ABSTRACT

As with the rest of human life, morality and moral education have an outside and an inside. Seen from the outside, morality provides a way of getting along with others, and from the inside it is a way of getting along with oneself. In other words, moral education is at once a necessary condition for social control and an indispensable means of self-realization. Most of us, including philosophers and psychologists as well as parents and educators, assume that these two functions of morality sustain each other: what is good for society is good for our kids, and vice versa. Although Nietzsche and a few other so-called rugged individualists have rejected this assumption I will not spend time defending it in this chapter. Instead I will focus on the second of these two perspectives, the “inside view.”1 My motives for doing this are twofold. First of all, I want to unpack the general understanding, shared by contemporary educators of all persuasions, that morality is a form of self-realization. Also, I want to situate this understanding within the philosophical tradition of what, using the term in its broadest possible sense, I will simply call “human development.” Specialists in the fields of education and psychology may object that not all conceptions of moral education are developmental, and that is certainly true if we understand development in the biological sense of an organic unfolding of innate powers, taking place within a reasonably stable environment that sustains but does not itself shape the developmental process. It is also true if we understand development in a nonbiological but equally narrow sense as an ordered progress through cognitive stages, each of which has its own logical structure.2 But our everyday concept of human development is not so narrow: there what is distinctive is not its inevitability or logical structure, but its normativity. Plainly put, most of us think of development as a movement from a less desirable state to a better one, even though in the case of human development the “betterness” at issue-namely, human flourishing-is subject to philosophical debate. In what follows I will trace the way philosophers have formulated the fundamental developmental idea of human flourishing, since I believe that the history of their

struggles to understand what it means to be human have shaped the ways in which contemporary moral educators understand their own enterprise. I am tempted to say that here as elsewhere in the history of ideas, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. However, to say this would oversimplify the way theories emerge within an intellectual tradition. It would be more realistic, I believe, to think of traditions, including our philosophical tradition, as providing necessary albeit usually unnoticed moorings for a specific theory or practice such as character education or moral judgment development. Thanks to these moorings a theory or practice is secured, stabilized, and thereby rendered intellectually plausible and practically useful. This point applies across the board, but as we will see in the following pages it is especially true for the theory, research, and practice of moral and character education. When I spoke just now of “our philosophical tradition” I had in mind the usual pantheon of Western philosophers, beginning of course with the Greeks. One could begin even further back, since ancient non-Western thought is rich with insights into the moral dimension of selfhood-or better, the liberation from the demands of the self. However, the non-Western part of our story is well covered in the next chapter, so let’s begin with what might be called the early Greek cognitive-developmental conception of human development.