We intend to explore a different dimension of practical and professional ethics, one that we can characterize as more positive. The dominant view of ethics is that it functions as a limit to power in that it establishes barriers beyond which we cannot go. (A colleague of our talks of la etica como un baden, ethics as a speed bump, an obstacle that we have to get around in pursuit of something more important.) In this paper, we want to do several things: (1) argue that ethics instruction actually empowers students in very interesting and fundamental ways; (2) delineate some of the skills that must be developed to become empowered ethically; (3) present a successful classroom exercise used to initiate this process; (4) discuss more generally other exercises that might promote ethical-empowerment; (5) raise the problem of how to go about assessing strategies, activities, and materials to ensure a continual process of improvement toward ethical empowerment.
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