thesis on moral education

What Is “Moral Education”?

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Moral education is one of the most significant arenas of preoccupation of analytic educational philosophy as well as of daily educational practice. Several significant alternative theories of moral education emerged in twentieth century philosophy of education.

It would seem that twenty-first century theory and practice of moral education reflects new realities, challenges, and responses.

This chapter is based on chapter 5 “The Moral Situation “in B. Chazan and Jonas Soltis, editors.( 1973 ). Moral Education . New York: Teachers College Press.

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• The moral situation
• Moral socialization
• Moral thinking
• Moral caring

Moral education is one of the central concerns of philosophy of education. Over the years, it has been described using a variety of terms—“moral education”, “values education”, “ethics and education” and “character education”. Ultimately, these diverse appellations all focus on the question of “What is the role of education in making us moral and good human beings?”

In former times, discussion of the moral and the good was typically related to religious belief and practice and was often regarded as one of the central missions of religious education. The discussion of moral education was to change dramatically in the modern era when morality was no longer necessarily dependent on or a derivative of religious education. Modern discussions do not necessarily—if at all—tie moral and ethical spheres to religion. Rather, they focus on the role of morality in education in general.

The Moral Situation

The discussion of what “moral education” means very much depends on the clarification of a prior question: What are the issues a person faces when he/she is confronted by a moral situation that calls for a decision?

The first component of a moral situation is that it constitutes a moment in which one has to decide between alternative actions regarding what to do or how to behave. However, the need for a decision in itself is not the single determining dimension of being moral since there are many moments in which we have to make choices in matters of taste, interest, or mood that are a part of daily life in modern societies and are issues unrelated to morality (e.g., “Which of Baskin-Robbins’ thirty-one flavors should I choose today?”). Moral decision-making is about having to make a choice between conflicting core values and principles that force us to decide which is the right and wrong thing for us to do. Moral conflicts are generally not between right and wrong but rather between two rights or two wrongs. Heinz has a very sick wife whose life was in danger. There is one drug that can save her; it is sold in only one pharmacy and it is extremely expensive because the pharmacist has devoted many years to developing it. Heinz does not have enough money to pay for the drug nor is he able to recruit funds. Ultimately, he has only two options: (1) to steal the drug and face the consequences or (2) not to steal the drug and potentially be responsible for his wife’s death. What should he do and why? Footnote 1 Moral decisions are about practical situations involving principled beliefs about what is right or wrong good or bad. In former times, priests and other religious authorities told us what to do. In modern life, we confront the situation with no clerical or supernatural dictates, rather, with only our own conscience and self.

Such decision-making is not an abstract discussion of wise philosophers sitting in easy chairs and deliberating for hours, days, months, or a lifetime. Moral decisions are issues that each of us faces every day in the here and now, situations that are central to human life, that are intensely personal, and that require making a choice of following a course of action.

Approaches to Moral Education

The emergence of contemporary public education created a dilemma about the place of moral education in schooling. As indicated, in former times this type of education was in the bailiwick of religion, which prescribed specific choices and actions. The question for a contemporary public education not rooted in specific religious beliefs is whether there is a place for moral education in schools. If the answer is in the affirmative, then we are faced with questions as to the bases on which moral decisions made, what are the goals of moral education in public schooling, and what the roles and responsibilities of teachers might be.

French academic Emile Durkheim is often regarded as the father of the fields of sociology and of modern thinking about moral education. Durkheim, in his numerous writings about morality and education, established a framework that influenced educational thinking and practice for many decades (Durkheim 1961 ).

Durkheim regarded human beings as social animals, meaning that human life originates and exists within social frameworks. There is no existence without society. Consequently, morality is a system of behaviors reflecting what societies regard as “right” or “wrong”. For Durkheim, modern moral education is the activity of transmitting good and right behaviors of a society to its future citizens. He regarded the teacher as a “secularized” priest or prophet charged with the mission—by means of words, demeanor, and actions—of transmitting society’s core values and behaviors. For Durkheim, the teacher is a powerful and essential force in moral education, and, in fact, is much more important than the family. A family is ultimately focused on caring, supporting, and protecting its children, and it will always compromise on moral issues when its own children are involved. Thus, it is the educator who is charged with transmitting moral codes and enforcing moral behaviors in the young.

Durkheim did not prescribe a specific code of ethics—and he indicated that moral codes could change over time—yet he maintained that ethics relates ultimately to behaviors that are for the good of a society. He did acknowledge that it was sometimes necessary to revolt against the practices of a society if its current moral behaviors strayed from societal principles. In such cases, it was both legitimate and indeed a requirement to call a society to order and to chastise it for corrupting its own core principles. Thus, Durkheim did not regard Socrates, the biblical prophets or Jesus as malcontents, but rather as social critics protesting the turpitude and degeneration of Athenian and Israelite societies and pleading with its citizens to return to their fundamental values.

