article on value based education in 150 words

Article on Value Based Education | Short and Long | Learning for The Future

Value based education is the process of teaching and learning in which the values of honesty, respect, responsibility, cooperation, and compassion are emphasized. It helps children develop the skills they need to become caring and contributing members of society. Let’s dive deeper to read complete article on value based education –

Education which aims at creating only means of livelihood is not complete in itself unless it is supplemented with human values. Write an article in 150-200 words on the “Need of Value Education”, especially in the present day scenario of declining ethical values in the country. You are Shreya/ Shaan. 

 Ans.                                                                 The need for Value Education

                                                                                      by Shreya

The world today is experiencing a systemic breakdown. There is an ongoing conflict between individual and social responsibilities of a person. A question increasingly being asked is that in the mad race of becoming modern have we somewhere lost our basic human values? It is always said that values are never taught, they are caught, but in the present scenario when parents don’t have time to be with their children, there is no source from where values can be imbibed. Fostering a child with values was always a family’s responsibility. But today with the fast-paced life the entire responsibility of providing values to the child falls on schools and educational institutions. It is the school which is an important stakeholder in a child’s development and nation-building. Making value education part of the curriculum is the only solution to protect society from getting degraded. This Endeavour is to saw as an investment in building the foundations for lifelong learning, promoting human existence as well as promoting social cohesion, national integration and global unity. Education is necessarily a process of inculcating values to equip the learner to lead a kind of life that is to satisfy the individual in accordance with the cherished values and ideals of the society. No education is value-free and goals of education include the goals of value education. A classroom has become the most influential place. It is in the classroom where the most important part of a person’s life is spent and only when values are taught here, we can expect the desired outcome. Bringing values in the curriculum will foster the worldwide vision of what true education is all about and create responsible members of the society and individuals leading a peaceful and morally just life.

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Short Article on Value Based Education In 150 Words

Value based education is an approach to teaching that focuses on instilling values in students. The goal is to help students develop into good citizens who can make positive contributions to society. There are many different ways to incorporate value-based education into the classroom, but some common methods include incorporating service learning projects, teaching social and emotional skills, and promoting character development. One important aspect of value-based education is service learning. Service-learning projects give students the opportunity to put their values into action by working on behalf of others. These projects can be as simple as volunteering at a local food bank or helping to clean up a park. Not only do these projects provide valuable services to the community, but they also teach students about the importance of giving back.  Another way to promote value-based education is by teaching social and emotional skills. These skills are essential for good citizenship, and they can be learned through classroom activities and discussions. When students are taught how to resolve conflict peacefully and how to cooperate with others, they are more likely to model these behaviors in their own lives. 

Essay on Importance of Value Education- 200 Words

Value based education is an important aspect of a child’s development. It helps them to learn the importance of moral values and how to apply them in their everyday lives.  By instilling these values at an early age, children can grow up to be responsible and contributing members of society. One of the main benefits of value based education is that it teaches children how to make good decisions.  With so many choices available to them nowadays, it’s important for children to learn how to weigh up their options and choose the right path. Value based education gives them the tools they need to do this, and as a result, they are more likely to make decisions that are in their best interests.  Another advantage of value-based education is that it fosters a sense of community. When everyone is working towards the same goal, there is a strong sense of togetherness and cooperation. This can help children feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves, and it can also teach them the importance of helping others. In conclusion, value based education is extremely beneficial for children. It helps them develop into well-rounded individuals who are able to make good decisions and contribute positively to society.

Importance of Value-Based Education Essay- 250 Words

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of value-based education. This type of education focuses on teaching students the importance of values such as honesty, respect, and responsibility. One of the main reasons why value-based education is so important is because it helps to instill these values in young people. When students are taught the importance of values such as honesty and respect, they are more likely to display these qualities in their own lives.  Additionally, value-based education can help to create a more positive and productive society. When individuals possess values such as responsibility and respect, they are more likely to contribute to their community in a positive way. There are many different ways in which value-based education can be delivered. For example, many schools now have programs that teach students about character development and social responsibility. Additionally, many teachers try to incorporate values into their lesson plans. By doing so, they are helping their students to develop into well-rounded individuals who possess strong moral character. Value-based education is important because it helps individuals to develop into responsible and productive members of society. It also helps to create a more positive community by instilling values such as respect and responsibility in young people. In conclusion, value-based education is important for several reasons. First, it instills values in students that will help them become good citizens. Second, it helps students develop a strong work ethic and character. Finally, value-based education prepares students for the real world by teaching them how to make responsible decisions. 

Article on Value Based Education 400 + Words

What is meant by value based education?

Value based education is an educational system that focuses on instilling values in students, rather than simply academic knowledge. The goal of value based education is to prepare students to be good citizens and productive members of society. Many schools and universities now have programs that focus on teaching values, such as respect, responsibility, honesty, and cooperation. 

Characteristics of Value Education

Value education is concerned with the development of the individual’s character and personality. It is not just about imparting knowledge but also about the development of an individual’s values and attitude. The aim of value education is to help individuals become responsible and ethical citizens.

Following are 5 key characteristics of value education:

1. Value education instills in individuals a sense of responsibility towards society. 2. It helps individuals develop a positive attitude towards life. 3. Value education fosters in individuals a sense of respect for others and their property. 4. It encourages individuals to be honest and truthful in all their dealings. 5. Value education inculcates in individuals a sense of duty towards the nation and its people.

Why is value-based education important to life?

Value based education is important to life because it helps individuals develop a strong sense of self-worth and purpose. In addition, value-based education can promote physical and mental health, as well as social and emotional well-being. Furthermore, value-based education can instill in individuals a desire to contribute to their community and society at large. Finally, value-based education can provide individuals with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in today’s increasingly complex world.

5 Values of Education

There are many values of education, but five of the most important ones are:

1. Education develops critical thinking and problem-solving skills. 2. Education helps us to become more independent and self-sufficient. 3. Education leads to improved employment prospects and higher earnings. 4. Education helps us to understand and appreciate other cultures. 5. Education can help to reduce crime and social problems.

Principles of Value Based Education

1. Developing a sense of self-worth: Every individual has intrinsic worth and should be treated with dignity and respect. 2. Promoting social and emotional learning: Students should be taught how to manage their emotions, set goals, and resolve conflicts. 3. Encouraging pro-social behavior: Students should be encouraged to cooperate, help others, and make positive contributions to their community. 4. Fostering moral development: Students should be given opportunities to explore ethical issues and develop their own moral code.

Main Goal of Values Education

The main goal of values education is to instill in students the importance of living by a set of moral and ethical values. These values can include honesty, integrity, respect, compassion, and responsibility. By teaching students to live by these values, they will be better equipped to handle the challenges and opportunities that life will present them with.

Factors of Value Education

1. A focus on the individual – Value education should be tailored to the needs of the individual and their unique circumstances. 2. A focus on relationships – Value education should help individuals to develop positive relationships with others. 3. A focus on life skills – Value education should help individuals to develop essential life skills such as communication, problem-solving and decision-making. 4. A focus on character development – Value education should help individuals to develop positive character traits such as honesty, responsibility and respect. 5. A focus on personal growth – Value education should help individuals to grow and develop as people, both intellectually and emotionally.

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Importance of Value Education

• Updated on  
• Jan 18, 2024

What is Value Education? Value-based education emphasizes the personality development of individuals to shape their future and tackle difficult situations with ease. It moulds the children so they get attuned to changing scenarios while handling their social, moral, and democratic duties efficiently. The importance of value education can be understood through its benefits as it develops physical and emotional aspects, teaches mannerisms and develops a sense of brotherhood, instils a spirit of patriotism as well as develops religious tolerance in students. Let’s understand the importance of value education in schools as well as its need and importance in the 21st century.

Here’s our review of the Current Education System of India !

This Blog Includes:

Need and importance of value education, purpose of value education, importance of value education in school, difference between traditional and value education, essay on importance of value education, speech on importance of value education, early age moral and value education, young college students (1st or 2nd-year undergraduates), workshops for adults, student exchange programs, co-curricular activities, how it can be taught & associated teaching methods.

This type of education should not be seen as a separate discipline but as something that should be inherent in the education system. Merely solving problems must not be the aim, the clear reason and motive behind must also be thought of. There are multiple facets to understanding the importance of value education.

Here is why there is an inherent need and importance of value education in the present world:

• It helps in making the right decisions in difficult situations and improving decision-making abilities.
• It teaches students with essential values like kindness, compassion and empathy.
• It awakens curiosity in children developing their values and interests. This further helps in skill development in students.
• It also fosters a sense of brotherhood and patriotism thus helping students become more open-minded and welcoming towards all cultures as well as religions.
• It provides a positive direction to a student’s life as they are taught about the right values and ethics.
• It helps students find their true purpose towards serving society and doing their best to become a better version of themselves.
• With age comes a wide range of responsibilities. This can at times develop a sense of meaninglessness and can lead to a rise in mental health disorders, mid-career crisis and growing discontent with one’s life. Value education aims to somewhat fill the void in people’s lives.
• Moreover, when people study the significance of values in society and their lives, they are more convinced and committed to their goals and passions. This leads to the development of awareness which results in thoughtful and fulfilling decisions. 
• The key importance of value education is highlighted in distinguishing the execution of the act and the significance of its value. It instils a sense of ‘meaning’ behind what one is supposed to do and thus aids in personality development .

In the contemporary world, the importance of value education is multifold. It becomes crucial that is included in a child’s schooling journey and even after that to ensure that they imbibe moral values as well as ethics.

Here are the key purposes of value education:

• To ensure a holistic approach to a child’s personality development in terms of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects
• Inculcation of patriotic spirit as well as the values of a good citizen
• Helping students understand the importance of brotherhood at social national and international levels
• Developing good manners and responsibility and cooperativeness
• Promoting the spirit of curiosity and inquisitiveness towards the orthodox norms
• Teaching students about how to make sound decisions based on moral principles
• Promoting a democratic way of thinking and living
• Imparting students with the significance of tolerance and respect towards different cultures and religious faiths

There is an essential need and importance of value education in school curriculums as it helps students learn the basic fundamental morals they need to become good citizens as well as human beings. Here are the top reasons why value education in school is important:

• Value education can play a significant role in shaping their future and helping them find their right purpose in life.
• Since school paves the foundation for every child’s learning, adding value-based education to the school curriculum can help them learn the most important values right from the start of their academic journey.
• Value education as a discipline in school can also be focused more on learning human values rather than mugging up concepts, formulas and theories for higher scores. Thus, using storytelling in value education can also help students learn the essentials of human values.
• Education would surely be incomplete if it didn’t involve the study of human values that can help every child become a kinder, compassionate and empathetic individual thus nurturing emotional intelligence in every child.

Both traditional, as well as values education, is essential for personal development. Both help us in defining our objectives in life. However, while the former teaches us about scientific, social, and humanistic knowledge, the latter helps to become good humans and citizens. Opposite to traditional education, values education does not differentiate between what happens inside and outside the classroom.

Value Education plays a quintessential role in contributing to the holistic development of children. Without embedding values in our kids, we wouldn’t be able to teach them about good morals, what is right and what is wrong as well as key traits like kindness, empathy and compassion. The need and importance of value education in the 21st century are far more important because of the presence of technology and its harmful use. By teaching children about essential human values, we can equip them with the best digital skills and help them understand the importance of ethical behaviour and cultivating compassion. It provides students with a positive view of life and motivates them to become good human beings, help those in need, respect their community as well as become more responsible and sensible.

Youngsters today move through a gruelling education system that goes on almost unendingly. Right from when parents send them to kindergarten at the tender age of 4 or 5 to completing their graduation, there is a constant barrage of information hurled at them. It is a puzzling task to make sense of this vast amount of unstructured information. On top of that, the bar to perform better than peers and meet expectations is set at a quite high level. This makes a youngster lose their curiosity and creativity under the burden. They know ‘how’ to do something but fail to answer the ‘why’. They spend their whole childhood and young age without discovering the real meaning of education. This is where the importance of value education should be established in their life. It is important in our lives because it develops physical and emotional aspects, teaches mannerisms and develops a sense of brotherhood, instils a spirit of patriotism as well as develops religious tolerance in students. Thus, it is essential to teach value-based education in schools to foster the holistic development of students. Thank you.

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Types of Value Education

To explore how value education has been incorporated at different levels from primary education, and secondary education to tertiary education, we have explained some of the key phases and types of value education that must be included to ensure the holistic development of a student.

Middle and high school curriculums worldwide including in India contain a course in moral science or value education. However, these courses rarely focus on the development and importance of values in lives but rather on teachable morals and acceptable behaviour. Incorporating some form of value education at the level of early childhood education can be constructive.

Read more at Child Development and Pedagogy

Some universities have attempted to include courses or conduct periodic workshops that teach the importance of value education. There has been an encouraging level of success in terms of students rethinking what their career goals are and increased sensitivity towards others and the environment.

Our Top Read: Higher Education in India

Alarmingly, people who have only been 4 to 5 years into their professional careers start showing signs of job exhaustion, discontent, and frustration. The importance of value education for adults has risen exponentially. Many non-governmental foundations have begun to conduct local workshops so that individuals can deal with their issues and manage such questions in a better way.

Recommended Read: Adult Education

It is yet another way of inculcating a spirit of kinship amongst students. Not only do student exchange programs help explore an array of cultures but also help in understanding the education system of countries.

