Chaos or coherence? Future directions for moral education

ABSTRACT

This introduction attempts to draw together the various threads which comprise this special issue and place them in the context of recent disruptions to the political order occasioned by the rise of populist politics, the resurgence of widespread racial tensions in a number of polities and the emergence of a global pandemic. Central to the challenges thrown up by these ‘events’ and a motive force, has been the incremental advancement of libertarianism with its capacity to disorient and displace a more socially oriented liberalism. Together with a range of changes (some might argue enhancements) to our technological capacities these moves offer significant challenges to the advancement of a moral education that is sufficiently robust. The discussion moves from the development of historico-political readings of our present situation and challenge, through some important epistemic questions about truth-telling, integrity and sociality, and on to practical questions about the relationship between technology and personal moral capacities. This last challenge is explored with respect to the need to maintain the very analogue capacity of judgement in the face of a digitally mediated world. Moreover, this introduction also explores the structural and political challenges posed by narrow specialisation in the field of moral education, the evolution of bio-technology/materials and consciousness.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberalism
• Libertarianism
• Truth-telling
• social cohesion

Introduction

This special issue emanates from a conversation sponsored by the JME Trust, bringing together a range of colleagues from different intellectual traditions and backgrounds to consider future directions in moral education. The essays here all stand the test of internal and individual coherence and require no further justification. Nonetheless, they represent a structure and trajectory that takes us from some of the macro political, historical, philosophical and sociological concerns that provide the bedrock for our deliberations in the essays of Alderdice, Conway, Andrews and Biesta through to some imagined if mutually challenging futures in the contributions of Reiss and Narvaez. And, from there to procedural (Krettenauer) and substantive considerations of pedagogy and professional life (D’Olimpio and Orchard).

Are they a complete account?—certainly not; are they wholly representative?—certainly not; do they address all of the myriad challenges faced by professional educators in their everyday practice?—certainly not; would we have liked more diversity?—certainly. Despite the manifest limitations of any such collection of essays we hope that they will add substantially to the conversation about the future shape of moral education and the contexts within which it is to be addressed. To this end, a number of colleagues will be responding to some of the points raised here in a subsequent issue of the journal. These will be led by a generic response from the distinguished psychologist, Gianvitorrio Caprara. I am immensely grateful to him as I am to all the contributors and indeed to my fellow Trustees who share a single desire; to make the conversation more robust and continue the task of refreshing our thinking and our combined abilities to read the, often hazy, horizon.

When this conversation was first being considered COVID-19 and its perturbances weren’t on our horizon, much less become the centre of our psychological and political imaginary. The relative successes and failures of particular governments weren’t being measured in the effectiveness of strategies that, by mid-April 2020, saw around one-third of the global population experience a ‘lockdown’ (Buchholz, 2020). Nor had we witnessed the explosion of violent resentment and civil unrest across the United States and elsewhere, triggered and fuelled in Minnesota by yet another needless and brutal killing of a black man; nor indeed the racist and alt-Right reactions to it. Nor yet had we seen the secondary entanglements of iconoclasm and iconophilia! But these events, rather than occluding or obscuring many of the issues raised in the discussions here, have served, rather, to highlight and accentuate some of the pressing concerns of colleagues as to the future of moral education. And this because moral education requires moral deliberation and, as we know, from Aristotle to Arendt such moral deliberation is both personal and political. John Alderdice’s perspective as a distinguished psychiatrist, politician and peacemaker opens up this thorniest of territory for those keen to secure a moral education; that is one by which we are bound in and by our collective behaviour; by our engagement with and treatment of each other in ways that demand framing and agreement. Like Martin Conway he brings some practical historical perspective to our deliberations. Such historical perspectives continue to offer definition and topography to our endeavours. Even where we might wish the boundaries of the morally acceptable to be somewhat porous and fluid; even where we valorise those who sit at and on the boundaries of our communal lived experience; even where we wish to protect the other in their otherness; even where we recognise such considerations as vital for ethical forms of accountable democratic governance, we still recognise the import of the bounded space (Conroy, 2004). In recognising that reasons and rationality are not the only, and often not the dominant motive forces in determining our collective moral practices, Alderdice’s resonant invitation to think of moral education as taking place in and between ‘theatres of the mind’ is an important opening. It immediately touches on Krettenauer’s considered invitation to spend more time reflecting on the interplay between reason and feeling in determining how we should understand moral education. Given recent enactments in the theatres of lockdown; in the theatres of the street; in the theatres of politics and the media, was there ever a more pressing need to respond to Krettenauer’s invitation?

