Ironically, I find this to be the height of elitism and disconnectedness with humanity, to believe that people need university education in "the humanities" to have a fully developed and grounded moral code and sense of ethics.
People who live "primitive" lifestyles who have zero academic education and have never heard of let alone from any "experts in humanities" can have a keen sense of what is fair, just, right, and wrong, empathy, etc. So can "tech people".
And students of humanities can be lacking all those things. I have my doubts that studying these things actually changes them significantly in a person, but would be really interested to be proven wrong about that. Certainly it is not necessary or sufficient to be an ethical person though.
I agree. Please note I didn't mention anything about a university education.
You can absolutely teach yourself philosophy online based on freely available resources. You can also do introductory psychology and sociology courses from Ivy League institutions at zero cost - although more advanced work and lab research is harder to replicate without access to an institutional context. Also the curriculums do tend to be quite arbitrary and not so rounded - but that's in common with the US style of multidiciplinary undergraduate degree and specialise later.
Harvard Business school also offer some ethics courses, but these are quite business focused and don't provide a strong general grounding
https://pll.harvard.edu/subject/ethics
To answer your broader point, you're confusing behaving in a commonsense moral or ethical way with understanding and reasoning from a grounding in ethics. I haven't suggested that studying ethics alone makes one virtuous, or that a lack of academic background precludes ethical behaviour. What I am suggesting - and I think your comment further evidences, is that a lack of interest and education in the (two thousand year long) tradition of thinking formally about ethical problems can ensure that our ethical decision making is arbitrary and reactive rather than rooted in our fundamental values. In other words, thinking and reading into this stuff doesn't replace your value system - it gives you a much richer understanding of how you've arrived at your values and can put them into practice.
You agree the post I replied to was the height of elitism?
> Please note I didn't mention anything about a university education.
What do you consider "education in humanities" then, that a "tech person" is unlikely to have received?
> You can absolutely teach yourself philosophy
Again, you seem to have confused having an academic understanding of ethics with a compulsion to act ethically. I don't believe there is much linkage between the two.
> To answer your broader point, you're confusing behaving in a commonsense moral or ethical way with understanding and reasoning from a grounding in ethics.
I'm not. Your comment I replied to suggested that a lack of education in this stuff is the cause of apparent poor behavior, so perhaps it was you who was confusing those things.
People who live "primitive" lifestyles who have zero academic education and have never heard of let alone from any "experts in humanities" can have a keen sense of what is fair, just, right, and wrong, empathy, etc. So can "tech people".
And students of humanities can be lacking all those things. I have my doubts that studying these things actually changes them significantly in a person, but would be really interested to be proven wrong about that. Certainly it is not necessary or sufficient to be an ethical person though.