ABSTRACT
In this chapter I wish to tackle what seem to me to be the most fundamental matters that must determine our approach to moral education. I am doing this because relatively recent social and political changes (as well as philosophical and other intellectual developments) have, I think, now fatally undermined those forms of consensus on which liberal-minded educators have sought to base their understanding of the moral life and moral education. In a context of increasingly conflicting social pressures and even stronger religious, ethnic, national and political fundamentalisms, current intellectual critique of the liberalism that was widely espoused in the 1960s and 1970s has, I think, left many not only confused but deeply uncertain about how best to conceive the very notion of moral education. I shall not here concern myself with the complex social and ideological changes that face us. But I shall try to get behind these to the intellectual changes affecting our basic understanding of morality and moral education. My concerns are primarily philosophical.