By and large people don’t launch themselves into the streets in either peaceful protest or indeed in violent (re-)action if they feel justly treated, are happy and secure! They do not do so if they find themselves represented in the historical narratives by which they live. This is no less true for people and communities whose reactionary sentiment is harvested by those keen to exploit social and cultural disharmony for myriad ideological and economic reasons. And, while the promulgation of lies, denial and deceit by many politicians was indeed a thing before the rise of the ‘alternative fact’, it had not quite manifested itself as an everyday habit. Rather than negate the concerns of this colloquium, these matters serve to energise the sense of urgency and highlight the sheer complexity of the task of moral education. Of course this complexity has always been around. Nigh on 40 years ago I began teaching in a Sixth Form college (senior high school) in Bristol (England) in the aftermath of the race riots in the early 1980s in Birmingham, Bristol and Brixton. Those riots were fuelled by many of the same ethical and political impulses: injustice, economic and social degradation, poverty, powerlessness … These challenges were occluded in some places and for some time in the intervening years but they never went away. And the cognate challenge of knowing how to best address them from the perspectives of research and social practice has certainly not diminished.

Not infrequently as a reader of, as well as a producer for, this and cognate publications, one is struck by the often unidimensional, not to say, monocular approach to research. Struck but hardly surprised, given the direction of the Academy, the constraints, expectations and rewards and punishments it visits on scholars. When I look at scholarship here on character education it is often only tangentially linked to the complex entailments of political and politicised citizenship in an intercultural or global context; when I turn to discussions on virtue they rarely yield much by way of responses to the grubby terrain of contemporary politics despite Aristotle’s very pronounced blurring of the distinction between the two; when I look at neuropsychological approaches, I see little about how economic life chances and their habits shape our patterns of ethical thinking. Indubitably there are many exceptions, with Dunne’s landmark publication, ‘Back to the Rough Ground’ (Dunne, 1997) being notable, but it is not a commonplace. The terrain of political and moral education is rubble strewn with the rocks and detritus of pedagogical initiatives that have failed to produce lasting, coherent or cohesive change (and I include some of the materials colleagues such as Bob Davis and I developed in the UK under the aegis of the Gordon Cook Foundation). Often a new initiative rises, has its day in the sun and fades, not because it wasn’t good, not because it was inappropriate, not because it wasn’t well researched; mostly because it fell victim to the ever-present urge for novelty. And, in this regard, it is interesting to note that the two papers most centrally concerned with everyday educational practice in a changing, digital age (D’Olimpio and Orchard) re-focus our attention on the need to retain critical skills of evidence sifting, analysis, diagnoses, prognosis. Hence, while the world in which young people grow up may be increasingly digital, with new forms of surveillance and social control the skills we need to impart to manage and navigate a space where control has been wrested from the individual are decidedly analogue; as D’Olimpio’s and Orchard’s essays intimate, the faculty of critique and reason remain as prescient, perhaps more prescient than has been the case in post (Anon., n.d.).

