It is an interesting exercise to try to locate Hand’s approach on Kohlberg’s taxonomy, particularly in light of what I think is an irresolvable tension in Kohlberg’s approach.

Kohlberg’s stages are entirely formal—higher levels of moral reasoning are identified not in terms of the actual beliefs or judgments endorsed but the principles by which agents defend their judgments. Accordingly, Kohlberg’s version of moral education focuses on improving the routes by which students arrive at whatever judgments they settle on, but it does not allow him to identify anything in particular that they should judge to be right or wrong. While it was clear that the politically minded and liberal Kohlberg had his own opinions about the right position on any number of controversial subjects, he could only hope that students would arrive at those conclusions themselves. Towards the end of his life this inability to identify, from within his theory, specific beliefs students should be taught directly was a growing concern for Kohlberg. Continue reading…

Michael Hand’s A Theory of Moral Education is a good book, and his theory a powerful and plausible one. The book is curious in one respect, however, which I want to poke at here. Hand presents the challenge of moral education in contemporary liberal democracies in the form of two questions: 1) what should children be taught by way of moral education? and 2) is it possible for moral education to be more than indoctrination? Hand spends a little time exploring why these two question seem most pressing, and the answer seems clear. The first arises when we acknowledge the pluralism of moral beliefs in modern liberal democracies, and the second when we acknowledge the paramount importance of respecting children’s autonomy either, as some would have it, while they are children but at least as future adults. In short, we don’t want to sanction state enforcement of some controversial beliefs and values over others, and we don’t want to foist upon children beliefs they cannot have chosen for themselves on some rational basis. Hand aims to outline an approach to moral education that respects both these constraints in the face fo doubts that it can be done. So far so good. Keep reading…