Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations “I am convinced that, if teachers today are to initiate young people into an ethical existence, they themselves must attend more fully than they normally have to their own lives…; they have to break with the mechanical life, to overcome their own submergence in the habitual, even in what they conceive to be the virtuous, and ask the ‘why’ with which learning and moral reasoning begin.” -Maxine Greene, “Wide Awakeness and the Moral Life,” p. 46 Maxine Greene Awakening to the Moral

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations Moral Action & Choice “Moral action, of course, demands choosing between alternatives, usually between two goods, not between good and bad or right and wrong.” -Maxine Greene, “Wide Awakeness and the Moral Life,” p. 48

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations “These are choices of consequence for the self and others; and they are made, they can only be made in social situations where custom, tradition, official codes, and laws condition and play upon what people think and do…To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted.” -Maxine Greene, “Wide Awakeness and the Moral Life,” p. 49

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations Morality & the Conventional “If individuals act automatically or conventionally, if they do only what is expected of them (or because they feel they have no right to speak for themselves), if they do only what they are told to do, they are not living moral lives.” -Maxine Greene, “Wide Awakeness and the Moral Life,” p. 49

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations Simon Blackburn: the invisibility and the inconvenience of ethics “The workings of the ethical environment can be strangely invisible.” -Simon Blackburn, Being Good, p. 2

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations the power of the habitual “For we may not be aware of our ideas. An idea in this sense is a tendency to accept routes of thought and feeling that we may not recognize in ourselves, or even be able to articulate. Yet such dispositions rule the social and political world.” -Simon Blackburn, Being Good, p. 3

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations being ethical - vs. - being moralistic “An ethical climate is a different thing from a moralistic one.” -Simon Blackburn, Being Good, p. 3

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations human beings: the ethical animal? “Human beings are ethical animals. I do not mean that we naturally behave particularly well, nor that we are endlessly telling each other what to do. But we grade and evaluate, and compare and admire, and claim and justify. We do not just ‘prefer’ this or that, in isolation. We prefer that our preferences are shared; we turn them into demands on each other.” -Simon Blackburn, Being Good, p. 4

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations philosophy & self knowledge “Philosophy is certainly not alone in its engagement with the ethical climate. But its reflections contain a distinctive ambition…It is an enterprise of self- knowledge.” -Simon Blackburn, Being Good, p. 4

Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 6424: Ethics and Diversity in Educational Organizations “Ethics is disturbing.” “We all have a tendency to complacency with our own ways…We do not like being told what to do…Ethics is disturbing.” -Simon Blackburn, Being Good, p. 6-7