus, serious academic ethics can become marginalized even in overt public discussions of ethics. Again, this casualness reinforces the impression that ethics is not a serious endeavor.

The various kinds of dysfunction associated with the “optional plus casual” approach serve to undermine ethics in many parts of society. First, the approach is prone to confuse students and the public alike. Why should they respond to the call to take ethics seriously when many of the relevant institutions do not appear to do so? How can they move beyond their own initial questions about ethics in a context where the basic level of ethics literacy is so low? How are they to navigate serious distortionary pressures—such as ethics washing, ethics bashing, and ethics narrowing—without a firm grounding in the theories, traditions, concepts, and principles of ethics to guide them? How are they to push forward and defend an ethics agenda with one hand tied behind their backs?

Second, the “optional plus causal” approach risks demoralizing and even alienating those professionals, scholars, and activists who invest time and energy in building serious levels of competence and expertise in ethical thinking. Why bother with studying or developing sophisticated theories if in practice the mere mention of some ethical concept by a politician or scientist will move the whole room? Why encourage policy meetings on ethics if the discussion struggles to get beyond the level of an introductory seminar? Why advocate for new courses on the ethics of new technologies if the most likely outcome is that they will be taught by technical experts without advanced training in ethics?

Embracing low literacy in ethics in many domains is akin to deciding that elite sports teams should be run by a loose coalition of casual fans, ignoring that there is such a thing as expert coaching and that it is desirable for coaches to have real knowledge and experience of the game. Perhaps, once in a while, one would get lucky with this approach. (After all, the history of science does occasionally offer examples of a highly successful “enthusiastic amateur,” and these should be applauded.) Nevertheless, for the most part, teams that do not take coaching seriously are likely to fall into trouble, and quickly. Moreover, a league dominated by such teams would probably discredit and undermine the sport, perhaps fatally. Plausibly, this is one of the risks being highlighted by Rosenthal and Wallach.

I propose that what is needed is not a re-envisioning of ethics as such, but a real commitment to ethics literacy in the academy and in society as a whole. The “optional plus casual” approach to ethics should be repudiated, as should one of its symptoms: the crude, simplistic ethics Rosenthal and Wallach rightly want us to resist. Instead, the aim should be to help the population achieve a broad level of familiarity with the main theories, principles, concepts, and traditions of ethics, together with a strong understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and competence in navigating ethical concerns in concrete settings. While ethics literacy will not solve all our problems, it could increase the quality of our conversations and thereby allow us to move forward together more easily.

Of course, increased literacy in ethics is not by itself any guarantee against the wider threats of moral corruption—such as ethics washing and ethics bashing—that always arise when ethics finds its feet. Still, a more ethically literate population would be better placed to resist, and perhaps “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our prosperity.”⁸ Such advances would be a gift to global as well as domestic ethics.

—Stephen Gardiner

Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy, Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment, and Director of the Program on Ethics at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also a Professorial Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Gardiner is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, co-author of Dialogues on Climate Justice and Debating Climate Ethics, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics and Virtue Ethics: Old and New, and co-editor of The Ethics of "Geoengineering" the Global Climate, The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics and Climate Ethics: Essential Readings.

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