Teaching Sympathetic Moral Reasoning

Abstract

I offer a new approach to teaching ethics that offers a heuristic for moral reasoning and attempts to inculcate a habitual process of moral reasoning. I use a variety of theories from ethics, philosophy of mind, and psychology to create what I call Sympathetic Moral Reasoning. In this paper, I explain my initial motivations for this approach as well as some of my theoretical inspirations in developing the process. However, the purpose of this paper is not to detail the theoretical background for such an approach, but rather to explain how I designed the course and used the various activities to instill a process of moral reasoning as a habit. Such an approach serves not only to teach students how to reason morally, but enables them to engage in moral reasoning regularly, which is what I take the ultimate purpose of teaching ethics to be.