ABSTRACTThe prospect of enhancing ourselves through the use of new biotechnologies is for the most part, hypothetical. Nevertheless, the question of whether we should undertake such enhancement is worthy of discussion as it may become possible in the future. In this article, we consider one form of argument that conservative opponents of biotechnological means of enhancement deploy in opposition to the use of enhancement technologies—the backfiring objection. This is the objection that the use of such technologies is liable to go (...) wrong and lead to outcomes that are inferior to the outcomes intended. We will argue that the objection is not nearly as significant as bioconservatives suppose it to be. Bioconservatives sometimes supplement the backfiring objection by arguing that change will be irreversible, that the new is especially liable to backfire and that humans possess severe and permanent limitations which cannot be overcome. We consider these ways of supplementing the backfiring objection and argue that each of them, when properly understood, is of limited value to the bioconservative. We also consider how traditional approaches to moral education can be supplemented by bioenhancement. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe study examined the links among maternal warmth and adolescents’ empathic concern, moral conviction and prosocial behaviors. Participants were 311 adolescents from a low-income community. The results demonstrated that maternal warmth was positively associated with adolescents’ empathic concern and moral conviction. Empathic concern was positively associated with three common forms of prosocial behaviors, and moral conviction was positively associated with four types of prosocial behaviors. Empathic concern and moral conviction also interacted to predict selfishly and selflessly motivated prosocial behaviors. Discussion (...) will focus on the role of maternal warmth in fostering sociomoral tendencies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe development of children’s lie-telling abilities is considered to be a social and cognitive milestone. While occasional lying is developmentally appropriate, the use of frequent, antisocial lies as a maladaptive problem-solving mechanism can indicate behaviour problems. Since lying is often considered a moral transgression, researchers should examine lying from the perspective of moral theory to understand children’s reasons for lying, which may help to understand how chronic lying develops. A theoretical framework, namely the social cognitive process of moral disengagement could (...) not only provide new insight into children’s justifications for telling common lies, but also atypical, antisocial lies. This paper aims to describe how MD may be applied to explain children’s justifications for lying, especially antisocial lies, and how adults can address MD by modelling the positive consequences of truth-telling, to promote honesty in children. (shrink)

ABSTRACTElevation is the emotion elicited by witnessing acts of moral beauty and may be framed as the opposite of disgust. Two studies investigated the role of elevation in moral judgment and its relation to disgust. In Study 1 it was investigated whether elevation can attenuate the effects of disgust on moral transgression judgments. Participants were either induced to experience disgust, or to experience disgust and elevation simultaneously. No effects of either emotion on moral transgression judgments were found. In Study 2 (...) the nature of causal connectedness between elevation and moral virtue judgments was investigated by testing whether elevation amplifies moral virtue judgments. It was found that participants judged morally good acts as being more morally good when being elevated, suggesting that there is a bidirectional causal link between elevation and judgments of moral virtue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines relationships between children and youths’ judgments and their justifications of truth telling and verbal deception, in situational and cultural contexts. Han Chinese, Euro-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians, seven- to 17-years of age were presented competitive scenarios in which protagonists told either lies to protect, or truths to harm, various levels of collectivity. Participants evaluated protagonists’ statements, using a 7-point scale, and justified their judgments. Cultural variations in moral evaluations emerged among the three groups of participants. Older Chinese participants reflected (...) significant collective cultural values in their judgements; by contrast, Euro-Canadians identified more individualistically; and Chinese-Canadians demonstrated notable variability between these perspectives in their judgments. The article enhances understanding of situational and cultural sources in the development of moral reasoning within a sociocultural framework. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research on children’s moral reasoning usually used a quantitative approach and a pre-determined set of methods in order to establish early moral landmarks. We proposed a qualitative perspective on the basis of which we have formulated three main objectives: 1) to identify the main categories of behaviors that children spontaneously associate with the notion of morality, in line with Turiel’s Domain Theory; 2) to investigate children’s conceptions of moral and social-conventional rules and 3) to assess the gender differences in (...) the use of care and justice reasoning, in line with Gilligan’s assertion that females are care-oriented and that males consistently use the justice orientation and infrequently use the care orientation. Ninety-two children were required to describe morality in behavioral terms without being guided by specific indications from the researchers. Our results reflected a tendency towards morality perceived through behaviors directed towards others, namely through altruism, and also the domination of moral norms as compared to social ones, partially confirming Gilligan’s theory concerning gender specificities regarding moral reasoning in the questions of care and justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent critics have suggested that character education is overly individualised and, as a result, fails to engage adequately with the political. In this paper, I offer an account of character education which takes issue with such criticisms, and seeks to make clear connections between the moral and the political necessary for character formation and expression. Drawing on an Aristotelian understanding of the political, I argue that individuals are intimately connected with their social associations, which in contemporary plural, westernised democracies include (...) the sort of engagement with the political advocated by critics of character education. Through a focus on civic virtue and deliberative engagement, it is argued that an Aristotelian-inspired account of character addresses the precise concerns, including recognising and challenging social injustices and deliberative engagement with difference, which critics suggest are lacking from character education. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt has become commonplace within the educational research community to invoke the transformative power of education. The call to adopt a ‘transformative’ approach to teaching and learning can be heard in fields as different as adult education and school leadership and as estranged as social justice education and educational psychology. While there is undoubtedly great promise in the idea of transformative education, the fact that it involves deep psychological restructuring on the part of the student requires ethical justification. In this (...) article, I analyze the three most pressing ethical problems that arise within a transformative educational environment: the problems of transformative consent, controversial direction and transformative trauma. In the concluding section, I argue that this ethical analysis urges us to adopt an approach to transformative education as a process of initiation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study explored whether three-dimensional wisdom and psychosocial growth, defined as increases in psychological well-being, spirituality, and death acceptance, can be learned in university courses. Specifically, the study examined whether courses that tried to engage the whole person rather than only the intellect and/or courses that included a service learning component fostered greater wisdom and psychosocial growth than regular sociology or religion courses. Results of repeated measure MANOVAs showed that, on average, the 165 students who were enrolled in 12 growth (...) classes significantly increased in wisdom, PWB, spirituality, and death acceptance between the beginning and the end of the semester, whereas the 153 students who attended eight control classes significantly decreased in wisdom and did not change significantly in PWB, spirituality, and death acceptance. It appears that it is indeed possible to learn wisdom and psychosocial growth in university courses. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUniversity settings present a unique opportunity for young adults to develop characteristics constitutive of wisdom. One challenge for educators working to support this development involves effectively measuring these characteristics. In this article, we present results from a secondary analysis of cognitive interviews to examine challenges that may arise when young adult undergraduate students respond to self-report measures of Meaning, Identification with all Humanity and Dedication to Lifelong Service—three characteristics of personality-focused accounts of wisdom. Although the items had well-fitting exploratory and (...) confirmatory latent variable models, between 12.5% and 87.5% of students provided unintended interpretations for each item. This mismatch between students’ interpretations and the intended interpretations can threaten item validity and obfuscate findings from applications such as pre-post assessments. Further research is needed to better understand the factors affecting young adults’ responses to measures of wisdom-relevant characteristics. (shrink)

