Abstract

Many contemporary political philosophers, such as Amy Gutmann and Bruce Ackerman, take it for granted that education to promote freedom must always be in tension with education to promote commitment to any particular form of virtue. Aristotle and Rousseau, however, claimed precisely the opposite: that mature freedom requires methods of moral education designed to mold the inclinations and beliefs of children. Despite the fact that Aristotle and Rousseau present very different conceptions of freedom, the theories of both entail that to give children the capacity for mature freedom, one must educate them for virtue, and that to give them true virtue, one must give them at least the limited or analogous freedom they are capable of as children. It would appear, then, that the tension between education for freedom and education for virtue is not as inevitable as is often presumed. ;Nevertheless, I argue, the legitimacy of directive moral education depends upon the relation of reason and desire in mature freedom. If, as Aristotle thought, the free person is the one who is capable of directing his inclinations according to a rational apprehension of his natural telos, then there is a legitimate place for directive moral education. The child undergoing such education is being led to discover and embrace the truth about himself in his beliefs and in his actions, and he is thus led to become free. On the other hand, if there is no telos to be grasped by reason, as Rousseau thought there was not, and mature freedom is the power to choose whatever one can desire consistently with willing a similar liberty for all, then the education that is required in order to attain mature freedom is itself an encroachment upon freedom, and as such, has no objective legitimacy. Moral education, on this thesis, must proceed either by way of arbitrary coercion or hidden manipulation, and is therefore an illegitimate compromise of freedom, despite Rousseau's protests to the contrary