Ethics as Pathway to sustainability and social balance

摘要

People involved in teaching ethics to university students usually know about ethics, about ethic principles, ethics schools of thought, ethic paradigms, and they are normally able to exhibit a solid conceptual background on ethics. The problem usually arises on how they are going to do it, how they are going to teach. Teaching, top-down, unidirectional ethic principles, and ethical rules, or facilitating the way students absorb and discover facts and create knowledge, how they learn, through discussions, negotiations and experimental decisions. Facilitating students work on discovering and mounting knowledge pieces. The main difference between these two approaches, these two strategies, these two paradigms, is about how knowledge is produced, how do we create and develop knowledge. We think knowledge is distinctive and unique, it is produced inside ourselves and for ourselves, and knowledge is what allows us to decide about alternative options and act upon. In this paper, we take ethics as a specific form of knowledge, that is, we create and improve our ethics behaviour the same way we create, improve and expand our own knowledge. Further, ethics can relate to small things, as it can relate to huge and transcendent things. That's why, maybe, in order to learn, we need to address these two categories of situations with different learning strategies, and suitable approach styles. In fact, we define a way to coop with small things, things from our everyday life, and another to deal with more difficult things, the ones that happen more singularly, that are more difficult to assume and usually with stronger consequences. It is about these intricate labyrinths of behaviour that, using narrative, we explore our research, defining pathways to navigate actual circumstances as they happen. This provides a specific type of learning, learning in the making. Better, learning by doing in the making.