These concerns refer us back to Michael Reiss’s existential reflection and our treatment of the evolving human. But the moral and educational import of his considerations open further lines of enquiry around privacy, tracking, and control. And as computational and synthetic biology make advances we are faced with issues of legitimacy. Hence, as the delivery vehicles for genetic medicine become increasingly sophisticated, the capacity to choose may be diminished or altered from that which we currently consider normative. As Fuller (Fuller, 2013) suggests, Humanity 2.0 is likely to give birth to blurring of traditional boundaries between good and evil. And of course, if Conway is correct (and I suspect he is), the end of the post-War consensual moral topography, based on a kind of immanent Christianity, may well be acting as mid-wife. Arguably it is this shift which has facilitated the rise of the libertarian credo with its altogether more Nietzschean impulses. None of this is a counsel of despair but a recognition of the sheer complexity of the task of moral education, which goes to the heart of our quest to understand what it is to be human, a quest given an interesting twist here in Reiss’s provocation on the nature and continuity of moral obligation. Rather, it is an invitation to come to terms with the sheer complexity and inter-related nature of our endeavours, where there is so much to unearth, reflect on and learn from: from the role of religions in the advancement of public and private education to the analysis of discursive practices in myriad contexts; from the relationships between neurobiology and social conditions to the capacity for self-denial and ethical self-enstrangement (Conroy, 2009), the terrain is vast.

Given the challenges in attempting to grasp the whole it is hardly surprising that colleagues focus narrowly on specific practices, techniques, readings, understandings at the expense of that whole. This segmentation and narrowing of focus is, of course, the product of the division of academic labour, which has gone on apace, first as our knowledge of the material world expanded and, more recently, even in universities, as the unending maximisation of bureaucratic complexity and its processes (Conroy, 2004). Both of these trends have largely expunged the generalist academic committed to the broad entailments and requirements of an academic culture and an understanding of the rhizomatic nature of our ethical and material entanglements. (MacFarlane, 2011). In my own professional memory at the University of Glasgow, Arts and Social Science students were mandated to take a course in moral philosophy/epistemology. Today there are four available courses in ethics across all undergraduate programmes, including medical ethics and none are mandatory, despite the University almost doubling its student population. This trend to ever narrower specialisation has however, and somewhat ironically, witnessed modest reversals of late as politicians, professionals and researchers recognise that the challenges which accompany social dysfunction are manifold and myriad. Hence, the effects of poor child-rearing practices as well as socio-economic disadvantage often accompanied by drug addiction, violence, hopelessness and feelings of inadequacy. This in turn leads to further expressions of disadvantage and civic dislocation. In these senses the task of moral education is social and political as well as personal. Whether or not Narvaez’s challenging essay here provides an answer is unclear but, without necessarily defaulting to nostalgia, her questions are both serious and prescient.

For those concerned to promote character formation as the ground of moral and civic life, moral behaviour can be viewed largely through the lens of self-regulation. For a Kantian this takes the form of rational self control; for the Aristotelian it is through the cultivation of right practice; what he considers to be ‘temperance’. Of course, I make no suggestion here that self-regulation is unimportant. Indeed, I consider the relationship between political probity and certain forms of character formation as vital (in both senses). Nontheless, when the system is rigged against one’s own self-regulation, when the material conditions under which individuals and communities live conduce to a life lived, if not immorally then amorally, what then? Is it not the case that the increasing concentration of wealth burdens us all with the insatiability of our appetites, (something that Narvaez here opens up with some force)? Is it not important to recognise that with respect to material conditions, severely disadvantaged individuals and communities do not experience their disadvantage in singular terms? Disadvantage rarely travels unaccompanied but manifests itself across a broad range of material, psychological and ethical goods. From health and housing to transport and violence; from substance abuse and relationships breakdown to unemployment, those most disenfranchised by the processes and conditions of globalisation experience multiple deprivation and comorbidities¹ (Dorling, 2019). Indeed, we know from the emerging data on COVID-19 that co-morbidity is a major determinant of outcomes (Guan et al., 2020). And, while we may not yet know exactly why, we do know that race plays a part in increased susceptibility to serious manifestations of COVID-19. So too does social class and often the two, class and race, are entangled in webs that have become so rhizomatic that it is challenging to tease them apart. At the time of writing, the foregrounding of the Black Lives Matter movement, has seen racism, once more, surface as the neuralgic point of United States politics.² But, while manifesting itself differently in different places, as the coming to terms with the historic economic positional advantage of slavery in European countries such as France and Britain, the substantive concerns have strong family resemblance. For liberals of a Rawlsian temper, the issue is one of universal, agnostic justice, for old-fashioned Marxists (admittedly a position under some pressure) it is a question of the exploitation of human beings as capital within a system dominated by global capital, for libertarians it has become emblematic of a perceived culture war, which they argue has been fuelled by etatist impulses, liberal interference and identity politics. Ironically, as Michael Sandel (Sandel, 2020) has rightly pointed out in his most recent work, traditional liberals have inadvertently if carelessly contributed to the success of a libertarian fuelled populism by embracing, rather too fulsomely, some of the nostrums of meritocracy so beloved of those intent on re-making the social contract.

