Patrick Keeney – författare

Academic ethics are currently much in the news but there is a great deal of uncertainty, both as to what constitutes specifically academic ethics and about a number of issues that are taken to be issues of academic ethics. This collection of papers focuses on both questions, moving from consideration of the very idea of a University and what that entails, via attempts to locate the major current concerns, to particular issues relating to the University's relations with the corporate world, the professor's role, relations between student and teacher, credentialling, the demands of collegiality and plagiarism. The editors have provided both a full and reasoned introduction and a critical end-piece that attempt to bring some order to the often inchoate nature of this field, raising the further question of whether institutions should, or should not, frame formal codes of conduct. The selected papers are drawn from diverse sources and together provide one of the first comprehensive overviews of academic ethics.

Communitarian thinkers have identified important deficiencies in liberal thought, in particular the limits of the account of justice given in liberal theories. This book makes transparent for the reader the implications that the liberal account of justice has for our ways of thinking about education. Citing the work of John Rawls as the principal expression of contemporary liberal thought, Keeney argues that there are certain intractable tensions between the view of the individual given in rights-based theories of justice and a certain valuable conception of education, which in the West has traditionally been termed a "liberal" or "general" education and concludes that ideals of a liberal education are only available to a political ethic which is capable of articulating a public conception of virtue and the good.