Enriching Ethical Judgments in History Education

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between the philosophy of ethics, history education, and young people’s historical ethical judgments. In the last two decades, “ethical judgments,” which focus on making decisions about the ethics of historical actions, has been acknowledged as a second-order historical thinking concept in history education. Despite the expectation that history students should make reasoned and critically thoughtful historical ethical judgments, this aspect of history education is under-emphasized and under-theorized. In addition, the limited research available indicates that history teachers’ and students’ ethical judgments are often oversimplified because they focus on the conclusion about the rightness or wrongness of an action over the thought processes involved in arriving at a justified position. Using refugee migration as an example of historical and contemporary controversy, we consider how the philosophy of ethics could enlarge the “ethical” in ethical judgment and offer history education a rich conceptual lens through which to explore making ethical judgments in, and about, the past. We argue that the kinds of questions, concepts, and lines of argument ethicists explore could better inform students’ historical ethical judgments by illuminating the contested landscape upon which ethical judgments rest.

Keywords:

• ethical judgments
• historical thinking
• history education
• philosophy of ethics

View responses to this article:

On ethical judgments in history education: A response to Milligan, Gibson, and Peck

Notes

¹ Briefly, the MS St. Louis was a German ship with more than 900 Jewish passengers seeking asylum from Nazi persecution in May 1939. We provide in-depth contextual information about this historical event in a later section in this article.

² This is often referred to as “moral reasoning.” However, in this article, we use the term “making ethical judgments” because it aligns with the historical thinking literature. Further, “moral reasoning” has often been associated with the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) in education. This article acknowledges alternative approaches to making ethical judgments and emphasises, in particular, the need for approaches that make thinking about a range of normative ethical perspectives a more explicit feature of critical reflection.

³ For Seixas and Morton (2013) this includes: identifying the differences between current worldviews, beliefs, values, and motivations and those that existed in the past; avoiding presentism when considering the actions of historical actors; considering the historical context in which historical events took place; making evidence-based inferences about the beliefs, values, and motivations of historical actors; and exploring historical actors’ diverse perspectives about historical events.

⁴ Portugal, 1755. Neiman (2004) discussed how this event shattered the optimism of early Enlightenment philosophy.

⁵ Numerous data collected during the classroom observations were analysed for the case studies, including field notes, audio and video recordings, learning resources used by teachers, and students’ completed written assignments.

⁶ Others have suggested that many may remain “essentially contested” concepts (Appiah, 2006; Gallie, 1956).

⁷ Another example taken from Table 2 is the concept of refugee. Just because the 1951 Refugee Convention legally defines refugees, their rights, and the legal obligations of states, does not mean that refugees should be defined in this way. Further, differences in definition have material consequences for the people involved.

⁸ Conversely, MacIntyre (1996) and others have cautioned against un-historicized, free-floating accounts of ethics.