conception of moral education as an attempt to get people to act in ways that are
consistent with morally acceptable behaviour without taking account of individual
moral agency is no longer of central concern. In reflecting the general acceptance that
moral education is distinct from moral training, O’Hear writes:
.. .what we want from moral education is not any sort of adherence to moral
principles, but an adherence that is fully internalized and does not require
policing.
(O’Hear 1998 p. 15)
It appears that the (mis)conception of moral education as moral training has been
replaced by arguments about the relative merits of what Steutel and Carr describe as a
deontic version of moral education on the one hand and an aretiac version on the other.
Where the emphasis in the former is placed primarily on judgments about the morality
of the actions of agents, the latter highlights the importance of moral character as well
as the morality of actions. Noddings and Slote offer a З-way division of approaches to
moral education, they say:
Virtue ethics ... would naturally encourage a form of moral education in which
schools and parents would seek to inculcate good character in the form of...
habitual virtues. KantianZRawlsian rationalism∕liberalism would seemingly
encourage moral education to take the form of developing certain capacities for
moral reasoning and certain very general principles that can be applied to
different moral dilemmas ... [and] an ethic of care would most naturally see
moral education as a matter of children’s coming to an intelligent emotional
understanding of the good or harmful effects of their actions on the lives of other
people...
(Noddings and Slote 2003 p. 349)
For the purposes of this thesis the differences in approaches noted by Steutel and Carr
on the one hand and by Noddings and Slote on the other are less important than the fact
that they both reflect the idea that of central concern in moral education is the debate
about the basis from which moral education should proceed. This suggests that
distinguishing between moral education and moral training that Wilson et al. believed
so important is no longer necessary for it has become generally accepted that moral
education requires the exercise of moral agency. Nevertheless it is an important
distinction that has a direct bearing on the arguments in this thesis. For this reason the
distinction between moral education and moral training will be rehearsed.
Being, or becoming, moral (rather than merely ‘acting’ in morally acceptably ways)
requires the freedom to choose to act in one way rather than another; someone who has
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