Adventures in Ethics and Science 2008-04-20

Getting students to ask good questions.

Neil Sinhababu (aka the Ethical Werewolf) lays out one approach to making an impression in a job interview teaching demo: Before giving my job talk, N[ational] U[niversity of] S[ingapore] had me give an hour-long presentation to the graduate students and advanced undergraduates to prepare them for the talk and also evaluate my teaching abilities. Since my talk was on the Humean theory of motivation, I taught them about the puzzle involving cognitivism, internalism, and the Humean theory -- if you accept all three, you end up having to say that humans can't make moral judgments, so you'd better deny at least one of the three. I'd planned the talk to include about 20 minutes of student questions, but a third of the way through, the students hadn't asked me anything. So I looked at them and tried a trick that ...

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