One year ago, the general education requirement “Education for Citizenship” was implemented to much fanfare. Today’s status of the requirement’s Ethical Reasoning option, however, is lackluster.

A quick perusal of the autumn-quarter time schedule will show that there is only one course under the Ethical Reasoning option — “Justice,” a popular class cross-listed under three departments. This stands in stark contrast to other Education for Citizenship (EC) options, all of which have 11 or more classes. While there are more courses offered in other quarters (seven in winter and eight in spring), this is still a far smaller number than for the other three EC options. A simple time conflict this quarter would render the Ethical Reasoning option impossible to fulfill. It is concerning that the academic infrastructure has not been developed to support a healthy variety of courses that fulfill this option.

When Ethical Reasoning was first implemented, Philosophy prof. Chris Bobonich said that it emphasizes the “important practical element” of studying race, class, gender and ethnicity — which comprise the other three EC options. The Acting Director of the Ethics in Society Program, Eamon Callan, notes that the goal of the Ethical Reasoning option is to “to ensure that students come to appreciate the range and complexity of ethical problems they are likely to encounter in their professional and civic lives and develop the necessary skills to address those problems responsibly.” This is certainly a noble and worthwhile goal, and an understandably broad one. But why, then, is it so hard to fulfill the Ethical Reasoning option?

The process for getting a course to count towards Ethical Reasoning is simple: a professor submits a draft syllabus to the Ethical Reasoning committee, which then assesses the course against a set of criteria. Part of the one-page criteria states that Ethical Reasoning courses should “ensure that students come to appreciate the range and complexity of ethical problems they are likely to encounter in their professional and civic lives and develop the necessary skills to address those problems responsibly.” The rest of the criteria aren’t much clearer, suggesting that professors have a great deal of leeway in constructing interesting and innovative courses that would satisfy this option. It is possible that professors who have courses that might qualify simply do not submit their course syllabi for review. But that is unlikely, because courses that knock out a requirement, especially one as hard to fulfill as this, would attract students.

Then perhaps the definition, while broad on the surface, is narrow in practice. For example, neither the introductory seminar “Values and Objectivity” nor the lecture course “Kant’s Ethical Theory” counts toward the Ethical Reasoning requirement this quarter, despite potential connections with ethics. Also, it seems like the Ethical Reasoning courses available are much more narrowly focused on ethical theory, while courses that count under Gender Studies, for example, are of a much broader variety. This narrow, practical definition means that the requirement, while clearly important, is difficult to fulfill.

One possible solution would be to move the Ethical Reasoning option away from the other three — American Cultures, Gender Studies and Global Community. It is important that students are introduced to all of these fields, but the addition of Ethical Reasoning also allows more students to avoid two of the remaining options. If the Ethical Reasoning requirement were moved within individual majors and made into a “WIM”-like requirement, it would ensure that students take an ethical reasoning course without sacrificing one of the other EC areas, while also making the requirement easier to fulfill.

The requirement can either be integrated into an existing class or offered separately. Students could fulfill either an ethics course that specifically deals with the content of one’s major (such as “Medical Ethics” for Biological Sciences majors and “Ethics and Public Policy” for Political Science/Public Policy majors) or a course that deals with ethics and questions of morality in a more general sense. Such a change would go a long way toward the option’s specific goal of educating students about how to make rational ethical decisions.