Why are some people ethical and others unethical? How do people become ethical or unethical? Do people sometimes act in ethical ways and at other times act in quite unethical ways? How can that happen? Are there situations and times when people tend to act in ethical ways and other times when they tend to act unethically? How can we get people to be more ethical and more consistently ethical? How can we get ourselves to be better people and act more ethically more of the time? These are the questions I address in this book. Philosophers refer to these questions and related ones as the problem of “moral agency.” This book is about moral agency. I look at the problem of moral agency—how we become moral (and immoral) and why we act morally and immorally—from many different perspectives. I circle around it, exploring different ways of thinking and rethinking what our experience of being ethical is all about—especially where our ethical capacity comes from, how it develops, and finally how to strengthen it and put it to best use.
One fairly popular idea among some scientists and philosophers looking to discover where our moral sense comes from is to search for an ethical module in the human brain. These brain scientists set out to discover and locate a special innate ethical capacity in the brain. They conjecture that some of us inherit a more effective ethical brain than others—that is, some of us are born with a strong moral brain capacity and others with a weak one. Other scientists and philosophers conjecture that perhaps some of us use and develop our ethical capacity better than others. These folks ask what certain people do to become better at being ethical than others. So some scientists and philosophers regard the variation as primarily between individuals because of an innate difference, while others chalk up the difference to how people are brought up. Still others raise the question of the effects upon moral agency of present context and situation, proposing that our moral capacity may be more about context and group behavior than about individuals.
The most common assumptions in the United States and the West more generally about the human moral capacity differ from the innate moral module view (nature) and also from the individual or social training view (nurture) just outlined. The view most prevalent among people all around us (and also nearly universally held by philosophers till very recently) is that we have free will. The free will view goes like this: we might have a brain that has certain biological tendencies toward good or bad, and we might have a biography replete with all kinds of terrible moral models and have suffered painful and harsh conditions and even abuse, and we might be in fairly coercive political and social situations and institutions, yet we all know what doing the right thing is, and we can and ought to do the right thing no matter what. We can rise above both our nature and our nurture and even our situation to be good people and choose to act ethically. This capacity to choose our actions—to rise above our genetic inheritance whatever it might be, above our upbringing no matter how terrible it was, and above our present situation despite its social pressures—is what we mean by “free will.” On this account, we are all capable of being good, and we are all equally capable of it because we are all human. Being human means that we can freely choose the good over the bad no matter what hand nature or nurture has dealt us. The choice is completely our own. Our actions have no other origin, no other ultimate causes, than ourselves as free agents. Even if we are somewhat shaped by our hardships, by our luck, or even by our brains, nevertheless we still have a sacrosanct core of free will that we can use to rise above all of that and be moral beings. We do moral acts for moral reasons, for no other reasons, and out of no other fully determining causes—such as brain modules, group pressures, or upbringing. And that is why we can be and ought to be held morally responsible for what we do and for what we fail to do. This free will story, about how and why we are moral and also at times fail to be moral, is everywhere around us. It probably seems and feels absolutely obvious and obviously true as you read my account of it here. But the evidence from the new brain sciences is amassing that the free will account of the nature and origin of our ethical capacity, of our moral agency, is in fact false, or at least highly unlikely; at best it may work that way in some rare individuals, who are probably philosophers.
In this book I argue that it is not obvious that human beings have free will, as we like to believe, in the way that it is obvious we have hands and feet and noses; instead, free will is a cultural assumption. And it is an assumption that turns out to be false. I make the case that, rather than serving as a description of human beings in general, free will is a particularly American and Western way of conceiving human nature. Even though it feels natural to us, the belief in free will is actually conventional and provincial. While we generally believe that this way of thinking about our moral nature is universally human, an account of human nature—everyone knows that we have “free will,” that all human beings experience this inner freedom and lay their claim to moral virtue or sin and to the right to praise or blame upon the basis of that freedom—it turns out that most other cultures have no notion of free will. They base their understandings of human moral nature on different cultural assumptions. They conceive both human nature and the human place in the universe quite differently from the way we do. The belief in free will is actually part of a larger story, a story we take for granted or have even forgotten. Other cultures have different stories. We are as culturally provincial as they are, for ours is just one way among many of thinking about the human moral capacity and human nature generally. One of the aims of this book is to expose the free will account of moral agency as a mere cultural assumption and inheritance. I argue that when we interpret our moral agency in terms of having freedom of the will, we are not discovering in our inner experience of ourselves something all human beings share, but instead are discovering cultural assumptions that deeply and implicitly shape the ways we envision our place in the universe. The notion of free will is based on a theological story whose religious origin and meaning we often tend to be unaware of and which some of us even explicitly reject. Nonetheless, the standard Western theological vision of the human place in the universe still has an implicit and quite pervasive hold over us. The belief in free will, I recount at considerable length in Chapter Four, has a unique history that more or less began at one time—in early Latin Christianity—and was widely disseminated through authoritative thinkers who worked to make it sacrosanct and to delegitimize and even outlaw other points of view advocated by other individuals and groups. The presupposition of free will has been embodied in our institutions, practices, and laws and transmitted for hundreds of years by systems of education. These practices and institutions, with their implicit notion of human moral agency, still govern our lives to a great extent in the West and especially in the United States. And that is why they feel natural and universal when they are really, instead, the products of a particular cultural point of view and hence peculiar to ourselves.
Once we have uncovered our own standard and ubiquitous cultural presuppositions about our moral capacity, we can begin to discover where they come from. We can also question their validity by looking at the new brain sciences to see if they are borne out. And we can turn to explore other ideas from other cultures to open our minds to different ways of thinking about why people act ethically and why they don’t, and why and when they think they can hold both themselves and others morally responsible. Can we learn anything from other cultures? How can we revise our own cultural conception of moral agency to reflect new and better understandings of how the brain works? Our first aim here, in this chapter, is to expose our deep presuppositions about how and why we come to act ethically and unethically. Then in the next chapter we shall turn to test cases, those of perpetrators and rescuers in the Nazi Holocaust, to determine whether the standard assumptions we hold about free will moral agency can explain either the evil of the perpetrators, the virtue of the rescuers, or the passivity of the bystanders.
In order to tease out our standard beliefs about moral agency, I begin, in this first chapter, with an investigation of moral education in America from colonial times to the present. I chose this starting point for my research on moral agency because I thought that how we as a society teach our children to be moral will expose our basic assumptions about our moral capacity, how we generally believe we can get our kids to become good people. Here we have our own cultural answer to Socrates’s famous question in the Meno: can virtue be taught? Americans have always believed that virtue can be taught, and taught in school as well as in church and at home in the family. I discovered that from our early beginnings to today, the ubiquitous assumption is that our moral capacity rests on free will, albeit a free will that needs some training in the classroom and in the home. I began with the present. The widespread introduction of (moral) character education into public schools since the 1980s makes it the predominant contemporary form in which children are instructed in ethics in the United States. I met with several of the leading proponents of the movement; I read lots of the books and articles pertaining to this movement; and, with the help of professional advice, I selected several elementary, middle, and high schools to go to so that I could observe their programs in character education. What I discovered was fascinating.
I set out on my journey to meet with prominent thinkers in the character education movement and also to observe teachers and schools nationally known for their successful implementation of moral character education programs. I went first to visit Fillmore Elementary School in an outlying suburb of a medium-size American city, which I’ll call here Park Center.1 Park Center is 97 percent white and its population is by and large neither affluent nor poor. It covers a large geographical area of parts of three counties and includes rural areas, semiurban village centers, and a growing summer resort area. Fillmore Elementary School is an award winner, a National School of Character, one of ten across the nation so designated each year by the Character Education Partnership (CEP) in Washington, D.C. The Character Education Partnership defines itself as “a national advocate and leader for the character education movement.” On its website it says that it is “an umbrella organization for character education, serving as the leading resource for people and organizations that are integrating character education into their schools and communities.” Each year since 1998 the CEP has given out awards to schools and districts. When it refers to “character,” the meaning is moral character, for the website defines its mission as “developing young people of good character who become responsible and caring citizens.” Here we have an encounter with the teaching of ethics that’s not about teaching philosophy in the college classroom or even in special ethics classes for budding professionals in business, law, and medical schools. This is where ethics is being formulated and transmitted in ways that affect all of us because this is the moral education that is being introduced to our kids in schools. In addition to the family and the church or synagogue, mosque, or temple, here we are on the front lines of ethical training. This is no arcane theoretical enterprise of professors teaching Plato and Wittgenstein but a major site of the moral education of our children.
So my attention is rapt and I am soaking up the dedication of Fillmore Elementary to teaching character across the curriculum. I have just been talking with Mrs. Finch, the current principal, who developed the character education program more than a decade ago, initially without national or professional guidance or connections, she tells me. Character education is at the center of the school’s mission and is not a separate curriculum but integrated into all the activities and programs, including gym. The designation National School of Character is just below the name of the school on the outside of the building over the front door. Mrs. Finch takes me to the main entrance of the school, where she shows me a large colorful ceramic mural that all the kids and teachers contributed to a couple of years ago. Its purpose is to convey the mission that is written in ceramic letters at the top, “Building Character.” Embedded in the mural are the names of the values that the school stands for. Each month one of these values becomes the focus of teaching and activities throughout the school. All the monthly values also contribute to the overall moral theme of the year, which this year is “respect.” Mrs. Finch points to each value word embedded in the mural and also to a small white ceramic building in the center of the mural that looks like a columned Greek temple. “These columns represent the values that are the pillars of our community,” she says. “The values that we honor and teach in our school are fairness, respect, responsibility, perseverance, honesty, helpfulness, patience, good manners,” and the like. “Each month we choose a moral value as the special one and all month we learn and think about that value. We plan activities around it, read stories about it, and practice it in our daily work and school life. Children who excel at it are given special public recognition, too.”2 The whole month is dedicated to transmitting that particular value, she tells me, and each month begins with an assembly where the value is introduced and a skit illustrating it presented. The school librarian’s job is to find a storybook that expresses the character trait of the month, and she reads that story to every class in the course of the month. Another short story illustrating the month’s value is photocopied and sent home with the kids to be read together with their parents. There are questions at the bottom of the sheet that the parents and children are asked to discuss together and then answer. Some examples of these questionnaires hang on a wall outside a second-grade classroom. During the month the children who best exemplify or articulate the value are given public recognition and awards, both in writing and over the loudspeaker. The award certificates are taken home to show parents.