Quick Read: Scholarships for Indian Students to Study Abroad

Imparting value education through co-curricular activities in school enhances the physical, mental, and disciplinary values among children. Furthermore, puppetry , music, and creative writing also aid in overall development.

Check Out: Drama and Art in Education

The concept of teaching values has been overly debated for centuries. Disagreements have taken place over whether value education should be explicitly taught because of the mountainous necessity or whether it should be implicitly incorporated into the teaching process. An important point to note is that classes or courses may not be successful in teaching values but they can teach the importance of value education. It can help students in exploring their inner passions and interests and work towards them. Teachers can assist students in explaining the nature of values and why it is crucial to work towards them. The placement of this class/course, if there is to be one, is still under fierce debate. 

Value education is the process through which an individual develops abilities, attitudes, values as well as other forms of behaviour of positive values depending on the society he lives in.

Every individual needs to ensure a holistic approach to their personality development in physical, mental, social and moral aspects. It provides a positive direction to the students to shape their future, helping them become more responsible and sensible and comprehending the purpose of their lives.

Values are extremely important because they help us grow and develop and guide our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Our values are reflected in our decision-making and help us find our true purpose in life and become responsible and developed individuals.

The importance of value education at various stages in one’s life has increased with the running pace and complexities of life. It is becoming difficult every day for youngsters to choose their longing and pursue careers of their choice. In this demanding phase, let our Leverage Edu experts guide you in following the career path you have always wanted to explore by choosing an ideal course and taking the first step to your dream career .

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Your Article is awesome. It’s very helpful to know the value of education and the importance of value education. Thank you for sharing.

Hi Anil, Thanks for your feedback!

Value education is the most important thing because they help us grow and develop and guide our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Thank you for sharing.

Hi Susmita, Rightly said!

Best blog. well explained. Thank you for sharing keep sharing.

Thanks.. For.. The Education value topic.. With.. This.. Essay. I.. Scored.. Good. Mark’s.. In.. My. Exam thanks a lot..

Your Article is Very nice.It is Very helpful for me to know the value of Education and its importance…Thanks for sharing your thoughts about education…Thank you ……

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2020 Articles

Critical Pedagogy in the New Normal: Teaching values-based education online

Maboloc, Christopher Ryan

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash INTRODUCTION The coronavirus pandemic is a challenge to educators, policy makers, and ordinary people. In facing the threat from COVID-19, school systems and global institutions need “to address the essential matter of each human being and how they are interacting with, and affected by, a much wider set of biological and technical conditions.”[1] Educators must grapple with the societal issues that come with the intent of ensuring the safety of the public. To some, “these are actually as important as the biological concerns of people.”[2]           The current global crisis shows that “scientifically, socially, and politically the economy and technosphere are not just related, they are integral to a comprehensive response to major challenges.”[3] In developing these responses, scientists, government leaders, and policy makers need to consider the vulnerabilities of people, especially those in “thrown away” groups.[4] Jerome Ravetz explains that “microscopic viral predators cull our populations, as ever, but with a selection that is not natural but social and political.”[5] Educators must address the underlying vulnerabilities and evaluate the virus as a threat to academic experiences and access to a fair education. ANALYSIS Critical Pedagogy          By definition, the critical approach to teaching is about the problem-posing method of education developed by Paolo Freire. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he proposed a paradigm shift away from the banking method of learning wherein teachers deposit knowledge into the minds of students. Critical pedagogy is an educational approach that challenges students to develop the ability to recognize and criticize dominating theories and evaluate them in their social context. Teachers press students to recognize oppression and try to remedy oppression in their culture.[6] Despite the lack of in-person interaction between the teacher and the students, the effort to use innovative teaching techniques like critical pedagogy should continue.           Online learning is not just about the use of technology, although the internet is crucial in the delivery of content. Since human beings are creators of value, they determine the meaning and purpose of technology. In this way, the set of values people have will influence online learning. Teachers cannot be more concerned about outcomes than about the process itself. The process is crucial since the ability of the student to think critically is developed in the exchange between the student and the teacher. The teacher cannot simply dump loads of information (deposit knowledge) but must pose problems to test the analytical and critical skills of students.[7]            Education is about how people humanize the world.  Policy makers miss the point when they focus on the delivery but do not pay attention to the substantive aspect of learning, which is human empowerment. Education is meant to expand the freedom of people. Education should be seen as an integrative activity. Learning is a formative process that aims to develop the human person. Without the face-to-face encounter between teacher and students, the challenge is finding ways to make learning an effective means to mold the values of young people. Online Critical Pedagogy & the Role of Technology            Physical distance appears to be an impediment in realizing the ideals of learning. The lack of contact between the teacher and the students may prevent a more meaningful interaction since online instruction is impersonal. It can be argued that there is no alternative to some classroom activities, especially laboratory experiments in science courses. The total classroom environment naturally influences the behavior of students when it comes to academic work: the look in the eyes of the professor, the caring ways of a teacher, or the pressure while taking exams contribute to an experience that only a classroom setting can provide. If implemented properly, technology can facilitate the personal relationships between teachers and students while providing meaningful experiences.           With the current need for online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, gadgets are indispensable.  Some would even consider gadgets an extension of the human body. A mobile phone is not just any instrument; it has evolved into a novel way of being in the world. Our gadgets are a means of seeing how the outside world unfolds. Modern technological tools allow the interface of people in many fields of experience in a globalized environment. Computers and other digital devices extend the meaning and value of human freedom. For example, a laptop provided to a poor child can redefine the meaning of and what the future might hold for that child. The device is crucial to the whole learning process. Modern tools are critical to self-discovery and greater freedom.            The values that people embrace will matter in the new normal. The internet has provided a new democratic space that empowers groups and individuals to express themselves and to understand the world.[8] In an online class, students and teachers alike need to analyze big picture questions and layers of information. For example, the student in an ethics or philosophy class can reflect on the realities of life. With the proper guidance, online education should help define the meaning of moral commitment and human responsibility. CONCLUSION           Before the pandemic, policy makers had been pursuing the goals of a globalized economy. They had been fashioning and promoting programs that cater to the interests of a consumer-driven world that has deprived the poor of opportunity. When the pandemic struck, globalization suddenly came to a halt and people realized the things that truly matter in life – family, love, and life itself. The new normal must now emphasize the role of education as a source of inner strength that can empower the person to live well reinforcing values based on a social consciousness.          Critical pedagogy is possible under the new normal. The distance between the teacher and student does not make the educational process less real and in the absence of a vaccine, online learning is the safest strategy. Governments cannot freeze an entire school year since education is the only way out from poverty for millions. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a reason to re-imagine teaching using technology to encourage all students to question systems of oppression or greed, as the persistent pursuit of the truth is what education is all about. [1] Hartsell, Layne, Krabbe, Alexander, & Pastreich, Emmanuel. “Covid-19, Global Justice, and a New Biopolitics of the Anthropocene.” Social Ethics Society Journal of Applied Philosophy 6, no. 2 (2020), 3. [2] Ravetz, Jerome. “Science for a Proper Recovery: Post-Normal, not New Normal.” Issues in Science and Technology [Internet] July 15, 2020. https://issues.org/post-normal-science-for-pandemic-recovery/ [3] Hartsell, et al. “Covid-19, Global Justice, and a New Biopolitics of the Anthropocene,” 6. [4] Ravetz, “Science for a Proper Recovery: Post-Normal, not New Normal.” [5] Ibid. [6] Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York: Continuum Books, 1993). [7] Freire writes that in such a situation “instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” See his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. [8] Bakardjieva, Maria. Internet Society. (London: Sage Publications, 2005).

• Medical ethics
• Bioethics--Philosophy

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Education, Online Education, Online learning, Critical Pedagogy, COVID-19, Global education

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15 Values Education

Graham Oddie, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Published: 02 January 2010
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This article offers a metaphysical account of value as part of a general approach to values education. Value endorsements and their transmission are unavoidable in educational settings, as they are everywhere. The question, then, is not whether to teach values but which values to teach, in what contexts and how to teach them effectively. This article discusses the contestedness of value endorsements, the place for noncognitive value endorsements in education and the role of inculcating beliefs in education. The article also describes the rationalist and empiricist response problem of intrinsic motivation.

Moral education has received a great deal of attention in the philosophy of education. But morality is just one aspect of the evaluative, which embraces not just the deontic concepts—right, wrong, permissible, obligatory, supererogatory, and so on—but also the full range of concepts with evaluative content. This includes the so‐called thin evaluative concepts (e.g., good, bad, better, worst ); the thick evaluative concepts (e.g., courageous, compassionate, callous, elegant, cruel, charming, clumsy, humble, tendentious, witty, craven, generous, salacious, sexy, sarcastic, vindictive ); and the concepts that lie somewhere between the extremes of thick and thin (e.g., just, virtuous, sublime, vicious, beautiful ). Value, broadly construed to embrace the entire range of evaluative concepts, presents an educationist with some problems. Should values be part of the curriculum at all? If so, which values is it legitimate for educators to teach and how should they be taught?

1. The Contestedness of Value Endorsements

Philosophers disagree wildly about the metaphysics of value, its epistemological status, and the standing of various putative values. Given the heavily contested nature of value, as well as of the identity and weight of particular putative values, what business do we have teaching values? Perhaps we don't know enough about values to teach them (perhaps we don't know anything at all 1 ).

It might be objected to this argument against the teaching of values, from value's contestedness, that value theory is no different from, say, physics, biology, or even mathematics. There is much about these disciplines that is contested, but no one argues that that's a good reason to purge them from the curriculum. This comparison, however, is not totally convincing. True, philosophers of physics disagree over the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, but there is little disagreement over its applications, its significance, or the necessity for students to master it. Similarly, even if there is disagreement over the foundations of mathematics or biology, few deny that we should give children a solid grounding in arithmetic or evolution.

The contestedness of value has been used to argue for a “fact/value” distinction that, when applied to educational contexts, leads to the injunction that teachers should stick to the “facts,” eschewing the promulgation of “value judgments.” Given the contestedness of values, an educator should pare her value endorsements down to their purely natural (nonevaluative) contents, indicating at most that, as a matter of personal preference, she takes a certain evaluative stance.

2. The Value Endorsements Informing the Educational Enterprise

Attempts to purge education of value endorsements are, of course, doomed. Value endorsements are not just pervasive, they are inevitable. The educational enterprise is about the transmission of knowledge and the skills necessary to acquire, extend, and improve knowledge. But what is knowledge—along with truth, understanding, depth, empirical adequacy, simplicity, coherence, completeness, and so on—if not a cognitive good or value? 2 And what is an improvement in knowledge if not an increase in cognitive value? Sometimes cognitive values are clearly instrumental—acquiring knowledge might help you become a physicist, a doctor, or an artist, say. But instrumental value is parasitic upon the intrinsic value of something else—here, knowledge of the world, relieving suffering, or creating things of beauty.

The enterprise of creating and transmitting knowledge is freighted with cognitive value, but episodes within the enterprise also express particular value endorsements. A curriculum, for example, is an endorsement of the value of attending to the items on the menu. It says, “ These are worth studying.” The practice of a discipline is laden with norms and values. To practice the discipline you have to learn how to do it well : to learn norms and values governing, inter alia, citing and acknowledging others who deserve it; honestly recording and relaying results; not forging, distorting, or suppressing data; humbly acknowledging known shortcomings; courageously, but not recklessly, taking cognitive risks; eschewing exaggeration of the virtues of a favored theory; having the integrity to pursue unwelcome consequences of discoveries. In mastering a discipline, one is inducted into a rich network of value endorsements.

The thesis of the separability of fact and value, and the associated bracketing of value endorsements, is not just tendentious (it precludes the possibility of facts about value) but also is so clearly unimplementable that it is perhaps puzzling that it has ever been taken entirely seriously. The educational enterprise is laden with value endorsements distinctive of the enterprise of knowledge and the transmission of those very endorsements to the next generation. Without the transmission of those values, our educational institutions would disappear. So, even if the value endorsements at the core of education are contested, the enterprise itself requires their endorsement and transmission.

3. The Place for Noncognitive Value Endorsements in Education

To what extent does the transmission of cognitive values commit us to the teaching of other values? It would be fallacious to infer that, in any educational setting, all and any values are on the table—that it is always permissible, or always obligatory, for a teacher to impart his value endorsements when those are irrelevant to the central aims of the discipline at hand. For certain value issues, a teacher may have no business promulgating his endorsements. For example, the values that inform physics don't render it desirable for a physicist to impart his views on abortion during a lab. Physicists typically have no expertise on that issue.

But it would be equally fallacious to infer that cognitive values are tightly sealed off from noncognitive values. Certain cognitive values, however integral to the enterprise of knowledge, are identical to values with wider application. Some I have already adverted to: honesty, courage, humility, integrity, and the like. These have different applications in different contexts, but it would be odd if values bearing the same names within and without the academy were distinct. So, in transmitting cognitive values, one is ipso facto involved in transmitting values that have wider application. 3 This doesn't imply that an honest researcher will be an honest spouse—she might lie about an affair. And an unscrupulous teacher might steal an idea from one of his students without being tempted to embezzle. People are inconsistent about the values on which they act, but these are the same values honored in the one context and dishonored in the other.

