Moral Deliberation - Dr. Marcus Hedahl

I'm Michael Sears at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy. We're continuing with the next installment, looking at the new N203 course of the Naval Academy. I've joined once again by my guest, Professor Marcus Titoff. Ethics and moral reasoning for the Naval Leader for sophomores. We call them youngsters here at Navy. Marcus, last time we spoke about moral perception, this time we moved to moral deliberation. Can you tell us a little bit about moral deliberation? Yeah, that's a great question, Michael, and thanks for having me back. Moral deliberation is a process that we all use, whether we know it or not, for making moral decisions. We deliberate about things that aren't moral, right? We deliberate about where to go to college or where to go to dinner tonight, but sometimes there are cases that are deeply, deeply morally loaded. Moral deliberation is the framework by which we make those decisions. In the class, we distinguish between what we call test of integrity, which are cases in which it's obvious what the right thing to do is, and you just have to have the ability to do it. There are reasons, personal reasons, maybe that speak against it. And what you might think of is more genuine moral dilemmas, cases in which there are moral reasons that either speak for or speak against two different courses of action. You can't do them both. And so how do you systematically figure out what the right thing to do is? That's what moral deliberation is. How is moral deliberation taught at a typical university ethics course? Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think obviously there's great variety there, and there's great differentiation. But there's a popular show on, now called The Good Place, you can see it on Netflix, I do recommend it. It's an interesting show. It has one of the characters is a professor of moral philosophy. And in one of the episodes in the third season, he's giving a lecture and he says over the last, you know, two thousand five hundred years, Western philosophers have formed three main ideas of how to live an ethical life. He says, first, there's virtue ethics. And Aristotle is generally taken to be the canonical source here. And Aristotle believe that there are certain virtues of mind and character like courage or generosity. And you should try to develop yourself in accordance with those virtues. Second, there's consequentialism. The basis for judgment about whether something is right or wrong stems from the consequences of that action. How much utility or good did it accomplish versus how much pain or back did it accomplish? And John Stuart Mill is often taken to be one paradigm example of a consequentialist. And finally, there's deontology, a semi from the Greek works for study and for duties. And deontology is the school thought that there are strict rules and duties that everyone must adhere to in a functioning society. Being ethical is identifying and obeying those duties following those rules. And so in a typical course, although there are obviously complexities and people look at different things, at some point, they focus on those three frameworks. And they probably read some of the classics from each one. They talk about what those frameworks say is good. It's really about understanding the foundations of what makes an action good or what makes a person a good person. And then they build if they consider more deliberation, they build it out from there, right? How would a virtue ethicist deliberate, how would a consequentialist deliberate, how deontologists deliberate, and what are the strengths and limitations of each of those kind of frameworks? Now that's the classic way you teach moral deliberation. And of course, how do we teach it here? Yeah, so that's a great question. And our courses have always been at least slightly different. They're at least slightly different because they are focused on the practical more often. So we have lots of case studies. And they're focused on the military. As I've heard many people say, we're the only institution that hires each one of our graduates. And so we've always had to focus a little bit more on the practical, on deliberation as opposed to the foundations and morality, and on cases. But we've traditionally used that kind of framework to have a little bit of time to talk about Mill and what he says are the foundations and deliberate and con and Aristotle. And the limitation there is as you quickly realize, or I think as most people quickly realize, even if one's right about the foundations is a practical matter, you often find yourself reasoning about each one of those aspects, right? Consequences do matter, at least sometimes, if not a great deal of the time. Doodies and the rules matter, at least a great deal of the time and character matters as well. In the episode of the good place where they lay out those those three frameworks, they actually call back to specific instances of in the episode of people in the show living up to each one of those ideals. And and that's what you find pretty quickly anywhere that they all have limitations. And you might be a proponent of one. But as a practical matter, you often need a blend of them. And we don't talk as much in a traditional philosophy class because it's about the foundations, because it's about understanding about about that blending, about how to blend those. And so what we've done in this new version of our moral reasoning courses provided them with a with what we call a roadmap with a framework that says, here are some steps to go through to think about and some questions to ask. It's not intended to provide one answer the way let's say a framework in an engineering course might do, right, a flow chart. But it is meant to kind of make sure building off moral perception that they consider at least all these different aspects. And the framework goes through four steps of roadmap. We start off by considering constraints, by considering rights, respect, justice, tying to that deontological framework, right. And those deontological reasons that might speak to us. We then look at consequences. And what will happen based on a particular course of action? What are the short term, what are the long term consequences? What are the consequences of eroding rules of thumb that people might follow? What's the consequences on all of those actions? And then we move on to to other areas. The first is special obligations, which we haven't talked about yet. That's really important in the military because there are