Education for Values: Morals, Ethics and Citizenship in Contemporary Teaching

Jo Cairns, Roy Gardner, Denis Lawton, Jo Cairns, Roy Gardner, Denis Lawton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780749430658
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134732135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Values in education, in terms of both how they are taught and of the ethics of teaching itself, are an area of lively debate. This text provides a resource of ideas, issues and practice for all those with an interest in this area of education.

PART ONE

APPROACHES TO TEACHING VALUES

Chapter 2

What Scope Is There for Teaching Moral Reasoning?

Graham Haydon

Introduction

When I first began to study moral philosophy, and to think about moral education, I frequently encountered the assumption that there is a certain way in which people ought to think about moral questions, and hence the idea that moral education should involve teaching pupils – or at least in various non-didactic ways enabling or encouraging pupils – to think in the appropriate way. In recent years these ideas seem to have become deeply unfashionable. To put the theme of this chapter concisely, I believe these ideas are well worth resuscitating.

You might interpret the title of this chapter as asking whether it is possible to teach moral reasoning. Actually, I think that question is fairly easy to answer: it is possible. It is not too difficult to come up with something like a set of guidelines for moral reasoning, and there is no reason to think that teaching pupils to apply such guidelines is any more difficult than teaching them to think in the ways appropriate to, say, doing history or chemistry (I am not, by the way, saying that this is easy). The more difficult question is whether schools should be trying to teach moral reasoning, given various objections that have come to the fore in recent years. So I hope here to devote just a little space to arguing that it is possible, and much more space to asking whether it should be done.

How does one show that it is possible to teach moral reasoning? One way is to produce a model of moral reasoning and then to find evidence, from current practice or if necessary from new studies, that reasoning according to this model can be taught. Since I have no findings from research studies to report here, I shall merely rely on an appeal to plausibility: if we can have a clear and simple enough sketch of moral reasoning, there will be no reason to think, in advance, that it's not teachable.

The best way to show that it is possible to have a set of guidelines for moral reasoning is to produce one. To show that this is not too difficult, I'll do it at the beginning of the chapter. No doubt, and quite rightly, all sorts of questions will come to mind when you read these guidelines – these will be the kinds of questions, if I can anticipate them, that I need to address in the rest of the chapter. But it will be more productive to address the questions if we have in front of us an example of what a set of guidelines for moral reasoning might look like; so here is just such an example (deliberately expressed in non-technical language).

Be aware of the ways in which what you are doing is going to affect other people. Think about this if it's not obvious.

Try to think yourself into the position of other people affected by what you are doing; try to see what it is like to be in their shoes.

Think whether they would be likely to agree to what you are doing. Sometimes, the appropriate way of doing this will be to ask them. If that's not possible, you can still ask yourself ‘if I were in their position, would I agree to be on the receiving end of the kind of thing which I, now, am thinking of doing?’ (For example, if you have in mind to do something which involves deceiving another person, ask yourself whether you could agree to be deceived in a situation like this.)

Having seen what it would be like to be in the position of each of the people affected – seeing it, if you can, as if it were happening to you – ask yourself whether you think it is all right for people, in the sort of situation you're in now, to do the kind of thing you are thinking of doing.

Where does that model come from? There are many influences behind it. So far as philosophical writing about morality goes, it has something in it both of Kant and of the rival tradition of utilitarianism; it is closest probably to the ideas of the Oxford moral philosopher Richard Hare; but I can also recognize an influence in my thinking of the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas, and of the American psychological researcher Lawrence Kohlberg.¹ But outside of academic writing there is in it something of the everyday question ‘what if everyone did that?’; and that carries in turn echoes of a tradition stretching back to the Golden Rule of the Bible ‘do unto others what you would have them do unto you’, while something similar is found in many other traditions.²

I have set out a model of moral reasoning, to show that it can be done. I am not suggesting that this model should be taken up just as it stands. If there are to be attempts to teach moral reasoning, then either this will be done on the initiative of individual schools, according to their own understanding of moral reasoning; or, if there were to be a national model, and appropriate teacher training to back it up, then presumably some sort of working group would have to agree on the model to be used. But my guess is that any model which would be likely to attract sufficient agreement would have to say something about considering the effects of one's actions on others, and it would have to have an affinity with the ‘what if everyone did that?’ question; and so it would not look totally different from the version above.

So let me turn to what, at least for this chapter, is the more substantial question. Is there any good reason for not teaching moral reasoning? I want to look at a number of possible objections and to try to draw the sting from them. In fact, in some cases I shall concede a lot of the substance of the objection but still argue that there remains a good case for teaching moral reasoning; replying to the objections will help in bringing out the positive case. At the end I shall summarize what I take the positive case to be. So let me look first at four broad kinds of objection:

1. a suspicion of the very idea that it is desirable for people to think about what is right and wrong;

2. a disbelief that there could be such a thing as a right way of moral reasoning;

3. the idea that the kind of model I've suggested is biased or over-narrow and misses a lot that is important in the way people think about and evaluate what they are doing;

4. the possibility that moral reasoning will have little effect on how people actually behave.

There will be overlaps between these objections, but this will serve as a way of categorizing various negative reactions to what I have in mind.

First, then, some people are suspicious of the very idea of people thinking about what is right and wrong. They want people to follow the old certainties; once people begin to think for themselves, the only certainty (on this view) is that they will go off the rails.

