I've

watched a lot of colleagues fall into the trap, and I've fallen into this trap too, of assuming that all arguments have validity. Right. Wanting to make sure that we don't discourage any line of reasoning and knowing just how easily a student can be crushed when the opposition comes from a professor. I've sometimes overcorrected, not challenged students enough, actually. One of my least favorite comments in my student course reviews over the years was, professor seems to think every student has a valid opinion. Yeah. And I actually think that's true. I think every student has a valid opinion. I don't think every opinion is valid, of course. Right. Yep. You took a strong stance on this. And you said, just as we correct students' math, we can correct their moral reasoning. Yeah.

So do you think, you know, moral relativism is something that we have in our sector often fallen into? And I think that's a mistake. The fact that there are moral errors or errors of moral reasoning is clear simply from the fact that any moral argument has a logical structure and logical arguments can have errors in them. So the notion that there can be errors in moral reasoning is, I think, straightforward and simple and one that people should simply start with. One can have a view about good and bad moral argumentation without necessarily thinking that you know the whole truth and it's all written down right here and here's the right answer. So that's the really important point. I do think that there are moral truths. I think they're very hard to know. I think we are fallible in our effort to know them. And therefore, it's our job to articulate the best possible moral argument we can. That means it has to be logically sound. It has to start from valid moral premises. And if we've made a mistake, we want to be corrected. So that's really the spirit I bring into the classroom. I try to help my students make the best argument they possibly can for the moral position that they're taking. Again, if there's a sort of error in their premises or in their reasoning, I will point that out and ask them to work on that. So the challenge is sort of the error in the moral premises. For example, the golden rule. Treat others as you'd like to be treated. Or the do-no principle that comes out of the Hippocratic Oath and the like. And of course, the do-no principle gets then connected to things like exceptions, like for the case of self-defense, et cetera. But there are a set of sort of basic moral premises of this kind that are widely accepted across societies and across time and place. The premise about human rights, the basic dignity of all human creatures. Again, not that there are no debates to be had about those. People will make arguments about speciesism and things like that. Nonetheless, there's a pretty sort of sound body of, you know, broadly agreed upon moral premises that I do think make for good starting points in moral argumentation. They don't deliver the answers in and of themselves to specific policy questions, which is why there's always massive room for debate. But again, then for me, the goal is in some sense to have a similar ethos to a courtroom. We want to hear the best arguments on both sides. We want to make sure those arguments are starting from sound moral premises, that the moral reasoning is sound. And then there will be judgment calls to be made. And so what I am always trying to do is strengthen my students' capacity for judgment. One

of the impulses I often have when I see what seems like a logical error or a moral error or both is just to try to decimate the argument. And, you know, you liken your classroom to a courtroom. Sometimes I can be too much of a prosecuting attorney, especially when I'm not in charge of facilitating a dialogue, but I'm actually immersed in a debate. And that usually brings the other person in as their most extreme version of a defense attorney and fails to actually correct the logical error because it's not recognized to begin with.

You've

written about how Socratic questioning is more effective and it can lead people to self-correct as opposed to needing to be corrected by others. And for me, this really resonates. It tracks with a lot of the recent research on deep canvassing in political science, on motivational interviewing in psychology, and I'm really drawn to the idea that the right kinds of questions can puncture what psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth, where I think I understand something, and then you ask me about it, and through hearing myself stumble or through struggling to answer the question, I suddenly realize I don't know what I'm talking about.

Thank you for drawing the contrast between the courtroom metaphor and Socratic questioning. I think that's a really important contrast. And I think you're right about it, that the courtroom metaphor can sometimes give us the wrong idea about how to have arguments. So the courtroom metaphor is useful because it helps us understand the standard that we want to hear the best arguments for both sides. But I agree with you that from a method point of view, hearing the best arguments from both sides will get there better and more powerfully with Socratic questioning as opposed to with an adversarial structure. Although that said, many of Socrates' interlocutors felt that he was very adversarial in relationship to them. He was always annoying people and making them angry, I guess, which is why he got killed. But at any rate, what are our moral obligations to human beings regardless of what they may have done. So there's that sort of line of questioning for starters. For me, also the question of let's be more precise in identifying where the wrongs are in this and where the various rights are that all parties have in this. Take the criminal context, for instance. You know, what kinds of responses are appropriate? I think there's lots of ways one can open up the conversation so that one can get both the more complete historical picture of the actual facts on the ground, a better argued sort of view about the kinds of rights all humans have and the kinds of protections they deserve, even in context of conflict, and also an alternative picture of approaches to resolving conflicts. I

think the way that you take a politically neutral but morally clear stance, I think, is so compelling, and it's really unusual to see. My idea of doing something is actually to get people to think more deeply about the problems that they're confronting, so that they can come up with a more plausible solution and then build a movement that doesn't alienate people or polarize people. Do you have guidance for how to better make that clear? Because I think I'm failing at what you described as establishing my own trustworthiness. I didn't realize that until you said it.

Oh,

it's actually not the question I'm asking. It's the other person's suspicion about my motives and intentions.

Again, it is important to remember that Socrates did get himself killed, okay? So in that regard, it's not easy work to try to help people strengthen their moral reasoning, and people do generally object to the experience. That would be what the Socratic story teaches us. Nonetheless, it's important and we can find ways to do it more safely than Socrates was able to do. So for starters, and I think what you're experiencing in a sort of very micro way is what and how questions people can engage with. Why questions? You know, why are you saying this? Why are you doing this? Produce defensive reactions. So first of all, one has to kind of train oneself out of the why questions and just use what and how questions. But also relatedly, we all are engaging with these issues, not only with our heads, but also with our hearts, with our spirits of moral evaluation, with hands that want to do something. And so one has to actually respond to all of those parts of a person's being as a part of having the conversation. So I often start by actually trying to feel the emotion behind the question. And I start by acknowledging the emotion. You sound both, you know, really frustrated and kind of pained by the experiences you've been having. And I'm sorry because, like, that's lousy. Like, that doesn't really feel good. So let's figure out what we can do about that.