ABSTRACT
Having established that our sense of desert can, from the naturalist standpoint adopted in the previous chapter, indeed be considered virtuous, the question which naturally arises next is how it is to be cultivated and coached. Unfortunately, even those previous accounts of desert which have been sympathetic to its role in distributive justice have tended to be long on theoretical and conceptual considerations, short on practical advice about what fosters and what stifles its development in moral education. That is a pity since, at least for a naturalist, the value of desert must have educational ramifications at all levels of engagement. In the remainder of this book, I will address those ramifications and attempt to explore justice education in the context of recent discourse on values education. This is a particularly apt and pressing task for a classical utilitarian, such as the present author, for although utilitarianism is not a ‘practical’, ‘action-guiding’ moral theory in the narrow sense invoked by our imagined interlocutor at the close of the previous chapter, utilitarianism does hold that knowledge of the good and the right has, as such, little moral value unless it is reflected in our actual reactions and actions towards fellow human beings. We are, from the utilitarian perspective, all jointly responsible in caring for the inculcation of proper moral dispositions in the young, with moral education being seen – to adapt a common aphorism – more as a (proper moral) condition than as a specific profession. In the present section, after giving a brief overview of the rising optimism
about the possibility of early moral schooling of the young, I will focus on some recent trends in values education, making use of the felicitous terminology of ‘non-expansive’ versus ‘expansive’ character education. I argue that the essential characteristics of non-expansive character education are moral cosmopolitanism and methodological substantivism. I call special attention to salient differences between the views of non-expansive character education, on the one hand, and a particular brand of expansive character education, namely citizenship education, on the other, concerning values education in general and justice education in particular. I suggest that citizenship education, with its overarching ideal of democratic justice, politicizes values education beyond good reason by assuming that political
literacy and specific (democratic) social skills, rather than cosmopolitan moral and emotional ‘basics’, are the primary values to be transmitted. I show how this objection is based on three major moral and political disagreements between advocates of non-expansive character education and citizenship education. In Section 5.2, I then go on to consider various remaining educational – in
particular, didactic – concerns. While my sympathies lie with non-expansive character education, with its broadly Aristotelian view of moral schooling, such character education has recently been the subject of harsh criticism which stands in need of rebuttal. I take on that defensive task, with special reference to two canonical works of the contemporary character-education movement by Lickona and Kilpatrick. Non-expansive character education stands out, in the end, as a reasonable middle-ground proposal with neither too little nor too much meat on its bones. I also consider and reject the complaint that the Aristotelian position is somehow less salutary in the case of emotion education than in instilling character traits relevant for proper action. At the end of Section 5.2, I do, however, point out that a mere panegyric to Aristotle is not enough: some of his practical guidelines may be faulty and stand in need of amendment from modern sources, for instance from Hoffman’s cogent line of argument for moral induction. In the end, I hope to have said something important about the practicalities of both justice education, in particular, and moral education, in general. Finally, in Section 5.3 I draw together not only the major strands of the present chapter but also those of the whole book.
