Teaching Philosophy

Online First: August 21, 2015

DOI: 10.5840/teachphil201581238

Philosophy for General Education:

Teaching Introductory Environmental Ethics
for Non-Majors

JANE DREXLER
Salt Lake Community College

Abstract: This article explores the value of teaching Environmental Ethics as

an introductory-level, general education course for non-majors. It focuses on
how philosophy can help students discern multiple voices within discourses,
texts and thinking, and by doing so disrupt several untenable mental para-
digms that new and underprepared students often bring with them to college:
fixed and dualistic notions of truth, relativistic conceptions of difference, and
decontextualized approaches to issues and ideas. This article also presents
examples of class activities that are designed to foster multivocal thinking
and that are also manageable for faculty with high teaching loads.

I teach philosophy at an open-access community college, which primar-

ily serves students filling general-education requirements for transfer
to four-year college, and students entering the workforce. For most
of my students, my class is their first and only course on the subject.
That they signed up for philosophy at all means their curiosity already
got them past two popular conceptions of philosophy that stops many
a student short of walking through our doors: that “Philosophy’s only
for those high-brow, intellectual types, not for me (and anyway, I don’t
even own a pipe or a tweed jacket)”; and, of course, that “Philosophy
is useless. I can’t get a job with that.” 1
Teaching philosophy as a general education course for non-majors
also means that my colleagues and I see a broad range of student
capabilities and interests. On the one hand, we see some very gifted
students who are well-prepared to succeed, who received a high-quality
secondary education that insured their college-readiness, are invested in
their intellectual endeavors, and face few obstacles to their educational
commitments. On the other hand, we also (and much more often) teach
students faced with college-readiness challenges, financial burdens,

© Teaching Philosophy. All rights reserved. 0145-5788

JANE DREXLER

and time-management issues that threaten to overwhelm them at any

moment: they may have not yet passed required composition courses,
or read primary texts before. Our students may have full-time jobs and
children. They may be first-generation students for whom the culture,
vocabularies and practices of college are deeply unfamiliar, and who
lack support systems outside of school to help them navigate the ter-
rain. They may have a small window of time in which they can reach
their educational goals, before bills and life catches up to them.
And as faculty we face our own obstacles. Even at many four-year
colleges, we are more-and-more asked to teach high course-loads (4-
4, 4-3, or the like) with high enrollment caps. And at the community
college, the situation is even more daunting: I teach a 5-5 load, which
means that I meet about 160 new students every four months, each one
new to philosophical inquiry. The sheer burden this places on commu-
nity-college and other high-course-load teaching cannot be overstated:
it limits our capacity to read and evaluate student work, to give indi-
vidualized attention to students, to take learning outside the classroom,
to encourage and support unfamiliar or less formalized types of student
work, and to foster and facilitate meaningful, intentional discussion.
So what is the value of philosophy for our general education stu-
dents facing some (or all) of the above circumstances? And how do
faculty create meaningful classroom experiences that are rigorous and
effective under the limiting conditions we face?
In what follows I reflect on the value of philosophy by focusing
on one important mental habit that an introductory level class in phi-
losophy can help students develop: thinking “multivocally”—that is,
discerning multiple voices and logics within discourses and arguments.
I argue that this habit must be developed if students are to become
critical thinkers and moral actors, because it disrupts a number of unten-
able mental paradigms that students often bring with them to college.
Moreover, I offer examples of some course activities that I designed
to help introductory students develop habits of multivocality, but that
also are manageable for me as a professor faced with the limitations
of heavy teaching loads.

Environmental Ethics as General Education

I frame my reflections here around one particular course, Introduction
to Environmental Ethics. While much of what I say below could apply
to other introductory level courses in Philosophy, I want to focus on
Environmental Ethics for two primary reasons.
First, because it is traditionally taught as an upper-division or gradu-
ate level course, I needed to be very intentional in designing it for
introductory, general education students. I could not rely too heavily on
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

sample syllabi, traditional course objectives, or typical assignments. I

had to ask at every turn what I was trying to do, how it would benefit
a general education, and how I could best enable students of different
abilities to develop and hone essential philosophical skills and attitudes.
Generally speaking, my assignments look different than if I had
designed them for an upper division. The readings are more intention-
ally selected: shorter and more guided, to enable the development of
close reading skills and textual analysis. The tasks are more structured
than they would be for students already versed in philosophical inquiry.
While organizing the content and activities, my emphasis was less on
embedding each philosopher and theme into its place in the formal
disciplinary subfield than it was on identifying and practicing skills
that cut across disciplines and personal or career goals.
Second, the field of Environmental Ethics covers issues and debates
that are deeply relevant, right now, across the disciplines: climate
change and biodiversity, human geography and resource management,
international and domestic economy, legal theory and global justice,
agriculture and food animals, wildlife management, and more. This
class allows students to see the connections between the humani-
ties and other academic disciplines like business, science, engineer-
ing, public policy, etc.; and to appreciate how shifting between the
analytical lenses of multiple disciplines can help them develop what
Paul Hanstedt calls “wicked competencies.” Where there are “wicked
problems”—that is, large-scale challenges that cut across disciplines
and “where the boundaries of the problem shift rapidly because in-
formation is incomplete, contradictory or continually changing”—our
world needs people with wicked competencies: “the ability to adapt to
a rapidly shifting landscape” and “stretch daily, if not hourly, outside
their undergraduate fields.” 2