While all these concerns provide interesting lines of enquiry, at the present moment the libertarian position offers the most important and present challenge to and for future directions in moral education. This is in part because it poses a direct challenge to the notion that moral choices should be shaped in the close encounter with the other, and in part because it is within this frame that there have been some attempts to tease out the rhizomatic entanglements of race and class as part of a challenge to and on liberalism. It is increasingly evident that in some countries libertarians are re-shaping the public discourse on moral acceptability and unacceptability. In doing so they are likely to influence the re-drawing of the map of liberal morality so significantly shaped by the events of the Second World War. And, as already noted it is a map heavily influenced by a particular liberal conceit of Christianity.³ Drawing heavily on Hayek, libertarians are often fuelled by particular ideological interests intent on challenging liberalism, which is deemed by them to be a philosophy of weakness and, perhaps more importantly, as one demanding and dependent upon unwelcome state regulation. But the interest in and dependence on Hayek underscores other drives, not least that which argues for a close relationship between economic and cultural success and genetic inheritance. This argument is captured succinctly, if somewhat crudely, by the father-in-law of the current UK Prime Minister’s Chief advisor, Dominic Cummings. A baronet, Sir Humphrey Wakefield, opined in a television programme (Doomblerg, 2014) that intellectual and material superiority was established and maintained by intergenerational success and that the reason the ruling classes ruled was a matter of superior genetic reproduction. Such views are not limited to the prudential domain but, as may be seen in the work of Ridley (Ridley, 1996), make their way into and shape a discourse of moral superiority and indeed political decision making (Cummings, 2013).⁴

For others the disruption to the liberal order emanates from a belief that global markets are intrinsically corrupt and that social disruption is the only way of combatting the manifest injustices that are embedded in capital. Chaos, they believe, will loosen the grip of global capital. And of course such readings of the inherent corruption of globalisation are inevitably part of the story, affording endless opportunities to move assets, hide the proceeds of crime, avoid taxes … (Nordstrom, 2007). The most cursory reading of the Financial Times (one of the few remaining reputable news outlets of global stature) will probably only serve to reinforce such a view.⁵ Yet there are others whose motives are somewhat more venal, seeing in the disrupted order, opportunities to be exploited for pecuniary advantage.

But why should any of this matter to our understanding of moral education?—Underpinning both education and moral development is some sense of the perfectibility or, at least, the evolutionary improvement of human beings both individually and socially. Democracy was a key means by which moral improvement would be secured, at least by those in developed Western economies. Indeed, Just Community Schooling, as promoted by Kohlberg and his disciples, had at its core the impulse to foster mature moral decision-making as both a foundation for, and an expression of a democratic and collectivist project (Power, 1988). The recent disdain for the kind of collectivism and complex sociality advocated for by post-War scholars has grown apace as certain strains of globalisation have exacted a substantial price. Whether from the Left or the Right the cultivation of crisis capitalism is manifest in a kind of political and economic dishonesty that has energised and nurtured disaffection and resentment, energetically fomented by many who stand to gain from the ensuing chaos. Often unencumbered by any attachment to truth, they consider that the social problems of advanced economies are a function of indolence and a dysfunctional or over-weaning state (Kwarteng et al., 2012). People can be freed from their own indolence, déshabillé and decline through the creation of a more robustly entrepreneurial culture with a substantially shrunk state. Here, moral education is to be found in and expressed by a kind of self-sufficient rugged individualism. Consequently, rather than see chaos as an unfortunate consequence emanating from politico-economic realignment and destabilisation, it is to be welcomed as an opportunity for not only securing private gain (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997) but also for a particular kind of character formation.