As I walk down the school corridors I see walls covered in three-by-five cards with children’s names on them and graphs. The character traits they have received awards for are written at the top, while below that, on the graphs, are colored stars marking their progress in reading and arithmetic. Some few children are chosen for an even greater recognition of their work on the monthly character trait, and these kids are given leadership roles in handing out awards during that month or the next. Teachers are also given awards by Mrs. Finch for exemplary service. Mrs. Finch has me walk with her and Joel, the current character award winner in the second grade, as we go from classroom to classroom handing out award certificates to students and teachers alike. A number of teachers are receiving awards for coming in on a Saturday to plant flower beds. Children’s awards are to be taken home to show parents, but a teacher’s awards are fastened to the door of her classroom. Also, on the door are signed pledges by the teachers, the children, and the children’s parents to abide by a set of school moral principles. It’s called the Fillmore Elementary School Pledge and it is as follows:
To Be Careful and Happy: I pledge not to hurt others inside or out.
To Learn: I pledge to always do my best and help others do their best.
To Be a Good Citizen: I pledge to respect myself, other people, and my school.3
In a few glass cases I see handwritten statements by parents, along with a picture of their child. At the beginning of the school year, the parents were asked to write a paragraph about which moral value or values they think their child particularly exemplifies. One mother writes about her son Phil, who is helpful with his younger brother. Another tells how her daughter perseveres in her homework even when it’s hard. And a third tells about her little boy’s good manners at home. As we walk down a corridor looking at the school pledge cards, the award certificates, and the special glass cabinet displaying the parents’ paragraphs praising their children’s virtues, we see an athletic-looking woman in her thirties with a pageboy hairdo walking toward us. Mrs. Finch introduces me to Sally Laury, a mother of both a second grader and a kindergartner, who volunteers in the school on a part-time basis. Mrs. Laury tells me how much she loves what the school does for her kids. She says that kids this age need to be told clearly the difference between right and wrong, and the moral lessons they learn in the school help with parenting at home. She can follow up on those lessons and use some of the same techniques at home. I ask Mrs. Laury what happens if a child disobeys or in some other way violates a character trait. How is that dealt with in the school? She tells me that the child is taken aside and asked, “What did you do? What character trait did you disobey? How did your action violate that moral value? How are you going to act the next time to uphold that value?” And then an appropriate punishment is meted out and recompense decided upon. That year’s overarching virtue, respect, and the additional monthly virtues provide a ready-made, clear framework for discipline both at school and at home. They set up clear, non-negotiable rules and unswayable lines of authority, Mrs. Laury tells me.
Mrs. Laury mentions that there is an after-school Character Club for kids that her daughter, Emily, goes to. I ask her if the club is involved in service projects in the community. She tells me that they do a little of that at Christmas, making decorations to sell and giving the proceeds to the needy. “We all love the moral character songs that the teachers and parents on the PTA Character Education Steering Committee make up,” she tells me. They are set to the tunes of songs everyone knows, such as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” and they list all the character traits for the year. “The whole school sings them at the assemblies, and the kids in the Character Club sing them each day in the after-school program.” The school song is sung to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and has the following lyrics:4
Kindness, sharing, and respect,
Following safety rules,
We’re proud to show how much we care
All around our school.
We give our best at Fillmore School
Every single day,
Working hard and learning well
To play and obey.
Each month one clear moral message is being communicated to kids in a variety of contexts and settings and through a variety of media and activities. Throughout the school the message at any given time is the same. And the overarching moral character message that each monthly value fits into is everywhere—it’s on the mural, in songs, on the walls, in pledge sheets. The school’s complete devotion to teaching morals is evident everywhere, and the almost complete absence of any display on the corridor walls of academic work unrelated to a moral message tells all.
Mrs. Finch now walks me down to a kindergarten classroom to meet and observe the school’s most highly regarded teacher and moral character educator, Mrs. Danvers. Mrs. Danvers is perhaps in her late fifties and is clearly an experienced teacher. She perches in a large, comfortable armchair above the eighteen or so kindergartners sitting in a wide circle at her feet. Mrs. Danvers reads a book to the class about how to control anger. It begins, “If you’re angry and you know it and you really want to show it, stomp your feet.”5 The following pages offer different possible responses: if you’re angry and you know it, take a deep breath, bang on a drum, walk away, or talk to a friend. It can be sung to the tune of the children’s classic “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands,” and the singing follows the reading. The children seem to like the singing. Upon the heels of this there follows a lesson in the moral value of the month, self-control. Mrs. Danvers gets up and comes back to her chair with a wicker basket in which there are a number of spongy Nerf balls of various colors and textures. Mrs. Danvers gently tosses these yummy balls into the center of the circle of seated children. Not one child reaches out a hand to touch a ball or even leans forward. They sit like statues glued to their spots. They have clearly been through this before and have learned the proper moral lesson, self-control. The balls remain in the center of the circle, untouched, unreached for, inert, as Mrs. Danvers now turns to me to say that she is going to tell me a secret. It is a secret, she says, that the class knows but has been sworn to silence on, and at this some of the kids nod. Mrs. Danvers explains that other teachers aren’t to know this secret, nor are other children, but she and the class share this special secret: Mrs. Danvers requested from the principal, Mrs. Finch, and was granted a classroom of the kindergartners who best exemplify moral character and whose parents are most involved in character education in the school. Their special status is a secret from other children and perhaps from other teachers within the school but not from the principal or from me. As an outsider doing a study of character education, I have been brought to the exemplary classroom to observe the exemplary teacher and children.
At this point, one of the kindergartners, Danielle, raises her hand and asks Mrs. Danvers if she may collect the Nerf balls and put them away. Mrs. Danvers grants her permission and the tempting balls are gathered together and returned to the basket, never having been played with or even touched. Temptation has been successfully resisted. The children in this class have thoroughly learned their lesson. Somewhat sullenly they return to their desks; circle time has ended.
Next Mrs. Finch suggests I visit a second-grade classroom. I choose a seat at a table with some children doing an assignment in their workbooks about caterpillars. The classroom has a terrarium with two caterpillars, and the caterpillars are in the early throes of sloughing off their cocoons. Every child I talk to mentions the chrysalis; perhaps it is a word of the day. The kids love to watch the caterpillars, and when they mention them their faces light up and they all want to bring me over to look at what’s happening in the terrarium. They draw wonderful pictures of the chrysalis in their notebooks and put captions below. I try to gently introduce the topic of the moral value of the current month, self-control, and that of last month, helpfulness. “What does self-control mean?” I ask. “Can you give me an example?” Again and again I hear the same answer: “Don’t talk unless you raise your hand.” When I ask for another example, there is silence, and I feel the tension mount; the joy brought on by the caterpillars is gone.
I ask about helpfulness. “How are you helpful?” I ask. Most say they wash the dishes. I ask what else could be helpful. More silence. One boy starts to tell me a story about his brother who is not really his full brother but lives with another father and was mean to him. He tells me about this brother “getting what was coming to him.” A sad, distraught little girl comes up to me and blurts out that her mother is in jail because she stole something. The children come alive when they tell their own stories. Their anguish and confusion is palpable. They reach out to me to listen; they want to share with me something they think is important and which troubles them. They want my understanding and perhaps even my advice or intervention. They clearly yearn for my help, or someone’s help. I respond to their emotions, emotions that are immediately rehidden when I ask them what I’m there to ask. Then they feed me what they think I want to hear, mimicking a standard definition of self-control or the same tired examples of helpfulness. Their school mask is securely back in place and a wall is erected between us. The dangerous moment of self-disclosure and need has passed. Their own personal moral dilemmas and confusions are left hanging and unaddressed. Real help is not on the way, so the kids go underground again. The children in this school are here to learn the mask of obedience, the outer neutrality of self control. They look generally subdued, with momentary flashes of joy (the caterpillars) or anguish and sadness (some personal tales) revealed to a receptive stranger. Most of these kids have already learned to put on a happy face, or at least to do what Archie Bunker used to yell at Edith: to “stifle.”
I return to the school office to thank the principal, Mrs. Finch, and say good-bye. Mrs. Finch hands me a packet of materials as I leave: sample moral pledge cards, examples of how moral values can be introduced into both the standard social studies and literature curriculums. I promise to return to the school in a couple of weeks to attend a PTA meeting where parents will offer ideas and plans for next year’s after-school Character Club.
The current character education movement had its origins in the 1960s and 1970s, according to B. Edward McClellan, whose Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present remains the most complete history of moral education in the United States.6 The impetus for the recent movement for moral character education came from two quarters: those who had supported the character education movement of the early twentieth century, which had become eclipsed by midcentury, and a number of politically conservative intellectuals alarmed by what they regarded as the moral decline of youth.7 The movement had its initial headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, in the American Institute of Character Education (AICE) and was organized and funded primarily outside of mainstream educational circles but, despite that, has had a significant impact on public schools.8 By the late 1980s roughly eighteen thousand elementary classrooms in forty-four states had adopted AICE’s Character Education Curriculum. That curriculum was made available to schools in kits that included books, films, story wheels, transparencies, and teachers’ manuals to guide discussion, role-playing, and stories introducing virtues.9 According to McClellan, AICE generally avoided educational organizations and university departments of education, preferring to go directly to teachers and principals to further the adoption of its aims and materials.10 A substantial amount of the institute’s funding has come from the Lilly Endowment, which has as its mission “to support the causes of religion, education and community development.”11 Lilly defines its religious mission in two ways: first, to “deepen and enrich the religious lives of American Christians,” and second, to “support projects that strengthen the contributions which religious ideas, practices, values and institutions make to the common good of our society.”12 Moral character education began to take hold in the 1980s and 1990s when a number of public intellectuals called for the development of programs to (re)introduce into American schools the explicit defense and transmission of a set of virtues. Since the Columbine, Colorado, high school massacre in April 1999 by two alienated, disgruntled students, character education has really taken off in American schools at all levels.13 Columbine Elementary School became one of ten National Schools of Character in 2000. Character education now receives financial support from all levels of government, with most of its funding coming from the federal government.14
“Virtues-centered” moral education had been a movement and then a commonplace of American schooling early in the twentieth century but was discredited in the 1930s and remained marginalized until recent decades, when a call for its revitalization could be heard especially from conservative quarters. In the words of B. Edward McClellan, who is not only the movement’s historian but a clear sympathizer, “a newly alarmed group of elite intellectuals and educational leaders” were “appalled by the growing ‘amorality’ of the school and blamed it in part for the soaring rates of social pathology among youth in the modern era . . . alarming rates of teenage suicide, crime, drug use, and unwed pregnancies.”15 They claimed that American schools had given up teaching moral values and were especially guilty of failing to convey a notion of individual moral responsibility and insisting upon its practice.16 The most prominent of the conservative intellectuals calling for a revival of character education to combat what they regarded as the moral decline of American youth were William J. Bennett, director of the National Endowment for the Humanities early in the Reagan administration and later secretary of education; Bill Honig, superintendent of public instruction in California; and several prominent academics, some associated with conservative think tanks (among them the American Enterprise Institute): Andrew Oldenquist (professor of philosophy, now emeritus, at Ohio State University), Kevin Ryan (founding director, now emeritus, of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University), James Q. Wilson (expert on crime and public policy, UCLA and Harvard, emeritus), and Edward Wynne (a leading theorist of the character education movement and of Catholic religious education).17
The public debate about the explicit teaching of moral values in the schools was initiated within the context of an expressed alarm over general societal moral decline and especially the waywardness of youth and within a conservative ideological framework.
