Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice in Ethics Education: A Discourse-based Analysis of the Website Ethics. Unwrapped

Over the last few decades, ethics has risen to the fore in an ever-growing number of professional and disciplinary fields, from medicine to finance, to engineering, to nursing. While ethics training has an established tradition in the medical and nursing professions, and whereas other domains have recently followed suit (most notably, the business world), most professional domains have only recently started to actively address ethical issues. In recognition of this shortcoming, ethics education has emerged as a key field in professional development, with ad hoc courses targeted at specific professional roles and figures becoming more and more widespread over the years. This chapter analyses the strategies of knowledge dissemination deployed in the award-winning ethics training course Ethics. Unwrapped, developed by the University of Texas at Austin (http://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/). The study is grounded in discourse analysis and identifies key linguistic traits of scientific popularisation in the discourse of ethics education. It also isolates recurrent discursive strategies in ethical reasoning, thereby contributing to a principled description of rhetorical patterns which appear to play a key role in ethics training.