Major Organizational Themes of the Course

Before getting too far into details, it’s worth offering a brief overview
of the thematic organization of this course, not only because that will
give a context for the specific examples I use later, but also because
in designing the course, I came to appreciate how content is itself part
of the pedagogy. How I organize content and theories under specific
themes is not just a disciplinary matter about the substantive knowledge
in the field, it is itself a strategic decision about how to best move
students through stages in the development of certain analytical skills
and sensitivities.

Section One: Basic Moral Theory

In the first section of the course, I offer a kind of moral theory primer
that embeds three classic theories (Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology,
JANE DREXLER

and Justice theory) within an exploration of their underlying conceptual

frameworks. Students explore the framework called “The Good,” in
which the moral yardstick is a consideration of consequences, utility
and the like; and they come to appreciate how reasoning with that yard-
stick looks substantially different than reasoning from the framework
of the “Right,” where morality is measured in terms of individual duty,
dignity, natural rights, and so forth.
I begin with these two moral frameworks, and the classic theories
that fall under them, because they interweave the rest of the units
of the course, and also because they offer an opportunity to show to
students the complexities and conflicts that arise between underlying
value-systems. Often students who are new to philosophical inquiry
think that a course in moral theory is just going to “teach them what’s
right.” But by providing this primer in the major moral frameworks,
students can see from early on that the answer to “what’s right” is
dependent, among other things, on the very conceptual frameworks
used. This insight, then, allows them to explore what those conceptual
frameworks are, where they come from, and where they may or may
not share points-of-connection with other frameworks.

Section 2: Value Theory and the Moral Circle

At its root, Environmental Ethics calls us to inquire about the very
nature of our moral valuing. What do we value? Why? What are the
implications and obligations of placing value? Exploring these ques-
tions helps students develop the ability to break down the assumed,
identify the hidden recesses of our thinking, bring undercurrents of
belief into view, and articulate the values that inform them. Thus, this
second major section of the course focuses on “Moral Extensionism”
and the boundary-markers and meaning of what some have called the
“moral circle”—that is, the underlying criteria we use to distinguish
between those beings that warrant (and require) our moral consideration
and those that do not.
We begin this section with fundamental challenges to a conceptual
myopia that environmental philosophers have argued underlies the
human-centered (and ultimately anthropocentric) theories in traditional
moral philosophy. Here, students explore a key insight in environmen-
tal philosophy: how we act in the world is driven by our conceptual
apparatuses; and therefore changing how we treat nature requires that
we re-imagine the very ways we conceive of it. Students begin to see
that conceptual apparatuses are constructions, not eternal; truth is not
fixed or uncontested—our stories are changing, and changeable.
As students move through arguments for expanding the moral circle,
they arrive at a central debate in environmental ethics between an
individualist approach of animal-rights and animal-welfare advocates
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

like Peter Singer and Tom Regan; and a holistic approach like Aldo
Leopold’s Land Ethic. Theoretically, and practically, these two ap-
proaches can create conflicting obligations: for instance, what do we do
when “preserving the integrity, stability and beauty” of an ecosystem
requires intervention, and individual sacrifice, within in that system?
Not only do students explore the deep tensions between individualism
and communalism, they also grapple with the difficulties of prioritizing
multiple, conflicting obligations.

Section 3: Oppression, Globalization, and Activism

In this third major section, students are introduced to theories regarding
Environmental Racism, Environmental Law, and Participatory Justice,
among other things. Students explore one of the more valuable insights
coming out of Social and Political Philosophy: that oppression is
structural and systemic, deeply interwoven within the fabric of culture,
rather than the product of direct intention, and is, thus, often very hard
to recognize and understand, and even harder to address effectively.
Exploring privatization of natural resources, international economic
policy, and other issues pertaining to global environmental justice, stu-
dents not only come to recognize the ways that political and economic
policies and practices affect and often dictate the development (and to
varying degrees the over-development, exploitation, and exhaustion)
of natural resources and local economies, they interrogate the very
concepts of “progress” and “development” that underlie our global
economy.

