Document Type
Dissertation
Publication Date
1975
Abstract
The dissertation investigates the possibility of a naturalist approach to moral education. The two initial chapters deal with questions of freedom and moral relativity, respectively. In regard to moral relativity, it is argued that the facts of cultural diversity fail to support a thesis of cultural relativity. The final two chapters focus on anti-naturalist attempts to discredit naturalism, and on the relation of naturalism to moral education. It is argued that anti-naturalists have failed to offer an adequate account of ethical and moral life, or of the critical demands laid upon the agent in making moral decisions. The naturalist rejoinder argues four points: (1) that there is no basis for a logical distinction between description and evaluation, (2) that contingent features fecundate the meaning of evaluative and moral judgments, (3) that morality has a content to be identified in the benefit or goodness perceived in holding a given moral point of view, and (4) that judgments of moral principle, like all judgments, are grounded in the agent’s perception of relations, bearings and consequences in confronting concrete problem situations. In the concluding chapter, a naturalist moral theory is related to moral education. Morality is envisaged as arising out of the experience of the child, manifested in the strategies employed in attacking moral problems, and in the child's perception of the benefit or goodness attendant on choice and action. The dissemination of moral principles in the classroom is therefore held to be unwarranted. Finally, democracy, defined as a community of shared common interests, is detected as the principal institutional background for moral education.
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Guin, Philip C., "A Defense of Naturalism in Moral Education" (1975). Collected Papers of Philip C. Guin. 21.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/pguin/21
Comments
This dissertation was submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education in April, 1975. Robert R. Wellman chaired the dissertation committee, which also included Philip Eddy and Seymour W. Itzkoff.