As some here may know, I teach part-time in one of the great public university systems in the US. Lately I’ve been teaching in their adult night-school program - a BA-granting program aimed at the needs of full-time working adults who didn’t have a chance to go to college when they were younger. The enrollment is majority female and, this being a working-class New York City population, non-white by a huge majority. Being older, the students bring a lot more life experience and practical wisdom to the class with them, so I expect more savvy from them than from clueless 18-year-olds. But that’s not to say they can’t surprise you.

This term I’m teaching an introductory ethics course. Last night we did a unit on “moral personhood” - the question to whom moral rules apply, or “who counts” within the obligations and protections of a moral theory. I noted that, historically, opinions on this issue had been mixed: at one time many people seriously argued that some normal adult human beings were not moral persons and thus could be enslaved, but opinion has essentially shifted completely on that question; it has also generally been assumed that animals are not moral persons, but opinion has now somewhat shifted on that question. I was trying to set the issue up as a live controversy, and then expecting some discussion of animal rights, abortion, stem-cell research, brain death, and the like as test cases. But the slavery issue caught their attention (and totally derailed my lecture, but that happens).

One of the most thoughtful and insightful students - a black man - asked why, exactly, slavery was wrong. Now, this is the kind of question you want to hear in a philosophical ethics course. Of course - I assumed - he didn’t believe slavery was right, but he wanted an explanation in terms of moral theory, and he wasn’t sure how to go about giving one himself. This was an excellent question - but I was still kind of startled to hear it, especially coming from a black student, especially in a largely-black class, and especially in a class that hadn’t previously been prone to ask such searching questions about other issues. (I’d like to think I’ve successfully made them into philosophers and now it’s paying off, but, frankly, I’m not that sanguine.)

So, OK, the black guy wants to know if there’s anything wrong with slavery. I can deal with that. Some of the other students point out the terrible things involved in slavery - whippings, abuse, being stolen from your native culture, etc.. I have to remind them that the stereotype images of slavery were not universally correct - that most slaves in Europe and the US were born there and did not come directly from Africa, that not all slaves were whipped, not all lived in squalor, some learned skilled trades and were allowed to earn money for themselves, and that US-style chattel slavery as an industry unto itself was not the historical rule. Slavery allowed for many wrongs and abuses, but slavery itself has to be wrong for some other reason - it’s still wrong to enslave people even if you don’t physically abuse them. The guy who raised the question looks startled by this idea. Apparently, he wasn’t just opening a philosophical debate about slavery - he really didn’t know it was bad, and hadn’t considered the idea that it might be a violation of fundamental moral rights.

Thinking to put the issue in sharper focus, I ask them “If you had a choice between being a slave and living in comfort, without being abused, and being free but living in poverty, which would you prefer?” Since - I assumed - freedom was still obviously preferrable, there had to be something bad about slavery beyond the question of physical misery. Bad mistake.

One of the other most talkative, and fairly bright, students - also a black man - thinks it over and declares he’d rather be a slave. I’m dumbfounded, and, like a foundered dummy, I ask him “You would!?” “Yeah! You said that you would get good food and comfortable living conditions. And if you’re a slave, you have no worries! You don’t have to look for a job! I’ll go for that!”

Some of the other students - especially the black women - get on his case for choosing slavery, and he keeps defending himself by pointing to the good living conditions. One woman yells at him “You just want the food! You keep saying ‘it’s the food! . . . There’s good food!’” (He’s a pretty hefty guy, so it’s even funnier, though luckily she doesn’t say that.) The rest of the students are looking uncomfortable.  The student tries to minimize all this by saying “I’m not defending slavery . . .” and I lose control and blurt at him “You just did! You said you wanted to be a slave!” He looks chagrined but doesn’t back down.