While it can be easy for liberals of a more community oriented bent to dismiss libertarians as amoral, their position(s) embody a strong moral character; it is just that they consider the Rights of the individual to self-expression, self-realisation, self-sufficiency and, indeed to selfishness itself to have a much stronger claim on the dispensation of law and the disposal of resources than those of equity, redistribution, care and community. For such as Haidt these differences reflect personality traits (Iyer et al., 2012). Their claimed lineage is traced to the work of seventeenth century liberals keen to limit the, not infrequently exercised, despotic power of sovereigns and government and their unjustifiable reach into the religious lives of subjects.

Tempting though it is to abandon the analysis of difference to nothing more than the kind of psychologisms preferred by Haidt and his colleagues, this would be both a procedural and a substantive error. In pursuit of a more rounded account of political difference we would be more true to the thing itself by placing such psychological dispositions within a broader hermeneutic of political framing, public discourse and epistemic practices in schools and other educational sites.⁶ This is particularly salient if we are to accord a meaningful place to education in the bi-nominal moral education. One only has to ask why the expression of particular character traits ebb and flow in the course of history. After all, I presume that the proportion of people displaying particular, ostensibly libertarian, character traits remains relatively stable over time. Surely what matters most in an educational—that is public—context is the way in which opportunity is afforded to particular forms of political expression and the kind of shaping performativity of a public language. As Alderdice intimates in his essay (and indeed his work more broadly) it is this shaping value of the language of peace and reconciliation that counts towards a key object of moral education; the facilitation of a civic society that simultaneously secures individual freedoms and peaceful coexistence for widely disparate groups.

Undoubtedly being a libertarian does not necessarily or logically entail fascism and it would be rash to make such a claim. Yet, as Alderdice, Andrews and D’Olimpio suggest in their distinctive ways, the kind of liberal consensus that built certain kinds of liberal protections are under threat. One part of that threat is, as quite a number of the authors here are suggesting, lodged in language. Libertarians are keen to ignore or play down the performative character of language in favour of freedom of expression but language is no neutral tool. Rather it can be weaponised (and this is as true for liberals as it is for libertarians) to shape public discourse, its meanings and its choices. Robert Paxton’s increasingly prescient 2004 publication, ‘The anatomy of Fascism’, reminds us that the slide into fascism is generally not the product of a ‘strong man’; nor is it presaged by marching bands and public fanfare. Rather,

[n]one of the more successful European far Right parties now proposes to replace democracy by a single-party dictatorship. At most they advocate a stronger executive, less inhibited forces of order, and the replacement of stale traditional parties with a fresh, pure national movement. They leave to the skinheads open expressions of the beauty of violence and murderous racial hatred. The successful radical Right parties wish to avoid public association with them, although they may quietly share overlapping membership with some ultraright action squads and tolerate a certain amount of overheated language praising violent action among their student branches. (Paxton, 2004, p. 186)

