Biographical sketch
I grew up on a small farm in rural north Louisiana, graduated from high school with 23 classmates, and attended the local college: Louisiana Tech, graduating in 1968. From there I wandered about a bit, eventually landing in Albany, New York, and starting graduate school at SUNY-Albany. I transferred after a couple of years to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to finish my doctorate in philosophy in 1979. My first teaching job was at Elon College in North Carolina, where I taught for ten years. Wishing to teach at an urban State university, in 1990 I took a position at Youngstown State University, teaching students whose parents – or often the students themselves – had lost jobs when the Youngstown steel mills closed: eager, dedicated, incredibly hard working and often very bright students who were typically the first in their family to attend college, who often worked full time jobs to pay for their education, and who saw college classes as a tremendous opportunity – and who, incidentally, were paying their own way and fully expected to get their money’s worth out of any class in which they enrolled. I cannot imagine any group of students that would be more satisfying to teach. Along the way I’ve published a few dozen articles, mainly concerning ethics and free will, but also ranging into bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of sociology, and logic; a couple of university press books concerning free will (The Natural Selection of Autonomy with SUNY in 1998, and Freedom Without Responsibility with Temple University Press in 1990); a critical thinking textbook, Critical Thinking: Consider The Verdict, now in its 5th edition with Prentice-Hall; and of course the books with Longman.
Why I Wrote this Book
In writing Consider Ethics, my goal was to produce a clear, conversational introduction to ethics that covers substantive issues in both theoretical and applied ethics. The questions in ethics are often difficult, and frequently controversial; but there is no reason why those issues should be inaccessible to people genuinely interested in examining them. No matter what one’s background or special interests, ethics should be of interest to almost everyone. It was the conviction that ethical issues are inherently interesting, often fascinating, and always important, and that those issues – including the most demanding ethical theories and the best arguments for and against them – could be discussed comfortably and conversationally that prompted the writing of this book. Above all, it was my experience with my students at Youngstown State University – a remarkably diverse group, from a vast variety of backgrounds and with widely differing levels of preparation – that convinced me that people from all backgrounds find ethics a fascinating and worthwhile inquiry, and that students of varying levels of educational preparation can profitably examine and successfully master substantive ethical theories and the arguments for and against them.
Over a number of years I have had the good fortune of teaching a great many very bright and creative students, and Coffee and Philosophy originated and evolved in my work with those students. In experimenting with writing assignments that would challenge and foster their creative and critical abilities, I discovered that dialogues were a very successful format. I started by giving students the first page or two of a dialogue among several characters debating free will or the nature of mind or the existence of God, and had students continue the dialogue (with the option of adding their own characters as the dialogue continued). I was delighted with the depth and sophistication of the work they produced, particularly the cheerful yet very serious exploration of genuine opposing arguments (their flaws as well as their strengths) and the way positions of the dialogue characters developed as they were pushed and scrutinized by one another – particularly the willingness of students to subject their own views (represented by their favorite character) to trenchant criticism. I was somewhat surprised by the positive results, but should not have been. Dialogue has for centuries proved its worth as a vehicle superbly suited for philosophical exploration and debate and development, particularly in pushing writers to develop real arguments, seriously consider objections, and grapple with genuine challenges to their cherished views; and philosophers as diverse as Lorenzo Valla, David Hume, Bishop Berkeley, Denis Diderot, and Raymond Smullyan have continued to use dialogue effectively since the time of Plato. Dialogue seemed especially appealing to me for use in an introductory text, for three reasons. First, embodying differing views in different speakers makes it much easier to identify and distinguish competing philosophical positions. Philosophy can hardly avoid abstract thought, but the dialogue anchors that abstract thought to concrete characters. Second, the format is conversational in tone, and difficult arguments, strong objections, and serious debates proceed pleasantly and naturally. And finally, the dialogue characters make the discussion richer and deeper by placing debates in a larger context. Ben’s religious beliefs are not confined to the first chapter and forgotten when he discusses the nature of mind or the question of free will. And Selina’s strong empiricism is of course prominent in her epistemology, but also shapes her view of ethics. Thus rather than artificially isolated chapters on each area of philosophy, the dialogue promotes an integrated examination of philosophy, reflecting the way we actually explore issues within larger patterns of belief.
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