Ethics and Critical Thinking in Leadership Education

Abstract

If you want to teach students to be ethical and socially responsible, you have to develop their moral imaginations, critical thinking skills and evoke their emotions or passion to act on what is morally right. Moral learning must reach the body, the head, and the heart. Punishment and rewards act on the body to behaviorally reinforce lessons about right and wrong. Teachers educate the head by giving students information about the world that is necessary for ethical decision making. Educating the heart is perhaps the most difficult and ignored part of teaching ethics, because it is about cultivating the emotions and feelings necessary for morality, and the will or desire to be moral. In this paper I focus on educating the head and the heart. I argue that critical thinking skills are crucial to ethics education and that the point of ethics courses should be to develop moral sentiment, will and imagination. My comments will specifically address the relevancy of these areas to leadership studies, but what I have to say applies in general to the liberal arts.

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References

Howard Gardner , Leading Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 34.

Ray Perkins, Jr. Logic and Mr. Limbaugh (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1995).

Ibid p. 172.

Ibid p.50

Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) p. 202.

take this element of imagining how from Patricia Werhanes's Ruffin Lecture on Moral Imagination. A full discussion of imagining how and imagining that is: (forthcoming) Joanne B. Ciulla , "Business Leadership and Moral Imagination in the Twenty-First Century," in Moral Values: The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Andrew Cecil , (Dallas: University of Texas Press, 1996). Also see, "Business Ethics as Moral Imagination, in Business Ethics: The State of the, Art, ed. R. Edward Freeman , Oxford University Press , 1991.

Iris Murdoch , Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals ( New York: Penguin Press, 1993), p. 315.

Iris Murdoch , The Sea, The Sea (London: Penguin Books, 1978).

Iris Murdoch , 1993, p. 325.

10.

Ibid p. 347.

11.

Gardner , p. 65

12.

Clifford Geertz , Local Knowledge (New York : Basic Books, 1983), p. 315.

13.

Ibid p. 10.

14.

Mary Warnock , Imagination (Berkeley: SAGE Publications, 1976), 206-7.

15.

Lionell Trilling , The Last Decade (New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979 ), p. 212.

16.

Iris Murdoch , 1993, p. 310.

17.

Daniel Goleman , Emotional Intelligence, ( New York: Bantam Books, 1995).

18.

Yuichi Shoda, Walter Mischel and Philip Peake , "Predicting Adolescent Cognitive and Self-regulatory Competencies From Pre school Delay of Gratification, Developmental Psychology, 26, 6 (1990), pp. 978-86.

19.

Goleman , p. xiii.