Moral judgment in history education and historical positionality as a moral evaluator

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical analysis of moral judgment in history education using the case of Cecil Rhodes as an example. For this purpose, I first examine the arguments for and against passing judgment on past actions given by historians, historical philosophers, and history education researchers. Second, I take a close look at the ways students approach moral issues in history and identify the shortcomings in these approaches. Then, I propose three cognitive acts students must perform to fully understand their historical positionality as a moral evaluator: (1) distinguishing between moral values and factual beliefs, (2) examining the consensual statuses of moral values and factual beliefs, and (3) evaluating the reliability of one’s own belief-forming processes. These cognitive acts, though mentioned in the literature in various contexts, have not been systematically analyzed in relation to moral judgment in history education. In the end, I argue that by performing such acts, students will be able to triangulate their position as a moral evaluator relative to the historical actor and his or her contemporaries and understand the epistemic status of their moral judgment.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical controversy
• historical positionality
• historicism
• moral judgment
• presentism

Notes

1. For an extensive discussion of this point, see, Sewell (2005).

2. Arguing for the of distinguishing between moral values and factual beliefs when making moral judgments should not be taken as supporting the dichotomy between fact and value espoused by the logical positivists in the early twentieth century. One of the tenets of positivism is that value judgments can never be objects of rational inquiry because those judgments, unlike statements of facts that are verifiable and thus can be objectively true, are essentially expressions of preference (Putnam, 2002). If anything, the position suggested here supports the opposite contention, that value judgments are not independent of factual judgments.