Ethical Reasoning and the Craft of Moral Practice

Abstract

Non-indoctrinational moral education involves teaching children to engage in ethical inquiry. This means that, since ethical inquiry has the status of a craft, the students will be apprentices in that craft. The classroom becomes, for this purpose, a community of ethical inquiry — an ethical atelier where students learn the tools, methods, practices and procedures which craftsmen associated with that tradition customarily utilize. It is only when one is adept at the generic procedures of reasoning that one can be adept at specifically moral reasoning, but to make the transition possible, the generic procedures should be taught within the humanistic and critical context of philosophy, and within the setting of a community of ethical inquiry.