Artificial intelligence technologies have become a ubiquitous part of human life. This prompts us to ask, ‘how should we live well with artificial intelligence?’ Currently, the most prominent candidate answers to this question are principlist. According to these approaches, if you teach people some finite set of principles or convince them to adopt the right rules, people will be able to live and act well with artificial intelligence, even in an evolving and opaque moral world. We find the dominant principlist approaches to be ill-suited to providing forward-looking moral guidance regarding living well with artificial intelligence. We analyze some of the proposed principles to show that they oscillate between being too vague and too specific. We also argue that such rules are unlikely to be flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. By contrast, we argue for an Aristotelian virtue ethics approach to artificial intelligence ethics. Aristotelian virtue ethics provides a concrete and actionable guidance that is also flexible; thus, it is uniquely well placed to deal with the forward-looking and rapidly changing landscape of life with artificial intelligence. However, virtue ethics is agent-based rather than action-based. Using virtue ethics as a basis for living well with artificial intelligence requires ensuring that at least some virtuous agents also possess the relevant scientific and technical expertise. Since virtue ethics does not prescribe a set of rules, it requires exemplars who can serve as a model for those learning to be virtuous. Cultivating virtue is challenging, especially in the absence of moral sages. Despite this difficulty, we think the best option is to attempt what virtue ethics requires, even though no system of training can guarantee the production of virtuous agents. We end with two alternative visions – one from each of the two authors – about the practicality of such an approach.

This article investigates the theoretical link between two approaches to civic character education: Service Learning and the Just Community, given that the two share a strong democratic ethical component. Based on historical research and bibliographical review, we show that John Dewey’s pragmatism forms a theoretical foundation of both approaches. Our revision combines the search for a normative foundation of democratic life with the need for contextual agreements: universal principles of justice with conversation and action in specific situations, moral autonomy with social commitment in real circumstances. By merging the two educational approaches to civic character education, we conclude that social and democratic progress does not mean renouncing ethical principles, but drawing them in a different way: revisably, creatively, dialectically, practically, and intersubjectively.

Empirical educational research nearly universally tacitly assumes that people attend college only in order to improve their likely earnings. Thus, it ignores the immense cultural importance ascribed to education (and particularly higher education) in modern culture, or at least proceeds as if this cultural valorization is irrelevant to individuals’ educational decision-making. I first review how an economistic model of action informs all dominant theories of educational decision-making, and then suggest how institutional theory can provide a richer account of the college transition. Drawing on in-depth interviews with first-time, first-year community college students, I illustrate this approach through a ‘thick description’ of individuals’ emerging educational orientations. I find that attending college reflects both instrumental goals and moralized conceptions of educational attainment. The decision to attend community college was informed by conceptions of college costs, a limited understanding of grant aid, and loan aversion. And I identify three educational dispositions among entering community college students which map onto institutionalized organizational pathways through the community college itself.

There are two ways, broadly speaking, that one might conceive of meritocratic education. On a standard, ‘narrow’ conception, a meritocratic approach to education is one which distributes certain educational goods and opportunities according to merit. On a second, ‘broader’ conception, however, meritocratic education is an educational system suited to a commitment to meritocracy – where ‘meritocracy’ refers to a particular conception of distributive justice. In this article, I argue that these two conceptions are incompatible with each other, and so the standard ‘narrow’ conception of meritocratic education is, in fact, incompatible with a commitment to meritocracy, at least given the typical way of understanding meritocracy. Of particular importance is that while meritocracy, as a view of distributive justice, requires a commitment to equality of opportunity principles, the narrowly meritocratic conception of education does not. The reason has to do with differences in the underlying justifications of the merit-based principles in each: Meritocracy appeals to moral desert, while the educational desert that is grounded by one’s merits is best thought of as a kind of institutional desert. Thus, I will argue, while meritocracy (and so the broad conception of meritocratic education) is constrained by a fair equality of opportunity requirement, narrowly meritocratic education is not. Recognizing the relationships between meritocracy, meritocratic education, and equality of opportunity, I argue, sheds considerable light on disagreements in the debate over equality of opportunity in education.

The most important and general aim of the education system is to edify students, epistemically speaking. However, it is a sad reality that the education system is sometimes a corruptive epistemic environment in which a variety of epistemic injustices occur. In this article, I first argue that the special character of educational institutions means that children sometimes suffer testimonial, participant, and hermeneutical betrayals as specifically educational variants of epistemic injustices. Next, I ask what our response should be to such epistemic injustices. I draw a distinction between an ‘ideal’ and a ‘non-ideal’ solution to these problems. I hold that consideration of (a) environmental bad luck and (b) children’s lack of control over their epistemic environments should lead us to favor a non-ideal solution to the problem of epistemic injustice in education. I propose that the non-ideal approach to epistemic injustice in education should focus not on the reduction or neutralization of our implicit prejudices, as has commonly been proposed in the literature, but on providing for the epistemic needs of those who suffer epistemic injustices in corruptive environments in two ways. First, we should aim to care for children who are afflicted by injustice by having their epistemic needs legitimately recognized by caring educators. Second, we should aim systemically to offer an educational curriculum for any child and teacher to develop critical imagination to care about the epistemic needs of those who are vulnerable to epistemic injustices. I conclude by explaining the acts of epistemic caring and critical imagining as parts of restorative epistemic justice that affords vulnerable children due recognition of their epistemic needs beyond merely knowing the mechanisms of implicit prejudices and the epistemic injustices associated with them.

This article argues for the need of a new, pragmatic response to claims of indoctrination in public school classrooms across the United States. While attempts at defining indoctrination and moral arguments for and against certain pedagogical practices may be worthwhile, the article maintains that claims of indoctrination, whether substantive or not, are an impediment to effective teaching, especially for educators who are primarily interested in perspective transformation. Drawing on recent scholarship regarding epiphany and transformative education, an argument is presented that teaching for epiphanic experience may be a pragmatic solution for teachers to adopt to remain effective in the classroom amid ever-increasing political polarization and professional scrutiny. After establishing this point, the article turns to arts education as a possible source for understanding the pedagogical technique that may lead to the creation of a classroom ethos for epiphany.

In this article, I argue that parental privacy has often been given too much weight in theorising about justice at schools. Susan Okin famously stated that as the family serves as the children’s ‘first school of justice’,1 it should also be internally just. However, she agreed with John Rawls on that interfering directly within the family life, even in the name of equality and justice, would risk causing injustice to those who do not share these liberal ideals. I ask in what sense this principle of non-intrusion into the private should be extended over the school institution. If the principles of public justice and private morality came into conflict in school education, which set of principles should be given priority? I pose Rawls’ suggestion concerning children’s schooling against his depiction of the family and claim that these two are normatively at odds with each other. Of the two, the latter seems paradoxically to allow for more extensive public regulation and therefore his view of the school must be modified accordingly. Moreover, I revisit one of Okin’s main arguments that countering injustices requires active and explicated countermeasures where education plays a key role. Therefore, it is justified to prioritise principles of public morality, and teach related substantial values at schools, given that they accord with the demands of justice. Parental privacy applies to schools only in a limited sense.

This article investigates whether there is any place for the school of thought that is known as analytic philosophy of education in the aftermath of postmodernism, and whether analytic philosophy of education can be treated as a ‘method’, among other alternative ‘methods’, that can be applied regardless of what kind of ‘-ism’ or ideology one embraces. An additional aim is to suggest some important questions for analytic philosophy of education to take into consideration. We argue that conceptual engineering may be a promising avenue for analytic educational theory if it is used with a critical intent that is more heuristic and inconclusive than prescriptively ideal.