Today in America we have far too may twelve-year-olds pushing drugs, fourteen-year-olds having babies, sixteen-year-olds killing each other; and kids of all ages admit to lying, cheating, and stealing. We have crime and violence everywhere and unethical behavior in business, the professions, and government. In other words, we have a crisis of character all across America that is threatening to destroy the goodness that . . . is the very foundation of our greatness. . . . We need to dramatically uplift the character of the nation. [Emphasis added.]
So states Sanford N. McDonnell, chairman of the board of the Character Education Partnership and chairman emeritus of McDonnell Douglas, in the foreword to Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin’s Building Character in Schools.18 In response to a claim of a precipitous decline of morals in America, those at the forefront of the character education movement called for what McClellan describes as an “educational counterrevolution . . . to restore both educational and behavioral standards they believed had been destroyed by the disruptions of the [nineteen] sixties and seventies.”19
To get a fuller idea of the public debate in which the movement to introduce or reintroduce explicit and directive moral character education into American schools began to be heard, I need quote only a few more passages from some of the widely discussed and loudly trumpeted books by several of its main advocates. Their overriding presupposition was that American society was in a precipitous moral decline and that American youth had lost its moral compass and was out of control. The overall assessment was that things were going to hell in a handbasket and youth were the victims of a wider societal moral decline—the moral bankruptcy of families, neighborhoods, and other aspects of the social fabric. In addition, the argument went, American children were the victims of morally misguided and even pernicious recent policies of the public schools themselves. Together these two factors were thought to amount to an alarming feedback loop in which this sorry state of social decline, rather than being mitigated by the schools, was in fact being aggravated by public schools’ neglect and even abandonment of the teaching of morals. This purported failure was, in the view of these conservative intellectuals, to be chalked up in part to the dominance in education since the 1960s of liberal models of ethics that amounted to nothing short of a moral relativism in which anything goes. Another factor, they believed, was educators’ reluctance to bring religion into the classroom, which was a result of Supreme Court decisions about school prayer and other decisions that strengthened both the separation between church and state and the rights of children and minorities in schools. Finally, they argued that the decline was due to the increasing focus of education on technical and (what they regarded as morally) neutral knowledge and skills.20
William Bennett remains the most prominent advocate of the view that there is a decline in American social institutions and in the public schools and that the two declines reinforce each other. Bennett also believes that introducing moral education—both in schools and outside them—can turn the situation around. In The Book of Virtues, Bennett set out to provide children with the means to “moral literacy” through the telling of moral tales, a practice that he believes has been lost.21 He indicts not only the schools but also what he calls the decline of the American family. (He titled his 2001 book The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family.) So character education through morality tales taught both in and out of school is the hoped-for remedy to America’s social problems. The purpose of these books and many others like them is to shape children’s individual personal behavior, or character, by offering a catalogue of virtues and corresponding examples of virtuous behavior. Such tales are held to be capable of playing a major role in reversing the alleged state of social disintegration that Bennett attributes to a widespread and catastrophic failure of individual morality. In The Broken Hearth, Bennett argues that individuals across society have chosen to ignore the standard and universal knowledge of right and wrong in “a vast social experiment” to reinvent family life, in turn leading to the “collapse” of “the” American family, a collapse that can be seen everywhere, he says, in high divorce rates, children born outside of marriage, the widespread neglect of children, and sexual immorality, including the acceptance of homosexuality. All this in turn gave rise to a further loss of morality in the next generations in an ongoing vicious circle. Bennett proposes that what we are witnessing is a social experiment with devastating effects, and he quotes the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as holding that “the family structure has come apart all over the North Atlantic world.”22
“The dissolution of the family is the fundamental crisis of our time,” Bennett argues, whereas “the ideal of the nuclear family [is] the essential foundation of society.”23 “Marriage and family are cultural universals,” he goes on, and “throughout history they have been viewed as the standard to which humans should aspire.”24 Bennett points to “cohabitation, illegitimacy, fatherlessness, homosexual unions, and divorce” as “the most important contemporary challenges to marriage and the modern family.”25 And the underlying cause of this social catastrophe is unwise and ultimately immoral individual decisions on a society-wide scale: “To put it simply: We could not have experienced the scale of marital breakdown we have witnessed since 1960 unless huge numbers of our fellow citizens—conservative and liberal, believers and non-believers alike—had willingly detached themselves from once-solemn commitments made to spouses and children.”26 (Emphasis added.)
“One reason so many American families are dissolving or never forming,” Bennett goes on, “is that many of us have forgotten why we believe—and why we should believe—in the family.”27 It is not the case, he assures us, that conditions of poverty and of economic dislocation and transition drive social breakdown, because “the decline of marriage and the American family happened during one of the greatest periods of economic expansion ever seen on earth.” In harder times, “the black family was relatively stable” and “the vast majority of black children lived in two-parent homes,” while at present “eighty percent of black women will be heads of family at some point in their child-bearing years.”28 So we are led to conclude that the problem is not economic conditions but individual moral failure, especially of black women but also of liberals and others, on a vast societal scale. And the proposed remedy, in The Book of Virtues, is moral literacy as the basis for transforming individual moral decision making. We have, as individuals, failed to learn right from wrong, and we are suffering the consequences. But the “we” here, we now realize, does not really apply equally to all of us. Only a large dose of moral education can save us from ourselves—or, by insinuation, save Us (prosperous whites, especially men) from Them (blacks and women, and particularly black women, homosexuals), and the country as a whole. But the situation is dire and the need immense.
James Q. Wilson goes even further than William Bennett and makes the explicit claim that poverty is the result of personal immoral decision making. Poverty is, in Wilson’s estimation, a kind of karmic punishment for bad individual moral decisions. Hence the poor (by implication) are getting what they deserve. Nevertheless, they are bringing the country (Us) down with them, and that is where the problem lies. This blame game is insinuated in Bennett’s analysis but is made explicit by Wilson, a prolific writer on crime and punishment—for example, in his essay “The Rediscovery of Character.” Commenting on a 1985 essay by economist Glenn C. Loury, Wilson says:
The very title of Loury’s essay suggested how times had changed [since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the problems of the black family]: whereas leaders once spoke of welfare reform as if it were a problem of finding the most cost-effective way to distribute aid to needy families, Loury was now prepared to speak of it as “the moral quandary of the black community.”
Two decades that could have been devoted to thought and experimentation had been frittered away. We were no closer in 1985 than we were in 1965 to understanding why black children are usually raised by one parent rather than by two or exactly what consequences, beyond the obvious fact that such families are very likely to be poor, follow from this pattern of family life.29 [Emphasis added.]
Here’s the argument: “the black family” (all lumped together as one entity) has made the fateful immoral choice of single parenthood, and hence is poor and the children immoral. A negatively stereotyped black family is demonized here in a way reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s excoriation of “welfare queens” as the model of immorality, an immorality consisting of bad personal decisions and choices. By implication, “these people” are to blame and they get what they deserve. Nevertheless, we need to morally educate them. Enter moral character education.
A similar alarmist message pervades William Kilpatrick’s Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong, another influential book in this genre.30 Kilpatrick, a professor of education at Boston College, begins his book with a look at “The Crisis in Moral Education.” “The core problem facing our schools is a moral one. All the other problems derive from it,” he insists.
If students don’t learn self-discipline and respect for others, they will continue to exploit each other sexually. . . .
If they don’t learn habits of courage and justice, curriculums designed to improve their self-esteem won’t stop the epidemic of extortion, bullying, and violence. . . .
If . . . schools were to make the formation of good character a primary goal, . . . hitherto unsolvable problems such as violence, vandalism, drug use, teen pregnancies, unruly classrooms, and academic deterioration would prove less intractable than presently imagined.31 [Emphasis added.]
The title of Kilpatrick’s book recalls a 1955 book by Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read, which was an attack on the whole-language technique of teaching reading as a disastrous fad that replaced an earlier focus on phonetics and precise skills.32 (Most schools now use a combination of whole language and phonetics to teach reading; the claim that the whole-language method of teaching reading is disastrous is not well founded, but that need not concern us here.) Kilpatrick argues that “the failure of moral education in the schools parallels the failure of the schools to teach reading.” Not only are “students . . . being taught by the wrong method, a method that looks more and more like a fad that won’t go away,” he says, but that method both “fails to encourage virtuous behavior” and “seems to actively undermine it.”33 Kilpatrick’s objection to the whole-language method seems to be that it does not consist of rote rules transmitted in an authoritarian way by teachers to be memorized by students and then applied to concrete, specific situations. Analogously, Kilpatrick believes that moral education should consist of a principle to be memorized and then a freely willed decision to apply that principle—a moral choice for which each of us is individually responsible. It is this approach, of directive training in identifying the relevant moral principle and then applying it through choosing the actions that accord with it, that Kilpatrick identifies as “character education.” “All the various attempts at school reform are unlikely to succeed,” Kilpatrick warns, “unless character education is put at the top of the agenda.”
Kilpatrick uses the analogy to reading education to indict liberal models of moral education as disastrous for American children and for society as a whole. The underlying message seems to be that a newfangled, nondirective, nonauthoritarian method derived from some crazy theory is being imposed on us normal people and on our innocent children by elite intellectuals removed from normal life in isolated ivory towers, and this is ruining the country. There is an appeal to what is purported to be (but of course isn’t) pure common sense—to what “everyone knows” is really the right way of doing things—and there’s more than a hint of conspiracy theory in the various alarmist claims that follow:
In addition to the fact that Johnny still can’t read, we are now faced with the more serious problem that he can’t tell right from wrong.