Durkheim believed that teachers should be models of morally correct behavior. Their mission is to transmit the core values of modern secular societies by pedagogy, personality, and public behavior. The teacher’s task is not simply to pass on knowledge verbally, but also to model “the good” and “the right”. At the same time, the teacher must be concerned that the moral sphere does not become mere habit; instead it should be linked to reflection and understanding of core social values. Durkheim indicated that a teacher’s authority must be tempered with benevolence and sensitivity to the frailty of the child and should not lapse into harshness.

The best pedagogic device for developing the social elements of moral education, according to Durkheim, is the utilization of the class as a social group for the nurturing of group pride, comradery, and loyalty. The school class should be the model for behaving according to a society’s highest and most worthy values. Durkheim’s approach to moral education is the first iteration of a secular theory and practice of moral education for contemporary life.

An important—albeit little known—contribution to the discussion of moral education is to be found in the writings of British educationist John Wilson (Wilson et al. 1967 ). Durkheim grounded the origins of moral education in sociology, while Wilson believed that philosophy was the basis of a theory of moral education rooted in moral deliberation and reflection. Wilson regarded moral education as a way of thinking about ethical issues rather than as a procedure for transmitting specific values to students. His emphasis was on individual inquiry and deliberation rather than societal imposition.

Wilson’s model of moral education was based on a thinking process, which encompassed identifying the moral dilemma; verifying the relevant facts and moral issues involved; and applying principles of reasoning and consideration of other people’s interests to enable moral action. This approach regarded the role of schooling to be the nurturing of the philosophic process of moral reasoning.

Wilson did acknowledge that in order to teach the process of deliberation and resolution, a teacher often would need to express a particular moral viewpoint, because to be neutral or passive is to omit one important part of the process of moral reasoning. At the same time, the role of teachers/educators is to teach the multi-dimensional patterns of moral thinking, rather than to serve as exemplars of moral action. Teachers should not model how students should behave but rather how they should model the dynamics of moral reasoning.

The rapid expansion of public schools in late twentieth-century American society led to the need for practical pedagogies and programs for implementing morals and values education in American schools. A group of educators committed to the practice of moral education in schools created an approach called “Values Clarification” (Raths et al. 1963 ). Values Clarification (VC) is rooted in the assumption that there is no clear or accepted set of moral values in contemporary life, and that the moral domain is a matter of personal choice and individual decision-making. Therefore, the VC approach states that teachers should not be allowed to impose their values or their behaviors and that their role in “values education’ is to develop a series of skill sets that would enable the child to become a valuing person. VC believed that classroom teachers could and should help the young focus on moral issues and help them learn how to make their own value decisions. The VC model encompasses a process with seven components: (1) Choosing freely; (2) Choosing from alternatives; (3) Choosing from alternatives after thoughtful consideration of the consequences of each alternative; (4) Valuing the choice; (5) Valuing the choice so much as to be willing to affirm the choice to others; (6) Acting in a certain way to reflect commitment to the choice one made; and (7) Acting repeatedly according to the choice that they made so that it becomes an imbedded form of moral behavior. In VC, the role of schooling in moral education is to train young people to be able to apply the seven stages of the process, rather than to be a “morally-educated person”.

The role of the VC teacher is to create classroom activities and pedagogies focused on developing the seven valuing processes. The VC teacher is a technician who facilitates the development of a series of thinking, feeling, and behavioral skills. Moreover, the VC teacher should not reveal his/her own moral preferences; indeed their personal moral lifestyle is totally irrelevant to their work. They are neither representatives of society nor models of advanced stages of thinking; rather, they are trainers of a set of necessary skill sets.

The VC proponents developed a series of pedagogic exercises, dialogue strategies, role-playing case studies, value sheets, and hundreds of activities falling into three main categories. One set of pedagogic tools focused on the strategy of valuing questions that caused the student to think about moral issues. Another strategy aimed to encourage students to express their own personal values and examine them. A third group of activities created guidelines for group discussion and processing to enable students to hear and react to different perspectives.

The academic world did not treat VC with the respect shown to other university-based moral education programs, probably because it was more shaped by teachers’ practical needs for engaging and compelling classroom materials rather than being rooted in philosophical or psychological models. The pragmatic aspect of VC should not be minimized because any theory of moral education can only truly be useful if it is accompanied by or leads to clear, accessible, and useful practical materials.

Lawrence Kohlberg was the most prominent name in twentieth-century moral education (Kohlberg 1968 , 1981 , 1983 ). A psychologist educated at the University of Chicago, Kohlberg spent his academic career as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he devoted his research, educational, and pedagogic interests to the subject of moral education, Kohlberg’s work was rooted in psychology and philosophy, and his focus was on the practice of education. His appeal and commitment to the field of moral education was profound, and he was singular in his quest for the synthesis of theory and practiceֹ.

