In this paper, I will discuss egoistic preconceptions among students – a phenomenon that I will dub ‘Student Egoism’ (SE) – as a potential challenge to successful ethics education. While the prevalence of this phenomenon is occasionally mentioned in the philosophical literature, there has been no systematic discussion of its pedagogical significance to date. The aim of this paper is to initiate such a discussion. To achieve this, I will first elaborate on egoism as a philosophical position in some detail in order to develop a more comprehensive account of SE. Against this background, I will argue that there are indeed good reasons to consider SE (i) a potentially widespread phenomenon that (ii) could have problematic implications for ethics education. Based on this, I will then identify three general desiderata that any successful strategy of dealing with SE has to fulfill and sketch one specific strategy in a little more detail
Dominik Balg (Mon,) studied this question.