Philosophical Discussion in Moral Education

The Community of Ethical Inquiry

Tim Sprod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134578580
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Counseling in Career Development

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of calls for moral education to receive greater public attention. In our pluralist society, however, it is difficult to find agreement on what exactly moral education requires. Philosophical Discussion in Moral Education develops a detailed philosophical defence of the claim that teachers should engage students in ethical discussions to promote moral competence and strengthen moral character. Paying particular attention to the teacher's role, this book highlights the justification for, and methods of, creating a classroom community of ethical inquiry.

Part I
Reason and autonomy

1
The ethical agent and reasonableness

1.1 Reasonableness and autonomy

When Wanda returns a lost wallet to its owner, we praise her for having done the right thing, and consider her to be an ethical agent, worthy of praise. This presupposes two key ideas: that Wanda freely chose to return the wallet (i.e. she is autonomous) and that she chose to do so for good reasons (i.e. she is rational or reasonable). These two notions seem to be central to morality.

There are those who would say that Wanda is merely a puppet of her environment (for example, Skinner 1971). Of course, no individual makes a moral judgement free of any influence from their community. Indeed, the thrust of this book will be that living and interacting in a community is essential in the development of an ethical individual. But it does not follow that because the individual could not have become an ethical agent without the community, then the individual is nothing more than that community. Pettit (1993: Part II) argues persuasively that both individualism (the doctrine that individuals do have true intentionality which is not overridden by social regularities), and holism (the doctrine that the ability to display intentionality depends on thought, which in turn depends on development within a community) are true, and I shall accept his conclusions. That is, I will assume that the common-sense view is, in broad outline, correct. To assume this, however, raises the further question: just how are we to understand notions of rationality and autonomy? Let us explore them a little further through another example.

Consider the following scenario: a young man is faced with the decision as to whether to register for conscription. In reaching a judgement about what to do, he engages in many activities. For example: he sits and thinks hard about the issues; he consults a variety of sources, written and oral, to ascertain relevant facts; he discusses his options with many people, considering their advice and deciding what influence it will have on his own views. All of these activities involve him in trying to make sense of the various factors which will go together to influence his final judgement: whether or not to register.

If we compare his situation to that of a dog about to be ‘conscripted’, we can see that the young man not only has a choice, he has the wherewithal to make that choice, in a way that the dog does not. How are we to make sense of the ability of this young man to reach such a decision? What sort of characterization are we to give to this capacity? Some of the differences between the dog and the young man that might account for this can be captured in the following words and phrases: rationality, emotional complexity, imagination, the complexity of representation of the environment and the self, discursive engagement. Do all of these have a part to play? Are there perhaps other factors? How do they fit together? In this chapter, I will develop a notion of reasonableness to capture this capacity.

Let us consider again the contrast of the young man and the dog. Suppose they are both picked up and taken to an Army barracks, to be forcibly conscripted into the Army. Suppose that they both find a way to escape, and do so. What would be the attitude of the Army in either case? In the case of the dog, they would most likely either let it go (‘We can always get another dog’), or they would recapture it and put it in a better enclosure. Unlike the man, they would not consider that the dog bore a moral responsibility for the escape. The young man, however, would find himself on trial. This would reflect the Army’s conviction that his escape was intentional: that he acted freely and bears responsibility for that judgement and action.

This sense of being an authentic source of judgement and action which has, in the past, been described using the word autonomy, is dealt with in Chapter 2. The concept of autonomy has increasingly come under attack of late for its extreme individualism and denial of human connectedness (an attack which §3.21 below addresses in further detail). While I agree that there are problems with the concept, I maintain that autonomy does play a crucial role in ethical agency. I shall explore its roots in the works of Kant, before drawing on the conception of reasonableness developed in this chapter to make a first pass at reconceptualizing autonomy. Chapter 3 will continue the task through a consideration of the actions of the teacher in the classroom. In Parts II and III, I will explore the implications of my accounts for both moral theory and classroom practice. But first, let us turn our attention to reasonableness.