Kohlberg’s approach to moral education rejected the position that morality was essentially a set of moral norms, while also rejecting the notion that morality was exclusively a matter of individual choice. Kohlberg believed that while individuals are raised and rooted in specific societies, at the same time they must deal with issues that are universal in nature and that extend beyond specific societal borders. Indeed, he regarded the moral sphere as a central domain of being human.

Based on his psychological research, Kohlberg developed a three-levelled classification of “types” or “orientations” of moral judgment. Level One of moral judgment (called the “pre-conventional”) refers to moral thinking and decision-making that is oriented toward (or shaped by) fear of punishment or pain. A person on this level makes moral decisions to avoid physical or other sorts of punishment and/or to satisfy egotistical needs. What is “good” or “right” is whatever prevents a person from getting yelled at or punished, or, conversely, gets them some candy. Level Two, moral reasoning (the “conventional level”) is oriented toward social expectations and behaviors—being a “good boy” or a “good girl” or doing what a good citizen in a particular city, society, or state is expected to do or not do. On this level, decisions are made in terms of adherence to accepted moral conventions. Level Three, moral thinking (the post-conventional), refers to individual decisions oriented to conscience, principles, and to the ultimate value of justice. In Level Three decision-making, we can sometimes be acting in accord with society but, ultimately, we are oriented to transcending societal norms.

These levels are generally assumed to be connected to three commonly accepted sociological stages in our biological development, that is, infancy; school-age; adolescence and emerging young adulthood; and adulthood. However, Kohlberg’s levels of moral development did not necessarily automatically synchronize with the standard model just described. Indeed, there are many adults who are preconventional or infantile in their moral decision-making processes, and there are also adolescents and young adults who are post-conventional or principled in their moral decision-making and development. Another important aspect of Kohlberg’s developmental notion is his belief that once people have reached a higher level of development, it is unlikely that they will regress to a lower level. One who has learned to live a life of principle (with all the complexities involved) will likely find it difficult not to live the principled life consistently.

Kohlberg was committed to the development of a theory as well as to its implementation in schools (and at a certain point he also tested its use in prisons). Kohlberg shared Durkheim’s emphasis on the importance of moral education in schools, although Kohlberg prescribed a much different pedagogy and practice. He shared some of Wilson’s philosophic thinking but was much more psychologically and practically oriented than Wilson. He agreed with VC’s emphasis on practice but rejected most of the other thinking of VC.

Kohlberg worked with a group of educators to create a five-step method for moral dilemma discussion: Step 1: A moral dilemma is read out loud to the class (Kohlberg created a group of approximately 16 dilemmas, indicating that dilemmas could also be selected from ancient texts, literary texts, and contemporary sources). After the reading, the teacher makes sure that the group has understood and agreed upon the main points presented in the dilemma.

Step 2: The teacher raises two questions about the dilemma: (1) What should the person facing the dilemma do? (2) Why? The “why” question is ultimately the central discussion topic for Kohlberg because it reflects the nature of a person’s orientation in terms of moral thinking . Step 3: The class breaks up into small groups to discuss the participants’ reactions. The reason for initially splitting into small groups is to make people feel comfortable to share their thoughts before reassembling. Step 4: A group discussion regarding what the protagonist should do and why. The teacher’s role is to listen, explicate, and, as much as possible, enable the participants to hear patterns that reflect all three levels of moral thinking. This stage is critical in enabling students to at least hear levels of thinking that are higher than theirs. Step 5: The teacher summarizes the entire exercise and, to the extent that there were presentations reflecting the three levels, briefly summarizes the three different ways of thinking. The teacher’s role is to explicate, not propagate views. This discussion section was very important to Kohlberg as he believed that enabling students to hear levels of thinking higher than their own and hopefully to be influenced accordingly. Moreover, it was important to demonstrate that moral deliberation and discussions are not simply empty talking but that issues of morality do, can, and should have solutions. The teacher’s role in the entire process is based on a familiarity with the three levels of thinking, an ability to utilize and model the Socratic method of questioning, a sensitivity to group dynamics, and the ability to summarize without preaching. Kohlberg’s influence was great for several decades in the second half of the twentieth century because it was both rooted in a philosophical and psychological theory of moral thinking and translated into actual educational processes.

