Autonomy and Decency in 21st-Century Liberal Education

Abstract

Colleges responding to Gutmann and Thompson’s (1996) plea for the cultivation of moral character and intellectual skills at the same time must, I believe, rethink their present understanding of the aim of much moral education, turning from the sole development of autonomy as that aim to the development of a sense of decency based on a new construction of autonomy. How autonomy and decency are to be construed in this reconceptualization of focus will be the remit of this presentation. How decency, using this newly conceived autonomy, might be learned will also be sketched. To begin, we should attempt to justify the need for this rethinking of liberal education in the 21st century.