“Multivocality” and Thinking-as-Conversation

Woven throughout all three of the above thematic sections is an atten-
tion to how content becomes a pedagogical consideration: how con-
cepts, arguments, and theories can help orient students towards habits
and sensitivities of “multivocal” thinking. The ability to discern the
multiple voices within a text—to recognize irony and other tones, to
trace an author’s development of a position or concept from simple to
complex, to understand when an author is presenting a viewpoint s/
he ultimately disagrees with, to see a line of reasoning as connected
to a larger conversation—is crucial to a student’s ability to think
critically and to participate in public and professional discussion and
decision-making.
But this ability is not a given, and many intro-level students lack
it. A friend of mine once called this inability to discern multivocality
the “Wikipedia model” of coming to a text. Wikipedia is, by and large,
mono-vocal: expositional and informational. It does not typically pres-
ent a topic as part of an ongoing conversation. Of course, you could
probably also call this model the “K–12 Textbook Model”: too often
JANE DREXLER

elementary and secondary textbooks in science, history, social studies,

and other fields treat their subject matter as fixed, and the knowledge
as objective and eternal.
It comes as no surprise then that many of our students approach
college texts and topics from that same mental paradigm: Books and
essays are simply presentations of uncontested information. In my En-
vironmental Ethics course, for instance, in any given semester, about
a quarter of the students will initially have difficulty recognizing that
Paul Taylor is, himself, not anthropocentric, but rather has argued
against those who are; or they will believe that Tom Regan has advo-
cated for a particular line of reasoning when his explicit purpose was
to reject it. After all, in the “Wikipedia Model” of coming to a text,
if Tom Regan talks about a line of reasoning in his essay, it must be
something that he supports.
I aim to disrupt that mental paradigm, and to reconstruct a model
of knowledge as derived from, and negotiated within, conversation. If
something works, then that is in contrast to what doesn’t work. If we
agree, there is someone we agree with (and indeed someone we don’t).
Truth is not fixed. The ideas we have are not neutral or arrived at within
a vacuum. We have built our world, and the ideas in it, with others.
The discipline of philosophy is well-suited to thinking dialogi-
cally. The history of philosophy, even if we sometimes aren’t good at
articulating it, is a history of embodied conversations, across time and
geography. 3 So one of the biggest contributions philosophy can make
to a student’s general education is to help them develop the skills to
treat thinking as an ongoing conversation, between others and within
ourselves. Inquiry is dialogic: when Tom Regan writes, he is writing
in response to someone. Moreover, he puts those “someones” right into
his text: he talks to them, and with them.
For instance, in one of the essays I ask students to read, Regan
traces the logic behind several lines of moral reasoning regarding
animals—a Kantian line, a Cruelty line, a Utilitarian line. 4 He presents
concise accounts of the ways these lines of reasoning have prohibited
animal mistreatment, but his purpose is ultimately to reject them as
inadequate. Thus when Regan argues his case, he does so in conversa-
tion with those who think about it differently. They are present to us
when we read his words.
In short, Regan is modeling the very mental habit I want students
to internalize and to practice: thinking conversationally. Not only can
that habit enable basic general comprehension of the content and form
of our subject matter (that is, simply, comprehension of what Regan
actually argues). But, as I explore below, it can also help the students
develop the capacity to think critically, in that it breaks down unten-
able mental paradigms:
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

1. It disrupts dualistic thinking that promotes fixed notions

of Truth and Authority;
2. It promotes strategies for moving beyond relativistic think-
ing that often can close down conversation, or excuse a
lack of attention to conceptual detail; and
3. It contextualizes and historicizes ideas, demystifying them
and making them contestable and usable.

Breaking Down Paradigm 1: Unfixing Truth

Many introductory level students come to class with a simplistic, black
and white model of thinking: “There is a Truth and this class is going
to give it to me, and then I’ll know it, and be done thinking about it.”
William Perry called this level of thinking “Basic Duality”: 5 “Right
versus Wrong,” “Us vs. Them,” “Good vs. Bad.” (and, of course, much
of contemporary public rhetoric assumes (and depends on) this level
of thinking). From a position of Basic Duality, the student relies on
Authority to set them onto a clear and unwavering Truth, and course-
work merely provides information on that truth, and needs no evaluation
because it is given by Authority. 6
But of course we aim for students to develop the capacity to see
Truth and Authority—moral, scientific, political, and otherwise—as
negotiated and developed, as the product of ongoing conversations
and subject to interrogation and refinement. We want our students to
accept the implied responsibility that comes from that understanding:
that none of us are off the hook from needing to form judgments and
cultivate wisdom. We hope our students will come to the conclusion
that one cannot abdicate thinking.

