Can moral values be taught?  
Michael Wee (University of Oxford)

We encounter normativity – broadly speaking, any kind of value judgement – everywhere. Discussions of moral issues are an obvious example, but organisational rules, principles of professional practice, and opinion-driven news commentary also clearly engage with some aspect of normativity. Where did we get our values from, and more importantly, can moral values be taught? Is it substantially different from teaching scientific knowledge? This seminar will explore Wittgenstein’s idea that teaching anything is never merely imparting facts, but is itself a normative activity. This means that teaching science, language-learning and character education may be more similar than we might first think.

Michael Wee is Postdoctoral Researcher in Global Mental Health Ethics at the University of Oxford. He is part of the Neuroscience, Ethics and Society (NEUROSEC) group in the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry, where he is working on the ethics of informed consent and of immortalised cell lines in psychiatric genomics. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy from Durham University on Wittgenstein and ethics, and is continuing to work on foundational questions about the nature of practical reasoning and morality.