I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.
Someone can likewise have every intention of being ethical, but just be bad at it. Conversely, someone could know ethics well and simply choose to disregard them and do unethical things anyways. An ethicist isn't necessarily someone who practices ethics particularly well, it's someone who understands the concepts of ethics well.
Is there really any empirical evidence that such people exist and could be helped by an ethics course? I think laymen [to ethics] with a desire to be ethical can generally go about being ethical with little more than the Golden Rule. And if somebody hasn't figured out the Golden Rule yet by the time of their mandatory ethics course in college, there's probably something wrong with them (narcissism? psychopathy? some compulsion that makes them listen to intrusive thoughts?) that will make the ethics lectures basically pointless.
The most effective time to teach ethics is probably Kindergarten, plus or minus a few years. I just don't believe in the existence of adults who want to be ethical but don't know how because a college professor hasn't explained it to them.
Yes. Many, many people (including me) don't speak up when we see someone else doing something wrong. These ethics courses not only drill home the point of the importance of speaking up, but helpfully give many mechanisms in which one can speak up anonymously, or otherwise in a protected manner.
A hypothetical of a situation the GP may have had in mind would be a person who is thinking of fudging or taking a shortcut, but doesn't want anything bad to happen. Ethics courses can show how minor deviations in ethical practice can have major impacts (jokingly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dWjKkF0Zi4 ). These courses can also show that actively stopping work for an ethical reason will not be punished or looked down on in any way. Because of this the person will feel confident in checking their initial impulse to fudge and instead do what's right.
Showing people how they can be ethical is just as important as showing them what ethics are. We don't need to be moral heroes in order to take more ethical action.
And you don't, or shouldn't, need an ethics course to tell you that minor deviations from the plan can have unintended consequences that might have ethical implications. Take taxi drivers for instance, a minor shortcut over a sidewalk could have lethal consequences; do we expect taxi drivers to know this already without having taken an ethics course in college? Of course.
Many people learn early in life that to speak up is to get shut down. This can be combated later in life with good examples and policies.
Incidentally I still have my assigned text from that course, right next to me in fact. "Cyberethics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace" Hmmm...
What studying ethics offers the individual is the tools to analyze their moral beliefs and ensure they are at least internally consistent. That "and why?" is probably the most valuable takeaway from studying ethics. Rather than saying "that act was wrong", a student of ethics can explain, down to axiomatic beliefs, why that wrong. If a disagreement between two people boils down to axiomatic beliefs, then you're never going change each others minds. But a difference in interpretation can be argued with the potential for persuasion.
It also gives you a lot of practice justifying your own actions. Useful, but perhaps not exactly altruistic.
Try the trolley problem. Is it okay to divert a trolley to kill 1 innocent person to save 10? What about 5? What about 1? And this is just an abstract thought problem. Now try war, nukes, abortion, death penalty, etc. Everyone has a simplistic and superficial idea of ethics. An ethics class helps you develop a deeper and broader understanding of ethics. To develop the what and why of ethics.
That being said, some work in practical ethics has had a huge impact. Peter Singer's work on animal ethics started the modern animal rights movement, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has inspired many people to donate a lot more to charity than they otherwise would.
Why do people use the term "ethical" as though there were a single agreed-upon "right" system of ethics?
My understanding is that there are numerous concepts of right and wrong, some of which are very divisive.
So i.e. there are people who would be widely detested for being "ethical" in unfashionable frameworks.
All ethics assert a universal ethical framework. Moral relativism just offers a really complicated one.
Except it doesn't. Moral relativism doesn't make any claims about the way one should behave. It's entirely consistent with a moral relativist point of view to oppose commonly accepted morality. Moral relativism merely asserts that there is no absolute arbiter of good and evil, no immutable arc of history towards freedom, no inalienable right. Everything is a matter of opinion and consensus, and consensus is always fluid.
(Of course it wasn't really "all" , either within one community or between communities. People in power were just better about killing the weak people were just better about silencing people who disagreed.)
As you might expect, it's among "one of the most popular" courses offered at Harvard.