Sample Activity: “Planting a Naysayer” Writing-Activities

As my course has evolved, I’ve come to realize that if I want stu-
dents to develop skills to think conversationally, and recognize truth
as dialogic and unfixed, I cannot just ask them to do it. Particularly
for the General Education student for whom this way of thinking is
unfamiliar, I need to design structured activities that can develop the
necessary skills. To that end, I have found Gerard Graff ’s and Dennis
Earl’s templates very helpful.
The practice of keeping ideas embodied, and putting your interlocu-
tors into your text is what Graff calls “Planting a Naysayer.” 7 Graff
argues that for critical thinking and engaged writing, it is not enough
to simply imagine an audience that might contest certain points of your
argument, you must make them a part of your argument, constructing
your analysis as a continuing conversation rather than rigid exposition.
JANE DREXLER

He offers a few structured templates to help students see how they

might treat a topic, concept, etc. as a conversation: the most basic one
looks like this, for instance:
“While most readers of ____________ have said ____________, a
close and careful reading shows that ___________.”
Similarly, Dennis Earl has suggested a template to help students
to strengthen their argumentative writing and attend to objections.
Like Graff’s template, Earl’s “Four-Sentence Paper” is set up as a
conversation:
(1) They say _____________.
(2) I say ________________, because ____________.
(3) One might object that ________________.
(4) I reply that _______________. 8
In both types of templates, by having students “plant” a naysayer or
objection within their writing, they can develop the mental habit of
seeing ideas as planted within ongoing conversations (that they too
are now a part of).
Following Graff and Earl, then, I created a few of these kinds of
activities. For example—and returning to my earlier example of stu-
dents’ confusion about the “voices” in Tom Regan’s essay—in order
help students to recognize and articulate that Regan is in a broad
conversation with those he disagrees with, I ask them to write short
practice paragraphs following a template that looks a little like this:
In the [PICK ONE: Kantian Account, Cruelty Account, Utilitarian
Account], Regan explains that our obligations to animals are based
on _____________________________.
More specifically, [this account] argues that ________________.
But Regan rejects this line of reasoning because ____________. He
writes “[pick a quote from Regan’s essay that explicitly illustrates
the very point you just said he makes].” Here Regan argues that
[explain quote in your own words.]
Instead of this moral approach, Regan himself advocates a different
line of moral reasoning called the “Animal Rights” Approach,” in
which he argues that ___________________________.
The skills practiced with these templates build on each other, especially
as the templates begin incorporating the students themselves into the
conversations. In general, in designing templates, I work from the
position that the more students can practice recognizing and writing
multivocally, the more they will be able to appreciate the dialogic nature
of thought, to see thinking as creating judgment rather than merely
applying rules, to dispel the conception that Truth is a fixed object to
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

be possessed, and to get past the kind of black-and-white, dualistic

thinking that pits a (my) Authorized “Right” against (your) “Wrong.”

Breaking Down Paradigm 2: Challenging Relativism

Getting students to move past what Perry calls “Basic Duality” is
often a monumental task in itself. That we are all bombarded with
black-and-white thinking in public discourse and in what passes as
news analysis only makes moving beyond this mental paradigm more
difficult. Although it is an early-stage basic element of critical thinking,
getting to the point where a student recognizes that another viewpoint
can be valid, that truth is developed through conversation, and that
disagreement is not evidence of barbarity—sometimes that small step
is a big accomplishment.
But it can create a new mental paradigm that has its own problems:
a naïve or simple relativism that holds difference, albeit perhaps more
kindly and gently than dualism, but in ways that nevertheless cannot
think with difference any more than dualism can. 9 In naïve relativism,
we can “agree to disagree,” we can each “have our own opinion,” but
that is the end to our conversation, not the beginning of it.
Naïve relativism 10 treats ideas as isolated and decontextualized,
opinions as no deeper than gut-preferences needing no justification.
Ideas are equal and transparent, and lacking depth. Thus students often
use relativism as a cop-out (though perhaps unknowingly and often with
friendly intention): relativism becomes a way to avoid thinking, dis-
cussing, looking too carefully, or paying too much attention to details.
Students will sometimes, for instance, gloss over details when it
comes to conceptual differences: for example, our class might spend
a week or so working through a philosopher’s argument for a com-
plex and conceptually-nuanced meaning of a word, say Peter Singer’s
“equality,” or Aristotle’s concept of Happiness; and in the next writ-
ing assignment, a student will revert to the “according to Webster’s
dictionary” strategy.
As much as that occurrence makes me want to scream, and reduce
that bad habit to intellectual laziness, I’ve come to see this lack of atten-
tion to conceptual detail as, in part, an extension of relativism. I figure
it’s a variation of Ockham’s Razor: “All ideas being equal, the simplest
meaning will be the right one” (“simplest” of course meaning “the one
that’s already familiar to me”). Here, I am thinking of Blythe McVicker
Clinchy, and how she identifies a deep root of relativism underlying the
position she calls “Subjective Knowing,” where “whatever feels right
is right to me,” and where external meaning seems to disappear and
“the words on a page dissolve into a sort of Rorschach inkblot, exerting
little constraint on the meaning the reader projects onto the page.” 11
JANE DREXLER