Reactions to—and, in some cases, critique of—Kohlberg’s work led to a new late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century school of moral education denoted as “the caring approach” (also referred to as “the feminist approach”) (Larrabee 1993 ). One of the most prominent voices of the caring approach is philosopher of education Nel Noddings, who developed what she called, “a relational approach to ethics and moral education” (Noddings 2007 ). For Noddings, the core of ethics and moral education is not “moral thinking” but rather the human virtue known as “caring” which refers to a trait at the core of human life characterized by concern for the other. This virtue is rooted in the emergence of what it means to be human, which encompasses being able to be a caring person toward others and a person able to be cared for by others. While not a theological model, Noddings’ position reflects the humanistic assumptions of Martin Buber and others who regarded human life as a dialogue in which one learns to appreciate the other, be appreciated by the other, and ultimately develop an authentic interactive human relationship denoted as the “I-thou” (Buber 1958 ). According to this perspective, ethics is about the human virtues of intuitiveness and receptivity, rather than moral principles or reasoning. Noddings’ caring is not a universal moral principle but a core human virtue.

Noddings regards schools as central platforms and frameworks for the development of caring, and her writings pay much attention to the creation of schools and school communities as caring environments. The teacher is one who has chosen a profession rooted in caring and, ultimately, one of whose roles, if not the central role, is to turn the school into a laboratory for developing a caring community.

While the twentieth century was deeply preoccupied with the issue of moral education, there were (and always have been and will be) voices which reject the role of schooling in issues of morality. Here are some famous examples: “My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school” (Margaret Mead); “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education” (Albert Einstein); “What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free and meandering brook (Henry David Thoreau); “It is our American habit, if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory, to add another story or wing” (John Dewey); “Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind” (Plato).

The “anti-moral education” tradition is rooted in the notion that by its very nature almost any kind of schooling is a form of indoctrination. This tradition says that schools should only teach topics, subjects, and issues that are based on agreed-upon and established methodologies and facts. As the nature of morality is one of personal preference, moral content cannot be regarded as shared or public knowledge, thus it should not be taught in school.

The epistemological version of this argument says that schools should only teach verifiable and objective bodies of knowledge. So-called “moral knowledge” is neither verifiable nor objective in the same way as the sciences. Education should deal with only publicly verifiable and agreed-upon contents often characterized as scientific or rational.

The individualist argument claims that the individual is the primary unit in life and schools should be concerned with the liberation and autonomy of the individual rather than the promulgation of a particular ethic. It opposes moral education on the grounds that it becomes a means by which the state or some power group—men, colonialists, Caucasians, and other such power groups—imposes their specific value beliefs. Education should be about ownership of self, and children should have the potential to be free choosing agents rather than be manipulated by a church or synagogue, big business, white capitalists, or gender-specific worldviews.

The empirical evaluative critique of moral education is fact-based rather than ideological, stating that there is no valid or reliable empirical data to validate the value of moral education in schools. Its argument is that research shows that schooling is not a very important factor in affecting people’s morality and hence the entire enterprise of implementation in schools is a waste of time and money. Schools should do what they do best, and they should not attempt to undertake an impossible task.

It is indeed legitimate to raise questions about moral education within public education. Are schools the tools of “power brokers” or interest groups or are schools simply incapable of having an impact on the moral sphere? The anti-moral educationists are good souls and not simply ornery troublemakers, and they do bring to our attention the potentially manipulative nature of schools, which may indeed serve the “power brokers” rather than “the powerless”.

Into the Twenty-First Century

Thinking about moral education has taken some new directions in the twenty-first century. The language of “moral education” has seemed to shift to the term “character education” and philosophic thinking has focused on virtues, with less of an emphasis on moral principles and judgments (Zagzebski 1966 ). The entire field of morality has been influenced by new trends in research within developmental psychology, neurology, and sociology that have been generally shaped by the neurosciences. Psychologist Vivian Gopnik indicates “that babies and young children are not the immoral creatures we thought them to be. Even the youngest babies have a striking capacity for empathy and altruism” (Gopnik 2009 ). The emerging field of neuro-education has been described as “the hot new area in education” (Klemm 1996 ).

Thinking about morality and education in the twenty-first century has also been shaped by a painful dynamic unrelated to the pastoral groves of the Academy. The hallways and sanctuaries of our schools, houses of worship, and other areas of public assembly have been desecrated by violence, shooting, destruction, and death. There is no need for Kohlberg’s fictional dilemmas; daily life on the West Coast and the East Coast, north and south, and even in the holy chambers of the Congress of the United States, have become a living pandemic of moral crisis, dilemma, and failure. Indeed, snapchat, smartphones, and on-site television cameras are writing the next sagas and stories of moral education in the twenty-first century.

It should come as no surprise that the subject of teaching morals and values has been a central arena of contemplation, thought, and practice in the world of education. From ancient times until today, there has been a sense of connection between education and being a good or moral person. As we have seen, there are many approaches to this subject, and it continues to preoccupy those who believe that education is related to how we live as human beings. The twentieth century was an extremely dramatic arena for reflection and the implementation of the diverse approaches to moral education. The twenty-first century is proving to be a painfully vivid setting highlighting the need for moral education and a moral way. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that moral education continues to be one of the central pressing and eternally important elements of the life and work of the world of education.

