The Moral Contract, Sympathy and Becoming Human: A Response to Michael Hand’s A Theory of Moral Education

David Aldridge

doi:10.1111/1467-9752.12394

Abstract

Michael Hand argues that at least some moral standards can be robustly justified and that because of this educators can legitimately cultivate subscription to those standards and teach with the intention of bringing about belief in their justification (that is to say, teach ‘directively’). The first claim depends on Hand's presentation and defence of a version of moral contractarianism in Chapter Five of A Theory of Moral Education (2018). Given that the well-trodden objections to moral contract theory have taken up so many pages of philosophical argument, I confess to finding it somewhat surprising that in only a few short pages Hand feels that he has demonstrated that the contractarian argument is ‘beyond serious dispute’ (p. 69). He may well have achieved this; I will leave it to philosophers better versed in the various controversies to evaluate whether Hand has adequately responded to the most well-known objections. For my part, I would like to suggest a specifically educational objection to the contractarian position Hand advances. I propose to consider what the endeavour of educating into the moral contract would entail, and argue that Hand's position loses persuasive force precisely where one might imagine it most ‘counts’ educationally. I will then briefly elaborate an alternative approach to morality in an education centrally concerned not with the ‘transmission of knowledge’ but with becoming human.

Highlights

Hand is careful to circumscribe the scope of his endeavour
C 2019 The Author Journal of Philosophy of Education published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
The Moral Contract, Sympathy and Becoming Human 637 that a standard is robustly justified will strengthen one’s resolve. Hand urges this connection, he argues that there is a logical separability between educating for belief that a standard is justified and cultivating the syndrome of dispositions that constitutes subscription to that standard. While they are likely to be intermingled in educational practice, the methods involved are different: directive moral enquiry exclusively involves appeals to reason, and invites students into an epistemological space of reasons where they are required to suspend or set aside their strong intuitions towards subscription to particular standards—to accept maybe that they might have subscribed to others, and to consider whether their strength of feeling in support of a particular standard can be justified

Summary

Introduction

Hand is careful to circumscribe the scope of his endeavour. He offers a distinction between two types of moral education: a cognitive endeavour (concerned with bringing about beliefs through rational enquiry) and moral formation (in which a ‘syndrome’ of affective, conative and behavioural elements is cultivated through activities that do not primarily operate on reason, such as prescribing, rewarding, punishing and modelling). While many versions of the argument concentrate on the limits of sympathy, arguing that self-interested considerations justify the moral contract, Hand frequently seems to want to make more of the (albeit contingent) natural fact of our sympathy.

Results

Conclusion