Using virtual reality to teach ethics
Does teaching ethics make people more ethical? Whether it works or not hasn't been studied much, but I think that if it did, the world would probably have far more vegans and vegetarians, and far fewer unethical business practices. Actually, if our approach to teaching ethics was effective at making people more moral it seems like the experts on ethics, the ethicists themselves, would easily be the most ethical individualsaround, but as the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel discovered they're probably no more ethical than anyone else. In fact, a running joke on the popular sitcom, "The Good Place,” was that the moral philosophy professor who taught the others how to be good people, was not a paragon of goodness himself. So, how do we make ethics education more effective at helping people become more ethical? We need techniques for teaching that are not just focused on learning the concepts and theory, but also cultivate ethical behavior. We need it to be something that becomes second nature to them. But, if teaching ethics doesn't do that, then what does? Well, think about ways we can learn a new language, for instance. One way would be to take a language course in a university and read books that teach us about the language.
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