I have argued that there are cognitive values informing the educational enterprise that need to be endorsed and transmitted, and that these are identical to cognate values that have broader application. However, this doesn't exhaust the values that require attention in educational settings. There are disciplines—ethics, for example—in which the subject matter itself involves substantive value issues. In a course on the morality of abortion, for example, it would be impossible to avoid talking about the value of certain beings and the disvalue of ending their existence. Here, explicit attention must be paid to noncognitive values. There are other disciplines—the arts, for example—in which the point of education is to teach students to discern aesthetically valuable features, to develop evaluative frameworks to facilitate future investigations, and to produce valuable works. Within such disciplines it would be incredibly silly to avoid explicit evaluation.

4. The Role of Inculcating Beliefs in Education

Grant that there are noncognitive values, as well as cognitive values, at the core of certain disciplines. Still, given that there are radically conflicting views about these—the value of a human embryo, or the value of Duchamp's Fountain—shouldn't teachers steer clear of explicitly transmitting value endorsements? Here, at least, isn't it the teacher's responsibility to distance himself from his value endorsements and teach the subject in some “value‐neutral” way?

In contentious areas, teachers should obviously be honest and thorough in their treatment of the full range of conflicting arguments. Someone who thinks abortion is impermissible should give both Thomson's and Tooley's famous arguments for permissibility a full hearing. Someone who thinks abortion permissible should do the same for Marquis's. 4 However, even if some fact about value were known , there are still good reasons for teachers not to indoctrinate, precisely because inducing value knowledge is the aim of the course.

Value knowledge, like all knowledge, is not just a matter of having true beliefs. Knowledge is believing what is true for good reasons. To impart knowledge, one must cultivate the ability to embrace truths for good reasons. Students are overly impressed by the fact that their teachers have certain beliefs, and they are motivated to embrace such beliefs for that reason alone. So, it's easy for a teacher to impart favored beliefs, regardless of where the truth lies. A teacher will do a better job of imparting reasonable belief—and the critical skills that her students will need to pursue and possess knowledge—if she does not reveal overbearingly her beliefs. That's a common teaching strategy whatever the subject matter, not just value. 5

The appropriate educational strategy may appear to be derived from a separation of the evaluative from the non‐evaluative, but its motivation is quite different. It is because the aim of values education is value knowledge (which involves reasonable value beliefs) rather than mere value belief, that instructors should eschew indoctrination.

5. The Natural/Value Distinction Examined

In ethics and the arts, noncognitive values constitute the subject matter. But that isn't the norm. In many subject areas, values aren't the explicit subject matter. Despite this, in most disciplines it isn't clear where the subject itself ends and questions of value begin. Even granted a rigorous nonvalue/value distinction, for logical reasons there are, inevitably, claims that straddle the divide. It would be undesirable, perhaps impossible, to excise such claims from the educational environment.

Consider a concrete example. An evolutionary biologist is teaching a class on the evolutionary explanation of altruism. He argues that altruistic behavior is explicable as “selfishness” at the level of genes. His claim, although naturalistic, has implications for the value of altruistic acts. Suppose animals are genetically disposed to make greater sacrifices for those more closely genetically related to them than for those only distantly related, because such sacrifices help spread their genes. Suppose that the value of an altruistic sacrifice is partly a function of overcoming excessive self‐regard. It would follow that the value of some altruistic acts—those on behalf of close relatives—would be diminished. And that is a consequence properly classified as evaluative. Of course, this inference appeals to a proposition connecting value with the natural, but such propositions are pervasive and ineliminable.

Here is an argument for the unsustainability of a clean natural/value divide among propositions. A clean divide goes hand in glove with the Humean thesis that a purely evaluative claim cannot be validly inferred from purely natural claims, and vice versa. Let N be a purely natural claim and V a purely evaluative claim. Consider the conditional claim C : if N then V . Suppose C is a purely natural claim. Then from two purely natural claims ( N and C ) one could infer a purely evaluative claim V . Suppose instead that C is purely evaluative. The conjunction of two purely evaluative (natural) claims is itself purely evaluative (natural). Likewise, the negation of a purely evaluative (natural) proposition is itself purely evaluative (natural). 6 Consequently, not‐ N , like N , is purely natural, and so one could derive a purely evaluative claim ( C ) from a purely natural claim (not‐ N ). Alternatively, not‐ V , like V , is purely evaluative. So, one could derive a purely natural claim (not‐ N ) from two purely evaluative claims ( C and not‐ V ).

Propositions like C are natural‐value hybrids : they cannot be coherently assigned a place on either side of a sharp natural/value dichotomy. Hybrids are not just propositions that have both natural and evaluative content (like the thick evaluative attributes). Rather, their characteristic feature is that their content is not the conjunction of their purely natural and purely evaluative contents.

Hybrids are rife among the propositions in which we traffic. Jack believes Cheney unerringly condones what's good (i.e., Cheney condones X if and only if X is good), and Jill, that Cheney unerringly condones what's not good. Neither Jack nor Jill knows that Cheney has condoned the waterboarding of suspected terrorists. As it happens, both are undecided on the question of the value of waterboarding suspected terrorists. They don't disagree on any purely natural fact (neither knows what Cheney condoned); nor do they disagree on any purely evaluative fact (neither knows whether condoning waterboarding is good). They disagree on this: Cheney condones waterboarding suspected terrorists if and only if condoning such is good . Suppose both come to learn the purely natural fact that Cheney condones waterboarding. They will deduce from their beliefs conflicting, purely evaluative conclusions: Jack that condoning waterboarding is good; Jill that condoning waterboarding is not good. So, given that folk endorse rival hybrid propositions, settling a purely natural fact will impact the value endorsements of the participants differentially because natural facts and value endorsements are entangled via a rich set of hybrids.

I don't deny that there are purely natural or purely evaluative claims, nor that certain claims can be disentangled into their pure components. I am arguing that there are hybrids—propositions that are not equivalent to the conjunction of their natural and evaluative components. The fact that we all endorse hybrid claims means that learning something purely natural will often exert rational pressure on evaluative judgments (and vice versa). An education in the purely natural sciences may thus necessitate a reevaluation of values; and an education in values may necessitate a rethinking of purely natural beliefs.

6. Intrinsically Motivating Facts and the Queerness of Knowledge of Value

I have argued that natural and evaluative endorsements cannot be neatly disentangled in an educational setting for purely logical reasons. Still, it's problematic to embrace teaching a subject unless we have a body of knowledge . For there to be value knowledge there must be knowable truths about value. A common objection to these is that they would be very queer —unlike anything else that we are familiar with in the universe.

The queerness of knowable value facts can be elicited by considering their impact on motivation. Purely natural facts are motivationally inert. For example, becoming acquainted with the fact that this glass contains potable water (or a lethal dose of poison) does not by itself necessarily motivate me to drink (or refrain from drinking). Only in combination with an antecedent desire on my part (to quench my thirst, or to commit suicide) does this purely natural fact provide me with a motivation. A purely evaluative fact would, however, be different. Suppose it's a fact that the best thing for me to do now would be to drink potable water, and that I know that fact. Then it would be very odd for me to say, “I know that drinking potable water would be the best thing for me to do now, but I am totally unmoved to do so.” One explanation of this oddness is that knowledge of a value fact entails a corresponding desire: value facts necessarily motivate those who become acoquainted with them.

Why would this intrinsic power to motivate be queer rather than simply interesting ? The reason is that beliefs and desires seem logically independent—having a certain set of beliefs does not entail the having of any particular desires. Beliefs about value would violate this apparent independence. Believing that something is good would entail having a corresponding desire . Additionally, simply by virtue of imparting to your student a value belief you would thereby instill in him the corresponding motivation to act. How can mere belief necessitate a desire? Believing something good is one thing; desiring it is something else.

One response to the queerness objection is to reject the idea that knowing an evaluative fact necessarily motivates. Let's suppose, with Hume, that beliefs without desires are powerless to motivate. A person may well have a contingent independent desire to do what he believes to be good, and once he becomes acquainted with a good he may, contingently, be motivated to pursue it. But no mere belief, in isolation from such an antecedent desire, can motivate. That sits more easily with the frequent gap between what values we espouse and how we actually behave.

This Humean view would escape the mysteries of intrinsic motivation, but would present the educationist with a different problem. What is the point of attempting to induce true value beliefs if there is no necessary connection between value beliefs and motivations? If inducing true evaluative beliefs is the goal of values education, and evaluative beliefs have no such connection with desires, then one might successfully teach a psychopath correct values, but his education would make him no more likely to choose the good. His acquisition of the correct value beliefs , coupled with his total indifference to the good, might just equip him to make his psychopathic adventures more effectively evil.

There are two traditions in moral education that can be construed as different responses to the problem of intrinsic motivation. There is the formal, rationalist tradition according to which the ultimate questions of what to do are a matter of reason, or rational coherence in the body of evaluative judgments. But there is a corresponding empiricist tradition, according to which there is a source of empirical data about value, something which also supplies the appropriate motivation to act.

7. The Rationalist Response to the Problem of Intrinsic Motivation

Kant famously espoused the principle of universalizability: that a moral judgment is legitimate only if one can consistently will a corresponding universal maxim. 7 A judgment fails the test if willing the corresponding maxim involves willing conditions that make it impossible to apply the maxim. Cheating to gain an unfair advantage is wrong, on this account, because one cannot rationally will that everyone cheat to gain an unfair advantage. To be able to gain an unfair advantage by cheating, others have to play by the rules. So, cheating involves a violation of reason. If this idea can be generalized, and value grounded in reason, then perhaps we don't need to posit queer value facts (that cheating is bad , say) that mysteriously impact our desires upon acquaintance. Value would reduce to nonmysterious facts about rationality.

This rationalist approach, broadly construed, informs a range of educational value theories—for example, those of Hare and Kohlberg, as well as of the “values clarification” theorists. 8 They share the idea that values education is not a matter of teaching substantive value judgments but, rather, of teaching constraints of rationality, like those of logic, critical thinking, and universalizability. They differ in the extent to which they think rational constraints yield substantive evaluative content. Kant apparently held that universalizability settles our moral obligations. Others, like Hare, held that universalizability settles some issues (some moral judgments are just inconsistent with universalizability) while leaving open a range of coherent moral stances, any of which is just as consistent with reason as another. What's attractive about the rationalist tradition is that it limits the explicit teaching of value content to the purely cognitive values demanded by reason alone—those already embedded in the educational enterprise—without invoking additional problematic value facts.

There are two problems with rationalism. First, despite the initial appearance, it too presupposes evaluative facts. If cognitive values necessarily motivate—for example, learning that a maxim is inconsistent necessarily induces an aversion to acting on it—then the queerness objection kicks in. And if cognitive values don't necessarily motivate, then there will be the familiar disconnect between acquaintance with value and motivation.

Second, rational constraints, including even universalizability, leave open a vast range of substantive positions on value. A Kantian's inviolable moral principle—it is always wrong intentionally to kill an innocent person, say—may satisfy universalizability. But so, too, does the act‐utilitarian's injunction to always and everywhere maximize value. If killing innocent people is bad, then it is better to kill one innocent person to prevent a larger number being killed than it is to refrain from killing the one and allowing the others to be killed. The nihilist says it doesn't matter how many people you kill, and this, too, satisfies universalizability. The radical divergence in the recommendation of sundry universalizable theories suggests that rational constraints are too weak to supply substantive evaluative content. Reason leaves open a vast space of mutually incompatible evaluative schemes.

8. The Empiricist Response to the Problem of Intrinsic Motivation

To help weed out some of these consistent but mutually incompatible evaluative schemes, value empiricists posit an additional source of data about value. They argue that detecting value is not a matter of the head, but rather a matter of the heart—of feeling, emotion, affect, or desire. It involves responding appropriately to the value of things in some way that is not purely cognitive. Many value theorists whose theories are otherwise quite different (Aristotle, Hume, Brentano, and Meinong, and their contemporary heirs) have embraced variants of this idea. 9

Different value empiricists espouse different metaphysical accounts of value, from strongly idealist accounts (according to which values depend on our actual value responses) to robustly realist accounts (according to which values are independent of our actual responses). What they share is the denial that grasping value is a purely cognitive matter. Responses to value involve something like experience or perception. That is to say, things seem to us more or less valuable, these value‐seemings are analogous to perceptual seemings rather than to beliefs, and value‐seemings involve a motivational component, something desire‐like.

What, then, are these experiences of value, these value‐seemings? According to the Austrian value theorists (Meinong and his descendents), evaluative experiences are emotions. So, for example, anger is the emotional presentation of, or appropriate emotional response to, injustice; shame is the appropriate emotional response to what is shameful; sadness to the sad, and so on. Emotions are complex states that are necessarily connected with value judgments, but also with desires and nonevaluative beliefs. A much sparser theory of value experiences identifies them simply with desires. 10 That is to say, to desire P is just for P to seem good to me. To desire P is not to judge that P is good, or to believe that P is good. Something might well seem good to me (I desire it) even though I do not believe that it is good. Indeed, I might well know that it is not good (just as a rose I know to be white may appear to be pink to me). Value‐seemings, whatever their nature, would provide the necessary empirical grounding for beliefs about value, while also providing the link between acquaintance with value and the corresponding motivations.

Imagine if you were taught the axiomatic structure of Newtonian mechanics without ever doing an actual experiment, or even being informed what results any such experiment would yield in the actual world. You might well come to know all there is to know about Newtonian mechanics, as a body of theory, without having any idea whether the actual world is Newtonian. But, then, why should you prefer Newton's theory to, say, Aristotle's, as an account of the truth? According to the value empiricist, values taught entirely as matters of reason alone would be similarly empty. By contrast, if value judgments have to be justified ultimately by appeal to some shared value data, and the value data consist of value experiences, then the job of a value educator would be, at least in part, to connect the correct evaluative judgments in the appropriate way with actual experiences of value.

