Exemplars and nudges: Combining two strategies for moral education

Abstract

This article defends the use of narratives about morally exemplary individuals in moral education and appraises the role that ‘nudge’ strategies can play in combination with such an appeal to exemplars. It presents a general conception of the aims of moral education and explains how the proposed combination of both moral strategies serves these aims. An important aim of moral education is to make the ethical perspective of the subject—the person being educated—more structured, more salient and therefore more ‘navigable’. This article argues why and how moral exemplars and nudge strategies are crucial aids in this respect. It gives an empirically grounded account of how the emotion of admiration can be triggered most effectively by a thoughtful presentation of narratives about moral exemplars. It also answers possible objections and concludes that a combined appeal to exemplars and nudges provides a neglected but valuable resource for moral education.

Keywords:

• Moral exemplars
• nudging
• admiration
• moral navigation

Acknowledgement

This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from The Beacon Project at Wake Forrest University and The Templeton Religious Trust. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Beacon Project, Wake Forrest University, or the Templeton Religious Trust.

Notes

1. Moral education can obviously be targeted at individuals at different levels of cognitive, emotional and moral development. Obviously, we are not claiming here that moral exemplars and the admiration they can trigger are the only or always the most appropriate pedagogical methods in moral education. It goes without saying that different strategies are more suitable for toddlers for example.

2. Williams’s use of a ‘minimal’ conception of the ethical implies that at least this is, uncontroversially, identifiable as an ethical system. That is independent of the claim about the extent to which people inculcated into any such system live up to its demands. The latter has to represent a psychological commitment that is, on any reasonable understanding, more than ‘minimal’. Living under the ethical is always an achievement even if that achievement varies by degree. Hence our further point that a moral education must bring all citizens up to functionally adequate standards.

3. While this characterization of moral exemplars may seem somewhat arbitrary, we believe it fits both conceptual work on moral exemplars and common sense. For example, the 23 moral exemplars with diverse backgrounds and goals, whose stories are told by psychologists Colby and Damon (1992), are all characterized by their exemplary moral reasoning and how committed they live out their moral convictions and principles, even if it implies standing up to or rectifying injustices. Lickona (2004, p. 21) summarizes the five criteria used by Colby and Damon to identify moral exemplars as follows: ‘(1) a sustained commitment to moral ideals; (2) a consistency between one’s ideals and means to achieving them; (3) a willingness to sacrifice self-interest; (4) a capacity to inspire others; and (5) a humility about one’s own importance’.

4. Algoe and Haidt (2009) distinguish between elevation (roughly moral admiration) and admiration (all other forms) and treat these separately. This does not impact on the point we are making here, as both were found to be connected to a desire to emulate.

5. For a justification of the distinction between benign and malicious forms of envy, see [van de Ven (2016)].

6. To avoid repeating the cumbersome phrase ‘narratives embedding moral exemplars’ or ‘stories featuring moral exemplars’ we will abbreviate this for convenience to ‘exemplar stories’.

7. In our view, this expansive list can certainly be made more parsimonious: for example, items (4), (5), (7) and (9) might all be folded into (2). Of course, different strategies can be combined: pre-commitment works well in combination with social norms, for example. Sunstein calls this ‘mixing and matching’.

8. Of course, exemplar stories can serve other purposes, such as historical accuracy, besides being used as an educational strategy. In this respect, they differ from other nudges, whose sole purpose is to change people’s behavior. Within an educational setting though, exemplar stories are generally used for this latter purpose. Often, this happens quite loosely in the hope that these stories trigger admiration, inspiration and subsequently, moral behavior. Amongst the more systematic approaches are the method of ‘Other-Study’, where the teacher presents an exemplar, selected for example from an online repository such as Virtue in Action (www.virtueinaction.org) and then asks students to reflect on the exemplar’s strengths of character, the obstacles she had to overcome, etc. (Davidson, Lickona, & Khmelkov, 2014, pp. 302–303). Lee (2014, p. 338) mentions exemplar stories as one of the five methods for moral character education used in Korea, adding that teachers can reconfigure those stories and the ways in which they are presented on the basis of the content, the class’s starting point and the desired goals. Our aim here is to draw on nudge theory to understand more specifically how to present these exemplar stories so as to generate genuine moral action and serve the main aims of moral education. Damon and Colby (2015, p. xvi) even develop an ‘exemplar methodology’, in which case studies of moral exemplars are analyzed in light of the ‘profound and moving insights into moral commitment that can be uniquely valuable for the rest of us’.

9. We thank an anonymous referee of this journal for pressing us to develop this point further.

10. Peter Singer himself seems to have understood this message. Instead of relying exclusively on abstract moral arguments and hypothetical thought experiments, he uses more and more concrete examples of how donating to charity can alleviate the plight of the poor. His most recent book (Singer, 2015) is full of examples of how people have come to donate substantial parts of their incomes. Each of these stories is set up with care so as not to invoke guilt trips and try to persuade you, the reader, that helping others is not merely good for them but also good for you.

11. Like an anonymous referee of this journal rightly pointed out, critics could argue that nudge strategies may undermine people’s reflective capacities in the longer run, incentivizing people to think less for themselves and rely more on others and the environment to guide them. We know of no empirical evidence in support of this claim. Also, remember the ‘argument from ubiquity’: even in the absence of intentional nudges will people be influenced by less reflective processes and small aspects of the choice architecture.