Approaching complex issues through a relativist paradigm guaran-

tees that the student will move no further than their initial, surface,
“gut” position. It means that even if they do recognize that there are
other viewpoints that might be valid, they will not seriously consider
those viewpoints because “they don’t feel right for me.”
Thus, another major goal for me in teaching philosophy at the intro-
ductory level is to start breaking down this relativistic paradigm, and
to show students strategies for “seeing difference deeply” by keeping
ideas embedded in conversations and multi-layered.
For instance, when I choose the content for our unit on animal
rights and welfare, I set it up as a conversation between Tom Regan
and Peter Singer, rather than use only of them as a representative of the
individualist approach to the moral status of animals. Now, that may
be a given in a graduate or senior seminar, but more often than not,
introductory level Ethics anthologies or textbooks—if they include a
section on animals at all—will only offer an essay by Regan or Singer,
but not both. One becomes a sort of a “representative” theorist for the
individualist approach to the moral status of animals. And I understand
why: we have sixteen weeks to cover everything we feel we need to.
Something’s got to give. Indeed, I am often navigating the pressure
to be uber-efficient, cover material survey-style and not get mired in
details. So I understand the impetus. And isn’t one animal theorist
enough, anyway?
But here’s why it’s worth it to me to give substantial attention to
Singer and Regan’s theoretical conversation with each other. Far from
being interchangeable just because they both care about individual
animals, the way they come at moral reasoning differs deeply, at the
fundamental source of animals’ moral status. Because both theorists
come at moral reasoning from two different conceptual frameworks—
Singer from “The Good” (mostly) and Regan from “the Right”—stu-
dents come to see that the differences in views can be subtle but still
far-reaching, and can be grounded in value systems and conceptual
apparatuses that underlie the surface of argument. Engaging Regan
and Singer together in conversation is therefore valuable for students.
It opens up conversations, not ends them: difference is the beginning
of where we go, not the end of the line of inquiry.

Sample Activity: Case Study Workshops

I use case study workshops in all units of the course. They usually
involve reading additional materials, or viewing a documentary, or
the like. They can often include activities in the community: service-
learning, environmental events, or nature-reflections. While I won’t
discuss all of the case study workshops I’ve developed or and the ways I
design the prompts questions in order to get students to practice certain
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

skill sets, I do want to highlight a couple workshops that specifically

ask students to practice “seeing viewpoints deeply.”

The Good vs. The Right

In one of the first workshops of the semester, I ask students to break
into groups based on a moral dilemma they want to explore (e.g.,
whether hunting is okay, whether grass lawns should be made illegal,
or the like). Each group interviews members of the class and records
each student’s answer and reasoning. For the rest of the workshop, the
group breaks down and analyzes each student’s reasoning (the answers
to the questions are much less important than the reasoning they use to
come to their answer), first discerning whether it would fall under the
framework of “The Good” or “The Right,” (or neither) and analyzing
it according to a series of other questions. I ask them to create a kind
of table graph on which they distribute the various lines of reasoning
according to conceptual categories, and then explore cross-value and
shared-values debates. A series of reflection questions follow about
the insights gained into debates and disagreements. 12

The Stories We Tell

This workshop is drawn from Carolyn Merchant’s insight that the sto-
ries we tell of nature and human’s relationship to it—the controlling
imagery we use to describe nature—reflects and affects the ways we
conceive of nature, which in turn affects how we treat nature. For this
workshop, I ask students to find any cultural artifact that reflects a
“story” about our relationship between non-human animals and/or the
environment. These can be sacred texts from religion, songs from the
radio, classic or contemporary art and sculpture. It can be architecture,
or children’s stories, or whatever (for example, Shel Silverstein’s The
Giving Tree). The goal here is to have students read below the surface
of a text or cultural artifact in order to find the underlying conceptual
frameworks, and explore the implications of those frameworks and
of the stories being told. I ask them, too, to imagine how the stories
might be told differently if written by Descartes or Kant, or Richard
Sylvan or Carolyn Merchant, for example.
In general, case study workshops offer an engaging opportunity to
explore underlying conceptual frameworks in order to see difference
deeply. But they also, and in general, serve several other purposes.
They are the hubs of the units, around which the content is organized.
The group discussions in turn become the early stages of students’ for-
mal papers, and help them prepare for tests. Pedagogically, they offer
opportunities to develop skills for analyzing texts, make claims and
back them up with evidence, apply concepts and theories to real and
pressing issues, work together to identify issues and propose solutions
and action-steps, learn effective strategies for responding to others in
JANE DREXLER

dialogue and in non-face-to-face written communication, and—as we

transition now into my final section on mulitvocality—identify and
analyze the contextual nature of ideas.