9. The Theory‐Ladenness of Value Data and Critical Empiricism

If pure rationalism seems empty of content, then pure empiricism seems correspondingly blind. Notoriously, people experience very different responses to putative values. Indeed, the highly variable nature of our value responses is the root of the contestedness of value, and it is often the major premise in an argument to the effect that either there is no such thing as value or, if there is, it cannot be reliably detected. If values education goes radically empiricist, and experiences of value (affect, emotion, desire, etc.) are the empirical arbiters of value, then an uncriticizable subjectivism, or at best relativism, looms, and the teaching of values would amount to little more than the teacher, like a television reporter, eliciting from her students how they feel.

This criticism presupposes a rather naive version of empiricism, according to which experience is a matter of passively receiving theory‐neutral data that are then generalized into something like a value theory. A more promising model is provided by some variant of critical rationalism. Perceptual experiences are rarely a matter of passively receiving “theory‐neutral” data, as a prelude to theorizing but, rather, are themselves informed and guided by theory. Even if there is a core to perceptual experience that is relatively immune to influence from background theory, the information that one gains from experience is partly a function of such theory. An experience in total isolation from other experiences to which it is connected by a theory rarely conveys significant information. If someone who knows no physics is asked to report what he sees in the cloud chamber, say, then what he reports will likely be very thin indeed and hardly a basis for grasping the nature of matter. So, enabling folk to have the right kinds of experiences—informative and contentful—which can then be appropriately interpreted and taken up into a web of belief, is in part a matter of teaching them a relevant background theory that makes sense of those experiences. This might be more accurately called a critical empiricist approach.

Given value experiences, and a critical empiricist approach to knowledge of value, values education would be, in part, a matter of cultivating appropriate experiential responses to various values; in part, a matter of refining and honing such responses; and in part, a matter of providing a framework that supports those responses and that can be challenged and revised in the light of further value experiences. Further, if experiences of value are a matter of emotion, feeling, or desire, values education would need to take seriously the training of folk in having, interpreting, and refining appropriate emotions, feelings, and desires. This would not in any way diminish the crucial role of logic, critical thinking, and rational constraints like universalizability. But it would open up the educational domain to cultivation and refinement of affective and conative states.

10. The Agent‐Neutrality of Value and the Relativity of Value Experiences

The hypothesis of the theory‐ladenness of experience is, unfortunately, insufficient to defuse the problem of the radical relativity in value experiences. Compare value experiences with ordinary perception. It is rare for a rose to appear to one person to be red and to another blue. But it is not at all rare for one and the same state of affairs to seem very good to one person and seem very bad to another. If these radical differences in value experiences are to be attributed simply to differences in the value beliefs that people hold, then value experiences are too corrupted to be of any use. Experiences too heavily laden with theory cease to be a reliable source of data for challenging and revising beliefs.

This problem can be sharpened by a combination of an idea endorsed by many empiricist value theorists (namely, that value is not what is desired in fact, but what it would be fitting or appropriate to desire), with a popular idea endorsed by most rationalist value theorists (namely, the agent‐neutrality of real value). The fitting‐response thesis says that something is valuable just to the extent that it is appropriate or fitting to experience it as having that value. The agent‐neutrality of value thesis says that the actual value of a state or property is not relative to persons or point of view. So if something—a severe pain, say—has a certain disvalue, then it has that disvalue regardless of whose pain it is. It is bad, as it were, irrespective of its locus. These theses combined imply the agent‐neutrality of the fitting response to value . If a state possesses a certain value, then it possesses that regardless of its locus. And a certain response to that value is fitting regardless of the relation of a valuer to the locus of the value. Consequently, the fitting response must be exactly the same response for any valuer. So ideally, two individuals, no matter what their relation to something of value, should respond to that value in exactly the same manner. The responses of the person whose responses are fitting are thus isomorphic to value, irrespective of the situation of that person or her relation to the value in question. Call this consequence of fitting‐response and agent‐neutrality, the isomorphic‐response thesis .

Now, quite independent of the issue of theory‐ladenness, the isomorphic‐response thesis seems very implausible. Suppose that the appropriate response to valuable states of affairs is desire, and the more valuable a state of affairs, the more one should desire it. Then, the isomorphic‐response thesis entails that any two individuals should desire all and only the same states to exactly the same degree. But clearly the states of affairs that people desire differ radically. Consequently, either we are all severely defective experiencers of value or one of the two theses that jointly entail the isomorphic‐response thesis is false.

11. The Effects of Perspective, Shape, and Orientation on Perception

The fitting‐response thesis looks implausible if value experiences are analogous to perceptual experiences. There is an objective state of the world that is perceiver‐neutral, but perceivers have very different experiences of the world depending on how they are situated within it. First, there are perspectival effects: the farther away an object is, the smaller it will appear relative to objects close by, and that is entirely appropriate; objects should look smaller the farther away they are. Is there an analogue of distance in value space, and an analogue to perspective? If so, something might, appropriately, seem to be of different value depending on how far it is located from different valuers. Second, there are variable perceptual effects owing to the shape of objects and their orientation to the perceiver. An asymmetric object, like a coin, looks round from one direction but flat from another; but again, it should look those different ways. Is there anything in the domain of value analogous to shape and orientation?

Grant that pain is bad and that qualitatively identical pains are ( ceteris paribus ) equally bad. I am averse to the pain I am currently experiencing—it seems very bad to me. However, an exactly similar pain I experienced twenty years ago does not elicit such a strong aversion from me now. Nor does the similar pain I believe I will face in twenty years' time. I can have very different aversive responses to various pains, all of which are equally bad, and those different responses do seem fitting. The temporally distant pains are just further away, in value space, from me now. Time can, thus, be thought of as one dimension in value space that affects how values should be experienced.

Some people are close to me, and the pain of those close to me matters more to me than pain experienced by distant beings. If my wife is in severe pain, that appears much worse to me than if some stranger is in severe pain; and that response, too, seems appropriate. I know, of course, that my loved ones are no more valuable than those strangers, and I am not saying I shouldn't care at all about the stranger's pain. Clearly, the stranger's pain is bad—just as bad as my wife's pain—and I am somewhat averse to it as well. But suppose I can afford only one dose of morphine, and I can give it to my wife or have it FedExed to the stranger. Would it be inappropriate of me to unhesitatingly give it to my wife? Hardly. Someone who tossed a coin to decide where the morphine should be directed would be considered lacking normal human feelings. Persons are located at various distances from me, and since persons are loci of valuable states, those states inherit their positions in value space, and their distances from me, from their locus. And it seems appropriate to respond more vividly to states that are close than to those that are more distant.

Finally, we can think of possibility—perhaps measured by probability—as a dimension of value. Imagine this current and awful pain multiplied in length enormously. If hell exists and God condemns unbelievers to hell, then I am going to experience something like this for a very, very long time. That prospect is much worse than my current fleeting pain. And yet I am strangely unmoved by this prospect. Why? Because it seems very improbable to me. First, it seems improbable, given the unnecessary suffering in the world, that God exists. And if, despite appearances, a Perfect Being really exists, it seems improbable She would run a postmortem torture chamber for unbelievers. So, extremely bad states that are remote in probability space elicit less vivid responses than less bad states that have a higher probability of actualization. And that, too, seems fitting.

Of course, one might argue that these things should not appear this way to me, that the same pain merits the same response wherever it is located. But that's just implausible. As a human being, with various attachments, deep connections with particular others, and a limited capacity to care, it would be impossible for me to respond in a totally agent‐neutral way to all pain whatever its locus: the pain of total strangers; pains past, present, and future; and pains actual as well as remotely possible. It would also be bizarre if one were required to randomly allocate one's limited stock of care regardless of the distance of the bearers of such pains. So, if a value that is closer should appear closer, and desires and aversions are appearances of value, then it is entirely fitting that desires and aversions be more sensitive to closely located values than to distantly located values. 11

Distance is not the only factor affecting value perception. A valuer's orientation to something of value (or disvalue) may also affect perception. Take a variant of Nozick's famous case of past and future pain. You have to undergo an operation for which it would be dangerous to use analgesics. The surgeon tells you that on the eighth day of the month you will go into the hospital and on the morning of the ninth, you will be administered a combination of drugs that will paralyze you during the operation, scheduled for later that day, and subsequently cause you to forget the experiences you will have during the operation, including all the dreadful pain. You wake up in hospital, and you don't know what day it is. If it is the tenth, the operation was yesterday and the operation was twelve hours ago. If it is morning of the ninth, then you have yet to undergo the operation in twelve hours' time. So, depending on which of these is true, you are twelve hours away from the pain. Both are equally likely, given your information. You are equidistant from these two painful possibilities in both temporal space and probability space. You are, however, much more averse to the 50 percent probability of the future as yet‐unexperienced pain than to the 50 percent probability that the pain is now past. This asymmetric response seems appropriate. We are differently oriented toward past and future disvalues, and that can make a difference how bad those disvalues seem.

What about the shape of value, and the effect of shape together with orientation on perception? Should the value of one and the same situation be experienced by folk differently if they are differently oriented with respect to it? Suppose that a retributive theory of justice is correct, and that in certain cases wrongdoers ought to be punished for their wrongdoing; that such punishment is some sort of suffering; and that the punishment restores justice to the victim. The suffering inflicted on the wrongdoer is, then, from the agent‐neutral viewpoint, a good thing. Consider three people differently, related to the wrongdoer's receiving his just deserts: the wrongdoer himself, the wrongdoer's victim, and some bystander. It is fitting for the victim to welcome the fact that the wrongdoer is getting his just deserts. A neutral bystander will typically not feel as strongly about the punishment as the victim does, but provided she recognizes that the deserts are just, she should be in favor. What about the wrongdoer? His punishment is a good thing, but he has to be averse to the punishment if it is to be any sort of punishment at all. The difference in the victim's and the bystander's degree of desire for the just deserts can be explained by their differing distances from the locus of the value. But the differing responses of the victim and the wrongdoer cannot be explained by distance alone. Desire and aversion pull in opposite directions. Unless the wrongdoer is averse to his punishment, it is no punishment at all. Unless the victim desires the wrongdoer's punishment, it will not serve its full role in restoring justice.

Value is one thing, the appropriate response to it on the part of a situated valuer is another. The same value may thus elicit different responses depending on how closely the value is located to a value perceiver, the shape of the value, and the orientation of the valuer toward it. The thesis that the appropriate responses to value are experiences, which, like perceptual experiences, are heavily perspectival, defuses what would otherwise be a powerful objection to the agent‐neutrality of value. If the appropriate response to an agent‐neutral value were the same for all, then value would impose a wholly impractical, even inhuman, obligation on a person to effectively ignore his singular position in the network of relationships. Fortunately for us, experiences of agent‐neutral values can legitimately differ from one valuer to another.

Interestingly, these features of value experience help explain the attraction of Nel Noddings's ethics of caring, perhaps the most prominent contemporary educational ethic in the empiricist tradition. For Noddings, the prime value seems to be caring relationships and fostering such relationships through fostering caring itself. But one is not simply supposed to promote caring willy‐nilly, in an agent‐neutral way. Rather, one is supposed to be attentive to the caring that goes on fairly close to oneself. Consequently, it would be bad to neglect one's nearest and dearest even if by doing so one could foster more caring relationships far away. But it is not just distance in the network of care that is important. I am located at the center of a particular network of caring relationships, and my moral task is to tend not just to the amount and quality of caring in my network but also to my peculiar location in the network. So, it would be wrong for me to neglect my caring for those close to me even if by doing so I could promote more or better caring among those very folk. I should not cease to care for my nearest and dearest even if by doing so I could promote higher quality caring among my nearest and dearest. 12

12. Teaching Values on the Critical Empiricist Approach

Agent‐relative responses to agent‐neutral values are, thus, entirely appropriate on a critical empiricist conception of value. If this is right, it is not the job of an educationist to try to impose a uniform experiential response to all matters of value. Rather, it is to try to provide the necessary critical and logical tools for making sense of agent‐neutral values in the light of our highly variable agent‐relative responses, and to elicit and refine the fitting response to value in the light of a valuer's relation to it.

But this, of course, raises a difficult question for any would‐be value educator. How is it possible to teach appropriate responses to value and coordinate such responses with correct value judgments? Partly, this is a philosophical question involving the nature of value and the fitting responses to it, and partly, it is an empirical question involving the psychology of value experience and the most effective ways to develop or refine fitting responses.

Let us begin with a fairly uncontroversial case. It is not difficult for a normal human being to appreciate the value of her own pleasures or the disvalue of her own pains. A normal child will almost always experience her own pain as a bad thing. There is no mystery here, given empiricism, for the child's aversion to pain is part and parcel of the experience of the pain's badness. Indeed, it is through aversion to states like pain, or desire for pleasure, that a child typically gets a grip on the concepts of goodness and badness in the first place, since the good (respectively, bad) just is that to which desire (respectively, aversion) is the normal and fitting response.

