3 - Grades

Summary

Natural law theory’s opposition to lying and its conception of the various goods that are the objects of our choices as incommensurable have implications for our thinking about the undertheorized practice of assigning grades to students. This practice is one to which liberals, concerned with fairness and merit, should perhaps pay more attention. In light of concerns related to truth and incommensurability, there is, Chapter 3 suggests, good reason to reject a number of conventional grading techniques and approaches, putatively warranted by what I call “academic consequentialism” and “academic retributivism.”