In Aristotelian virtue theories, phronesis is foundational to being good, but to date accounts of how this particularly important virtue can emerge are sketchy. This article plumbs recent thinking in Aristotelian virtue ethics and developmental theorizing to explore how far its emergence can be understood developmentally, i.e., in terms of the growth in ordinary conditions of underlying psychological capacities, dispositions, and the like. The purpose is not to explicate Aristotle, nor to assimilate Aristotelian ideas to cognitive developmental moral theorizing, but (...) to draw on both to build an independently plausible theory of practical intelligence and its development. It is argued that one fruitful direction attends to the psychology of virtues Aristotle associates with practical intelligence, including comprehension, understanding, sense, and cleverness, instead of Aristotle’s remarks distinguishing fully virtuous persons from the continent, incontinent and the many. (shrink)

ABSTRACTInterest in the topic of wisdom-focused education has so far not resulted in empirically validated programs for teaching wisdom. To start filling this void, we explore the emerging empirical evidence concerning the fundamental elements required for understanding how one can foster wisdom, with a particular focus on wise reasoning. We define wise reasoning through a combination of intellectual humility, recognition of world in flux/change, open-mindedness to diverse viewpoints, and search for compromise/integration of diverse perspectives. In this article, we review evidence (...) concerning how wise reasoning can be facilitated through experiences, teaching materials, environments and cognitive strategies. We also focus on educators, reviewing emerging evidence on how the process of explaining and guiding others impacts one’s wisdom. We conclude by discussing the development of wisdom-focused education, proposing that greater attention to the situational demands and the variability in wisdom-related characteristics across social contexts should play a critical role in its development. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe highest form of virtuous behavior in the Aristotelian virtue ethics approach to character education involves practical wisdom, or phronesis, which allows an individual to act in the right way about the right things for the right reasons. Here, we use our experiences with social-emotional and character development in low-resourced urban middle schools to put forth a Spiral Model of Phronesis Development. We aim to contextualize phronesis development to reflect the realities of students of color attending low-resourced urban schools and (...) provide a theoretical framework for cultivating phronesis and developing curricula in this setting. We include a description of how we have applied this theory to an SECD curriculum currently being taught in urban middle schools. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay introduces the present special issue on wisdom and moral education, which draws on a conference held in Oxford in 2017. Some of the seven contributions make use of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, while others focus more on the wisdom concept as it has developed in contemporary psychology. One straddles the distinction between the two. All the contributions, however, address in different ways practical questions about how wisdom can be evaluated and how it relates to (...) issues of moral development and education. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFull virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWisdom, long a topic of interest to moral philosophers, is increasingly the focus of social science research. Philosophers have historically been concerned to develop a rationally defensible account of the nature of wisdom and its role in the moral life, often inspired in various ways by virtue theoretical accounts of practical wisdom. Wisdom scientists seek to, among other things, define wisdom and its components so that we can measure them. Are the measures used by wisdom scientists actually measuring what philosophers (...) have in mind when they discuss practical wisdom? I argue that they are not. Contemporary measures of wisdom and its components may pick out some necessary prerequisites of practical wisdom, but they do not measure a philosophically plausible practical wisdom or its components. After explaining the argument and defending it against objections, I consider its implications. Should wisdom scientists ignore the philosophical conception of practical wisdom in favor of other conceptions, revise their methods to try to measure it, or continue the interdisciplinary study of practical wisdom without expecting to measure it? I make a preliminary argument for the third option. (shrink)