Using a theoretical framework combining the sociological concept of habitus and virtue ethics philosophy the article analyses 39 interviews with junior British Army officers and cadets to explore moral character development in the early years. Overall, with a focus on moral character, the article asks how these junior Army officers are exploring…

The resurgence of Confucian education in present-day China has received increasing academic attention over the last two decades. However, certain aspects of this trend remain poorly understood, particularly parents' involvement in their children's Confucian education. Based on a qualitative study conducted at a Confucian school, this article sheds…

At present there is a clear distinction between robots and persons. In this article I explore the possibility that this distinction may not hold in perpetuity, as some robots attain personhood. I argue that personhood is an emergent property in both the development of individuals and the evolution of life, that personhood may not require a…

'Genius, cannot be taught,' Ralph Waldo Emerson reports, reiterating Socrates's conclusion in Plato's "Meno." This article considers this claim and its significance for moral education, specifically in modern science, by focusing on Emerson's account of genius and the virtue of self-trust that perfects it. Genius, for Emerson, does not…

The centrality of learners and their learning in contemporary educational discourse and practice, seems to suggest that the self of the student should be at the heart of the educational endeavour. This is not just an educational programme, but actually an expression of a particular way of thinking about human beings and their position in the…

An adequate response to the environmental and sustainability issues we now face cannot be limited to single perspectives, disciplines, or ways of knowing, and instead requires an interdisciplinary approach. Despite the connections between the fields of citizenship-, character- and sustainability education, they have thus far run parallel to each…

This article explores the role of educators in our current environment, where truth and truthfulness must fight their corner in a world of 'alternative facts'. The article opens with a review of the effects of the 24/7 news cycle on our sense of the overall well-being of the world, then discusses the meaning of moral identity and questions whether…

One of R. S. Peters' interests was psychoanalysis. In this paper, I explore the relation between Peters' philosophy of moral education and his Freudian psychology. In section 2 of the paper, I introduce Peters' Freudian supplementation of the Piaget-Kohlberg model of moral development. To clarify the way in which Peters deals with two unresolved…

The relation between children's guilt proneness and theory of mind (???) was examined in children (? = 96) aged 7- to 11-years. Guilt proneness was assessed with a self-report scenario-based measure and ToM was examined with a battery of first-order and second-order mental-state tasks. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that second-order,…

This article proposes that Catherine Elgin and Nelson Goodman's work on exemplification is relevant for discussions within moral philosophy and moral education. Generalizing Elgin and Goodman's account of exemplification to also cover ethics, the article develops a two-factor account of moral exemplarity. According to this account, instantiation…

The aim of this article is to show that an aesthetics of exemplarity could be a useful component of projects of moral self-cultivation. Using Linda Zagzebski's exemplarism, I describe a distinctive, aesthetically-inflected mode of admiration called moral attraction whose object is the inner beauty of a person--the expression of the 'inner' virtues…

Virtue theorists commonly assert that significant moral change, such as the cultivation of a virtue or the elimination of a vice, can only occur over a prolonged period of time. Many scholars who make this claim also accept the comparison between virtues and skills. In this article I argue that if one accepts the comparison between virtues and…

A crisis we face is that moral character seems to be declining in significance in everyday life and is not particularly relevant in evaluations of current political leaders. A case for character, however, can be mounted through the study of moral exemplars; in demonstrating that character is a viable construct and not an artifact of situational…

This exploratory study assessed links among children's moral concern and their ideas about the rights and protection of companion, farm, wild animals and ecosystems. Sixty-one children responded to three interview questions that were coded as either anthropocentric or biocentric in orientation. Results revealed unique links among children's moral…

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the "Journal of Moral Education" ("JME") in 2021, this study explores moral education research trends and changes as reflected in "JME" from 1971 to 2021, with special attention to significant changes in the last decade, a period of rapid digitalization and increasingly…