Breaking Down Paradigm 3: Contextualizing Ideas

Neil Postman once commented that our entertainment-centered culture
treats ideas and knowledge as if they can be entered at any point, and
approached in any order. Thinking requires no prior knowledge or
understanding of context. History is irrelevant. If it requires too much
backstory, the message is too complicated. 13
Tim Wise, anti-racism author and activist, similarly diagnosed the
decontextualized thinking prevalent in the U.S. today this way: “We
speak as if history didn’t happen, as if historical memory doesn’t
matter, as if every day is disconnected from the last, and patterns are
irrelevant. We speak…as persons who enjoy the luxury of viewing
life as a collection of random experiences, and ourselves are mere
individuals floating through life.” 14
Too often, our culture presents world events, issues and peoples as
isolated, mono-vocal snippets of information lacking depth and reality.
So it should not be surprising when we see our students all-too-easily
swayed by messages that explain complicated matters overly-simplisti-
cally, myopically, and preferably in 140 characters. It’s not surprising
that blame tends to get placed haphazardly on easy-to-see targets. It’s
not surprising that when someone does try to draw attention to racism
or sexism or other patterns of injustice, students often want to mark
them as overly-sensitive, and as a trouble-maker who refuses to just
move on. Many of our students are unpracticed in connecting dots and
tracing patterns.
And to the extent that we fail to disrupt that pervading mental
paradigm, we all but guarantee that our responses, if we even have
any, will be inadequate to the task; and our professional, public and
personal decision-making will continue to efface systemic discrimina-
tion, minimize violence, and normalize exploitation of global resources,
environments, economies, and peoples.
On the bright side, because philosophy focuses on cross-referential
and perennial debates, on theorists engaging in multi-vocal styles argu-
mentation, and on the logic and underlying structures of arguments, it
is well-suited to challenge these decontextualizing habits. It can help
students develop skills of placing ideas within larger conversations,
bring to light implied but unreferenced premises and opposition, and
more. Towards this end, in my Environmental Ethics class I have found
a few activities effective. I highlight two below.
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

Sample Activity: Bumper Stickers And Twitter Philosophy

While I am generally suspicious of bumper sticker politics or tweet-
exposition, because of their tendency to oversimplify and water down
complexity, I actually find that these modes of expression can be used
against themselves pretty well to recognize and think contextually.
One idea is to start with a bumper sticker or the like and have students
break it down with questions a bit like these:
What is the bumper sticker’s overall claim? What are the reasons
it implies? In other words, what does the sticker mean to say that
it didn’t say outright?
What context does the message come out of? In other words, what
arguments, events or people is it referencing, either in support or in
critique? If it is play on words, or a joke, how does the joke work?
What connections or analogies are they making?
What relevant insights or points might be lost when the message is
narrowed to the size of the sticker?
How would an opponent respond to the sticker’s message? What
counterpoints would they raise? If you were to create an opposing
bumper sticker, what would it say?
A few bumper stickers that I find effective:
“I’m Pro-Choice” (with images of three types of hunting rifles).
“Be Environmentally Friendly. Wave at Ducks Before Shooting
Them.”
“Deer Hunting is Not a Sport. It’s Cold-Blooded Killing.”
“Like to Hunt? Ego Problems? Abused as a Child?”
“I’m a Pro-Logging, Pro-Hunting Environmentalist.”
A second activity is to ask students to try to write their own tweet-
recaps of the philosophers’ arguments. Here’s an example of one
inspired by Peter Singer’s argument for animal welfare:
“The question is not Can an animal reason? Nor Can an animal
talk. The question is Can it suffer? Boom! #Bentham #Sentience
#MeatIsMurder #Utilitarianism #DescartesCanSuckIt.”
As one can imagine, this is an engaging exercise using modes of com-
munication that most students are well-versed in. But the primary pur-
pose is to help students appreciate two things: first, the power of editing
and careful word choice; but mostly, the importance of communicating
complex ideas by locating them within a broader conversation. What
makes this activity so effective is that, in the twitter-verse, “hashtags”
become a mode of contextualizing—placing each 140-character ex-
JANE DREXLER