Correct judgments on the goodness of one's own pleasures and the badness of one's own pains thus follow rather naturally on the heels of one's direct experiences of those pleasures and pains. What about judgments concerning more remotely located goods and evils? Provided one has some capacity to empathize, one also has the capacity to experience, to some extent, the disvalue of another's pain or the value of another's pleasure, albeit somewhat less vividly than in the case of one's own. Clearly, normal people do have an innate ability, perhaps honed through evolutionary development, to empathize with others in these crucial ways. 13 Recent research suggests that this capacity may be realized by the possession of mirror neurons and that these structures have played a crucial role in the evolution of social behavior. 14 With empathy in place, there is the capacity to experience values located beyond oneself.

What may not always come so naturally, and what might conceivably require some tutoring, is that the exactly similar pains and pleasures of others must have exactly the same value and disvalue as one's own. Even for a good empathizer, given the perspectival nature of value experience, another's exactly similar pain will seem less bad than one's own. And the more distant the pain is, the less bad it will seem. One has to learn, at the level of judgment, to correct for this perspectival feature of value experience. That will mostly be a matter of learning to apply principles of reason—specifically, that if two situations are qualitatively identical at the natural level, they must be qualitatively identical at the level of value. Presumably, knowledge of the agent‐neutrality of the goodness and badness of pain and pleasure will feed back into one's capacity for empathic response, enhancing and refining such responses. A defect in empathy may, thus, be corrected by becoming cognizant of the actual structure of value.

A person may, of course, have a very weak capacity for empathy, or even lack it altogether. This seems to be a feature of severe autism. Interestingly, an autistic person is often capable of using his experience of what is good or bad for him, together with something like universalizability, to gain a purchase on goods and evils located in other beings. His purchase on these more remote goods and evils lacks direct experiential validation, but he can still reason, from experiences of his own goods and evils, to judgments of other goods and evils. An autistic person may not thereby acquire the ability to empathize—just as a blind person may not be taught how to see—but he may still learn a considerable amount about value. 15 The value judgments he endorses will admittedly rest on a severely reduced empirical base, and that may never be enlarged by the theory, but the theory might still be quite accurate.

A more radical defect is exhibited by the psychopath, who seems to have no capacity to reason from his experience of his own goods and evils to goods and evils located elsewhere. 16 It is not clear how one might go about teaching value judgments or value responses to a psychopath. It might be like trying to teach empirical science to someone who has vivid experiences of what is going on immediately around him, but lacks any capacity to reason beyond that or to regard his own experience as a situated response to an external reality. Clearly there are limits to what can be taught and to whom.

13. Conclusion

Value endorsements and their transmission are unavoidable in educational settings, as they are everywhere. The question, then, is not whether to teach values but which values to teach, in what contexts, and how to teach them effectively. Clearly, the constraints of reason are crucial to the cultivation of a coherent set of value endorsements. But reason alone is insufficient. To access values we need some value data, experiences of value. And, to mesh motivation appropriately with value endorsements, value experiences have to be desiderative. This critical empiricist model of value knowledge suggests a model of values education that is richer and more interesting than either its rationalist or its naive empiricist rivals—one in which the cultivation and refinement of emotion, feeling, and desire and the honing of critical skills both play indispensable roles.

Of course, any teaching of values could go awry. That we are serious about teaching values, and that we attempt to do so with due respect for both reason and experience, does not guarantee that we will succeed. We ourselves may have got value wrong. Or, we might possess and try to pass on the right values, but our students reject them. Here, as elsewhere in the educational enterprise, there is always a risk that things might turn out badly despite our noblest intentions and sincerest efforts.

Mackie 1977 .

Putnam 2002 .

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All three are reprinted in Boonin and Oddie 2004 .

Scheffler 1973 and Siegel 1997 .

If not, then other troubling consequences flow.

Kant 2002 .

Kohlberg 1981 ; Hare 1998 ; Simon, Howe, and Kirschenbaum 1972 .

Oddie 2005 , chap. 3.

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Oddie 2005 , chaps. 3 and 8.

Bergman 2004 .

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Value of Education Essay

500 words essay on value of education.

Education is a weapon for the people by which they can live a high-quality life. Furthermore, education makes people easy to govern but at the same time it makes them impossible to be enslaved. Let us take a look at the incredible importance of education with this value of education essay.

                                                                                                                        Value Of Education Essay

Importance of Education

Education makes people independent. Furthermore, it increases knowledge, strengthens the mind, and forms character. Moreover, education enables people to put their potentials to optimum use.

Education is also a type of reform for the human mind. Without education, the training of the human mind would always remain incomplete.

Education makes a person an efficient decision-maker and a right thinker. Moreover, this is possible only with the help of education. This is because education acquaints an individual with knowledge of the world around him and beyond, besides teaching the individual to be a better judge of the present.

A person that receives education shall have more avenues for the life of his choice. Moreover, an educated person will be able to make decisions in the best possible manner. This is why there is such a high demand for educated people over uneducated people for the purpose of employment .

Negative Impact of Lack of Education

Without education, a person would feel trapped. One can understand this by the example of a man who is confined to a closed room, completely shut from the outside world, with no way to exit it. Most noteworthy, an uneducated person can be compared to this confined man.

Education enables a person to access the open world. Furthermore, a person without education is unable to read and write. Consequently, a person without education would remain closed to all the knowledge and wisdom an educated person can gain from books and other mediums.

The literacy rate of India stands at around 60% in comparison to more than 80% literacy rate of the rest of the world. Moreover, the female literacy rate is 54.16% in accordance with the 2001 population census. These figures certainly highlight the massive problem of lack of education in India.

To promote education, the government of India takes it as a national policy. The intention of the government is to target the very cause of illiteracy. As such, the government endeavours to eradicate illiteracy, which in turn would lead to the eradication of poverty .

The government is running various literacy programmes like the free-education programme, weekend and part-time study programme, continuing education programme, mid-day meal programme, adult literacy programme, etc. With the consistent success rate of these programmes, hopefully, things will better.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of Value of Education Essay

Education is one of the most effective ways to make people better and more productive. It is a tool that can make people easy to lead but at the same time difficult to drive. Education removes naivety and ignorance from the people, leaving them aware, informed, and enlightened.

FAQs For Value of Education Essay

Question 1: What is the importance of education in our lives?

Answer 1: Having an education in a particular area helps people think, feel, and behave in a way that contributes to their success, and improves not only their personal satisfaction but also enhances their community. In addition, education develops the human personality and prepares people for life experiences.

Question 2: Explain the meaning of true education?

Answer 2: True education means going beyond earning degrees and bookish knowledge when it comes to learning. Furthermore, true education means inculcating a helping attitude, optimistic thinking, and moral values in students with the aim of bringing positive changes in society.

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Essay on 'Importance of value Education' in 120 - 150 words.

Life without values education is like ship without rudder.Education without values or edification will fall short of achieving its goal. Mere teaching, learning, improving knowledge and skills without building character and mind may not contribute to the holistic development of children, which is a must for the world to become a better place. In spite of the increasing literacy rate and more people receiving education, the crime rate is refusing to come down! The rise in crimes, violence and other destructive activities in the society can be ascribed to poor inculcation of values. It has been seen in the recent terrorist attacks in various parts of the world, that those who carried out the attacks were educated men and women. What they lacked was edification. Had they been thoroughly taught the values of human character, it is possible they would have shuddered to think of killing so many innocent people. Education policy makers need to lay more stress on education with much stress on imparting human values and edification. This will have better results than mere education.Once values become everyone's priority in life, all the negative aspects of life will automatically dwindle. The world direly needs people with high values to make it a better place to live in.

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Article on Need of Value Education

Fresh Reads

Spurt of violence previously is known in Indian schools makes it incumbent on the educationists to introduce value education effectively in schools. Write an article in 150- 200 words expressing your views on the need of value education.

Value Based Education

Values are inculcated by family and school so that the child grows up with morality and can differentiate between right and wrong on his/her own.

However, with time, the tenets of tolerance, spiritualism, self-discipline and sympathy seem to be losing their importance. Growth of nuclear families, working parents, absence of elders, lack of quality time with family members are few but important factors responsible for children being ill-behaved. In addition, schools too fail to impart proper moral values to students on a regular basis. As a result, students lack discipline, engage in unnecessary fights and take pride in being labeled as a rebel.

Other factors responsible for the lack of discipline in children are over exposure to media, lack of emotional support, over ambitious nature, peer pressure, etc. Such behaviour has its consequences too. Besides spoiling school culture and environment, it often leads to self destruction.

Children, feeling depressed due to the inadequacies of life are prone to inflicting injuries on themselves. It often leads to suicide. Children, whose minds are clouded by negative thoughts, who lack moral values, harm not only themselves but are also a threat to the society and country as well.

There have been many instances where youths in their late teens have opened fire on unsuspecting civilians for no apparent reason. Spurt of violence previously unknown in Indian schools makes it incumbent on the educationists to introduce value education effectively in schools.

As Gandhiji rightly said that training of soul can be best given by a teacher. A teacher can influence the character of the student through words and actions and make the child learn the moral values at every stage.

To improve the present condition in school, morning assemblies must be filled with inspiring talks, stories, interactions, etc. Parents, teachers, counsellors and even students with a positive outlook can influence children through optimism. It is here in school that children spend maximum time of the day and learn to share, team-spirit, kindness, companionship, etc.

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Magazine readers share their thoughts on the value of a college education

The question of whether a degree is still worth the sizable investment strikes a chord in the college & careers issue., educational value.

I was amazed that not a single word in “Is College Still Worth It?” mentioned the value of what is actually learned (April 14). I received a liberal arts education at a private university in the mid-1960s. For me, what made college worthwhile was not just the money I later made from having a degree but the learning experience I had while I was there. It opened my eyes to a wider worldview and exposed me to people and ideas I never would have discovered. My education helped me to become a more thoughtful person than I might have been had I not attended. Nearly every life experience I’ve had since was enhanced by the education I received as an undergraduate.

Sam Kafrissen

This story asked the wrong question. A more relevant and insightful question would have been “At what cost is college worth it?” The responses could be much different for an annual cost of $30,000 versus $90,000. Another way to approach this issue is to ask at what level of accumulated student debt a college education could be justified on the basis of economic return. Leaving college with a loan balance of, say, $15,000 is much different than $150,000 or more in terms of monthly loan payments and the impact on one’s discretionary spending and ability to build savings.

Daniel Levenson

As a retired educational and vocational counselor, I would advise anyone deciding whether or not to go to college to rely on facts, not opinions. The survey done by the Globe and Emerson College is interesting, but it should not weigh too heavily on that decision. Every individual is different; what is right for one is probably wrong for another. Seek good counseling. There are aptitude tests that can give a good indication of whether one will be successful in various occupations, and interest inventories that can compare your interests to successful people in various occupations.

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There is no consideration of potential job satisfaction, with the focus being exclusively on college cost, loans, and potential earnings. How many of the surveyed cohort might have found a rewarding career in a field unconnected with higher education? I speak as a college dropout; in my junior year, over 50 years ago, I abandoned a scholarship in favor of working. I am now long retired from a successful and lucrative 40-year career as a carpenter, building contractor, and real estate investor, and in retrospect, could not have chosen a more satisfying way to earn a living. Perhaps the emphasis on a college degree usually leading to higher income is driven by the relentless barrage of marketing that has convinced people that their satisfaction with life is achieved only by acquiring more and costlier stuff.

Steven Artigas

Westerly, Rhode Island

To What Degree

Overlooked in this brief article are the many jobs in the building and construction trades (“How Important Is a College Degree in Today’s Job Market?” April 14). Compensation and benefits are excellent, and these jobs are readily available to those who applied themselves in public technical and vocational high schools. In my half-century of commercial bank lending, a majority of my large general and specialty contractor clients entered a building trade directly out of high school. (All this while the parents of other students were driving around “looking at colleges.”) Many of them eventually founded companies that grew impressively in clients and number of employees.

Paul Ricchi

Rumford, Rhode Island

I feel that the writers are making the wrong comparison. One should compare a 22-year-old college educated job applicant with a 22-year-old without a college education. Even a bright 18-year-old high school graduate is unlikely to get hired because of lack of maturity and life experience, whereas a 22-year-old may well be hired despite a lack of a degree. College confers not only four more years of maturity at a critical time in one’s life, but actual experiences (living away from home, making decisions about money and time management), not only advanced education.

Ellen Penso

West Newton

As a manager who often hires new employees, I always look at degrees and years completed, and make rough calculations in my mind, to note who completed their bachelor’s in four years and grad degrees in typical durations. In fact, just the achievement of finishing what one has started I always take as a positive. We know all the posturing, pressure, and challenges that confront young adults; if one has a track record of completing a goal, and by reason handling all the smaller tasks and social pressures to get there, I think the applicant in front of me has, to some degree, what it takes to do the job.

Peter J. Atkinson

CONTACT US: Write to [email protected] or The Boston Globe Magazine/Comments, 1 Exchange Place, Suite 201, Boston, MA 02109-2132. Comments are subject to editing.