All of this seems remarkably familiar and, perhaps more importantly, Paxton carefully adumbrates the ways in which the compact is forged between disaffected and often disenfranchised populations and political leaders who see an opportunity. The fascist nurtures and plays upon collective obsessions with decline, humiliation and victimhood (O’Toole, 2019).⁷ Such fanciful mis(readings) of history pose a particular challenge for moral education. While it may appear strange to consider the importance of history in reflecting upon future directions in moral education, recent events have illustrated the ways in which historical memory has simultaneously been appropriated and weaponised. Indeed, Conway’s contribution here is important in understanding the evolution of a politically rhetoricised moral conversation as a tool of rehabilitation. This rehabilitation from what he describes as a Year Zero/Stunde Null focused not only on the rehabilitation of the language of religion (Christianity) but the reimagining of space with its emotional attachments. And of course, many of the current conversations about sovereignty and race have at their core the imaginary of space. Conway’s articulation of a ‘trinity of apparently complementary values: a humanist Christianity, liberal intellectual norms, and a European identity’ and their gradual disintegration seems particularly apposite in the context of the present conversation. A new, secularised kind of Christianity⁸ offered a kind of re-balancing underpinned by a set of Rights. And as these Rights have evolved over time in and beyond the institutions of the EU and the US; as their rhetorical force extended and grew globally, any sense of the transcendent call of the religious has gradually evaporated. Equally, while the force of our historical narrative has diminished, he suggests, this does not de facto have to be a counsel of despair (O’Toole, 2019) but can be an opportunity to free ourselves from the prejudices of our narratives of ‘choice’. Here we see, once more, that the technological changes considered above are not discrete from epistemic and political change. It is precisely these inter-weavings that make the task of the moral educator simultaneously so demanding and so urgent.

Self-regulation (a favoured shibboleth for both classic and libertarian strains of liberalism) stretches its tentacles beyond questions of economic and social self-sufficiency into the very heart of the pedagogic practices that shore up contemporary education in most occidental traditions. Its more spurious manifestations are to be found in the facile but almost ubiquitous doctrine of the learner. Drawing upon one of, if not the most important of contemporary theologians/philosophers, Jean-Luc Marion, Biesta offers a timely challenge to this specious doctrine. Indeed, not only is it timely but hugely important for moral education and teachers. If everything is to be scaffolded around the familiar, built upon the already existing, where is the demand that we give something to students that they never asked for and never wanted? In a future that is likely to make increasing demands on individuals and communities, it is surely incumbent on serious moral teachers not to be constrained by the desires of the customer. Equally surely, a pedagogic doctrine rooted in what one wants rather than what the world presents itself as is a kind of moral solipsism. As Biesta himself puts it, the point of education is to give people what they didn’t ask for. This Augustinian turn is central to moral education for, if the present is a guide to the future, vast numbers of people ask nothing more of their moral education than it offer some kind of self-confirmation, even where such self-confirmation is merely a form of ego extension. The consequent notion that the task of the teacher is a double-truth-telling; that is not only telling the truth but offering the conditions of recognising it as such, is central to a number of the essays here.

Biesta’s reflections tie together a number of subsequent themes. These include Krettenauer’s concern to move beyond a purely rational paradigm in understanding moral development with the inevitable consequences for moral education. They are strongly echoed by Andrews and Orchard in quite different ways. Following Hegel, MacIntyre and Taylor, Orchard argues for a sense of the lived experience of ethics as communal and social. Her very practical lens highlights the limited resources made available in professional education to prepare educators for a task that, as we see across the essays in this issue, is immensely complicated. Her focus on practice in many ways echoes that of Biesta; the teacher, properly construed, embodies many of the things they wish/need to teach. Her call for serious professional education for teachers so that they can embrace the challenge of moral education is vital if we are to equip our communities with the resources and tools needed to deal effectively with future moral complexities.

