The Ethical Function of Research and Teaching

It is the epistemic as well as the ethical responsibility of academics to aim to approach their research and teaching with a proper understanding of the ultimate ethical purpose or telos of their defining activities and products, which is the practical aim of promoting human flourishing. Minimally, academics should aim at understanding, and a key component of understanding is to understand the ideal ethical purpose of what is being researched and taught. For instance, sadistic Nazi medical researchers and teachers-Mengeles of sorts-in addition to having reprehensible commitments, would be significantly ignorant about their own intellectual concerns by virtue of their abject (belief-expressing) commitments. I will show that insights drawn from extreme cases such as this one apply across disciplines and in less extreme cases.