ONLINE FIRST
published on August 13, 2015
Court D. Lewis
Engaging Student Aversions to Moral Obligations
This essay examines why some introductory ethics students are averse to any sort of moral requirement (i.e., moral obligation). It provides a series of descriptions and techniques to help teachers recognize, diagnose, and engage such students. After discussing the nature of student aversions to moral obligations, I discuss three causes and several ways to engage each: 1) Student Relativism; 2) student fears and misunderstandings of obligations; and 3) the phenomenon of what I call fetishized liberty, which leads to the “liberty paradox”—where students actively fight for liberties, yet actively give up or fail to use the ones they currently have.