ABSTRACT
Adherence to the metaphysics of timeless truth and universal reason makes it tempting to theorise moral education in one of two ways: either as an instruction in doctrine - the body of timeless true propositions of morality - or as the development of a cognitive capacity to recognise and employ general principles from which the truth is derivable. Such principles
could be thought of in either a Kantian or a naturalistic manner. In the absence, however, of the metaphysics of timeless truth we cannot think of moral education as either doctrinal instruction or as the instruction in general principles that underpin moral thought. If truth is at best only timely, it might seem that the moral educator has no choice left but to offer young people a record of what their culture/community/society currently think. Even if this opinion is expressed in terms of offering young people the opportunity to ‘discover’ themselves by locating themselves in their community, the opinion amounts to a flaccid relativism that gives no account of how and why someone could rationally exit their community, should they find it wanting.’ On such an approach moral education would be in danger of being doctrinal without the support of the thought that the doctrines had a claim to truth. By placing the emphasis of moral education on the idea of the education of character I want to show how a robust realism can be sensitive to the contingencies of belief formation and reason, and that it can avoid the relativistic communitarianism that many people seem to think is the only option once we forgo the transcendent standards of belief and reason that the Enlightenment promised.