As one reads the essays in this collection, the ways of thinking about future directions in moral education evoke something of the ‘back to the future’ syndrome; that is a refurbishment of older, established ways of thinking about moral deliberation and action in order to secure an ethical present and future. Even where we might wish to refurbish, re-imagine and re-use the intellectual and ethical resources available to us we may be taken in quite different, sometimes, intellectually and emotionally incompatible directions. Both Andrews and Narvaez are sceptical of the contemporary construction of our moral sense. However this shared perception leads to very different accounts of how the resources of the past might be refurbished and redeployed. On the one hand Narvaez’s urgent eco-appeal evoking a return to a pre-lapsarian account of child-rearing is open to accusations (not always justified) of nostalgia. On the other, Andrews’ challenge to rediscover an appetite for the world of ‘facts’ is embedded in a robust claim to and of human progress. Both are post-colonial but there any similarity ends. Whereas Narvaez argues that we should re-learn the lessons of our hunter-gatherer forbearers in order to re-energise our moral, civic and personal nurturing, Andrews adumbrates the evidence of global progress that has seen substantial advances in welfare, care and voice. And, in this, she invites us to re-position our gaze away from the neuralgic obsessions of a Euro-American axis while, simultaneously, taking seriously a pre-Facebook commitment to truth-telling. What is particularly compelling and disturbing in equal measure is the observation that some polities are less prone to the seductions of ‘fake news’ and that the extent to which resistance is manifest would appear to be related to a curriculum that fosters both information literacy and critical thinking. The success of a country like Finland in producing ethically politically literate citizens indeed has its roots in the past; in a history of political subservience and tension with a powerful neighbour, a history of the fight for full emancipation, a history of moving from an agrarian to industrial society (Sahlberg, 2011). In important respects, this is a challenge to Krettenauer’s intimation of the rise of positional feeling and the demise of Kohlberg’s more Kantian account of the import of moral reasoning. It is also a call to dust down the import of ethical exemplification (Walker, 2013). Of course ethical exemplification is itself a function of a coherent public discourse on what might constitute ethical behaviour. Certainly Andrews’ detailing here of the importance of truth and sensitivity to what’s not there provides an important corrective to deracinated accounts of utility, performativity, functionality … This concern addresses more directly the conditions of a political landscape framed by the libertarian conceit discussed above. In this, and in her call to ‘judgment’ as an educational and ethical task, she points to the most important dispositional resource we are likely to need in the coming decades.

And here we turn to D’Olimpio’s concern with the ever-advancing power of social media and its attendant platforms—a timely reminder that online civility is not fostered within the medium and that our future media mediated engagements require quite different, older forms of pedagogy than those required to functionally navigate the virtual spaces. Her claim that the development of critical perspectivism as an ethical attitude is one that can and perforce demands cultivation outside and anterior to any engagement with the media. Any perfunctory encounter with Facebook and Twitter will acquaint the viewer with the myriad forms of verbal abuse freely used to deride intellectual or political opponents. And indeed such abuse is robustly defended and informally sanctioned by a range of libertarian thinkers and their attendant media outlets. Their argument of course is one that antedates the emergence of these media forms but is deftly deployed in these spaces in pursuit of the politics of disruption and the follies of the facile. Such arguments, promulgated by libertarian organisations including Spiked in the UK and the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) in the US deliberately conflate the Right to free speech with the Right to have a platform (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_vebZmPRHY).

The challenge with actually instantiating critical perspectivism is of course one of persuasion; that is persuading those with control over our educational institutions that such an ethically engaged education materially contributes to the flourishing of the community as a whole. One only has to consider the challenges being thrown up by the global economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to see how future proofing criticality is likely to be a herculean task. While universal common schooling has always carried the DNA of the economy in its structures, fabric and discourse, it has simultaneously had some protection from the antibodies of a liberal general education grounded in the work of nineteenth century educational thinkers from Matthew Arnold to John Henry Newman and in the twentieth century the post-War injunctions of the Conant Harvard Report (Harvard 1945) in the United States and the extraordinary 1947 Fyfe Report on Secondary education in Scotland, which observed that:

There has been a fresh awakening to the value and the precariousness of our liberal way of life. It is clear now that the marriage of freedom and order which democracy presupposes is possible only for a people conscious of its inheritance, united in purpose, and proof against the attacks of sophistry and propaganda; and that these qualities require not merely a literate, but an educated, nation, capable of a high degree of self-discipline, objective judgment and sustained vigilance. (Advisory Council on Education in Scotland, 1947)

Krettenaeur draws our attention to the fissure that has opened up between the traditional formulations of moral education, grounded in philosophically rich, psychological accounts of moral maturation and, in particular, more robustly biological and genetic accounts of moral education. As moral education turns its gaze to these myriad accounts of moral science it encounters new tensions in the ways in which they have shaped the conversation up to this point: importantly, in the context of this discussion, these include increasing claims of biological structures as foundational and constitutive of moral development and choice making. The controversial nature of the biological has become increasingly pronounced as it has become a leitmotif of libertarians such as Matt Ridley (who consider virtue as something emanating from and embedded in our genes rather than our social formation). While for most serious scholars the presence of a genetic component goes largely undisputed, here it finds a new, more disturbing resonance often taken up by soft eugenicists such as Cummings.