Humans are thinking beings: our enhanced ability to think is what sets us apart from the ‘lower animals’. Just what this enhanced ability is, or even what it ought to be called, is not so clear. ‘Rationality’, ‘reason’, ‘reasonableness’, ‘critical thinking’, ‘ratiocination’ and other terms have been used. Sometimes two terms are used to mean roughly the same thing (§5.22 documents Habermas’s interchangeable use of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’); at others, the same term is used by different authors to mean wildly different things. In the narrowest sense, rationality can be defined as the use of formal logic or, more commonly, informal logic. ‘Critical thinking’ has, by some, been expanded so much as to denote all cognition and much that is affective as well (for example, Siegel 1988; see also §1.11). ‘Reason’ has been defined as in exclusive opposition to the emotions, or to be that which harnesses the emotions, or to take in the emo- tions as an integral part (§1.231). Many authors use one or more of these terms as if their meanings were perfectly clear.

I shall argue that the key guiding intellectual aim of moral education is to produce (in the words of the title of Pritchard’s 1996 book) reasonable children. It is interesting that Pritchard, despite the title, offers no definition of reasonableness, confining himself to ‘a rough demarcation’.

‘The concept of a “reasonable person” lies at the heart of Philosophy for Children’, say Splitter and Sharp (1995:6), ‘and, arguably, of education itself and the ideal of democracy. Reasonableness itself is a rich, multi-layered concept.’ They continue by pointing out that reasonableness is linked to, but goes beyond, rationality, which they characterize as ‘all-to-often rigid, exclusively deductive, ahistorical and uncreative’. In addition, they note that reasonableness is social, that it is not just process oriented (requiring sufficient knowledge or content as well), and that it has a ‘dispositional component…[that] helps to bridge the notorious gap between thought and action’.

In this chapter, each of these factors will be revisited as I develop an account of the concept of reasonableness and its aspects. But before that, I will briefly survey some previous characterizations of reasonableness and its close cousin, critical thinking.

1.11 Reasonableness and critical thinking

Over the past few decades, following Passmores influential 1972 article, the teaching of critical thinking has been increasingly promoted. However, what is actually meant by ‘critical thinking’, and how wide a variety of thinking types the phrase subsumes, has been highly contested. Some (for example, de Bono 1985) attack critical thinking for being too narrow, linear and logical. Some argue that we should add creative thinking (for example, Boostrom 1992; Lipman 1991), as well as caring thinking (Lipman 1995). Some, as we shall see (§1.21), attempt to widen the scope of critical thinking to cover a very wide conception of thinking. To my mind, however, the adjective ‘critical’ has a perfectly good use, and it is weakened by using it to try to cover too many things.

My main aim in this chapter is to provide a descriptive, rather than evaluative, account of reasonableness. In education, teachers are trying to strengthen and improve thinking, and to say that one is teaching ‘critical thinking’ is usually taken to mean that one is teaching good thinking. But critical thinking can be done well or badly, to good ends or bad. In what follows, I do not here mean to imply that all purposive thinking, or any particular aspect of it, is necessarily good. My intention is to analyse the aspects of reasonableness, regardless of whether they are well used or not. Of course, since in education we wish to improve thinking and reasonableness, this aim shall sometimes enter into the discussion.

One of the differences between the connotations of the terms ‘rationality’ or ‘critical thinking’, and ‘reasonableness’ is that we tend to expect critical thinking to converge on a single rational right understanding, whereas it makes more sense to talk of a range of reasonable interpretations. We will find that the criteria for reasonableness will not amount to hard and fast rules for deciding if a conclusion is reasonable. It seems possible for reasonable people to agree that a number of options, not all of them compatible, are reasonable. Equally, it seems possible for reasonable people to disagree about what would count as a specific example of reasonableness. We shall find (§5.22) that this question of whether we can expect rationality or reasonableness to converge is of great philosophical import.

1.2 The aspects of reasonableness

I propose that reasonableness, when looked at from a number of perspectives, reveals five aspects: critical, creative, committed, contextual and embodied. Roughly speaking, they address the calculative, the imaginative, the affective, the situated and the kinaesthetic aspects of thinking. A reasonable thinker will be one who is capable of accessing each of the aspects, and of coordinating them, in an appropriate manner. Because of the large amount of attention that has been lavished on the first two aspects (and not because they are not important), my account of the first two will be relatively brief, and I will concentrate on the latter three, relatively neglected, aspects of thinking.

