Educating the Virtues

This book seeks to outline and defend an approach to moral education based on the promotion of moral virtues. Starting from a critical appreciation of such past philosophers as Plato, Aristotle and Kant and of more recent developments in moral philosophy, it proceeds, by way of a survey of the social scientific perspectives on moral life of such theorists as Durkheim, Freud, Piaget and Kohlberg, to a full discussion of the nature and educational implications of the idea of a moral virtue. The third section of the work critically examines certain theses about moral virtue - that virtue may be explicated largely in terms of self-control, that all genuine virtues have the character of other-regarding obligations and that the main role of practical reason is to establish the basic principles of moral life. The combined conclusions of these discussions present a challenge to prevailing concepts of moral education. The virtues have begun to reclaim a central place in moral philosophy, and the author has written a work which will interest those concerned with problems of moral education, whether they are academic specialists in universities and colleges or educationalists.