ABSTRACT
As with the rest of human life, morality and moral education have an outside and an inside. Seen from the outside morality provides a way of getting along with others, and from the inside it is a way of getting along with oneself. More crudely: moral education is at once a necessary condition for social control and an indispensable means of self-realization. Most of us, including philosophers as well as parents and educators, assume that these two functions of morality sustain each other: what is good for society is good for our kids, and vice versa. Nietzsche and a few other so-called rugged individualists have rejected this assumption but I will not spend time defending it here. Instead I will focus on the second of these two perspectives, the “inside view.”1 My motives for doing this are twofold. First of all, I want to unpack the general understanding, shared by contemporary educators of all persuasions, that morality is a form of self-realization. Also, I want to situate this understanding within the philosophical tradition of what, using the term in its broadest possible sense, I will simply call “human development.”
