A short reflection given to the Colleges & Universities of the Anglican Communion, at CUAC’s Online Seminar XI: Learning to ‘Disagree Well’ given on Wednesday, 29th January 2025, 12-1.30 by Professor Bob Bowie, bob.bowie@canterbury.ac.uk, Director of the National Institute for Christian Education Research https://nicer.org.uk

Changing times:

From the perspective of an ethics teacher, things have changed. I taught ethics for 28 years and in all that time, in the ethics classroom, there has always been a strong possibility of disagreement, and I think a requirement for disagreement. I used to be aware of Christian normativies in class discussions, such as when student had opposing views on what was right, and when they agreed with or disagreed with Christian viewpoints. but there are now new normativities asserting their presence on campus and in workspaces, and these bring powerful pressures on tutors and students. These are not traditionally religious but are socially and philosophically significant.  There is an extensive legal and professional compliance education agenda with far greater degrees of mandatory training for employees. There is also a far greater group pressure through social media where it’s quite possible to have significant judgement asserted on you if you misstep. I think the situation for the ethics teacher or tutor, has changed and I have felt a need to respond to that and I feel challenged by that.

A faithful possibility of disagreement

My formation in ethics education included a Christian normativity but also an emphasis on the primacy of conscience and the duty to inform that conscience: the idea that I should truly believe in the things that I did and not simply do things I was told to do. I should seek to inform myself. There is a faithful possibility of disagreement in any classroom. Disagreement, even heterodoxy did not necessitate expulsion or censure in the classroom. There is the possibility of constructive disagreement, and this is part of the ethical classroom that I was brought up into in my own Christian schooling. 

Welcome to the ethical gymnasium, the sacred space for disagreeing well

I introduce ethics differently now with the students that I teach and I begin by welcoming them to the ethical gymnasium. The classroom is a sacred space – reserved like the dojos of karate or jujitsu. It’s not the same as the place to win political battles and nor is it the same as the place to make judgement and condemn – it is neither parliament, senate, the election trail or the law courts. Nor is it a library or the cafeteria or the square on campus. The ethical gymnasium is sacred.  It is protected in my institution by our Anglican foundation commitment to academic freedom and free speech without interference^[i]. This commitment protects me and my students from any pressure to conform doctrinally and it should also protect from a pressure to conform to the masses as well, though that can be harder. Social norms outside have a different potency. In the classroom, the disagreeable can be explored. Dissenters are not only welcome but necessary if positions and ideas are to be understood. 

Not being right better but a search

Educationally the ethics class and the ethical gymnasium is not a place for being right better. That’s not enough of an educational aim.  It’s insufficient. In my mind there’s a Christian pedagogy of humility that must encourage and permit this kind of pedagogic space as I do not know the mind of God even though I might be a professor. Any moral certainty has to be tempered by humility because I might be wrong. If I’m to attend to others who differ from me then I must listen and seek to understand, to stand under, not to Lord over. This requires the classroom to be a place of restless searching, not the Churches pulpit or the Judges bench. I’m not allowed to consider myself to have finished and to no longer in need to change. 

An unfinished project of ongoing discernment

The ethical classroom, the ethical gymnasium, must be a genuine space for the search for truth and it contains a project of discernment that should be taking place which requires points and counterpoints, consideration of other possibilities, scrutiny of your own argument, as much as your opponents, a general goodwill disagreement in the pursuit of a better understanding. This is why it’s different from the compliance training where the certainty is set out and you are told precisely what you should do. An ethical pedagogy that is humble, mandates a genuine search for truth, not just a rehash of prior positions. This openness is in part an understanding that God is a God who reveals, present tense, not just a God who revealed, past tense; a spirit that moves, present tense, not a spirit that once moved, past tense. I do not mean by this that I believe there are no moral fixed points or moral normativities or no true goodness that stands for all time; I’m not a relativist, but I believe that our perspective is not total that our vantage point is not God’s view of the universe, and so the ethical pedagogy for the ethical gymnasium is one of ongoing discernment not a projection of certain final position.

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^[i] See Article 92, Canterbury Christ Church University Articles of Association, September 2021 Available online at  https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/asset-library/about-us/Governing-body/Articles-of-Association.pdf