Not every Johnny, of course, but enough to cause alarm. An estimated 525,000 attacks, shakedowns, and robberies occur in public high schools each month. Each year nearly three million crimes are committed on or near school property—16,000 per school per day. About 135,000 students carry guns to school daily; one fifth of all students report carrying a gun of some type. Twenty-one percent of all secondary school students avoid using the rest rooms out of fear of being harmed or intimidated. . . .
The situation is no better outside of school. Suicides among young people have risen by 300 percent over the last thirty years. . . . Drug and alcohol use is widespread. Teenage sexual activity seems to be at an all-time high. . . . Forty percent of today’s fourteen-year-old girls will become pregnant by the time they are nineteen.34
Leaving aside the factual validity of the claims, how do we know that this situation is due to the failure of moral education? Kilpatrick makes his case by claiming that “many youngsters have a difficult time seeing any moral dimension to their actions; getting drunk and having sex are just things to do,” he says. And not only that, but “police say that juveniles are often found laughing and playing at homicide scenes.”35 Now that we are thoroughly alarmed, he thrusts home: “One natural response to these grim statistics might be to ask, ‘Why aren’t they teaching values in the schools?’” Though Kilpatrick admits that moral values programs have been present in the schools for more than twenty-five years and that more research is being conducted on moral education than ever before, he claims that “these attempts at moral education have been a resounding failure.”36 “The same educators and experts who still cling to the look-say [whole-language] method [of teaching reading] want desperately to hold on to this failed philosophy of moral education,” a philosophy he now identifies as a “moral reasoning” and “values clarification” approach to moral education, lumping the two together as a “decision-making” approach. He contrasts this approach, one that he regards as disastrous and as “leaving children morally confused and adrift,” to one that “like phonics . . . has been tried and proven.”37 This “tried-and-true” method of character education was used “in school and society in the past” and “seemed to serve our culture well over a long period of time.”38 Character education, Kilpatrick tells us, “is based on the ideas that there are traits of character children ought to know, that they learn by example, and once they know them, they need to practice them until they become second nature.”39 Kilpatrick, like Bennett, identifies both the problem and its remedy as matters of “learning”—really, of training. Virtues must be identified and transmitted in an authoritarian way so that each individual child adopts them and then chooses to act upon them. The underlying message is that if any child fails to act morally he or she is to blame, and “we” can wash our hands of social problems.
The successful institutional model for the teaching of moral values that Kilpatrick wishes schools to emulate, he tells us, is the military.
What the military has that so many schools do not is an ethos of pride, loyalty, and discipline. It is called esprit de corps. . . .
How does the military manage to create such a strong ethos?
First, by conveying a vision of high purpose: not only the defense of one’s own or other nations against unjust aggression but also the provision of humanitarian relief and reconstruction . . . Second, by creating a sense of pride and specialness . . . Third, by providing the kind of rigorous training . . . that results in real achievement . . . Fourth, by being a hierarchical, authoritarian, and undemocratic institution which believes in its mission and is unapologetic about its training programs.
Schools can learn a lot from the Army. . . .
In the past, schools were run on similar lines. They had a vision of high purpose. . . . There was a sense of pride in one’s school. . . . Schools were serious about their academic mission. . . . Finally, schools were unapologetically authoritarian. They weren’t interested in being democratic institutions themselves but in encouraging the virtues students would need for eventual participation in democratic institutions.40
The implicit model has become explicit, and the battle lines are now drawn: moral character education means the authoritative transmission of principles or values that the child (and later the adult) adopts and then applies to situations through an act of personal decision or will. The adversaries identified here are liberal versus conservative models of moral education; for Bennett and others, the former amounts to the absence of any real moral education at all. Kilpatrick clarifies his position as a conflict over authoritarian versus democratic teaching methods, which is to say, over an authoritarian transmission of values as the basis of personal moral commitment versus a more open-ended evaluation of values as the basis of such commitment.41
William Kilpatrick, inadvertently and perhaps against his own intentions, has exposed something important: liberal and conservative models of moral education are more similar than different. They share a basic set of assumptions about what morals are and what the moral life consists in. Both hold that morals are explicit principles about values or virtues that individuals (freely) choose and commit themselves to and then apply to specific situations by choosing the actions that accord with them, for which they are then responsible. Ethics is about individual choices of action and about holding individuals responsible for those choices and actions, assigning the individuals praise and blame. That understanding underlies both versions. What differs is largely the mode of transmission: hierarchical and authoritarian (with a good dose of fear and a punitive orientation) versus more egalitarian and open-ended (with much more leeway and encouragement). The point I am making is, in a sense, an anthropological one: there is a deep structure to this notion of moral agency, what it means to be moral and act ethically, that pervades and underlies all (or perhaps most) of the various versions we see around us, liberal as well as conservative. In their analysis of the character education movement, Robert W. Howard, Marvin W. Berkowitz, and Esther Schaeffer have defined what practitioners and theorists mean by character education as “an attempt to prepare individuals to make ethical judgments and to act on them, that is, to do what one thinks ought to be done.” It is a “process of defining what is the ethically correct action and having the integrity, or character, to do the right thing.”42 When it comes to our children, we think it’s all about free will and choice.
Thomas Lickona, a professor of education at the State University of New York College at Cortland and the founder and director of its Center for the 4th and 5th Rs (Respect and Responsibility), is a former president of the Association for Moral Education.43 He is one of a small number of educators who have worked to bring Bennett and Kilpatrick’s vision to practical application in American education by translating it into specifics on the ground.44 Lickona has developed programs and curriculums to implement the teaching of moral character in schools, and he also gives workshops to teachers and educators all over the country. His version of the moral character curriculum is captured in the portrait of Fillmore Elementary School with which I began this chapter. He proposes the inculcation of specific virtues month by month; the use of areas of the curriculum, especially history and literature, to teach morality tales; a focus bringing individual behavior into conformity with a personal commitment to obedience (through choice or free will) to authoritatively transmitted values and principles. Lickona, in his widely influential Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility, prominently quotes Kilpatrick’s assertion that “the problem facing our schools [is] a moral one.”45 He, too, argues that “escalating moral problems in society—ranging from greed and dishonesty to violent crime to self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse and suicide” are resulting in a “summons to the schools” “from all across the country, from private citizens and public organizations, from liberals and conservatives alike” to “take up the role of moral teachers of our children.”46 For “schools cannot be ethical bystanders at a time when our society is in deep moral trouble,” he warns.47 Lickona sounds the alarm of a society in moral danger and points to moral character education as the needed remedy:
The premise of the character education movement is that the disturbing behaviors that bombard us daily—violence, greed, corruption, incivility, drug abuse, sexual immorality, and a poor work ethic—have a common core: the absence of good character. Educating for character, unlike piecemeal reforms, goes beneath the symptoms to the root of these problems. It therefore offers the best hope of improvement in all of these areas.48
Lickona’s evidence for the moral deterioration of American society is of the same type and just as weak as Bennett’s, Kilpatrick’s, Ryan’s, and Wilson’s: it consists of carefully picked examples, broad and unverifiable claims, and correlations with no causal evidence. His tone is equally histrionic: “There is today a widespread, deeply unsettling sense that children are changing—in ways that tell us much about ourselves as a society.”49 “Children with the most glaring deficiencies in moral values almost always come, their teachers say, from troubled families. Indeed, poor parenting looms as one of the major reasons why schools now feel compelled to get involved in values education.”50 Moreover, “young people growing up in mass media culture are stunted in moral judgment.” The result is that “the most basic kinds of moral knowledge . . . seem to be disappearing from our common culture.” “Educators” now speak of the “ethical illiteracy” of young people.51 So schools must step up to the plate and “do what they can to contribute to the character of the young and the moral health of the nation.”52 The judgment of pervasive societal decline and social fragmentation is attributed to the cause of a society-wide epidemic of individual moral deficiency, itself chalked up to bad parenting, in turn caused by families with bad values. The solution is to intervene in the schools by inculcating moral values to children no longer able to tell right from wrong because of their moral neglect.
Most of us would be likely to agree that our contemporary society faces serious social-moral problems and that these problems have deep roots and require systemic solutions. Many of us are now coming to realize the link between public life and private character—that it is not possible to develop a virtuous society unless we develop virtue in the hearts, minds, and souls of individual human beings. . . . [T]he health of our nation in the century ahead depends on how seriously all of us commit to this calling.53
Lickona calls what he is advocating the coming together of “head, heart, and hand”: the head proposes (a value or principle is learned and known), the heart adopts it (one wills or commits to do it), and the hand performs it (behavior or action follows).54 Moral character, Lickona writes, consists of three components: moral knowing, moral feeling, and moral action.55 It involves the training through direction, inculcation, and practice of each individual child’s decisions and choices, that is, of his or her will, in order to address what he calls a nationwide social emergency. While subscribing to the standard conservative analysis and developing a largely authoritarian model of direct inculcation, Lickona has nevertheless been supportive of several forms and kinds of moral education in schools, in “a spirit of accommodation and cooperation,” he says.56 Most recently both the debate and the model of moral education advocated and instituted generally have broadened and become more varied, and its proponents are no longer just those of a narrow ideological sector.57
Thomas Lickona is one of the few theorists of moral education in schools who grasp that liberals and conservatives share certain basic assumptions in their models of moral education and that these shared assumptions are of Christian origin.58 In keeping with his own conservatism, he calls for the reintroduction of religion into the public schools as the basis for their moral education programs.59 Lickona claims that “there is an emerging consensus that the exclusion of religion from the public school curriculum is neither intellectually honest nor in the public interest.” So he has developed “seven ways that [public school] educators can constitutionally incorporate religion into character education.”60 Although I do not echo his call for more explicitly religious moral education in the public schools, I believe that Lickona is right in claiming that it is dishonest of moral educators to maintain that the moral education offered in our schools is culturally and religiously neutral and universal. Moral education in early America was simply Christian education, and I argue below that today it remains true to its Christian origins in important respects. As a result, we Americans are particularly vulnerable to diagnosing societal ills as due to individual moral failure of choice and decision making, and hence to instituting the moral training of children as the remedy. American moral education took shape as the transmission and inculcation of Protestant Christianity to children from colonial times to the present. That shape, I’ll now argue, has not substantially changed.