This is one of a series of dilemmas created by Lawrence Kohlberg for his dilemma discussion practice.

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Chazan, B. (2022). What Is “Moral Education”?. In: Principles and Pedagogies in Jewish Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83925-3_4

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Article Contents

Introduction, the ‘noble lie’ thesis: is plato’s educational theory nonegalitarian, self-control and the virtuous agent, concluding remarks, acknowledgements.

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Plato’s legacy to education: addressing two misunderstandings

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Alkis Kotsonis, Plato’s legacy to education: addressing two misunderstandings, Journal of Philosophy of Education , Volume 57, Issue 3, June 2023, Pages 739–747, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad049

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Building on Jonas and Nakazawa’s recent work ( A Platonic Theory of Moral Education) , my aim in this paper is to address two widespread misunderstandings of Plato’s ideas about education. The first is that the Platonic theory of education is nonegalitarian, promoting an educational system that justifies and perpetuates a caste-based society. The second is that the Platonic conception of the virtuous agent is primitive and far inferior to the Aristotelian conception, especially concerning the psychological make-up of the virtuous agent. By exploring some of the ways these misreadings can be countered, I defend the value of the Platonic educational theory for contemporary education and show the value of Jonas and Nakazawa’s project.

Following the contemporary revival of virtue ethics ( Anscombe 1958 ; Foot 1978 ; MacIntyre 1981 ), Aristotelian virtue theory has been at the epicentre of recent interest in character education. In the last thirty years or so, numerous studies have proposed and developed Aristotelian theories of education, especially in virtue education (for example, Carr 1991 , 2007 ; Curren 2010 , 2013 , 2014 ; Kristjánsson 2007 , 2015 ; Sanderse 2014 , 2019 ). Quite recently, however, Plato’s ideas on education have attracted the attention of a small number of educational theorists. According to these scholars, Plato’s ideas on education are relevant to contemporary education, as they offer an alternative to the Aristotelian account of virtue acquisition and development. These scholars argue for a re-evaluation of Plato’s legacy in the educational field and have developed and proposed Platonic theories of education ( Jonas 2016a , b , 2017 ; Mintz 2016 , 2018 ; Marshall 2020 ; Kotsonis 2020 , 2021 ; Jonas and Nakazawa 2021 ).

Jonas and Nakazawa’s A Platonic Theory of Moral Education is an important, recent addition to the small but growing body of work in this area. Jonas and Nakazawa’s main aim is to address certain widespread misunderstandings about Plato’s ideas on education and to highlight the significance of Platonic views for contemporary education. Most importantly, they argue that, unlike Aristotle, Plato believed in the possibility of moral re-education and virtue rehabilitation ( 2021 : 94, 95). They also argue that, concerning the role of moral epiphanies in character education, ‘Plato seems to offer a more complete picture than Aristotle’ (p. 116). More widely, in central chapters in the book they show that Plato developed a methodology for rehabituation through transformative epiphanies, and, in later chapters, proceed to modernize this method, and to show its significance for, and applicability in, education today. Their arguments demonstrate that Plato’s educational theory is well worth re-evaluating, and that it can provide important inspiration for the development of contemporary theories of education.

My aim in this paper is to build on this work. Following the lead of the authors of A Platonic Theory of Moral Education , I will offer some reflections on two widespread misunderstandings about Plato’s ideas on education. In so doing, I will defend the value of the Platonic educational theory for contemporary education. In the next section of this paper, I discuss the misunderstanding that Plato’s theory of education is nonegalitarian and promotes an educational system which justifies and perpetuates a caste-based society. I will show how this misunderstanding emerges, in part, from a certain reading of the ‘Noble Lie’ thesis that appears in Republic . In the subsequent section, I turn to the misunderstanding that the Platonic conception of the virtuous agent is primitive and inferior to the analogous Aristotelian concept, especially in what concerns the psychological make-up of the virtuous agent. I argue that this perception is misinformed and that that the view that the Platonic account of virtue education has nothing of significance to contemporary conceptions of moral education is far from the truth.

there is wide agreement across the dialogues that Plato thinks that all people are capable of achieving virtue if they are properly educated… Unfortunately, interpreters have tended to overemphasize the Republic, without sufficiently appreciating the metaphorical character of the kallipolis , and assume that Plato’s educational philosophy and the politics it was supposed to support was radically anti-egalitarian. ( 2021 : 9)

We shall tell our citizens the following tale: You are, all of you in this community, brothers. But when god fashioned you, he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers; he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other workers. Now since you are all of the same stock … your children will commonly resemble their parents. (415a) 2