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Connecting to the Heart: Teaching Value-Based Professional Ethics

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• Published: 16 April 2020
• Volume 26 , pages 2235–2254, ( 2020 )

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Engineering programs in the United States have been experimenting with diverse pedagogical approaches to educate future professional engineers. However, a crucial dimension of ethics education that focuses on the values, personal commitments, and meaning of engineers has been missing in many of these pedagogical approaches. We argue that a value-based approach to professional ethics education is critically needed in engineering education, because such an approach is indispensable for cultivating self-reflective and socially engaged engineers. This paper starts by briefly comparing two prevalent approaches to ethics education in science and engineering: professional (teaching professional ethical standards, including codes of ethics) and philosophical (teaching ethical theories and their applications in professional settings). While we acknowledge that both approaches help meet certain ethics education objectives, we also argue that neither of these is sufficient to personally engage students in authentic moral learning. We make the case that it is important to connect ethics education to the heart , which is extensively driven by values, and present a value-based approach to professional ethics education. We provide some classroom practices that cultivate a safe, diverse, and engaging learning environment. Finally, we discuss the implications of a value-based approach to professional ethics education for curriculum design and pedagogical practice, including opportunities and challenges for engineering faculty eager to incorporate value-based inquiry into their classrooms.

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Introduction

When our true values, virtues and competencies flow through us, whatever the choice, then transformative power—life power—is ours as well. We are enlivened, as is everything our choice touches. (Sinetar 1988 , p. 159)

Ethics education for engineers is of critical importance because engineering increases our power over the world, yet knowledge of engineering does not come with a recipe on how that power is to be responsibly stewarded. In other words, despite that engineering has consequences for humans and the environment—which largely is the reason humans engage in these activities—engineering usually does not come explicitly with the values or “the moral compass” that guide the wise application of the engineering power. The history of engineering has generated ideologies, such as technocracy and meritocracy, that disengage engineers from reflecting on the sociopolitical nature of their identities and practices (Slaton 2015 ). This allows engineers to distance themselves from the political and value aspects of their work, which can potentially lead engineers to design artifacts that enable serious issues, such as social and environmental injustice (Karwat 2019 ). Approaches to engineering ethics education are often instrumentalist, especially when ethics is defined in terms of “ethical skills, competencies, and practical tools (e.g., codes of ethics, ethical theories, and other decision-making tools such as ‘line-drawing’)”, expected to be applied by engineers to solve professional ethical dilemmas (Zhu and Jesiek 2017 ). Engineers are, then, assumed to be instrumentalists who are mainly interested in the effectiveness and proficiency of ethical problem-solving. The self-reflective dimension of engineering—where engineers consciously reflect on the values embedded in their work and its broader impacts—is often absent from the practice and education of engineers.

Mitcham ( 2014 ) makes the case that society needs a critical reflection on the purpose for which we use engineering. He invites engineering educators and future engineers to carefully examine the following “big” questions: What is the world that we seek to create? How does engineering contribute to this? Who benefits from these choices, and who is hurt? Mitcham ( 2014 ) considers these questions to be the true grand challenges for engineering, but current engineering curricula often provide limited (if any) space for students to engage in them. Karwat ( 2019 ) provides a more extensive list of similar, thought-provoking questions.

Capra notes that “it is generally not recognized that values are not peripheral to science and technology but constitute their very basis and driving force” (Capra 1996 , p. 11). In other words, it is unavoidable that values—defined as that which we hold to be important—are a driver of individual and collective behavior (Haidt 2013 ; Roeser 2012 ). The Conscious Capitalism movement (Mackey and Sisodia 2014 ) shows that corporations in a capitalist society can transcend the value of generating monetary profit, while being profitable. But how can we expect that students, as future employees of corporations and universities, exercise their profession in ethical ways when they have not learned to discover and articulate what their values are, what it is they want to stand for?

If values are such an important driver of individual and collective behavior, should we not let engineering students reflect on the values of engineering, and on the roles that these values will assume in their careers? Dominant approaches to engineering ethics education provide limited opportunities for students to reflect on their own values, meaning, and commitments that will impact their long-term professional development. The traditional approaches to teaching engineering ethics are not sufficient for allowing students to problematize and engage in the true grand challenges for engineering in the way in which they practice their profession.

There are examples that demonstrate the limitations of traditional approaches to ethics education and justify the urgency of an approach that focuses on values, meaning, and a moral compass. Wike ( 2001 ) argued for using values as the basis for engineering ethics education, but she did not connect such a value-based approach to prevalent engineering ethics education approaches. Barnwell ( 2016 ) argues that students have largely lost their moral compasses, and states that “the pressures of national academic standards have pushed character education out of the classroom.” Even though he refers to K-12 education, one can still argue that the same holds for engineering universities, which focus extensively on the development of technical and disciplinary skills while overlooking the character development and personal growth of future professionals. The absence of a moral compass is further demonstrated in the “2012 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth” (Josephson Institute for Ethics 2012 ), which states that although 98% of 9–12 graders say that “it’s important for me to be a person with good character”, 40% of the same group also say that “a person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed.” Accompanying this loss of a moral compass is the worrisome state of the mental health of college students. According to the American College Health Association ( 2018 ), 41% of college students felt at some moment in the last 12 months so overwhelmed by depression that it was difficult to function, while 12% seriously considered suicide. There are many factors contributing to the poor state of mental health of students, but a loss of meaning and purpose is a recognizable one (Martin 2000 ).

We argue that engineering students need more for their development and wellbeing than solely scientific and technical education. College students are in the process of developing their professional identities, and values often help give shape (in explicit and implicit ways) to these identities. Studies in the history and philosophy of science have shown that values deeply influence the choices of scientific methods, concepts, assumptions, and questions and the ethical decision-making of practicing engineers (Elliott 2017 ). Roeser ( 2012 ) argues that as design is not value-free and values and emotions are integral for engineering decision-making, they should be part of the development of professional identities of engineering students. Similarly, Troesch ( 2014 ) advocates for a phenomenological approach to ethics that invites students to consciously explore and reflect on the everyday, lifeworld experience of being an ethical engineer. In other professions such as business, Arce and Gentile ( 2015 ) point out that values should be part of a business education and they introduce the concept of Giving Voice to Values , while Brophy ( 2015 ) argues for incorporating spiritual values in business. Therefore, responsible educators and policymakers need to carefully consider at least two questions: (1) what is the role that higher education plays in the development of professional identities? and (2) what role can or should ethics education play in this development?

To a large extent, ethics education in engineering in the United States often adopts a professional approach that places a strong emphasis on engineers’ individualistic obligations that prohibit misconduct behaviors and prevent their practices from harming the public (Conlin and Zandvoort 2011 ). In this view, engineers are portrayed as rational and autonomous humans who “act individually and independently in relation to client[s]” as it is only the professionals who are “able to act based on adequately developed knowledge” (Luegenbiehl 2004 , p. 59). Personal traits such as emotion, virtues, and commitments are sometimes invisible in engineering education or are considered irrelevant (Davis 2015 ; Harris 2008 ). In summary, the traditional professional approach to engineering ethics education often assumes that engineers are isolated, rational, and autonomous human beings and engineering as a profession needs to be depersonalized .

Engineering ethics textbooks and other teaching materials often start by making a clear distinction between personal and professional ethics . Footnote 1 Here the assumption is quite straightforward: to be professional is to be impersonal or disinterested. Such a depersonalizing tendency in professional education can be traced to early works in the sociology of science. For example, according to Robert K. Merton, scientists are supposed to “engage in an impersonal and disinterested search for the truth” and “academic organizations should embody a form of organized skepticism that rectifies individual shortcomings” (Hansson 2017 , p. 10). Merton’s work has exerted profound influence on the professional education of scientists (and engineers) in the United States. More recently, scientists Kipnis and South argue that “personal values are not relevant to issues in professional ethics” (Kipnis and South 2000 , p. 13), as they are too subjective (e.g., akin to personal color preferences) to be considered as part of professional ethics applicable to all engineers no matter where they are from. However, a separation between personal values and professional behavior amounts to a lack of integrity, a concept which, according to Snieder and Schneider ( 2016 ), implies that all the elements of our life support each other and that we always are a true person who upholds and out-pictures our values consistently. This is what Palmer ( 2004 ) calls “living a life without compartments.” Living in integrity thus implies that our personal and professional values are aligned.

The main point of this paper is that ethics education can be an essential component of the broader development of students, and that ethics education needs to go beyond a depersonalized approach that focuses on teaching only the professional (e.g., what should be done by following codes of ethics), intellectual or philosophical (e.g., ethics as a purely intellectual or philosophical exercise) aspects of morality. Engineering students should be perceived as “flesh-and-blood” persons (Ames 2011 ) with their own values, goals, and commitments. We, as their teachers, need to make ethics education alive and connected to issues that students hold as important. To achieve this goal, ethics education needs to help students develop capacity for self-reflection in the process of “personal analysis of one’s beliefs, actions, and outcomes of those actions” (Karwat 2019 , Self-Refection for Activist Engineering section, para. 2). Engineering educators and university leaders, thus, need to view ethics education as an important contributor to the growth of future professionals instead of another mandatory component of the engineering academic curriculum.

In the following, we first briefly compare the two prevalent approaches to ethics education in science and engineering: professional (teaching professional ethical standards including codes of ethics) and philosophical (teaching ethical theories and their applications in professional settings). We, then, make the case that it is important to connect ethics education to the heart . We use the word heart to describe the feelings, convictions, and passions that humans have and value. Arguably, these are also unique and intuitive ways of expressing values that complement our rational ways of thinking. For example, a person may feel ashamed if she fails to live up to or value something (Mulligan 2010 ). Such shameful feeling indicates that she values something important for her life. Subsequently, we provide ideas on how to incorporate values into ethics education for engineers in order to make ethics education personal, meaningful, and relevant. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities educators may encounter while teaching value-based ethics.

Dominant Approaches to Professional Ethics Education: Professional and Philosophical

In practice, the goals of ethics education vary among institutions, the scopes of classes, and even instructors. One prevalent method is the professional approach, which is often concerned with teaching professional ethical standards and how to contextualize and comply with these standards in professional practices. This is the case, for example, when students review and sign an ethics code, a popular extracurricular activity at engineering universities, an activity that often is superficial. Another example is the way in which the research ethics training requirement of the National Science Foundation is implemented at many institutions (National Science Foundation n.d.): students take an online training, pass the online test, and then they are assumed to have received adequate ethics education, regardless of the degree to which they have internalized the material, or have a personal commitment to apply what they have learned in their future careers.

We use Fig.  1 to illustrate the different approaches to ethics education and how they are related to values. Before students receive any engineering ethics education, they have a set of preexisting values. This is indicated by box 1 in Fig.  1 . These prior values may be deep or shallow, and they may or may not be connected to engineering practice. Similarly, codes of ethics (box 2 in Fig.  1 ) have been informed by values that the engineering community holds. Yet in presenting these codes of ethics to students, these underlying values may not be explicitly articulated.

Diagram of different levels of ethics education and the connection of values

The second dominant approach to professional ethics education is the philosophical approach, which teaches students the historical, social, or philosophical viewpoints of ethics. We label this the theory of ethics in box 3 of Fig.  1 . In this approach, students gain a broader and deeper understanding of the ethical issues and of the ways to think about these issues. As indicated in Fig.  1 , ethical theories are also informed by values. For example, social values (e.g., making a better world) may drive consequentialism; historical and/or religious values (e.g., moral duties derived from historical and religious traditions) may drive duty ethics; virtuous values drive virtue ethics; and the values of compassion drive the ethics of care. Yet these underlying values are often not made explicit and the conversation centers on philosophical argumentations.

Both approaches—professional and philosophical—serve a purpose of professional ethics education and may enrich students’ learning experience. However, they also have limitations that may prevent students from committing to a lifelong project of moral learning and development. In professional ethics education, reviewing the professional codes of ethics serves a purpose. Martin and Schinzinger ( 2005 ) argue that engineering codes of ethics may play at least eight different roles, and are expected to:

(1) serve and protect the public (they function as a commitment of engineering professionals to hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public); (2) provide guidance (they provide some guidance on the professional responsibilities of engineers); (3) offer inspiration (they provide positive motivation for ethical conduct); (4) establish shared standards (they communicate the moral standards shared by all engineers to the public); (5) support responsible professionals (they provide engineers with some group backing and even legal support); (6) contribute to education (they can be used to facilitate discussions and reflections on professional ethical issues); (7) deter wrongdoing (they can be used as the formal basis to investigate ethical misconduct); and (8) strengthen a profession’s image (they can present a positive image to the public that engineering professions are ethically committed). (pp. 44–46)

Michael Davis, one of the most well-known advocators for codes of ethics, argues that codes of ethics are critical for the sustainable development of engineering professions. According to Davis ( 1991 ), there are at least four reasons why professionals should support their profession’s code:

First…supporting it will help protect them and those they care about from being injured by what other engineers do. Second, supporting the code will also help assure each engineer a working environment in which it will be easier than it would otherwise be to resist pressure to do much that the engineers would rather not do. Third, engineers should support their profession’s code because supporting it helps make their profession a practice of which they need not feel…embarrassment, shame, or guilt. And fourth, one has an obligation of fairness to do his part…in generating these benefits for all engineers. (p. 166)

Nevertheless, there are some caveats to be made with regards to the functionality of engineering codes of ethics. First, in order for codes of ethics to be efficacious they often require: (1) collective commitment (e.g., a code of ethics is a convention that a group of engineers agree on); and (2) personal commitment (e.g., joining a professional engineering society means that one promises to comply with its code of ethics and implicitly commit in certain ways required by the code of ethics) (Peterson 2020 ). This raises the question to what extent a code of ethics would still work in any of the following circumstances: (1) engineers only pay “lip service” when joining engineering societies and reviewing the code of ethics; (2) they do not commit themselves to the values underlying different articles of a code of ethics; (3) they treat the code of ethics mainly as a legal document rather than a source of inspiration; (4) they think anything is ethically acceptable insofar as it is not prohibited in the code of ethics. In order to make codes of ethics really work , we need more than just the written articles included in them. We need engineers to commit themselves to the values , as indicated in the left box of Fig.  1 , that support the formulation and implementation of these codes of ethics.