In early colonial times in America, moral education consisted primarily of Protestant versions of the Christian catechism. “It was Protestants from northern Europe, especially from Great Britain, who did the most to give moral education its character in the thirteen colonies,” McClellan writes in Moral Education in America.61 The Puritans of New England were “deeply committed to moral education and extraordinarily fearful that their children would drift away from the faith and culture,” despite their understanding of their own journey to the New World as a special mission to establish a model Christian commonwealth. Religious and moral education were inextricable, and the family was the locus of both.62 “The most devout families among the Puritans . . . conducted family devotions at the beginning of each day; . . . drilled [their children] in the church catechism; and exercised a careful, sometimes severe, discipline.”63 Children heard Bible reading, psalm singing, lessons, and stories of piety and moral instruction at the dinner table and, as soon as they could, participated in prayers. McClellan quotes the following telling passage from The Diary of Cotton Mather:
I began betimes to entertain them [the children] with delightful Stories, especially scriptural ones. And still conclude with some Lesson of Piety; bidding them to learn that Lesson from the Story.
And thus, every Day at the Table, I have used myself to tell a Story before I rise; and make the Story useful to the Olive Plants about the Table.
When the Children at any time accidentally come in my way, it is my custome to lett fall some Sentence or other, that may be monitory and profitable to them.64
In most Puritan families, McClellan goes on, the catechism, the basic instruction in the denominational doctrines of the Christian faith, was “the single most important element in formal moral instruction”; it was even more important than reading the Bible, he says.65 The short version of the Westminster Catechism, which was the standard in early New England, stated that “man’s chief end is to glorify God,” whose nature is “a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” Hence “the duty which God requires of man” is “obedience to his revealed will.”66 Although the family was the primary locus of religious moral instruction, what schools there were in colonial New England reinforced the same message in primers and hornbooks.67 Religious instruction was not primarily the job of churches but a task of the home and, to a lesser extent, of school and apprenticeship. Even higher education was theological, including classical, Greek, and Latin texts in its curriculum. And of course Puritan New England was known for its public scrutiny of private life.68
What about the rest of early America? We know that both traditions and conditions in the southern and middle colonies, although not as thoroughly documented, were different from those of New England. The Anglicans of Virginia, for example, while concerned about the religious and moral education of their children, had come to the New World for economic reasons rather than religious ones. Nevertheless, they passed laws mandating the teaching of the catechism to youth, servants, and apprentices in the family, in church, and in the workplace. In Virginia, however, the harsh conditions of life, the very high mortality rate, the much lower literacy rate, and the pattern of settlement of scattered plantations and farms distant from one another did not permit the development of the kind of community and educational and religious institutions common in New England, with their focus on religious moral instruction.69 The Quakers of Pennsylvania, while emphasizing literacy and Bible reading less than the Puritans of New England, nevertheless taught children the Quaker catechism and basic Quaker values and exercised firm discipline. Southern society generally followed the Virginia pattern, whereas the middle colonies followed the example of New England. There were common assumptions and common patterns in all regions: the family was thought to be the major transmitter of moral values, while school, apprenticeship, and church were supplementary. Religion and morality were seen as intertwined and even indistinguishable, and the catechism was the main document transmitting both.70 After the Revolution and up to the 1820s, growing prosperity and social stability and hierarchy brought a loosening of the severity of the moral instruction of the earlier colonial period.71 McClellan points to a new gentler tone in child rearing and “a more affectionate and egalitarian structure challeng[ing] the rigid patriarchal forms” of earlier times.72 A prolonging of childhood and the allowance of play came to be accepted. McClellan characterizes this change as toward moderation and also toward a divergence in the roles of mother and father in child rearing, the mother now taking the primary role as moral educator in response to the new Victorian conception of women as the moralizing force of society.73 Churches and schools began to have an enhanced role in the moral education of children. Following the vision of Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, and Benjamin Rush to teach the virtues appropriate to the new nation as a republic, a system of public education began to develop.74 At the universities and colleges, the Enlightenment and its vision and values softened the older sternness and rigidity of early colonial Christianity while nevertheless maintaining “a general Christian framework.”75 Also, at this time, religious revival and intensity were taking hold in certain areas, especially along the frontier. Methodists and Baptists, other evangelicals, and newly arriving settlers of pietistic sensibilities emphasized strict and harsh methods of child rearing and moral education.76
The transformation of moral education in America took place in the context of great social, economic, demographic, and political changes. These included the end of the rule of the propertied elite and the beginning of popular rule; the weakening of the family economy that accompanied the decline of the family farm and small business; the growth of suffrage to roughly all white male adults; the opening of the West to settlement; and the growth of urban centers and large commercial and manufacturing enterprises. Mobility and opportunity replaced stable hierarchical social arrangements as the norm.77 These were the years of Jacksonian democracy, a revival of evangelical Protestantism, crusades for various moral reforms, a new utopian literature, and a new form of moralistic sentimental literature.78 Perhaps not as paradoxically as one might expect, in morals and personal behavior Americans at this time abandoned the relaxed moral style of the earlier period and moved toward more institutional restraints and “an insistence on rigid self-restraint, rigorous moral purity, and a precise cultural conformity.”79 McClellan suggests that “a distinctly evangelical temperament pervaded the society.”80 The new freedoms bred a concomitant moral rigidity, perhaps because of both the fears and the opportunities let loose by the new freedoms and mobility and the loosening of structures and hierarchies. An intense focus on self-restraint accompanied the new freedoms, especially in the years 1820 to 1865. Parents, keenly aware that the new opportunities offered their children might soon distance their offspring from them forever and also bring their children into urban areas or the western frontier, where lawlessness, danger, and “alluring evils” ruled, turned with a new urgency to giving children a firm and direct foundation in moral instruction.81
At this time education and especially moral education began to be institutionalized and systematized in ways previously unknown, and there was also an emphasis on beginning such education early. The family and the school were to be focused on providing this urgent and early moral education, as one educator put it, in “prepar[ing the child] for this transition to freedom by effective training in self-control and self-guidance, and to this end, the will must be disciplined by an increasing use of motives that quicken the sense of right and make the conscience regal.”82 As another wrote, “Having ordained that man should receive his character from education, it was ordained that early instruction should exert a decisive influence on character.”83 This was moral character training through a prism of normative Christian free will and conscience, and it was incorporated into the new nineteenth-century view of a “special role for mothers” and the new social demand that women and especially mothers “exhibit . . . a constant Christian virtue in their own lives” and take up the primary responsibility in moral education “through daily readings and exhortations to children designed to increase piety and teach proper conduct.”84 Mothers were less focused on the catechism’s doctrinal specificities than on inculcating simple moral values, now readily available in a vast new popular literature of moral instruction for children.85 Mothers were seen as in charge of shaping the moral character of their children and could leave their academic education to the schools. The preference for women teachers, especially in the early grades, was indicative of the focus of public education on the moral shaping of children, for it was thought that only, or especially, women could provide that moral instruction.86 As McClellan writes, “The primary task of the female teacher in the classroom was to exercise a strong moral influence on the child, reinforcing the lessons of the mother both by serving as a model and by eliciting proper behavior from the child.”87 Both Sunday schools (a new institution gaining popularity as a result of early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, which brought a wider constituency than the urban poor, who were the initial target of reformers in their hope to “civilize” the urban poor) and daily schools were seen as continuing the moral instruction begun in the home.88 A vast new public school system was just being developed in the 1830s–1860s as education became universal in America and all white children were to be educated together in the public schools.
The middle and upper classes envisioned the introduction of universal public education as serving to integrate, Americanize, and morally educate the children of the growing immigrant population. Moral education was particularly directed at the children of poor immigrants. As McClellan puts it, “Leaders of the movement to create public schools sought to use moral education . . . as an instrument for remedial moral instruction” of “the poor and the immigrants, not to mention blacks and Native Americans.” “What was critical was that all children learn self-restraint through a common moral code.”89 McClellan writes that the very aim of the classroom “was to win student assent to certain values, to cultivate in the young minds a love of virtue, and to develop moral commitments that would last a lifetime.”90 Moral lessons in the form of maxims and morality tales were pervasive in nineteenth-century textbooks such as the McGuffey readers, and the values were “a blend of Protestant morality and nineteenth century conceptions of good citizenship”: thrift, honesty, hard work, love of God, love of country, duty to parents, the dangers of drunkenness and pride and deception, and the rewards sure to follow from courage, honesty, and respect.91 The “evangelistic and moralistic tenor of the times” even led colleges and universities, which had drifted toward a more critical and freethinking perspective in the eighteenth century, to return to a devotion to moral concerns. Hand in hand with a new emphasis on Christian pieties, many colleges put in place a course in moral philosophy as the culmination of a curriculum in which morality was seen as a “a matter of bringing the will into conformity with absolute and universal moral rules.” Universities thus distanced themselves from the more utilitarian perspective on morals of the previous century.92 “In the antebellum years,” McClellan suggests, “the college experience only reënforced the basic values that children had first learned at their mothers’ knees.”93 “The centrality of moral education remained an article of faith from the creation of the public school system in the 1830s until the last decade of the century,” McClellan writes, while, at the same time, the denominational allegiances were becoming blurred and to some extent eliminated.94 The aim of non-sectarian public schooling “was not to forbid religion in the classroom but rather to teach a nonsectarian Christianity at public expense,” “to teach children universal moral values and a generalized Protestant religion in the public schools.”95 The movement to establish nonsectarian public schools “was a thoroughly Protestant campaign,” an attempt “to turn their particular world-view into a kind of civic religion.”96 It drew “heavily on Protestant social thought and Protestant modes of organization, and it recruited a disproportionate number of its leaders from the Protestant clergy.” Protestants openly proclaimed their hope to “put the stamp of their own values on the entire society” and insisted on “the connections between morality and religion.”97
The notion of a common, broadly Protestant Christian culture as the basis for the social harmony and unity of the American polity came out of the Second Great Awakening of the first decades of the nineteenth century. The active “soldiers” in its various “crusades” “began to think of themselves not simply as Presbyterians or Methodists but also as a part of a great pan-Protestant moral empire, an empire they found it increasingly easy to identify with America itself.”98 A telling example of this nondenominational Protestant approach was the introduction into public schools of Bible reading but without any interpretation following. “The presence of the Bible in the schools became a powerful symbol of the connections between religion and morality, and Protestants resisted any effort to remove it.”99 While Catholics eschewed the unvarnished anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant biases of the public schools and set up their own system, Jews, especially Reform Jews, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely embraced the opportunities public schools afforded, attending them in large numbers. There were also Protestant Nativist efforts, especially in the 1920s, to restrict Catholic parochial education so as to force Catholic children into public education.100 As the wall between church and state became higher as the twentieth century progressed, however, the openly Protestant character of public schools lessened in favor of a heightened official non-sectarianism.101
In the first decades of the twentieth century a call for character education began as a reaction against modernity and as a way to recapture an older moral framework. Its purpose was to “develop educational mechanisms to stem the erosion of moral training and preserve traditional values.” Those who rallied around the banner of “character education” favored a number of educational programs that sought to make the teaching of a list of specific virtues and the cultivation of good traits of character central to the curriculum.102 At the same time a new progressive movement in education was emerging whose aim was to match values to new and changing times. By the mid-1920s the progressive movement had gained strength.103 Character education’s advocates feared the new freedoms and also the growing specialization of knowledge and occupation. They advocated a strong effort to preserve traditional values against a progressivist tide. Many traditionalists lamented that modernism in religion and the decline of the importance of religious authority in favor of the authority of science had diminished the “fear of eternal punishment,” leading to a loss of “some of its power to divert men and women from pleasures that were increasingly available and alluring.”104 McClellan quotes a teachers’ manual of the day as declaring that “the day of science has taken away from mankind most of the fears that once censored his conduct.”105
By the mid-1910s a movement to develop and implement codes of conduct took wide hold. “It was the use of character codes that most clearly set these reformers off from the progressives.” These codes were essentially lists of virtues in the form of laws or pledges. The most famous of these was the result of a competition initiated by Milton Fairchild, who in 1911 founded the Character Education Association. The winning entry was published in 1917 as the “Children’s Morality Code.” Its substance was “Ten Laws of Right Living: self control, good health, kindness, sportsmanship, self-reliance, duty, reliability, truth, good workmanship, and teamwork.”106 Many school systems adopted the code, while frequently modifying it according to their needs. The Boston schools, for example, added to it a “law of obedience” and made that law the center of their moral education program.107 In Birmingham, Alabama, schools focused on one virtue per year. The code became the subject of posters in classrooms and hallways and the focus of extracurricular activities and especially of student clubs, some of which formed around particular virtues.108 In Boston there were, among others, the Courtesy Club, the Prompt Club, and the Thrift Club. Girls and boys often had different clubs, with girls’ clubs devoted to such domestic virtues as sexual purity, gentleness, and meekness, while boys’ clubs were focused on the complexities of the modern workplace and on athletics.109 The content of the moral education promoted in these clubs “was derived primarily from nineteenth-century morality.” Their overarching purpose was “to use every means available to them to ingrain good habits and to strengthen the will of students against the temptations of the day.”110 Their general approach “subordinated ethical reasoning to an emphasis on training the will.”111
By the late 1920s, however, the broad appeal and pervasiveness of the first round of moral character education had begun a slow decline. The decline was due to an exhaustive study that exposed its ineffectiveness. In its place a progressive approach to moral education began to take center stage.
