​Seminar: Ethical reasoning and the sociological curriculum

Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - 10:00 to 11:30
NIRSA seminar room (Iontas Building 2.31, 2nd floor)

Rubén Flores and Ryan Burg, Higher School of Economics, Moscow

This paper offers an assessment of the state of ethics education in sociology programs at major universities around the world, as well as a critical, and prescriptive, discussion on this topic. Sociology programs engage with ethics at many levels, from research ethics to prescriptive policy analysis, yet the formal analysis of ethical methods and frameworks is rarely to be found in either the undergraduate or postgraduate sociological curriculum. After exploring the landscape of where ethics is taught through a small empirical investigation, we advance a normative argument that an ethics course would serve aspiring sociologists, strengthen sociological curricula, and better locate sociological discourses within humanities epistemologies. Alongside a descriptive / prescriptive argument on the pedagogy of ethics, this paper engages in a related conversation about the place of ethics within social research. Drawing on process sociology, we argue that the distinction between involvement and detachment can help us to deal reflexively with the plurality of traditions regarding the role of normative arguments within social research.

Rubén Flores (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) has published on healthcare, the sociology of compassion and suffering and the dialogue between Buddhism and social research. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Dept of Sociology, Maynooth.

The seminar is free and all are welcome.