pression into a conversation. In the above tweet, for instance, we see

that Singer’s ideas are embedded in a conversation with Bentham (and
rightly so, since it’s a Bentham quote he borrows here) and Descartes
(who the tweet tells us Singer apparently disagrees with). Singer’s
words speak to the issue of meat-eating (he’s opposed to it), and of
what criteria grants moral status (he thinks it’s sentience, of course).
The idea here is to have students create tweets with accompanying
hashtags, and the other students work to flesh out their meanings and
layers.
This is an engaging activity for practicing contextualizing of
philosophers’ theories. But it can also go a long way to cultivate a
broader sense of contextualizing for the whole course: at any point
in the semester, we should all be able to “hashtag”—that is, set the
context for—what we’re doing. I can ask students to “hashtag” an
idea or argument. Moreover, at any point, the students can ask me to
explain the context of what we’re doing, why it matters and what it’s
in response to. Indeed, by always being able and willing to contextual-
ize my course’s content, activities and pedagogies, I can practice one
of the most important qualities of good teaching, according to Ken
Bain: the ability to keep the larger questions of the course constantly
at the forefont—that is, to always be ready to answer the “WGAD”
question—“Who Gives a Damn?” 15

What Philosophy Can Do

In the end, designing an introductory, general education course in phi-
losophy requires asking a different set of questions than the ones we
normally ask when thinking programmatically about how we can best
educate majors. It requires considering, not what will firmly establish
students as educated members of the discipline of philosophy, but rather
asking the more basic question of what philosophy, as a discipline, is
best-suited to contribute to an education.
It requires answering this question:
What do students need that philosophy can give them, even if they
only ever take a single class in it?
As I’ve reflected above on what I do in my Introduction to Envi-
ronmental Ethics class and why, here’s how I answer that question:
 They need to encounter the world with the ability to take
a holistic perspective, converse with multiple voices,
navigate conflicting obligations or interests that arise
from the multiple communities they belong to—and to
begin to build the tools to do so.
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

 They need to appreciate the value of shifting perspectives,

exposing assumptions and conceptual frameworks—and
to develop skills for those tasks.
 They need to recognize the contextual, historical, and
constructed nature of knowledge and truth—and to treat
the contextual nature of ideas as a starting point of en-
gaged thinking and problem-solving.
 They need to see themselves as participants in ongoing
conversations with real people and implications, and to
develop the ability to participate effectively: to make
claims and support them with good reasons and evidence,
to seek consensus and/or understanding, to appreciate
the underlying logics of opposing positions, assume re-
sponsibility for outcomes of deliberations and actions,
and so forth.
 And they need to be invested in the life of their mind—to
approach issues, questions, and decisions with care and
engagement; to explore the internal world as much as the
external one (and to appreciate how exploring one helps
one explore the other).
In the end, what we hope is that these mental habits help a student
become the kind of person that shifts perspectives, looks for the un-
given, challenges their own thoughts, is curious and engaged in the
world around them and the world within them, lives mindfully, and
sees oneself as an active member of a larger whole. Those attitudes
may of course be harder to measure than their manifested skills, but
they are at the heart of what philosophy does. 16

Notes
1. Of course, we know that the latter preconception is false: even if you don’t major
in philosophy, philosophical skills are highly valued by employers. For example, the an-
nual survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers consistently shows
that the majority of the top skills sought by employers center on the kinds of critical
thinking, problem-solving and case-making skills emphasized in our field: evaluating and
processing information, influencing and persuading others, identifying and evaluating
problems and their solutions, communicating verbally and in writing at multiple levels
inside and outside an institution, and more. (see the National Association of Colleges
and Employers, November 18, 2014; https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/class-
2015-skills-qualities-employers-want.aspx). And as for the former popular conception,
I flat out reject it. Unfortunately, it’s all too prevalent in today’s student population, and
we don’t do enough to disrupt it. While philosophy often wears that high-brow, elitist
reputation well, it is one of the reasons too few voices from beyond the most privileged
social locations sound out from our bookshelves. The culture, assumptions, questions,
perspectives, and experiences of privilege tend to harmonize comfortably with traditional
philosophy; and anyone who comes at it differently must convince the establishment that
JANE DREXLER