The decline and eclipse of the first round of character education were precipitated by a broad study whose findings seemed to demonstrate definitively that the direct and didactic approach of moral education programs such as character education was ineffective. Research into the effectiveness of the character education widely implemented in schools in the early twentieth century was proposed by the Religious Education Association at its 1922 meeting. The question that was to be addressed by an empirical study was: “How is religion being taught to young people and with what effect?”112 The Religious Education Association requested that the Institute of Social and Religious Research fund a study of the question, and the institute agreed to do so in 1924. Hugh Hartshorne (University of Southern California) and Mark May (Syracuse University) were chosen to serve as co-directors, and later the research project was housed at Columbia University’s Teachers College and supervised by Edward L. Thorndike. The first phase was a three-year “inquiry into character education with particular reference to religious education.”113 In 1927 the research funds were extended for another two years so that the project could continue. Hartshorne and May broadened the original intent of the study and widened the research to include a primary study and seven ancillary ones, only three of which ended up included in the study results, which in the end came to three volumes (1,782 pages) of data and interpretation.
The primary study focused on the development of a large body of standardized test materials for use in the field of moral and religious education. Tests were to be developed in the areas of knowledge and skills, attitude, opinion and motive, conduct and self-control. Student character was assessed through innovative classroom tests of honesty (deceit) and altruism or prosocial behavior (service).114
The three secondary studies addressed the problems of character traits: how behavior, on the one hand, and knowledge and attitudes, on the other, affect each other; the biological, social, and cognitive causes of behavior; and the effectiveness of current techniques to develop moral character and habits.115 “The findings of the study represented a potential body blow to the enterprise of character and religious education.”116 The primary finding was that moral character traits were not attributable across contexts; instead, “character was found to be situationally specific.”117
Hugh Hartshorne, writing later in his Character in Human Relations, doubted whether moral character was really a viable description of human beings at all:
If, for example, honesty is a unified character trait, and if all children either have it or do not have it, then we would expect to find children who are honest in one situation to be honest in all other situations, and, vice versa, to find dishonest children to be deceptive in all situations. What we actually observe is that the honesty or dishonesty of a child in one situation is related to his honesty or dishonesty in another situation mainly to the degree that the situations have factors in common.118
The authors’ conclusion was devastating: “The mere urging of honest behavior by teachers or the discussion of standards and ideals . . . has no specific relation to conduct. . . . The prevailing ways of inculcating ideals probably do little good and may do some harm.” Hartshorne and May recommended a shift away from direct methods of teaching moral character traits and virtues toward “indirect methods such as the creation of a positive school climate and service oriented activities for students.”119 Subsequent research over the years has only strengthened the evidence that “children cannot be sorted cleanly into behavioral types on the basis of presumptive traits, habits, or dispositions.”120
The progressive education movement associated especially with the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey introduced what McClellan calls “a radically different approach to moral education,” which gained more and more supporters beginning in the 1920s, especially among “liberal Protestant clergy, intellectual leaders, professional elites, and educators associated with major universities and large urban and suburban school systems.”121 Dewey rejected the notion that ethics carved out a particular sphere or segment of life, instead arguing that the social and the moral coincide: morals are embedded in contexts and necessarily articulate those contexts. All education is ethical or moral (or unethical or immoral) insofar as it expresses the values and structure of the community. Dewey regarded schools as mini-societies and, furthermore, considered them potentially ideal ones that could exemplify even more perfectly the values and arrangements of the larger American society, namely, its democratic values, institutions, and practices. “The controlled environment” of the school was the chief means for initiating society-wide social reform.122 He believed that thoughtful and considered moral deliberation took place within social contexts that deeply inform ethical decision making yet did not completely determine its outcomes.
So moral education was to model flexible and innovative responses to a changing world and the unprecedented and unique situations and experiences therein. As Dewey scholar and philosopher Richard Bernstein remarks, “It should . . . be clear that ethics conceived of in this manner blends into social philosophy,” for Dewey conceived “the entire universe as consisting in a multifarious variety of natural transactions” in which the person “is at once continuous with the rest of nature” while also “exhibit[ing] distinctive patterns of behavior that distinguish him from the rest of nature.”123 Bernstein characterizes Dewey as “a robust naturalist or a humanistic naturalist.” On this model, justice and ethics are intertwined and not clearly distinguishable; as a result, children’s concerns for the justice of the school and for the justice of the larger society were inseparable. Ideally, the school would look outward as well as inward. There was no such thing as a politically neutral ethics, in Dewey’s conception, for ethics was inseparable from justice, the justice of institutions near as well as far. John Dewey’s notion of moral education marks a momentary glimpse of ethics as a social phenomenon, implemented largely structurally and institutionally, from which individual personal decisions and choices emerge and are shaped.
In 1951 the National Education Policies Commission of the National Education Association and the American Association of School Administrators published a report, Moral and Spiritual Values in the Public Schools, in an attempt to define moral education for the post–World War II era. The report emphasized both the teaching of certain central values as well as a degree of moral flexibility in the face of a fast-changing world. Its authors identified a number of “essential” values that schools had the responsibility to inculcate. These included “respect for the individual personality, devotion to truth, commitment to brotherhood, and acceptance of individual moral responsibility.”124 They also urged teachers to respect and encourage children’s spiritual and religious values and expressions.125 There was a good deal of consensus about this report for its moderate tone and recommendations, but some vocal dissenters outside the mainstream called for the revival of an older form of character education that emphasized the development of specific character traits and the adoption of formal codes of moral conduct.126 At issue was a progressive notion of the evolution of values versus a notion of the unchanging character of values—hence the latter’s call for “the direct teaching of the eternal verities.”127 The dissenters, harking back to an even earlier vision of moral education, were largely affiliated with, or had their origins in, religious institutions, and some prominent advocates received generous funding from the Lilly Endowment.128 Generally the 1940s and 1950s witnessed a new emphasis on cognitive development and skills, and the sidelining of the moral, due to the needs of a more technologically oriented and quickly expanding economy.129 Perhaps less emphasis on moral education in schools was also due to the concentration of moral focus on anti-Communism above all else.130 A judicial atmosphere that encouraged the separation of church and state and the enhancement of the rights of children also contributed to a retrenchment, a treading lightly, when it came to moral instruction in public schools.131 Beginning in the 1960s, however, the quest for moral education in schools was renewed with three new individualist, free choice approaches with a liberal tenor: values clarification, cognitive developmentalism, and a caring approach to morals.132
The immediate appeal of values clarification when it emerged in the mid-1960s was that it offered a ready alternative to traditional inculcating approaches to moral education. Louis E. Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sydney B. Simon, in their Values and Teaching, set out a clear and easy program with curricula and exercises for teachers to follow. It met with great success and was widely adopted in schools in the 1960s and 1970s.133 The approach focused on individual moral decision making and emphasized the situational character of moral decisions. Children, it was held, needed to learn how to think about values and make value judgments in changing situations. McClellan points out that “what made the matter especially pressing to these reformers was their sense that the troubles of youth in modern America stemmed . . . from the difficulty of choosing values.” Hence they emphasized the “personal and individual nature of valuing.”134 The teacher’s role was to help students engage in a process of discovering, discussing, developing, and then freely choosing values. These values were chosen from among alternatives after thoughtful consideration and class discussion, and then each student was to act by choosing the actions that fit with the principles he or she had chosen.135 The role of the teacher in the discussion was as facilitator rather than as moral authority. The teacher, like a therapist, was to help students determine their own values, to help them “find a personal path in a bewildering world.”136 Conservative critics charged values education with promoting moral relativism, on one hand, or with presuming controversial and politically charged moral commitments such as to the environment, on the other.137 The philosopher Andrew Oldenquist criticized values clarification for presupposing too blithely that human beings are essentially good and just needed help in clarifying how to direct their basic goodness. With these criticisms, enthusiasm for the program waned and values clarification increasingly fell out of use.138
Concurrent with the popularity of values clarification was a movement to help children develop moral reasoning and judgment. This was the cognitive moral development approach of the widely influential Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. “From the mid-1960s to the present,” McClellan writes, “Kohlberg’s theories have occupied a central place in the discourse about moral education.”139 Kohlberg wished to counter conservative charges of moral relativism. He focused narrowly on the cognitive component of moral growth and proposed a universally human six-stage schema of moral reasoning, from the earliest, most primitive to the fully mature. The burden of the teacher was to help children rise in their cognitive moral development to more mature levels. Kohlberg’s concern, like that of the values clarificationists, was the process of individual moral decision making.140 Despite various modifications over the years, Kohlberg’s schema retained an overall structure of discrete developmental stages that every person had to move through sequentially. Moral development began with primitive selfishness (egoism) and developed by stages to an ultimate stage of personal commitment to and application of universal principles. Not everyone reached the final, ideal stage, but children could be helped to improve their moral reasoning by teacher-led discussion of moral case studies carefully prepared for that purpose. Later on, after working in both prisons and troubled schools, Kohlberg turned to a model of restructuring schools democratically as essential to transmitting a notion of justice. With the Just Community Schools model Kohlberg transformed his notion of how moral development occurs—it is not just as an internal psychological developmental process within reasoning resulting in personal choice and commitment but also needs to takes place within a specific kind of social context. The teaching of moral thinking was transformed from the abstract, hypothetical stories he first developed to the lived community of the school itself. Free rational choice and commitment to act on principle, Kohlberg’s stage six, was now set within and supported by democratic structures, practices, and social arrangements, a nod to Dewey. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of individual choice of action on principle, through personal independent rational decision making, remained intact.
