ABSTRACT
University teachers have become increasingly concerned with professional ethics, particularly medical, legal, and business ethics. However, they have not given similar attention to the ethical issues associated with their own profession, though important moral issues do arise in university teaching. This chapter focuses on the humanities and the teaching of values. It describes a Socratic view of professional responsibility and claims that university teachers have a social obligation to help other citizens, both inside and outside the classroom, formulate reasoned principles for themselves. The ethical case against the freely experimenting doctor is persuasive because we recognize that "medicine" actually encompasses more than one profession: there is the activity of the researcher who is committed to scientific investigation. To teach values in a pluralistic society, academic humanists must help people develop that faculty that most other professions either ignore or consider tangential: the capacity for critical questioning.
