Using the Economic Concept of a 'Merit Good' to Justify the Teaching of Ethics across the University Curriculum

• Main Authors: NOWACKI, Mark, Ver Eecke, Wilfried
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2004
• Subjects: Higher Education; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/23; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/1022/viewcontent/UsingEconomicConceptMeritGood_2004_wp_Nowacki.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Philosophers often lament the limited role that philosophy plays in the intellectual formation of the average university student. Once central to university life—there was a time when the study of philosophy defined what it meant to be a student of the liberal arts—philosophy as a subject of study has become marginalized. It is a painful reality that in many universities philosophy has been reduced to the status of a fluffy elective, a course of study to be conscientiously avoided by the more "practical" and "hard nosed" students bent upon success in the pragmatic worlds of business and politics. Only classical studies has suffered a greater come-uppance. The situation is dire, but I don’t believe that we should give up hope yet. What follows in this paper is an argument that can be used to justify the introduction of philosophical, and specifically ethical, discourse into a wide range of university courses. The argument I advance is, I hope, both sufficiently formal to convince administrators, and sufficiently broad to convince students, of the practical importance that at least one area of philosophy has for the successful pursuit of even the most praxis-oriented career.