A variant of the moral cognitive developmental approach to moral education in schools emerged in the 1980s out of a critique of Kohlberg, especially by his student Carol Gilligan. Gilligan criticized Kohlberg for what she held was his masculinist bias in thinking that ethics was about justice and rights rather than about caring. Caring, she held, was a feminine way of looking at morals, whereas justice was biased toward the masculine. Women, unlike men, conceive ethics in terms of personal relationships rather than as an impersonal arena of justice, she argued. The difference was not due to women’s occupying a lower stage of moral development as Kohlberg’s schema would suggest, Gilligan said, but due instead to a different way of being a moral person. Women, she argued, had a more relational and emotional approach to morals than the emotionally detached and impersonal and impartial stance of men.141 Caring, rather than justice, informed women’s moral sensibility and should inform the various stages of an account of female moral developmental and how it differs from male moral development. Gilligan developed an alternative version of Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development that traversed an initial stage of caring for self, then an intermediate stage of caring for dependents (mothering), and culminated in caring for all, insofar as all human beings are within interconnected webs of relation.142 Nel Noddings, Jane Roland Martin, and others joined Gilligan in calling for a moral education in schools that includes what they regarded as female as well as male moral orientations and voices. The intimate relations of women’s domestic life were seen as offering a moral orientation of special importance, equal to the male public arena of justice. Practice in caring ought to inform moral life within the classroom and school, and Noddings proposed that the school curriculum could be reorganized around the theme of caring—“caring for self, for intimate others, for strangers and global others, for the natural world and its non-human creatures, for the human-made world, and for ideas.”143 Noddings envisioned the moral model of caring as relation-centered.144 Virtues are defined “situationally and relationally” rather than abstractly.
Care theorists focused on virtues, “put[ting] far greater emphasis on the ‘social’ virtues . . . [for example] of congeniality, amiability, good humor, emotional sensitivity, good manners, and the like,” than the standard character educators do.145 Noddings criticized the out-of-context nature of the teaching of virtues in standard character education. Parents, she suggested, most often introduce a moral lesson in context rather than as a lesson in general principles: for example, they often say such things as, “You must not hit your little brother; be nice.”146 That kind of intervention with a direct and directive moral lesson is preferable because it is immediate and relevant rather than theoretical and distanced, Noddings proposed.147 Nevertheless, she applauded the use of cultural narratives and stories, suggesting that these can be from many cultures and offer differing moral points of view, bringing up legitimate moral conflicts and, hence, moral options to choose from. Noddings and the other care theorists rejected the impersonality of principles and opted for appealing to individual emotional relationships as the proper guide for individual moral decision making. We may no longer be rational choosers, on this model, but we are still choosers, individual subjects who engage in decision making according to our emotional commitments. Noddings highlights and wishes to encourage personal emotional responsiveness as the basis for an ethics of free choice. It is these emotionally rich choices that are to bring the (potentially isolated) individual into a world of relationships.148
I became acquainted with the caring approach to character education when I attended a workshop for educators, “The Ethics of Caring,” at the Boston University Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character, part of the School of Education, in April 2007. The introductory session of the workshop began with the showing of the 1983 German film The White Rose, which tells the story of the group of five Munich University students and their philosophy professor, who came together to form a secret, nonviolent resistance organization in defiance of the Nazis. The group took their name, the White Rose, from a Spanish novel about peasant resistance in Mexico and also gave that name to the underground newsletter they published opposing the Nazis and calling for general resistance to the Nazi regime. The newsletter called attention to the mass murder of Jews in the east and also opposed Nazi militarism and tyranny. The group wrote and distributed six issues of the newsletter clandestinely over a period of eight months in 1942–43, mailing them from distant cities and also distributing them by courier runs to various locations. The Gestapo led a concerted search to find the source of the publication and distribution, and the group was eventually betrayed to the Gestapo by a university custodian who witnessed members hastily doing drops of leaflets on campus in February 1943. The six were tried by a court devoted to political offenses against the Nazi state, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to death. Three were executed by guillotine on the same day as their verdict, and the other three some months later. Several of those who assisted the White Rose Six in publication and distribution and in collecting funds for their surviving family members were sentenced to long prison terms.149 After the showing of the film, Bernice Lerner, director of the Boston University center, offered the participants in the workshop an interpretation of the film that was strangely apolitical: it was to be understood as depicting a quintessential illustration and model of caring. The film was not seen as portraying grassroots political resistance to injustice but instead as an example of personal attachments being the source of choosing courageous actions in response to feelings of caring. The lesson to be taken away from the film concerned the personalizing and individualizing of the social-political moral arena in terms of personal decision making. This interpretation of The White Rose alerted me to some of the underlying assumptions of the caring approach to moral education: its depoliticizing of the moral domain and its de-emphasis of, perhaps even blindness to, issues conceived in terms of social justice and injustice (which are regarded as masculinist and impersonal). Thus social structure and the distribution of power, especially of political power, are taken off the table in this liberal model of ethics, as is done also in conservative character education.
While eschewing an approach to ethics focused exclusively on rational discourse and decision making according to abstract universal principles divorced from emotion, the caring approach to moral education is nevertheless just as individualist and personalist in its understanding of moral agency. If anything, caring heightens the underlying notion of morals as emergent from individual, freely chosen personal commitments. Both Kohlberg’s stage of cognitive moral development and Gilligan’s alternative notion of stages originate in the individual and move outward to connect to others and finally to the larger human and natural worlds. Gilligan’s model of moral development makes that movement completely explicit. The individual does not begin as relational; instead, relationality is the moral goal and achievement to be taught and learned. Children are to be brought from self-centeredness to community. They begin as infants and small children, having what could be an isolating self-focus if carried on into adulthood, but ideally they end up in family and community, in a full life of personal emotional relations of caring. The bonds of community are believed to depend on individual, personal choice.
The current focus on caring and character exposes the privatization of moral life, and also has parallels and resonances with the moral perspective of the Gilded Age. It was in the Gilded Age that the privatization of the family and a new idealization of private life took hold.150 It was only at that time that “the nuclear family was made the sole repository for standards of decency, duty, and altruism.”151 “Middle-class Americans,” writes Stephanie Coontz, a historian of the American family, “elevated family values and private rectitude into the defining features of Gilded Age morality,” with the concomitant mission to try to get the poor to adopt the private virtues whose lack, it was claimed then as now, was the cause of their poverty.152 This moral outlook coincided with a withdrawal from public life associated with the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War and with the rise of great disparities in wealth and of the tremendons power of capital. “The notion that enhancing private family morality could substitute for forging public values and societal bonds,” Coontz says, “developed comparatively late in American history.” The privatization of the family, “far from being a source of social commitment and responsibility,” instead “helped erode” them.153 “In the Jeffersonian tradition, public engagement was considered the primary badge of personal character; honor and virtue were political words, not sexual ones.”154 In her influential study of the American family from colonial times to the present, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, Coontz argues that ethical sensibilities were different in different eras in America. Today, she says, we are undergoing a revival of an ethical outlook of the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age: a withdrawal of moral concern from the public arena to the family seen as a private domain. The family in America was not always seen as “private,” and in fact rarely was. She writes, “The idea that private values and family affections form the heart of public life is not at all traditional. It represents a sharp break with Enlightenment thought and the republican tradition, which held that public values . . . were qualitatively different from and superior to private values of love and personal nurturance.”155 Even in the Victorian era, the unique “womanly” moral character of mothers, their “domesticity,” was not seen as contributing exclusively or even predominantly to the family but was instead, in the first half of the nineteenth century, thought to be a vital public contribution that helped curb the “masculine” competitiveness and ruthlessness of the public arena.156 Women’s public service and reform organizations abounded and had tremendous influence on society, from the temperance movement and the abolitionist movement to caring for the indigent.
The Progressive Era, Coontz says, marked a change toward a renewed public engagement from a Victorian focus on the family. Parallel to the Progressive Era was the tremendous public moral engagement of the civil rights era of the 1950s through the mid-1970s. The current retreat into private life and the concurrent growth of income disparity and the power of corporations are equal only to the similar phenomena of the Gilded Age. “The Gilded Age of the mid-1870s to mid-1890s resembles the period since the mid-1970s in most intriguing ways. After the intense idealism of the 1860s, most middle-class individuals entered a phase of political disengagement and economic reorientation that required them to disavow old alliances and beliefs. Turning away from social activism, many people focused on their personal lives and material ambitions.”157 Even Gilded Age political discourse succumbed to the shrinking of the moral domain to the privatized family. What we now think of as the recent “American practice of selling candidates’ sincerity and family values instead of their positions on issues began during the first Gilded Age.”158 All this marked “a retreat of the middle class from previous involvement in social reform.”159 The turn toward the private arena was also reflected in the religious concerns and ideologies of those times, focused as they were on a social message of law and order and an ethical appeal to repentance for private vice.160 It was not until the late 1890s that “the middle class participate[d] in a revival of mass action around women’s suffrage, ma[d]e new alliances with workers and immigrants, and beg[a]n to move in the direction of Progressive Era reform.”161 Moral education, while focused on individual choice, nevertheless was not as disconnected from civic engagement, commitment, and identification with the public arena in those more public-spirited times as it now is.
