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Jennifer Morton |
| Associate Professor of Philosophy, City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY and Senior Fellow, Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison |
This talk discusses the ethical costs upwardly mobile students must bear if they are to dramatically transform their life circumstances. These costs affect their relationships with family and friends, their sense of cultural identity, and their place in their community. Morton argues they are ethical in so far as they concern those aspects of life that give it value and meaning. Using social science evidence, Morton shows how these costs are the result of a complex tangle of economic, cultural, and structural factors that unjustly and disproportionately affect disadvantaged students and their communities. Morton suggests that we need to offer students a new ethical narrative of upward mobility that recognizes and acknowledges these ethical costs. Morton concludes with some thoughts on how institutions of higher educate might mitigate some of these costs.
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About the Speaker
Jennifer M. Morton is associate professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY and senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way was published by Princeton University Press in 2019. Morton has published numerous papers on education in The Journal of Political Philosophy, Educational Theory, and Theory and Research in Education. She received her doctorate from Stanford University.