In Defence of Rational Moral Education: Replies to Aldridge, de Ruyter and Tillson

Abstract

In the foregoing articles, David Aldridge, Doret de Ruyter and John Tillson offer some weighty and wide-ranging criticisms of my recent book, A Theory of Moral Education (Hand, 2018a). I cannot hope to do justice to the detail of their criticisms in the space available to me, but I shall attempt, in what follows, to defend my account of moral education against their principal lines of attack. I am grateful to Aldridge, de Ruyter and Tillson for their close engagement with the book and for the opportunity their objections afford me to clarify aspects of my argument. There is not a great deal of overlap in the three critiques, so I shall respond to each in turn. Aldridge develops what he takes to be ‘a specifically educational objection to the contractarian position Hand advances’. His claim is not that my contractarian justification for basic moral standards fails, but rather that it will be unpersuasive to students in the context of classroom moral inquiry. It will be unpersuasive because it relies on the unwillingness of sympathetic inquirers to raise certain kinds of objection, but objections of exactly these kinds are routinely raised by intellectually adventurous students. He writes: