ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a cluster of issues arising from the teaching of ethics on
vocational programmes in higher education. Such teaching has mushroomed in recent
years. More and more, professionally oriented degree programmes involve an ethical
component at the centre of the curriculum, rather than at its periphery. Grappling
with ethics is a requirement for trainee nurses, doctors, social workers, probation
officers – indeed, across the range of caring and social professions, as well as beyond
it. This is welcome, but brings challenges. It poses questions about the nature and
scope of vocational education and about what education in ethics is (or should be)
like. Broadly, the argument of this chapter is that doing justice to both of these
requires a subtler calibration of educational priorities than cruder, more reductive
and instrumentalist models of ‘learning outcomes’ are able to accommodate.