lots of duties everybody has just in virtue of being human, but there are other duties that we have in virtue of our past promises in virtue of our past actions and in virtue of the oath that we take. And obviously in the military, we talk a lot about the oath of office that our students take and that the enlisted members take and why those are significant and how they change the moral landscape and how they don't change the moral landscape. You can't be duty bound by a promise to do something immoral. So it can't give you a duty in any way to follow in a legal order, for example. And then we end with character. What kind of person do we want to be? Because that will give our students as well different kinds of responsibilities to be the type of person that they want to live up to. But that's got to be in line with rights, consequences and their oaths. And so that's the framework that we give them for thinking better, for reasoning better about moral impacts now in this new version of ethics and moral reason for the naval leader. So what motivated that change? Yeah, that's a great question, Michael. What motivated the change primarily was an understanding that what we want our students to be is better moral reasoners. We want our students to think more systematically and clearly about these things and to try to capture all of those salient features in moral perception. This is not meant to be foundationally a course in philosophy where our students have a deep appreciation and understanding of Kant, Milen, Aristotle and other thinkers like Confucius, like Mamonides who are in the class. Those are meant to help our students see and develop their reasoning better. But that's the end that we want to be able to be better at. And we find that focusing on deliberation specifically, whether than foundational questions. We hope will make them better moral reasoners in a job that requires tough moral decisions on a frequent basis. And has that been successful? Yeah, that's a great question. And the proof is ultimately in the putting in how they act on active duty. We certainly hope so. We certainly have seen some improvements in the way that they discuss things in class and after. At the very least, it helps them understand that we don't really care what Kant would say about a certain situation or what Aristotle or what Milen would say, which is a common pitfall in this course and another university course is like it. You see the caricature student essay Kant would say, don't do this, Milen would say do it, etc. What we want them to do is to be able to see the good moral reasons for each course of actions in a genuine moral dilemma and then be able to work through those. And so, has it been successful? Their writing has certainly improved some. We need to be able to see that continue over over the course of the lifetime of this course. We have seen some improvements certainly in the way they talk about these things. It does. does allow as well for greater export to other places. So for example, the Stockdale Center has lots of great initiatives to get this kind of language and framework into other places on the yard, into coaches, into other academic classrooms. And I think if we were still based on, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, that would be much more difficult. This framework has also been exported to the new Navy Community College. Where enlisted people are now being instructed through moral reasoning in the same steps. And so in some ways it's already been hugely successful in that we've been able to export this framework in this way of thinking and it'll influence and touch the students in lots of ways other than just our course. But ultimately the success is if the students are better moral reasoners on active duty. And for that, we just have to wait. And I certainly hope so, but we'll have to see. - Mark, it's last time when we were talking about moral perception. You identified a couple of military cases that are germane in that area. Do you have cases, military cases, that you'll be working on and analyzing for moral deliberation? - Oh, yes, certainly. We have lots of those, military cases. We start off actually the moral deliberation with the really interesting and problematic case that isn't a moral dilemma, but ties back to moral perception about the way that Japanese soldiers were treated in World War II and the way that the idea of war trophies, of taking trophies off the dead of our enemies. And we use that to talk a little bit about human dignity and what to do there. We've got another case there about working with partner forces in the use of medical resources and trying to get people to be able to act on their own, but still caring for them as human beings. We've seen those cases on active duty recently. It's really important and useful, I think. We've got cases about the keeping of records and the way that records are sometimes kept, especially maintenance records. We've got, obviously, we talk about the use of the atomic weapons in World War II. We talk about the use of torture and the war on terror. And we've got a series of cases talking about the limits of loyalty. We talk about Captain Rockwood, who is someone in Haiti who disobeyed orders in order to help prisoners in that area and the issues with that. We talk about the recent case on the USS Teddy Roosevelt about the captain going outside of the chain of command to with his concerns about the COVID protocols and whether or not that was appropriate. And the last thing we've got a really interesting case about a platoon commander and how he cleared streets in Fallujah and the way he considered the dignity and respect of both his people and the non-combatants working in the area and the way that his superiors viewed those actions. And so that's another really interesting case. We have a host of them in this section. I'll just mention one more briefly about no one behind, about a rescue mission in very rough seas and rough conditions for sending off aircraft, off an aircraft carrier, whether or not to send another round of rescue ships after the first one has had difficulties. So there's a host of cases built on real world scenarios that are in this section that we ask our students to go through and think about and deliberate about and think a little bit more about that process and how to make that decision. Professor Marcus Hidal, thanks for joining us with moral deliberation as we continue our investigation on this new NE203 course. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]. [MUSIC PLAYING]