Second, students may raise questions that challenge ethics codes. Here, we highlight some questions that have arisen from our own experience with teaching the code of ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE). Item 1 of the first “fundamental canons” reads “Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” (National Society of Professional Engineers 2019 ). This raises questions such as: Should a professional engineer work for a company that develops weapons of mass destruction, or that produces foods or drinks without nutritional value, or which may be damaging for public health? Is it ethical to work for an employer that spreads misinformation about climate change? Much later in the NSPE Code of Ethics, in section III, item 2d it is stated that “Engineers are encouraged to adhere to the principles of sustainable development in order to protect the environment for future generations.” From some engineering specialties’ perspective, there is inherent tension between holding the safety, health, and welfare of the public paramount , and encouraging the protection of the environment. For instance, students in petroleum engineering may defend their profession by arguing that their everyday practice is itself ethical as it contributes to the ideal of serving the welfare of the public by providing a source of energy. At the same time, some feel puzzled by their difficulty in balancing the extraction and use of hydrocarbons with protecting the environment. We, as instructors, have been challenged when teaching the code of ethics to students in an authentic, reflective, and meaningful way, as we are sympathetic to the challenging questions raised and their struggle to internalize and harmonize the code of ethics with their own personal values.

Third, ethics codes may not always be sufficient to resolve dilemmas that arise in practical situations. As noticed by Lyes ( 1952 ),

ethics, in the sense of a code of ethics, is not a complete guide in decision-making, since our more difficult choices are among alternatives that arise when we cannot act strictly according to our professional code or when we are not sure how to apply the code to the immediate situation. (p. 12)

It is widely acknowledged that codes of ethics often have limitations that may affect their practical effectiveness in guiding ethical decision-making in engineering: (1) most codes are written in general wording and contain substantial areas of vagueness; and (2) codes of ethics can be misused or abused if not taken seriously, e.g., treated as “sacred documents” rather than documents open to public criticism (Martin and Schinzinger 2005 ).

Given these reservations and limitations of the ethical codes, it is not surprising that despite their crucial role in the history of the engineering profession, research has indicated that codes of ethics only play a limited role in ethical decision-making among practicing engineers. For instance, a survey conducted in 1983 by the journal Chemical Engineering showed that written codes of ethics had little impact on the professional ethical decision-making of chemical engineers (Luegenbiehl and Puka 1983 ). According to the survey, “although the American Institute of Chemical Engineers… has a code of ethics, this was almost universally ignored in determining the solutions to our survey problems [ethical cases and scenarios]. Fewer than a half-dozen [out of 4318] respondents even mentioned a code of ethics at all.” (Luegenbiehl and Puka 1983 , p. 41).

The second approach to ethics education is based on the philosophy of ethics and the historical development of ethical thinking. The history of philosophical ethics is rich, and the distinction between utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics helps students understand the different drivers for ethical decision making. Yet, this approach to ethics teaching may reduce ethics to an intellectual exercise that focuses on the nuanced differences between different ethical theories.

Engineering ethics textbooks often start by introducing classical ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, etc. Footnote 2 However, consequentialism and especially deontology are more frequently used to analyze and discuss ethical cases in the classroom compared to virtue ethics (Harris 2008 ). Such an applied ethics approach does not often provide a clear justification for prioritizing certain mainstream ethical theories as the fundamental tools for ethical reasoning, and it tends to overlook other less prominent Western (e.g., ethics of care, feminist ethics, pragmatism) and non-Western (e.g., Confucian ethics, African ethics) ethical theories (Zhu and Jesiek 2017 ). Engineering faculty and students often find it difficult to apply general ethical theories and principles in specific cases since “there continues to be serious disagreement among philosophers as to which principles or set of principles should be used” (Luegenbiehl 2010 , p. 149). Finally, some philosophers have found that applying different ethical frameworks may lead to different outcomes (van de Poel and Royakkers 2011 ). Nonetheless, the ability to reflect on and compare the outcomes generated by different ethical frameworks should be taught to students since it helps them understand the variety of ethical viewpoints and it further gives them insights into their own ethical drivers. This insight can be deepened when ethical theories are connected to the values that underlie these theories (the right box in Fig.  1 ).

Moral psychologists, such as James Rest, argue that there are multiple elements that contribute to ethical action: moral sensitivity (or recognition), moral judgment (or reasoning), moral motivation, and moral character (Rest et al. 1999 ). Arguably, teaching ethical theories might be able to improve students’ moral judgment (and maybe also their moral sensitivity). However, moral motivation and moral character are too complicated to be shaped exclusively by the knowledge of ethical theories. An engineer may be aware of ethical theories and the right course of action but lack motivation and/or character to actually do good and take the right action .

In other words, knowing what is right and wrong does not necessarily lead to ethical action. People need to be personally committed to the moral judgment they have made. Engineering students may be only interested in the intellectual part of these theories but not apply them to their own situations. In other words, they are not engaged. If they truly believe the consequentialist theory, do they still want to invent unhealthy drinks or food that can potentially bring long-term welfare concerns to a large part of the population? Nevertheless, we are not arguing that ethical theories should not be taught. What we caution against is that ethical theories are taught in a purely skill-based way: students use the ethical theories to solve a hypothetical dilemma and then set the theories aside and return to their technical decision. In such an approach, ethical theories are considered as first aid tools, useful and visible only when engineers and their companies face financial and legal threats. A worse case is that engineers and engineering students misuse ethical theories (sometimes oversimplified versions they learn in a relatively limited amount of time in the classroom or online) to justify wrongdoings.

Teaching ethics based on the codes of ethics helps students be aware of general ethical issues they may encounter in their professional life, while teaching the philosophy of ethics and ethical theory helps expand their ethical perspective. Both approaches are worthwhile, but as argued above, they both have their limitations (as shown in Fig.  1 , codes of ethics and ethical theories are informed by values that may never be mentioned in the classroom). In the next section we explore what is missing in these approaches to ethics education.

Connecting to the Heart

We live in a society preoccupied with achieving. Ethics teaching based on the codes of ethics tells us the rules we must follow while we are doing the achieving, but it does not provide opportunities to reflect on what it is we seek to achieve . Teaching philosophy of ethics provides students with different models for ethical thinking and a broader and deeper perspective, that may be disconnected from the values and passions that many students have. Limiting professional ethics education to codes or philosophy of ethics is a symptom of the achievement-oriented approach that many universities and their faculty pursue. As Brooks ( 2019 ) states,

Students are engaged in critical thinking to doubt, distance, and take things apart, but they are given almost no instruction on how to attach to things, how to admire, to swear loyalty to, to copy and serve. The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor. (p. 194)

This is, in particular, the case for engineering schools with their focus on technical and intellectual topics. While going through such an education, students may hide their sense of purpose and meaning, or let it submerge to live the dream of achievement. The cultures of engineering education tend to instill a kind of “sociotechnical dualism” that invites students to separate the technical from the social (Slaton 2015 ). An underlying message of such ideology is that students who raise social issues, such as those involving values and meanings around engineering, will be considered as unprepared for service to the engineering profession. Erin Cech’s ( 2014 ) research has shown that students’ support for public welfare decline over the course of their engineering education. One explanation is that engineering programs embed the often unspoken premise into their curriculum that non-technical cultural beliefs (e.g., ethics and responsibility, social welfare) are important but less important than math and science skills therefore prioritize the technical over the non-technical, including concerns about social and environmental implications, ethics, values, and meaning.

Adolescents naturally ask questions such as, What is my purpose? What am I here to do? How can I make the world a better place? One can argue that such questions are also ethical questions, as they relate to how thoroughly our personal and professional lives make a positive difference in the world. Universities, whose educational mission is to help adolescents grow into responsible and mature professionals, should stimulate students to ask such questions and find meaningful answers. Many academic programs leave no space for such broad and big questions (see the quote of Brooks above) and since the answers don’t come easily, many of us may give up. Ethics education is the perfect vehicle to do this work with students, as we are reminded, by the poem At the End of the Day, a Mirror of Questions by O’Donohue ( 2008 ), from which we quote the following lines:

What differences did I notice in those closest to me? Whom did I neglect? Where did I neglect myself? What did I begin today that might endure? How were my conversations? What did I do today for the poor and the excluded? …. What did I avoid today? From the evidence—why was I given this day? (p. 98)

Teaching an undergraduate class on “Science and Spirituality” annually to about 25 undergraduate engineering students has shown us that students love thinking about questions like these. Integrating such questions into an ethics curriculum teaches students that it is natural and healthy to bring these questions to the life of the professional.

Note the question “what did I avoid today?” in the poem. We tend to focus in ethics education on staying away from the don’ts, on following rules, and we tend to not pay much attention to what would be the right thing to do. In fact, we think that the main ethical question to ask ourselves is What do I give my energy and my talents to? This is an ethical question, because the choice of what we give ourselves to determines how we contribute to humanity and/or the environment. This question focuses both on what the right action is, and on what a good person is supposed to do. It has a bearing on the meaning and the fulfillment that we seek. It determines what difference we will make, and who or what benefits from or is hurt by our actions. These are deep and meaningful ethical issues that young people love to engage in. These issues are related to our values, and it is for this reason that we make the case to supplement and enrich traditional engineering ethics education with value-based ethics.

Toward Value-Based Professional Ethics Education

What do we value? That which we deem to be important. We are more likely to make choices that support that which we value. Our values are shaped by factors such as our history, upbringing, past experiences, faith, and education. Values come both from within and from outside whereas rules are externally imposed (e.g., codes of ethics were developed by professional societies). In general, we are more likely to break rules when they are not aligned with our values.

Ideally, rules are based on values. If we embrace the value that supports a rule, then we are like to follow the rule, but adherence to rules, whose value we question or simply don’t understand, leads to actions governed by fear of punishment. In a college environment, this may apply to the rule to not plagiarize. We often fail to tell students what values this rule seeks to support, and it should not come as a surprise that students’ choice of whether to plagiarize or not is based on the chance of being caught (Holsapple et al. 2012 ).

Real-life situations are more complicated, as values may often conflict. For example, when designing a car, how does one balance the value of passive safety for the occupants with the value of a clean environment supported by a lighter, less polluting automobile? If we only look at engineering codes of ethics, we may be confused by what we mean by the public and its health, safety, and welfare. Does that refer to the occupants of the car, or to others who will be affected by a more polluted environment? Dilemmas such as these don’t have easy answers, but without knowing how to value the different alternatives, one has no map to navigate by for making wise decisions. Incorporating values into decision-making thus does not solve the problem of dealing with conflicting considerations—as we noted earlier with codes of ethics or with ethical theories—but incorporating values into such conflicting considerations assists our choices to be driven by what we consider to be most important.

It may appear that values are of limited use for ethical decision-making as critics may argue that there is a personal and subjective component to them as they are often shaped by our past, experience, upbringing, and for many, by our faith. In that respect, somebody might hold values that others find repugnant, which is a challenge in the classroom when a student supports such values. For example, many of us now frown on the value of racial supremacy, but at the time of Apartheid this was a fairly accepted value in some circles. A deeper analysis of our values and of their consequences would include the following:

A conversation to make us accountable for our values. This involves an analysis to find out what core beliefs or core values are most important. One may discover in the process that what we think of as a value is really an expression of fear or personal interest, as might have been the case for some of the proponents of Apartheid.

Apply some intuitive moral tests on the consequences of these values, using for instance, Davis’s Eight Moral Tests ( 2014 ). These tests pose simple and intuitive questions to guide students through their reflections on their decision-making. For instance, we can use the “harm test” to examine whether the implementation of a specific value, such as the value of racial supremacy, would actually harm people. Or, we can use the “rights test” to examine whether the value of racial supremacy would violate anyone’s right, especially a human right.

Whitbeck ( 2011 ) points out that it is crucial for engineers and engineering students to reflect on their own values in engineering practice by asking themselves the following questions: (1) in deciding to enter engineering, what value judgment did you make (or others, such as parents and guidance counselors, make for you)? Have those values changed as you have learned more about engineering? (2) what makes a good engineer and good engineering? and (3) what reasons can you give to support your value judgments about engineers and engineering? Asking these self-reflective questions about values and their role in professional development is a critical lifelong learning skill for professional engineers.

We now have over seven years of experience with value-based ethics teaching to engineering students (group size 20–40) in two undergraduate classes Research, Values, and Communication and Science and Spirituality and two graduate classes Introduction to Research Ethics and The Art of Science . We have not encountered a single case where students proposed values that were considered to be outlandish or repugnant by us or by their fellow students.

