In Defense of Israel Scheffler's Conception of Moral Education

Israel Scheffler views moral education as having two major objectives: inculcating minimum standards of decent conduct and developing rationality in moral deliberation and judgment. The latter is to be achieved by engaging students in discussions of moral issues in such a way that they come to appreciate and follow standards of rational deliberation and judgment – standards that Scheffler explicates primarily in terms of impartiality. This paper argues that the conception of rational moral deliberation and discussion underlying Scheffler's approach to moral education is inadequate, and suggests an alternative conception that gives far more prominence to the problem of interpreting the meaning of substantive moral concepts and determining how they apply to particular cases.