I am not claiming there are five types of thinking. Any specific example of thinking will exhibit each of the aspects, though to greater and lesser degrees. For example, work that we might think is purely creative, like writing a poem, reveals each of the aspects. We see its critical aspect in the judgements involved in choosing one word over another, its committed aspect in the impetus to write it at all, its contextual aspect in the choice of content for the poem or indeed in access to the genre of poetry writing, and its embodied aspect in the metaphoric projection of image schemata (Johnson 1987: introduction; see also §1.25).

Indeed, because the aspects are merely analytic, and not separate thinking types, it is often hard to disentangle them. Embodied thinking involves the physical correlates of emotional states, the emotions we feel are shaped by the context of a situation we are in, the judgement that we are in a particular situation involves critical inferences and so on. The question of the symbiosis between the several aspects will be further addressed in §1.26.

One important point about the interrelation of the five aspects is that, often, thinking dominated by one aspect can be turned upon thinking drawn from another, or even the same, aspect. Thus we can be critical about our critical thinking, or creative about our committed thinking and so on. This reflexivity of thinking, or metacognition, is important in improving thinking, and will also be taken up in §1.26.

Thinking, both during the course of and at the end of an inquiry, issues in judgements (Lipman 1991:65). Judgement also contains an admixture of the critical, creative, committed, contextual and embodied aspects. Judgements that are explicit, conscious and reflective tend to be those that contain a stronger element of the critical aspect of reasonableness. It is probably for this reason that critical thinking has received greater attention than the others. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that judgements with any balance between the aspects can be correct or mistaken.

1.21 The critical aspect

Critical thinking has received a great deal of attention. Some members of the critical thinking movement characterize critical thinking very broadly, to take in thinking that primarily displays what is here called creative or committed thinking as well. However, this is a mistake: the word ‘critical’ carries too many connotations, such as overzealous negative fault finding, to make it desirable to broaden it like this. To be sure, it is commonly used in other senses as well. Nevertheless, in talking about critical thinking to those (parents, some teachers, community members, school students) for whom this connotation may be at the forefront of the mind, it would pay to be explicit that this is not what is meant.

The etymologically central connections of the word ‘critical’ are to ‘critique’ and ‘criteria’ (Lipman 1991:116). Indeed, the word ‘critical’ is so tied to ‘critique’ and ‘criteria’ that it seems to broaden it beyond those links, into dispositional or imaginative thinking, is to dilute it unnecessarily. Thinking displays its critical aspect insofar as it takes what is given or proposed and examines it for consistency, the correctness of inferences, the assumptions on which it rests, the implications that may be drawn from it and so on.

The critical aspect of thinking, on this account, does not supply new material to the inquiry, but merely draws out (and makes judgements on) that which is implicit in what is stated. Indeed, to the extent that finding assumptions or implications requires an imaginative act, then these acts involve the supplementation of the critical aspect of thinking by the creative aspect, while the need to actually want to find the assumptions or implications requires input from the committed aspect. This only goes to emphasize that any particular act of thinking can almost always be considered from each of the aspects.

Lipman, in Thinking in Education (1991), advances critical thinking as one of the two components of higher order thinking—the other being creative thinking. Critical thinking he defines as ‘thinking that (1) facilitates judgement because it (2) relies on criteria, (3) is self-correcting, and (4) is sensitive to context’ (1991:116).¹ The link of critical thinking to criteria is made clear in this definition, as is that to critique—not just of the content of the thought but also of the thinking itself—through self-correction. Also evident (both here and in Lipman’s definition of creative thinking to be presented later) is the important role of context in thinking. Later, we will see that we ought to separate out a contextual aspect of reasonableness.

Because critical thinking has been very widely analysed, I will not develop my own analysis. Different authors propose different lists of abilities, skills, dispositions, competencies and so on. There are two comments to make about these lists.

Firstly, although these lists differ in detail, there is a great deal of commonality between them. Different conceptual schemata of critical thinking each have their own strengths and weaknesses and a ‘perfect’ scheme is probably impossible to construct. As I have discussed elsewhere (Sprod 1994c), on the basis of an empirical study into the analysis of thinking-in-action in a classroom, the elements of good thinking probably intertwine, rather than form a neat hierarchy, and this makes extricating them very difficult. A list loses the dynamic interplay and contextual deployment of the elements. Nevertheless, listing elements of critical thinking is useful for diagnostic and analytic purposes, and each of the lists contributes to these tasks.