Certain passages of Republic , such as the one presenting the ‘Noble Lie’ thesis, suggest that Plato argued for a radically nonegalitarian educational system. 3 As such, they cast doubt on the wisdom or appropriateness of considering what the Platonic educational programme can offer to education nowadays. Do we want our educational programme to divide students into classes, and provide the best education only to the ‘elite’? First, in response to this, I believe that scholars studying ancient philosophers for inspiration should ‘borrow’ whatever can be valuable and leave aside anachronistic theories and ideas of little value in contemporary classrooms. Arguing that we should not examine Plato’s potential contributions to contemporary education because of his argument that people are born into classes denies us access to a tremendously rich corpus of ideas about education and other matters. Similarly, Aristotle, whose ideas have greatly influenced contemporary virtue ethics and education, had a very poor opinion of women. 4 Does that mean that we should disregard his monumental philosophical work? 5

One might be inclined to answer this question in the affirmative, maintaining that we should disregard any philosophical work perpetuating or justifying nonegalitarian or sexist views. However, although many people perceive Plato’s educational theory as quite ‘conservative’, I argue that this association is not entirely accurate. In fact, it has been extensively challenged by recent work on the significance of Plato’s theory of education for contemporary contexts. This is a point that finds further development in Jonas and Nakazawa’s book. Indeed, as suggested above, a central premise of this book is that Plato was open to the possibility of re-habituation. Rehabituation involves, amongst other things, giving a second chance to those who have not had the best education. This does not seem to be the mark of a ‘conservative’.

Most importantly, it seems that the ‘Noble Lie’ should not be read literally. Going back to Jonas and Nakazawa’s argument with which I began this section, it seems that Republic , in which the ‘Noble Lie’ thesis is to be found, is unique among the Platonic Dialogues and should not be taken to represent Plato’s ideas about moral education ( Jonas and Nakazawa 2021 : 8; McClintock 2005 ; Mintz 2016 ). As a matter of fact, arguments in dialogues like the Laws (664a) and the Statesman (308e–309a) refute the idea that different classes should receive different education, arguing explicitly that all students should be educated on the virtues. Hence, there is room to argue that Plato’s ideas on education are not as nonegalitarian as they are widely taken to be—and that perhaps we should not read Plato’s Dialogues too literally. 6

Some may object to the above argument, maintaining that Plato intended to advocate for an educational system that justifies and perpetuates a caste-based society. Such arguments might take it that kallipolis was not described as a metaphor but as a blueprint for educational practices. However, these objections are difficult to square with the fact that Plato clearly abandons this position in his later Dialogues. Even those passages of Republic which promote a class-based education system can be of use for contemporary theorists interested in education if we simply assume that all students in contemporary classrooms are to be seen as ‘philosophers’ receiving the best possible education. Undoubtedly, certain aspects of Plato’s ideas on education ‘would have no place in secular pluralistic classrooms’, as Jonas and Nakazawa admit ( 2021 : 10). But this should not preclude us from modernizing and employing certain aspects of his methodology, such as moral epiphanies and habituation, in contemporary moral education.

Another important reason why contemporary scholars in character education focus on the Aristotelian virtue theory and downplay the importance of Plato is their implicit (and sometimes explicit) belief that Aristotle’s account of the concept of virtue is much more nuanced. Aristotle is considered the pinnacle of ancient Greek virtue ethics, and the contemporary revival of virtue theory has been building on his understanding of virtue and the virtuous agent ( Anscombe 1958 ; Foot 1978 ; MacIntyre 1981 ). It is to be expected, therefore, that the Aristotelian educational theory, which aims to cultivate virtue in students, is deemed superior to its Platonic counterpart that also aims to cultivate virtue in students, but rests on a presumably ‘primitive’ understanding of the virtuous agent. Yet are we really justified in believing that Plato’s conception of the virtuous agent compares unfavourably to Aristotle’s?

In their book, Jonas and Nakazawa (2021) highlight and address the misconception that Plato is an intellectualist about virtue. They note that Plato does not believe that cognitive knowledge is sufficient for virtue. ‘For Plato’, they argue, ‘having full knowledge of virtue requires not only that we have cognitive knowledge about which actions are virtuous and which are not, but that we also have the desire to perform virtuous actions and the strength of character to follow through on those desires’ ( 2021 : 12). Building on Jonas and Nakazawa’s work, in this section I want to show that Plato’s conception of the virtuous agent is not inferior to Aristotle’s, at least not in what concerns the virtuous agent’s psychological make-up.