While Krettenauer argues that the healthy future of moral education lies in a kind of rapprochement, indeed a fulsome embrace of the moral sciences, this may not be quite as straightforward as might appear to be the case prima facie. Of course for liberal educationalists, attached as they tend to be to a particular conceit of egalitarianism predicated on traditional conceits of equality of opportunity, this can seem utterly abhorrent. There is little doubt that, as technologies such as the gene-editing CRISPR evolve, become cheaper, become readily available that individuals will see this as an opportunity to improve their genetic legacy. How is moral education to confront the selection of/for personality traits when such selection is itself an expression of pre-existing inequalities?

As we continue the conversation about future directions in both research and practice we should do so having witnessed and taken cognisance of some striking eruptions in the somewhat taken-for-granted liberal consensus in those countries deemed to have dominated the post-War global spaces and its institutions. The rise of populism, the emergence of a pandemic, the financial crash, the evolution of fluid money and tax avoidance, the de-funding of the public spaces, the re-emergence of eugenicist politics … all bear witness to the cords of society being tested to nigh on destruction. And, in their turn they imperil the social contract. Any moral education worthy of our attention must pay as much attention to the discursive tropes that have energised these moves as to the formation of character, the development of a Kantian rationality or indeed the cultivation of moral sentiment. And, we should proceed with courage, caution and humility.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

James C. Conroy

James C. Conroy is Professor of Religious and Philosophical Education, Dean for Global Engagement (Europe) and Director of the European Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Glasgow where he has also served as Vice Principal, Dean of the Faculty of Education, Head of the Department of Religious Education. He is currently Chair of the Journal of Moral Education Trust and has previously served as President of AME and Chair of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. His published monographs include the award winning, ‘Does Religious Education work?’ and ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy’.

Notes

1. The work carried out by colleagues at the Glasgow Centre for Population health, headed up by Darren McGarvey, is based in an outreach facility in the East End of Glasgow where the University of Glasgow is a partner and that part of the partnership led by Bob Davis.

2. Of course this is not to suggest that racism is not a neuralgic stain on other polities across the globe, from India and China to the UK and France.

3. This is not to suggest that other traditions haven’t been party to the evolution of public morality and moral education, but its framing has been ‘Christian’.

4. Of course it is impossible to disagree with everything Cummings writes in this blog given that it is so wide ranging and his analysis of bureaucratic failures has some point. However, often these truisms act as a form of seduction, drawing the reader into an altogether murkier world where the explanatory power of genetic inheritance and its failures supplants sociality.

5. At the time of writing the German company Wirecard filed for bankruptcy having admitted that €1.9bn (c.40% of its revenues) were fictitious and the Big Four accountancy firm EY was under serious scrutiny having failed to ask for accounts for three years for an alleged €1bn deposit in a Singapore bank, OCBC, that didn’t exist. EY had audited Wirecard’s accounts for a decade and arguably the relationship was much too close. (See https://on.ft.com/2BGjR3W).

6. Putting aside the myriad truisms of Lyer et al.’s study such as libertarians are more individualistic, there are some very odd claims such as libertarians operate out of rationality and liberals out of feeling. This seems to me a gross over simplification. Arguably at least, conviviality, collegiality, sociality, redistribution; indeed caritas may all be perfectly rational responses in an imperfect world.

7. O’Toole’s work is undoubtedly somewhat polemical and literary but for all that it captures important insights into the way in which collective sentiment can be weaponised for particular political ends.

8. This secularised Christianity is well captured in the writings of post War analytic philosophers such as R B Braithwaite (Braithwaite, 1955).