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Articles
Moral Education
Graham Haydon on this year’s hot topic.
It was good to see the publication in Philosophy Now (Issue 6) of an interview with David Pascall, then Chair of the National Curriculum Council, on moral education. The issue is one that needs to be opened up to philosophical reflection, and that reflection should not be confined to specialists. The interviewer for Philosophy Now was obviously aware of some of the issues which could have been pressed further (as Geoff Wade pointed out in a letter in Issue 7): David Pascall did not satisfactorily defend the idea that telling the truth and keeping promises are moral absolutes (does this mean, as few philosophers other than Kant would have held, that no exceptions to them are ever justified?); and he could have been more positive about the need for an input of moral philosophy into the training of teachers (but it would have made little difference, since he was leaving office anyway). But in this article I want to raise a more fundamental issue. Do the parties to current debates about moral education have any clear understanding of what morality is? (Do any of us?) Are we even right to be so confident that morality is a good thing?
Some of the politicians and churchmen who have been calling most loudly for a revivification of morality in our schools might be surprised that the current Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University has suggested that we would be better off without morality.
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