a) they really are carrying a tune, even if it doesn’t harmonize with theirs; and b) that tune
is worth learning to sing. Too often, non-traditional thinkers end up being told that they
don’t fit into the established chorus. So it’s no surprise that many would-be philosophers
end up feeling inadequately intelligent.
2. Hanstedt, General Education Essentials, 20–21. (Han­stedt is referencing the work
of Edmund Ko in his exploration of “Wicked Problems” and “Wicked Competencies.”)
3. Unfortunately, the discipline of philosophy has been, and continues to be, suscep-
tible to the charge of disconnecting from reality: of taking philosophic thought so far from
the concrete and the embeddedness of real contexts and conversations, that it too often
ceases to seem relevant or meaningful. If you’ve ever attended a philosophy conference,
you’ve probably seen how good we can be at getting so mired in the details that we forget
(to explain) what’s at stake, what issue or question we started out trying to grapple with,
who we are responding to and why what we’re saying matters.
4. Regan, “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs.”
5. Perry, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development.
6. Ironically, this dualistic thinking seems to be especially prevalent in introductory
Moral Philosophy classes, as so many people approach moral decision-making as if we
are opening a rulebook handed down by an Authority: as long as we follow the rules,
we are “right,” we are “morally good.” Indeed, a significant amount of traditional moral
philosophy itself arguably comes at morality this way. I’m thinking here of Hannah Ar-
endt’s reflections on the moral theory of Immanuel Kant (and we could also include St.
Augustine here, or others). While the origin of the rules may differ (e.g., God or Reason),
morality is nevertheless, at bottom, about following rules. Arendt argued that Kant’s moral
theory was so focused on the question “What ought I do?,” that conspicuously absent
was “How do I judge?” (See Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.) (see also
Elizabeth Anscombe and Alisdair McIntyre for similar arguments.)
7. Graff, “Why Johnny Can’t Argue,” particularly page 171.
8. Earl, “The Four-Sentence Paper.”
9. William Perry identifies several learning positions that move beyond Basic Duality,
but that move into a kind of relativism which too must be transcended. (See Perry, Forms
of Ethical and Intellectual Development, especially his chapter on Positions 2–5.)
10. Here, I’m not really offering a critique of (or support for) “theoretical relativ-
ism,” that is, the philosophical and anthropological study of materially- and culturally-
constructed difference. Naïve relativism is not a theoretical relativism. Naïve relativism
holds the view that opinions have no depth or underlying structure. They just are: it’s the
Disneyland version of relativism: “we are different” “and unique” and “let’s just all cel-
ebrate diversity! (but we don’t have to think too much about it).” Theoretical Relativism,
in contrast, requires us to see difference deeply: to understand the conceptual frameworks,
context (cultural and material) for belief systems. One need not accept or reject the notion
that there are more-or-less universal standards that apply across cultural landscapes in
order to appreciate the general imperative offered by theoretical relativism that we “see
difference deeply.”
11. Clinchy, “Toward a More Connected Vision.” Clinchy’s “epistemological posi-
tions” of learning build off of her work on Perry’s model.
 PHILOSOPHY FOR GENERAL EDUCATION

12. I got a variation of this activity several years ago from Anthony Weston’s “A
Twenty-First Century Ethical Toolbox,” currently in its third edition from Oxford Uni-
versity Press (2012).
13 Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death. (See, for example, his chapter called
“Teaching as an Amusing Activity.”)
14. Tim Wise, Facebook Status Update, April 9, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/
permalink.php?story_fbid=10152735182915969&id=140254320968&fref=nf (last ac-
cessed June 9, 2015).
15. Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, 39.
16. Thanks go to Jason Pickavance and Tam Hoskisson for talking out a lot of these
ideas with me over amber ales.

Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 2004).
Clinchy, Blythe McVicker. “Toward a More Connected Vision of Higher Education,” New
Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 82 (Summer 2000).
Earl, Dennis. “The Four-Sentence Paper: A Template for Considering Objections and
Replies,” Teaching Philosophy 38(1) (March 2015): 49–76.
http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/teachphil20151730
Graff, Gerard. “Why Johnny Can’t Argue,” Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obsures
the Life of the Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003).
Hanstedt, Paul. General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty. An American
Association of Colleges and Universities publication. (San Francisco: Wiley Press,
2012).
Merchant, Carolyn. “The Death of Nature,” in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal
Rights to Radical Ecology, 1st edition, edited by Michael Zimmerman (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993).
Perry, William. Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years (San
Francisco: Wiley and Sons, 1999).
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Busi-
ness (New York: Penguin, 1985).
Regan, Tom. “Animal Rights, Human Wrongs,” Environmental Ethics 2(2) (Summer
1980): 99–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19802225
Singer, Peter. “All Animals Are Equal,” Philosophic Exchange 1(5) (Summer 1974).

Jane Drexler is associate professor of philosophy at Salt Lake Community College. She
earned her Ph.D. at SUNY-Binghamton, specializing in ethics and feminist political
theory. She continues to pursue research interests in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt,
and has published several essays on Arendt and feminist theory. But when she wears
her generalist hat, she likes to publish essays on ethics and the history of philosophy for
general audiences in non-academic journals and magazines. She earned a Blackboard
Exemplary Course award for her fully-online version of Introduction to Environmental
Ethics. jane.drexler@slcc.edu