Some argue that ethics teaching must be value-neutral. In other words, ethics instructors should not try to impose ethical theories on students (Rachels and Rachels 2019 ). This is, perhaps paradoxically, what we advocate. When we speak about value-based ethics, we don’t mean that we impose values on students. That would actually amount to a preaching approach, which is exactly what we want to avoid. Instead, we consider it our task to help students discover and reflect on what their values are. The codes of ethics and the ethical theories may support this process. But we advocate asking students to take the next step and to go on a discovery tour to find out what their own values are. In this process, students often find after reflection that their values differ from what they originally thought. For example, many students state at the start of one of our courses that they have a utilitarian point of view: the greatest good for the greatest number of people. During class conversations students discover that they have vague ideas of who should or not be included in the greatest number of people . They further discovered that they were, for example, much more driven by virtues or by their faith than they thought they were, and they rediscovered the values they truly upheld. Callahan ( 1980 ) articulates this process with the following words,

Self-knowledge is fundamental because feelings, motives, inclinations, and interests both enlighten and obscure moral understanding. In the end, individual selves, alone with their thoughts and private lives, must wrestle with moral problems. This sort of struggle often forces one to confront the kind of person one is, to face one’s character and integrity and one’s ability to transcend narrow self-interest to make good moral decisions. (p. 15)

It is our job as ethics educators to assist students on this journey of self-knowledge, and exploration and articulation of values. With the addition of value-based ethics to engineering ethics education, students get the opportunity to hone and deepen their values, as indicated in box 4 of Fig.  1 . These deepened values are influenced by the prior values of the student, the values that inform the codes of ethics and ethical theories, the reading, conversations, and exercises in class, and the synthesis that the student makes of these considerations and experiences. The ultimate goal is for students to bring these deepened values to their professional engineering practice (box 5 in Fig.  1 ), and an intentional interplay between their values and engineering practice can help engineers further reflect on and deepen their values.

Implications for Curriculum Design and Pedagogical Practice

Teaching value-based ethics is a challenge for ethics educators because the topic of values is personal, and sometimes it can bring up strong emotions. It is much easier to discuss codes of ethics and ethical theories because this can be done with an intellectual detachment that keeps personal values and priorities at bay. But such an approach hides the reality that many of us have strong feelings about our values, and that we need to share these feelings and confront the issues that arise in conversations. In this process, the class becomes personal. We argue that it needs to be personal if we want to have any hope that ethics education will lead to wiser and more responsible personal and professional choices.

In order to channel this process in a positive way, it is essential to spend time early in the course on creating a class atmosphere where students feel safe. Students can only feel safe in an environment that is respectful, and thus in our classes we spend significant time on the concept of respect. The word respect is both a noun and a verb: one can have respect, and one can respect a person. Respecting differences in worldviews, opinions, priorities, and values is essential, but we also explain that respecting such differences does not mean that one condones them or needs to agree with other points of view. Part of having respect is that we let go of the idea of wanting to be right or that others agree with our point of view (both are often valued in philosophical debates). After all, if we value the identities of ourselves and of others and assume good intentions, it is much easier to respect differences.

Nevertheless, readers may wonder whether we are self-contradictory as we discussed our support for value-neutral ethics pedagogy while imposing the value of respect to create a safe learning environment. Values, such as respect, are indispensable for building norms that allow students to participate in meaningful learning and (inter)acting in the classroom as a community. We call these values for building communal norms cardinal values and, when introducing them in our classroom, we do not force students to comply. Rather, we take a personal approach to learning and invite students to reflect on: (1) why these values are critical for their own participation in a community like the classroom; and (2) how these values can potentially support their journey toward the discovery of and reflection on their own values.

Part of the creation of a safe class environment is a conversation about debate versus dialogue. The book On Dialogue by Bohm ( 1996 ) offers great reading material for this topic. Debate is usually not about convincing but verbal out-maneuvering the other party. Through debate contests in high-schools or colleges, and through the current political culture, students are familiar with the concept of debate, and their default behavior in an ethics class is to debate ethical issues. But since debate is not really aimed at changing our views, it does not contribute much to the exploration of values. In addition, the confrontational or aggressive nature of debates makes many students, especially introvert ones, shut down. But in an atmosphere of dialogue there is an exchange of ideas, and the possibility exists that a third viewpoint arises. Therefore, a class atmosphere of respect and dialogue is essential, especially when a difference in views is likely to arise.

According to Bronowski ( 1956 ), science is built on two pillars or values: honesty and dissent. Honesty is important because it is often impossible to fully replicate the work that others have done, therefore we must be able to trust our fellow scientists and engineers that they act in good faith. Dissent is essential to the advancement of science and engineering because the questioning of common knowledge spurs further innovation. Honesty and dissent are also key ingredients of a well-functioning democracy, and students appreciate this analogy. Additionally, we stress the importance of disagreeing respectfully, and provide guidelines for respectful disagreement in our graduate and undergraduate classes.

We also have a class conversation in which we point out how little students know each other. Students sometimes bring up fictitious scenarios to illustrate a point. These scenarios may, unknowingly, generate strong emotions because they may relate to a traumatic or hurtful experience of another student, or bring up strong feelings of guilt or shame. Therefore, we ask students to be cognizant of how little they know about the personal life of their colleagues and to be sensitive to not bring up examples that may be confrontational. Being sensitive to the pain of others is another example of demonstrating the value of respect.

Another reason why teaching value-based ethics is challenging is that when we ask students to take the conversation to a personal level and to share their views in class, we—as teachers—have to be engaged and share our own stories and values from a personal point of view as well. That may include sharing that we don’t have all the answers, that some dilemmas are truly difficult to resolve and that we cannot provide resolutions. Perhaps we can share our own doubts, possibly our mistakes. In other words, we must be willing to be vulnerable, which is difficult for many engineering faculty and professional engineers. In fact, we often receive students’ appreciation of our willingness to be authentic and vulnerable in teaching evaluations. Not every engineering teacher has this mindset (Troesch 2014 ), posing restrictions as to who could teach value-based ethics.

We do a number of self-reflective exercises in class to help students discover and reflect on their values. Here we introduce three examples and additional examples can be found in Troesch ( 2014 ). The first is the moral exemplars exercise , that one of us learned at a local church. When we ask students what their values are, they often cannot give a clear answer, but most have role models whom they admire. So we ask students to write down the names of seven people (i.e., exemplars) they consider as positive role models. These can be scientists or engineers (e.g., Albert Einstein); famous public figures (e.g., Martin Luther King); friends (e.g., postdoctoral researcher Tom in our lab); family members (e.g., my grandfather); or they can be fictional characters (e.g., Frodo Baggins). Next, students list three character traits for each of their exemplars. This provides them with a list of up to 21 positive character traits. Each student picks those that are most meaningful, and often these are the traits that are most frequently selected. Since it is easier to think of moral exemplars than of abstract concepts, this exercise helps students get clarity on their values.

The second example is the final class project personal ethics statement . These are presented in the last class as the ethical values by which each student wants to lead their personal and professional life. We give students much freedom in how they present their statement; they can write a piece of text, a poem, create and sing a song, make a collage, or find another way of expression. We have a class conversation about each statement to gain a deeper understanding of the values presented. Students take this project very seriously and are willing to make the articulation of their ethical values personal and heartfelt. Often the presentations are quite emotional. We admire our students for making their personal ethics statement so heartfelt and passionate.

The third example is the ethics autobiography employed by one of us in his honors class on Science, Technology, and Confucian Ethics . An ethics autobiography is one’s personal account of her own moral experience. It has been widely used in health and psychological science programs to train future professionals to develop moral sensitivity and awareness of how their own personal values shape the processes by which they adopt professional practices and cultures, i.e., professional acculturation. Bashe et al. ( 2007 ) discuss how to use the ethics autobiography to train clinical psychologists. They assign a reflective writing assignment at the beginning of the semester and ask students to respond in writing to self-reflective guiding questions. At the end of the semester, students revise their ethics autobiography by incorporating their reflective learning experience throughout the semester. Bashe et al. ( 2007 ), some of the guiding questions students use as writing prompts include:

What is your idea of right and wrong personal behavior, and where does this conception come from?

What did you learn from your family of origin about right and wrong?

What do you recall were the messages about ethic or cultural groups different from yourself, and how they see right and wrong?

What is your idea of right and wrong professional behavior, and where does this conception come from?

What formative experiences account for how you live your life?

What experiences have you had in the field, and what ethical dilemmas have you already encountered?

What professional ethics in the field are most compatible with your own personal values, and which professional ethics are least compatible?

What aspects of this profession strike you as being “not intuitive”?

What are your top three values, and where do they come from?

What are three personal needs that you think match well with the profession?

What are three personal needs that you think might conflict with the profession?

What morals are most important to you, and where do they come from? How do these align with or conflict with the ethics code and professional standards?

How might the alignment or conflict influence your work with clients or students? (p. 62)

An ethics autobiography has certain notable strengths that can complement other traditional ethics pedagogies. It can improve students’ self-reflection and moral sensitivity to the ethical significance of professional practice. It can also increase students’ awareness of their own values, assumptions, and even biases and the ways in which these affect their everyday decision-making. Because it can make students emotionally engaged and invested in moral learning, ethics becomes relevant and personal. Finally, it integrates multiple required student learning outcomes of the ABET (incorporated as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc.) ( 2018 ) (e.g., ethics, communication, contextual and critical thinking, lifelong learning) in one writing-intensive exercise.

Discussion and Conclusion

The main point we want to make is that since our decisions are affected by our values, it is important to enrich ethics education with components that assist students to hone and deepen their values. As values have communal and personal aspects, we need to bring a personal element into ethics education (Roeser 2012 ).

Traditional approaches to teaching ethics have their own merits. Codes of ethics (box 2 in Fig.  1 ) communicate professional expectations, and they show what ethical issues students may encounter in their professional lives. Teaching ethical theories and the history and philosophy of ethics (box 3 in Fig.  1 ) shows students that there is more than one way to think about ethics. This helps students understand a) why others may think differently, and b) discover how different ethical approaches can help their own ethical reasoning. But if ethics education does not go beyond these two approaches, there is a risk that ethics remains an intellectual abstraction disconnected from the students’ personal values. By incorporating values into ethics education, the topic of ethics becomes personal at a visceral level (box 4 in Fig.  1 ), helping students apply what they learned to reflect on the ethical decisions they encounter in their professional and personal lives (box 5 in Fig.  1 ).

We acknowledge that the codes of ethics and ethical theories are informed by values (the left and right boxes in Fig.  1 ), but the values that students ultimately develop (box 4) may differ from the prior values that students had (box 1), or from the values that inform codes of ethics or ethical theories. When done well, value-based ethics teaching assists students in the continued, life-long development of their values and their awareness of and their commitment to these values. We consider this to be an essential element of educating well-rounded responsible engineers.

The proposed work on value-based engineering ethics education has a bearing both on the engineering practice and on the conduct of research. In other words, we believe the values underlying, supporting, and justifying rules or codes are more fundamental and crucial than the rules or codes themselves. Thus, a value-based approach to ethics education can help us reframe concerns in engineering ethics education in the following ways:

If we value honesty , then we don’t falsify data.

If we value integrity , then we present our research truthfully without bias.

If we value sharing appropriately , then we invite the right colleagues to be co-authors.

If we value giving credit where credit is due , then we don’t plagiarize.

If we value fostering the growth of others , then we are nurturing and compassionate mentors.

If we value loving others as we love ourselves , then empathy and compassion come easily.

If we value making the earth a better place , then we choose a career that serves the safety, health, and welfare of the public and the health of the environment.

Teaching value-based ethics is challenging, because the topic becomes personal, students are more involved, and strong feelings and emotions may come into the classroom. It is, thus, essential to create a class atmosphere in which students feel safe. If we ask students to apply the class to their own life and to share their values, we ask them to be vulnerable. If we ask this of students, it is important that as teachers we are also willing to be vulnerable, for example, by sharing our doubts or past mistakes, or by presenting our personal ethics statement. Value-based ethics teaching is more taxing than teaching ethics from an exclusively intellectual and academic point of view. But the reward of doing so is that students love thinking about their life’s purpose, and to connect their professional ambitions with meaning, personal growth, and values. And if we do that as ethics educators, we become guides that help students discover their values and priorities rather than academic professors who go through yet another dry intellectual topic.

In the engineering ethics literature, there are other ways to distinguish different approaches to engineering ethics education. For instance, Herkert ( 2005 ) distinguishes micro ethics and macro ethics in teaching engineering ethics: (1) micro ethics: the responsibilities of individual engineers/professionals; and (2) macro ethics: the collective, social responsibilities of engineers and societal decisions about technology. Both micro and macro ethics in Herkert’s sense would belong to the category of professional ethics in our paper as they exist in the professional environment of engineers. Personal ethics in our paper is different from Herkert’s two approaches as it is mainly focused on the values, meanings, and commitments derived from engineers’ “non-professional” experiences (e.g., an engineer’s own value system may not be captured by her individual professional responsibilities which are often defined not by herself but by the profession and its cultures).

For instance, Vesilind and Gunn’s book Engineering, Ethics, and the Environment ( 1998 ) considers ‘‘applying’’ classical ethical theories as a way for engineers to practice environmental ethics. A few other examples that propose applying classical ethical theories include Mitcham and Duval’s book Engineering Ethics ( 1999 ) and Catalano’s book Engineering Ethics: Peace, Justice, and the Earth (Second Edition) ( 2014 ).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor, Dena Plemmons, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and questions. We thank Carl Mitcham, who as a teacher, role model, and friend, had a huge impact on our development as ethics educators. We also thank our friend and colleague Sandy Woodson for inspiring us to use the ethics autobiography to teach engineering students ethical sensitivity. We very much appreciate the editorial comments of Lida Anestidou.

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Snieder, R., Zhu, Q. Connecting to the Heart: Teaching Value-Based Professional Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 26 , 2235–2254 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00216-2

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Received : 22 November 2019

Accepted : 01 April 2020

Published : 16 April 2020

Issue Date : August 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00216-2

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