Being philosophically trained, I keep wanting to use the “Socratic method” - leading questions designed to reveal flaws in another person’s argument - to allow the students to find their own way toward understanding of the subject. And I don’t normally criticize students’ positions on moral issues, whether I like them or not; I concentrate on pointing out strong or weak defenses of those positions. But in this case I can’t make any headway on what I had honestly introduced as a non-controversial moral issue, in the face of a student who says he’d like to give up all his moral rights if he could get some good food and a decent place to sleep.*

I’m watching my class disintegrate before my eyes. I’ve got a shouting match developing, mostly among the black students, over the propriety of slavery. Two of the best students, both black, are criticising the idea that there’s anything wrong with slavery, and one of them wants to be a slave!

The class is taught in this screwed up utility room (they miscalculated their space) that has a huge pillar right in front of the students’ seats, which I have to keep dancing around while I’m addressing the class. I retreat completely behind the pillar and lean against it, hoping this is all a dream. Some of the students see me holding my head in my hands and start laughing. I’m thinking:

(1) Somebody’s going to lynch this guy.

(2) It might be me.

(3) If not, I’m going to wind up on the front page of the New York Post under the headline “SHAME ON CAMPUS!!: Liberal Prof Praises Slavery, Invites Black Students Onto the Plantation!“.

(4) On the other hand, I’ll be famous. Maybe I’ll be in David Horowitz’s next book!

Getting off the slavery topic for a moment, the “bondage-questioning” guy raises another burning moral issue that’s been bugging him: he recites, in lengthy detail, some bizarre story he’d heard about a man who was arrested after being caught humping a road-kill deer carcase. The student was particularly incensed that the same man got a heavier sentence for fucking an already-dead wild animal than he had previously received for killing and then fucking a horse. Why, he wanted to know, was that? The wannabe-slave guy chimes in from a philosophical perspective: if animals are not moral persons, why can’t you just . . . “All right, all right - I get it!” I scream at him. I’m staring, open-mouthed, at my nutcase students. Some of the students are staring at me. Partly I think these two guys are winding me up - just being smartasses. But partly they really want to learn, and, it’s all too evident, these are the things they want to learn about.

It’s that last part that scares me.

So, I waste another half hour of my dwindling class time on a recitation of Supreme Court doctrine on sexual morals laws, culminating with Lawrence v. Texas. One of the students - the cute, shy type - looks physically ill as I carefully detail the legal distinction between sex and sodomy. I manage a convoluted segue back into moral personhood via necrophilia, animal rights, the A/RSPCA, the film Amazing Grace, and, finally . . . slavery. I’m thinking this is actually a fairly deft piece of pedagogy, not that it matters now, because I’m also thinking:

(5) “SCANDAL ON CAMPUS!!: Pervert Prof Endorses Dead Ungulate Fucking!”

I’m going to have David Horowitz and Rick Santorum on my ass.

Still reeling, I eventually put the lecture on Hold to discuss the students’ term papers. On the question whether there are any absolute moral truths - a subject we had discussed at length - every paper I received, with just one exception, endorsed moral relativism (the idea that moral judgment is “just a matter of opinion”, and anything is right for anyone who believes it is). Worse, almost all of them based that claim on the fact that there are deep moral disagreements on some issues - i.e., they believed that because people haven’t agreed what the facts are on some moral issues, there just aren’t any moral facts. (I did get them to agree that not knowing, say, scientific facts, or historical facts, does not mean that there aren’t real scientific or historical truths “out there”, but when I asked them if moral truths might be the same way - that the fact we don’t agree on the answers to moral questions doesn’t mean there aren’t any answers at all - I got a roomful of quizzical looks. I suppose, to a group of which some were willing to endorse slavery, and others willing to actually be slaves, the idea that anything “just is” really and truly wrong may be foreign, but . . . jeezelouise!)

So, great. About a third of the way through the semester in a college-level class on ethical theory, a subject on which I am nominally an expert, all of my students are moral nihilists, one of the black guys wants to be a plantation slave, and another black guy shows an inordinate appreciation for both slavery and carrion-ophilia.

I appear to be practicing negative moral education. By the second quiz I’m sure they’ll be worshipping a pig head and actively hunting the weaker students. Already I have to circulate their photographs to the Central Park Zoo. God knows what they’ll come up with next.

I’m screwed.

Teaching. The Noble Profession.

 

* Somewhere, Earl Butz is smiling.