Cultural Wars, Then and Now

The Islamic world: cartoons provoke riots and death, teachers imprisoned for allowing students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, bombs detonated in markets and on minibuses, rape victims jailed. The Islamic world: leaders of countries reject evidence about the Holocaust and ban the practice of yoga. The Islamic world: irrational behavior in the name of religion

Pedagogical Strategies for Teaching Moral Minimalism

In 1986, Stephen Satris’s article, Student Relativism, means to offer analysis of, and suggest some methods for dealing with, a quite particular and peculiar problem in teaching philosophy…I speak of the problem of student relativism. (Satris, 1986, p. 193) The problem has not gone away. However, psychological research suggests that the problem of relativism, a problem especially critical for teaching business ethics (or any other class in applied philosophy) is not insolvable. This paper, extending earlier work by R. McGowan, provides a brief account of research by Lawrence Kohlberg and William Perry on the structure of thought exhibited by students, gives evidence of that structure, and offers pedagogical strategies for overcoming that structure and attaining moral minimalism in the classroom