Secondly, the lists of most authors go well beyond what is here called the critical aspect to thinking. Take, for example, Ennis’s list (1991:8–9). Ennis provides a ‘working definition’ of critical thinking: it is ‘reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do’, and he provides a list of twelve dispositions and sixteen abilities that characterize the ideal critical thinker. As an example, the dispositions include ‘to take into account the whole situation’. Such a disposition (like all dispositions) clearly goes beyond the critical aspect of thinking: it includes the creative aspect in that it requires the exercise of imagination about what might form part of the total situation beyond the immediately obvious; and it requires a desire to look at further evidence— involving the committed aspect. Indeed, the disposition as stated by Ennis is quite impossible. The ‘total’ situation is beyond the capability of any real agent to comprehend (Cherniak 1986); a rational agent must be able to make decisions about when the amount of information collected and considered is sufficient for reasonable judgement, and this process goes beyond the critical capability. As shall be discussed in §1.237 and §1.24, both the committed and contextual aspects play an important part in these saliency decisions.

Or take Ennis’s ability ‘to ask and answer questions of clarification and/or challenge’. While such questions may involve merely identifying the logically puzzling parts of a statement, such as that it involves a contradiction, it is much more often likely to be the case that such questions require an imaginative or creative ability to make connections beyond the given. Equally, there is a desire that lies behind puzzlement, and this lies in the committed aspect to thinking. Each of Ennis’s abilities likewise needs more than the mere capacity to carry it out; it is easy to imagine a person who has these abilities but never uses them.

Glaser (1998a: ch. 1) presents a detailed survey of a number of the key players in the critical thinking movement. As I did above, she characterizes Ennis’s view as ‘skills plus dispositions’, and contrasts this with Paul’s ‘skills plus traits of mind’ account and Siegel’s ‘skills plus character’ view.² However, it is not my intention either to survey these accounts in any detail (Glaser’s work is well worth reading for this), or to develop a fuller account of the critical aspect of thinking. Each of the extensions beyond skills, though, and Glaser’s own extension to a consideration of identity and the critical thinker illustrate that there is much more to reasonableness than merely being able to critique.

1.22 The creative aspect

One of the clearest indicators of good thinking is that the thinker can go beyond the information given.³ Purely critical thinking is unable to do this, as its target is the information that is either explicitly or implicitly present. Indeed, thinking confined solely to the critical aspect is virtually impossible: all thinking requires input from many if not all of the five aspects.

There are those for whom good critical thinking is represented by an extreme of analytic precision or logical rationality; others may maintain that really good creative thinking is represented by an extreme of pure intuition or imagination. Nevertheless, if we examine the documents that are considered major products of critical intelligence, we find them shot through with creative judgement. If we examine the works of art that are highly esteemed, we are struck by the amount of sheer knowing and thoughtfulness they contain, not to mention their obvious craft and calculated organization.

(Lipman 1991:68)

Lipman (1991:193) defines creative thinking as ‘thinking conducive to judgement, guided by context, self-transcending, and sensitive to criteria’, which echoes to some degree the definition he gave for critical thinking. Critical thinking, he says, aims at truth, whereas creative thinking aims at meaning: both are types of judgement. The next three features differentiate the two aspects. Firstly, criteria play a more directive role in critical thinking, which relies on them, as opposed to the creative aspect of thinking, which is merely sensitive to them. Secondly, both the critical and creative aspects of thinking are connected to the context (§1.24). In Lipman’s view, context places constraints on the critical aspect of thinking, but it provides positive impetus to the creative aspect. Finally, critical thinking, as critique, focuses thinking more narrowly towards the acceptable, while creative thinking is expansive, going beyond by seeking transcendence.

Some of the ways in which thinking displays its creative aspect are that it provides new material for the thinking to grasp, widens the domain of thinking, presents to the mind that which cannot be directly experienced but must be imaginatively constructed and creates links between objects of knowledge previously thought ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: As Morning Shows the Day
• Part I Reason and Autonomy
• Part II Moral Theory and Moral Development
• Part III Discourse and Ethics in the Classroom
• Notes
• Bibliography