According to Aristotle, both moral and intellectual virtues are necessary for the soul to function as one consistent unified body without conflicting desires ( EN , 1,099a7–15). Aristotle argues that one element in the soul has reason, and another is irrational ( EN , 1,102a28–30). According to Aristotle, the soul’s irrational element has two parts: it includes a vegetative element and an appetitive or desiring element which is responsive to reason ‘in so far as it listens to and obeys it’ ( EN , 1,102b30–1,103a). In contrast, from the middle Dialogues onwards, Plato argues for a tripartite division of the soul. On his view, the soul is made up of three different parts: i) the rational part, ii) the spirited part, and iii) the appetitive part ( Rep ., IV, 439c–d; 441a3–10). Each part has its characteristic desires. The rational part desires knowledge and wisdom (IX, 581b1–10), the spirited part desires ambition and honour (581a10–15), and the appetitive part desires bodily pleasures like food, drink, or sex (581a1–10). Crucially, in contrast to Aristotle, Plato believed that the appetitive part of the soul is irrational ( Rep ., IV, 439d), that it does not listen to reason, and that it is ‘insatiable’ (442a7).

Given the differences between them, it seems that the Aristotelian conception of the human psyche has a distinct advantage over its Platonic counterpart when it comes to moral education. Aristotle believed that the appetitive element of the soul is responsive to reason. Therefore, he argued that it is possible, through habituation, for one to align their desires with what is objectively good ( EN , 1,172a20–25). This means that, for Aristotle, the virtuous agent does not need to exert control over the appetitive or desiring element of their soul. A truly virtuous person desires only what is genuinely good and never what is objectively harmful or bad (see EN , 1,151b32–1,152a5). Aristotle believed that the continent, self-controlled individual is second best in terms of virtue: this individual has bad appetitive desires, although they are not led by these desires (see EN 1,151b32–1,152a7; see also Sanderse 2014 ). In contrast, Plato’s tripartite division of the soul, and his view that the appetitive part of the soul is not responsive to reason, both suggest that the best possible product of an education in virtue is a self-controlled individual. For Plato, education should aim at developing individuals who have self-control and discipline, who can control and bracket harmful desires which are not responsive to reason ( Rep . III, 410a; 411a VIII, 559b; IX, 571C–e; 573b).

The following example illustrates the difference between the two conceptions more vividly. Following the Aristotelian understanding of the human psyche and virtue, one could argue that, through habituation, we can teach students not to desire excessive amounts of food or drink, in the sense that the excess becomes harmful ( EN , 1,147b25–30). Once this habit has been formed, students will have no desire to eat or drink excessively, and, therefore, they will not have to control any such appetitive desires. On the other hand, according to Plato’s account of the human psyche , appetitive desires are not responsive to reason. This entails that we cannot teach students not to desire excessive amounts of food or drink. All we can do is train them to control such desires, so that they do not become extreme and harmful. This argument has important implications for what the final aim of character education should be.

We both are and are not inclined to think that the harder a man [sic] finds it to act virtuously the more virtue he shows if he acts well. For on the one hand great virtue is needed where it is particularly hard to act virtuously; yet on the other it could be argued that difficulty in acting virtuously shows that the agent is imperfect in virtue. ( 1978 : 10)

Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children, and I say that they are the forms under which virtue and vice are originally present to them. As to wisdom and true and fixed opinions, happy is the man who acquires them, even when declining in years; and we may say that he who possesses them, and the blessings which are contained in them, is a perfect man. Now I mean by education that training which is given by suitable habits to the first instincts of virtue in children; —when pleasure, and friendship, and pain, and hatred, are rightly implanted in souls not yet capable of understanding the nature of them, and who find them, after they have attained reason, to be in harmony with her. This harmony of the soul, taken as a whole, is virtue; but the particular training in respect of pleasure and pain, which leads you always to hate what you ought to hate, and love what you ought to love from the beginning of life to the end, may be separated off; and, in my view, will be rightly called education. (653b–c)

Contemporary scholars’ belief that the Platonic theory of education is of no import for contemporary education derives primarily from a number of widespread misunderstandings of Plato’s work. In this paper I have provided some reflections on two such misunderstandings. What the discussion has shown is that, while there would indeed be little value in a non-egalitarian educational theory built from a ‘primitive’ conception of the virtuous agent, Platonic educational theory is neither nonegalitarian nor primitive. On the contrary, it is rather progressive and offers an understanding of the virtuous agent as sophisticated and complex as that of Aristotle's. Nonetheless, our work here is far from finished. There remains much to be done to convince educational theorists that ‘Plato’s views are far more suitable to contemporary democratic classrooms than is commonly believed’ ( Jonas and Nakazawa 2021 : 1).

Special thanks to Theodore Scaltsas and Renia Gasparatou.

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See Page (1991) for an overview of the unsympathetic reception of the ‘Noble Lie’ by modern scholars.

