Moral Relativism, Cultural Awareness and Cooperative Learning in Teaching Professional Ethics

Anyone who has taught an introductory ethics course or a professional ethics class has likely heard students writing off ethics and ethics instruction as unimportant, offering as evidence some type of moral relativism. In an effort to address this problem, the author has crafted an approach to teaching professional ethics which borrows from critical thinking instruction, the recognition of multiple cultural identities, and cooperative learning and pedagogical techniques. In this paper she discusses this combined pedagogical method which she has found to be somewhat successful in
mitigating the impact of moral relativism and even more successful as a means for achieving the important goal of equipping students with the tools for making reasoned ethical decisions in their future professional
lives.