So far as education is concerned, there is even a curious brand of anti-intellectualism around when the topic is one of right and wrong. People who are concerned about educational standards will usually believe that there are appropriate ways of thinking in particular areas of the curriculum, so that when pupils are thinking about a problem in, say, maths or physics it does not follow, just from the fact that they are doing their own thinking, that there is no limit to what they can reasonably come up with. Yet where questions of right and wrong are concerned, these same people seem to believe that if pupils think for themselves they might come up with anything at all – at which point we begin to get invocations of Friedrich Nietzsche, relativism, and various other bogies. This actually suggests that these critics themselves subscribe to a kind of irrationalism about morality, believing that morality does not rest on any rational basis, and therefore that there is no such thing as a right way of thinking about moral matters. If they believed there were a rational basis for morality, why would they be so worried that other people, doing their own thinking, would come to the kind of answers which they (the critics) think are wrong? If they believe there are right answers in morality, why should they be so sceptical about ordinary people's capacity to see what these answers are?

What I am saying here, of course, does assume that moral reasoning will at least sometimes – but not necessarily always – lead to a definite conclusion. I think it is not too difficult to see that this is so – given a particular model of moral reasoning.

Suppose the question is ‘Would it be all right to beat up this old man for fun?’ Remember that the kind of thinking I've suggested involves putting yourself in the other person's position, and asking whether he could agree to what you are doing. Is there any doubt that someone thinking in the way I've sketched will have to reject the idea that it is all right to beat people up for fun?

This particular example, of course, does not lead to any moral conclusion that you, the reader, don't already accept (I think I am fairly safe in assuming that). My point is that, when you think of some kind of behaviour which you take to be quite clearly wrong, the idea that people thinking about right and wrong may lead them to different answers should be the least of your worries. Surely what lies behind such behaviour, when it happens, is more likely to be sheer thoughtlessness than serious moral thinking which has come to different conclusions from yours? But what, after all, of the bogey of relativism? Isn't the worry that once people begin to think about whether there really are any moral standards which they should adhere to, they will come to the conclusion that it is all relative and anything goes? This may be the first kind of position people come to once they begin to think seriously about matters of right and wrong (there was some evidence for this in Kohlberg's (1981) research); a bit more thought shows how difficult it is consistently to hold a relativist position.³ The answer to worries about relativism is not less thinking but more and better thinking (and how could anyone with a serious concern for education think otherwise?).

The next kind of objection is more likely to come from those who have subscribed to some form of relativism. It is that there cannot be a single correct kind of moral thinking. There are simply different ways, and we cannot prove that one is better than another; or alternatively, while there may be a limit to what we could sensibly count as moral thinking, there is nothing to say that we have to engage in moral thinking at all. At least for the sake of argument, I am prepared to concede this objection. (Others who agree with me in the general thrust of this chapter might take a different line on this point.) To claim some kind of Platonic validity for a particular model of moral thinking is probably to make the task of persuading people to adopt it more difficult. Educators can and should make a more modest claim: that this is a way of thinking which has shown itself to be useful and also quite widely, even if not universally, acceptable (what I mean by calling this way of thinking ‘useful’ will become clearer near the end). We should be able to say ‘this is a way of moral thinking which is worth teaching’ without having to claim that it is laid up in heaven or handed down on tablets of stone.

To my mind a more serious objection than the ones I've considered so far is the idea that the kind of model I've suggested is biased or over-narrow and misses a lot that is important in the way people think about and evaluate what they do in their lives. Moral philosophers in recent years have often been sceptical of what appear as unduly rationalistic accounts of morality. We are told that morality, or an ethical life, is not a matter just of making decisions from time to time about particular moral questions; it is a matter of how one lives one's whole life from day to day and year to year. And we are told that what is most important is that people have the appropriate dispositions – qualities of character involving their motivation and feeling, not just their intellectual capacities. Sometimes the idea is that when people have the appropriate dispositions then, by and large, they will see what to do without having to work it out by following any particular process of reasoning. Thus, many moral philosophers and writers on moral education in recent years have revived a model of moral virtues taken originally from Aristotle. There have been influences tending in the same direction from empirical researchers, particularly stemming from Carol Gilligan's (1982) response to Kohlberg's model of moral reasoning. The notion of an ethic of caring– for the concrete other in the concrete situation – is proposed as complementary to and often as superior to an ethic of abstract and general principles of justice.

My response to this is: a) to agree with almost everything in it; b) to argue that none of it makes the idea of moral reasoning dispensable; and c) to argue that the points the critics make about the need to respond to the concrete situation rather than applying abstract principles are quite compatible with the kind of moral reasoning I have in mind.

First, there is certainly more to morality than thinking from time to time about what one should do. But we can hardly deny that this is part of it – not because we hold one conception or another of the nature of morality, but because of the nature of life in the modern world. (It's possible to imagine a way of life in which people can get by without ever stopping to think about what they should do, but it's unlikely to be a life that any of us or our students or pupils will lead.) People do find themselves in situations which they themselves see to be difficult, where it is not at all clear what is the best thing – morally– to do. They also find themselves in situations where, if they don't think, they may act in ways which they or others will certainly regret later, but where if they had stopped to think things would have turned out better for all concerned. But in fact none of the theorists of virtu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Contributors and Editors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Morals, Ethics and Citizenship in Contemporary Teaching
• Part One Approaches to Teaching Values
• Part Two Issues in Education in Values
• Part Three Teacher Education and Values
• Part Four Research for Education in Values
• Part Five Comparative Studies
• Index