Throughout this paper, I use Lee's (in Lee and Lane 2007 ) translation of the Republic , Jowett's (2006) translation of the Laws , Ross's (in Ross and Brown 2009 ) translation of the Nicomachean Ethics , and Rackham's (1932) translation of the Politics .

It is important to note that Plato’s educational programme and Socrates’ pedagogical method have significant differences and should not be understood as one and the same educational approach. The latter, for example, employs elements such as the elenchus, irony and aporia—elements which do not feature in Plato’s educational programme as presented in Republic .

For example, see what Aristotle says in the Politics : ‘The male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject’ (1,254b13–14). I am not suggesting that Plato had a much better opinion of women: ‘… and it is natural for women to take part in all occupations as well as men, though in all women will be the weaker partners’ ( Rep ., V, 455d10–15). Nevertheless, he did think, contra Aristotle, that women should be educated: ‘to make a woman into a Guardian we need … the same education as we need to make a man into one, especially as it will operate on the same nature in both’ (456c13–d1).

I want to make abundantly clear (in case it is not obvious) that I strongly and wholeheartedly disagree with the two philosophers on such matters (i.e. people being born in classes, the relationship between the two sexes).

Some scholars argue that Plato’s Dialogues should not be read as representative of his views (e.g. Gordon 1999 ; Press 2000 ; Statkiewicz 2009 ; Smith 2011 , 2014 , 2018 ). For example, according to Smith (2011 : 227), ‘the problem here is in thinking of Plato as a philosopher at all, where philosophy as a kind of writing is conceived as essentially different from other kinds, such as poetry (or, to use Statkiewicz’s term, ‘rhapsody’). It has to be said that philosophers of education, and those writing about Plato from the point of view of education, have not always been sensitive to the distinctive nature of Plato’s texts’. In contrast, other scholars seem to believe that Plato’s Dialogues are representative of his views (e.g. Hurani 1949 ; Carr 1991 ; Page 1991 ; Lane 2007 ; Jonas 2016a , 2016b ; Jonas and Nakazawa 2021 ). Nonetheless, irrespective of whether one sides with the former or the latter camp, it remains the case that Plato’s Dialogues are full of educational insights that can be taken up and deployed today.

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Ross Douthat

The Limits of Moralism in Israel and Gaza

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.

This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past. It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression. It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.

But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.

Sometimes those accusations have some bite . A “realist” foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations. It can underestimate the power of a righteous cause — as I underestimated, for instance, Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself in 2022.

But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel’s war in Gaza. The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply disappear.

For example, reading the apologia for pro-Palestinian protests from certain left-wing intellectuals, you have a sense of both elision and exaggeration, a hype around Israeli moral failures — it's not enough for a war that yields so many casualties to be unjust , if it’s wrong it must be genocide — that ends up suppressing the harsh implications of a simple call for peace.

A representative passage, from Pankaj Mishra in The London Review of Books, describes many protesters as “motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.”

No doubt many campus protesters have these motivations. The difficulty is that liberal “freedom” is on offer almost nowhere in the Middle East, certainly not in Gaza under Hamas’s rule, and the most challenging “otherness of beliefs” in this situation are the beliefs that motivated the massacres of Oct. 7.

Another difficulty is that some instigators of the protests, including some of the student groups that were at work immediately after Oct. 7, seem untroubled by this fact, and perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.

Which yields the moral dilemma the protests don’t acknowledge: Ending the war on the terms they want could grant a major strategic victory to the regional alliance dedicated to the murder of Israelis and their expulsion from the Middle East.

Maybe the Gaza war is unjust enough, and Israeli goals unachievable enough, that there’s no alternative to vindicating Hamas’s blood-soaked strategy. But you have to be honest about what you’re endorsing: a brutal weighing-out of evils, not any sort of triumph for “universally desirable” ideals.

Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war, for whom moral considerations — the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel — are invoked as an argument-ender in an inflexible way. We are constantly urged to “stand with Israel” when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing. Joe Biden’s administration is chastised for betrayal when it tries to influence Israel’s warmaking, even though the Israeli government’s decisions before and since Oct. 7 do not inspire great confidence.

Biden’s specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or hamfisted. But it’s not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.

The alternative articulated by, for instance, Mitt Romney — “We stand by allies, we don’t second-guess them” — is not a serious policy for a hegemon balancing its global obligations. And the religious vision of the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and other Christian Zionists, where Israel’s re-founding is evidence of a providential plan, does not imply that Israeli governments are immune from strategic blunders. Go read the Book of Kings!

In each case, you have a desire that mirrors the impulse of the left-wing intellectuals — to make foreign policy easy by condensing everything to a single moral judgment. But the problems of the world cannot be so easily reduced.

Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @ DouthatNYT • Facebook