From the beginning, moral education in America has taken an individualist free will and personal commitment perspective, emerging from the memorization of, recital of, and commitment to the Christian catechism. That Protestant model of moral education has been the bedrock to which all other experiments have eventually returned. It was everywhere in the schools and classrooms I visited, it was evident in the moral educators I talked with, and it still dominates current popular books on the subject. The central model buried deep in the American psyche revolves around individual moral choice: using one’s free will to act in conformity with principles and virtues. Even if we consider liberal models of moral education since the 1960s (values clarification, Kohlbergian cognitive moral developmentalism, and Gilligan’s caring alternative to Kohlberg), we still find that, like character education, the focus is on individual choices and decision making. All four models seem to presuppose that social problems are moral problems and are due to aggregates of bad individual choices and personal decisions. As a result, social problems are to be attacked and remedied by changing personal decision-making processes, and hence individuals’ choices. The set of shared assumptions about what it means to be moral, how a moral person develops, why a moral person acts morally, and how moral weakness can be changed to moral goodness and strength share implicit presuppositions about how social problems arise and can be remedied. In the American context, the term character points to individual morality and behavior driven by personal free choices and decisions. Insofar as social problems are seen as signaling the failure of what is variously termed character, caring, or rational choice, they are chalked up to failures of personal will, the remedy for which involves changing that will, person by person.
Both standard character education and its seeming opposite, the ethic of caring, use stories to sway individuals’ emotions—although the stories in character education are focused on illustrating and inculcating various virtues, while the focus in the ethic of caring is to illustrate and recommend cases of caring behavior. In both, however, the final stage is presented as making the right decision. Children are instructed to make a choice according to a learned and adopted value or principle illustrated in the story. From that choice or decision a moral commitment and obligation emerge. While both character and caring moral education involve both emotions and thinking, Kohlbergian moral education is strictly cognitivist or about rational choice. Nevertheless, the notion of personal commitment, which is to say some form of free will, pervades all the models as the sine qua non of ethics, for the individual will is brought into conformity through commitment (whether affectively tinged or not) with larger virtues or principles and with other wills. It is choice and decision that are thought to bring the individual into the moral arena, whether that domain is thought of as universal moral truths or, alternatively, as relation and community (Gilligan, Noddings). Both liberal and conservative versions take the form of free commitment to moral demands even though both character education and also caring moral education, in contrast to Kohlberg and values clarification, use the language of virtues and habits rather than free decision making and choice.
Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez in the authoritative Handbook of Child Psychology, seventh edition, make the point that all the current kinds of moral education programs in schools today are fundamentally about individual free will, choice, and responsibility, and that makes them Kantian. The major model in the West of what it means to be ethical is Immanuel Kant’s: (1) the identification of universal moral principles of right action, (2) the discernment of how these principles can be applied in actual situations, and (3) the commitment and resolve of the free will to act upon those principles when such practical situations arise.162 Kantian ethics is about moral obligation to principles that set out as a duty the performance of certain kinds of actions on those principles in relevant situations. It depends on a kind of cognitive skill to determine the relevant principle in a situation, and then a resolve of the will to act upon it. Classical Greek philosophical ethics, in contrast, generally was based on the Delphic maxim “Know thyself.” For the Greek philosophers the fullest understanding possible of human nature, political institutions, and the nature of the cosmos was the basis of the ethical life. From a Kantian perspective, however, ethics is more narrowly about action: how discrete actions are chosen and what standards they conform to. The kind of knowledge involved is, therefore, narrow and focused rather than broad and open-ended. Knowledge in the modern, Kantian perspective offers precise answers, whereas for Aristotle, and for Plato before him, it is a way of life, an open-ended engagement in a quest for understanding the world and the human place within it, which is the virtuous life itself. For moderns, ethics is properly about doing, whereas for the Greek philosophical tradition, it was about the transformation of the self through gaining wisdom about what it means to be human, within the biological and cosmological natural order, within the social arena (for Aristotle), and within an underlying mathematized scientific universe and within the political community (for Plato). For the Greeks, all knowledge, not just some discrete arena of moral education, was thought to be contributory to ethics. In the Kantian notion of ethics, ethics and broad knowledge of the world seem to have been torn apart in ways that would be completely anathema to the ancient Greeks.
The Kantian notion of ethics expresses a Latin Christian approach to our human moral nature—albeit secularized on the surface. Perhaps it is ironic that the three liberal versions of moral education so criticized by the main revivers of traditional character education share with moral character education a perspective based on free will and personal decision making, for both liberal and conservative varieties are Kantian and Christian. And this is despite the fact that character education on the face of it seems to be not about freedom of the will but instead about training the personality in habits of virtue—an ancient Greek, Aristotelian view of moral agency. Lapsley and Narvaez recognize that the term character education is, however, a misnomer, for the American movement of character education is in fact not at all the transformation of character in the Aristotelian sense as the name suggests and as it purports to be.163 Ironically, perhaps, character education programs do very little to train kids in particular situations; instead they present hypothetical stories and ask kids to identify the correct virtue that was chosen and acted upon in the story.164 They repeatedly instruct children in the identification of abstract moral principles and in action that conforms to those principles, with much rewarding of the correct answers to questions, but they do not provide much in the way of the behaviorist-style training of action that one would expect from the name. Instead, they tell and retell stories and reshape historical events and personalities so that they exhibit clear black-and-white moral principles that pupils then are supposed to identify and be inspired to commit themselves to choose and act upon accordingly.
The idea of habits, in contrast to decisions and free choices, implies an automatic and even unconscious way of acting, rather than the reflective and self-aware independent choices and decisions of the free will. The training of character in habits of virtue goes back to Aristotle’s ethics. The advocates of moral character education are explicitly aligning themselves with an Aristotelian notion of moral psychology and agency. But in the American context, the Aristotelian notion of personal character has been reshaped through the lens of free will, that is, through a Kantian lens. And that Kantian lens is fundamentally Christian, not Aristotelian. It owes a great deal to the Christian appropriation and transformation of Aristotle, especially by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. (I discuss the Christian origins of free will and the Christianization of Aristotle at some length in Chapter Four.) The use of the term character education muddies our understanding of how character education programs actually attempt to educate children’s morals. In practice, character educators use a (Kantian) model of choosing actions that accord with principles (or virtues) to which children have freely committed themselves, rather than a model that involves training behavior. Why, then, use this term, which is a misdescription, rather than a term that more accurately describes the process?
Character educators appear less committed to the individualist model of ethics than liberals do. But when it comes to looking at what they actually do, they are in fact more committed than are liberals to a model of society based on individual free decision making and individual responsibility. What the moral character educators seem to be signaling by their use of the term is their disdain for nonauthoritarian models of moral education, in contrast with their own more authoritarian one. But in terms of the dependence on individual free will and responsibility, both liberals and conservatives are playing the same game—a Western, Christian, Kantian game. The character educators no less than the liberal moral educators have little use for an Aristotelian conception of ethics. They do not train children in moral habits, nor, as Lapsley and Narvaez point out, do they raise the question of what kind of life brings overall fulfillment. In contrast to the model used by character educators, a (true) ethics of virtuous character (virtue ethics) has two outstanding features: (1) it makes a claim about the best human life, about what is required for human flourishing, and (2) it includes an account of how best to conduct one’s life and oneself in keeping with that notion of human fulfillment, flourishing, and excellence.165 Neither of these considerations is operative in standard character education as it has been conceptualized and implemented in American schools either historically or at present. In the American school setting, the term virtues is used to identify principles of right action (instead of human excellences, the classical Greek arête) that are to be adopted as morally obligatory. Their rightness is not connected to an Aristotelian account of what is biologically natural for the human species, nor is it about what uniquely fulfills our humanity. It never calls for a broad and general quest to learn about the human and the natural worlds, which Aristotle deemed essential for the discovery of the good human life. Instead, Lapsley and Narvaez say, we run up against a Kantian set of assumptions, for it is all about discrete actions conforming to principles of right action.
In most accounts of character education one cultivates virtues mostly to better fulfill one’s obligation and duty (the ethics of requirement) or to prevent the rising tide of youth disorder (character utilitarianism or the ethics of consequences). . . . [T]he point of virtues in most accounts of character education is to live up to the prescriptions derived from deontic considerations: to respect persons, fulfill one’s duty to the self and to others, submit to natural law. When the goal of character education is to help children “know the good” this typically means coming to learn the “cross-cultural composite of moral imperatives and ideals.” Rather than emphasize agent appraisal[,] the animating goal of many character educators is appraisal of actions, for, as Wynne and Hess . . . put it, “character is conduct” and the best test of a “school’s moral efficiency” is “pupils’ day-to-day conduct, displayed through deeds and words.”166
Thus, against their stated intentions, character educators and the liberal supporters of a Kohlbergian approach have a great deal in common with each other and little in common with the Greek philosophical notion of ethics they claim to embrace:
Character education, for all its appeal to virtues, seems to embrace the ethics of requirement just as surely as does moral stage theory, rather than an ethics of virtue. The most important moral facts for both paradigms are still facts about obligation, universal principles and duty. The most important object of evaluation for both paradigms is still action and conduct: it is still deciding the good thing to do rather than the sort of person to become. The fact [is] that character education is . . . thoroughly deontological and utilitarian with . . . little in common with virtue ethics.167
Lapsley and Narvaez propose that the difference between those who call themselves character educators and the champions of more liberal models is largely about the role of authority and hierarchy in moral education. Character educators embrace the transmission of ready-made moral principles on authority, whereas educators who are more liberal have a constructivist concern as well: they want to involve young people not only in the commitment to values but also in their formation. What I wish to call attention to here is what the different models of moral education in America share: a reliance on a notion of free will, decision making, and obligation to follow discrete moral principles as guides for action. That assumption is not universal across cultures (we just saw that it was absent for the Greeks). Instead, I argue in this book, it is highly specific to our own culture. And even the adversarial positions within our culture share a deeper and larger implicit religio-cultural framework that emerged from an ongoing cultural context and its particular Christian theological history. American moral education has inherited a past rooted in the teaching of the Christian catechism, and while it has gone in several disparate directions, it remains nevertheless beholden to theological notions of human nature and agency.
What makes John Dewey’s model of progressive education an alternative to both the character education championed by conservatives and the moral education promoted by Kohlbergians and other liberals is that it recommended contextual interventions into social structures rather than direct attempts to educate or manipulate the individual will. Dewey’s model builds upon the social determination or shaping of action that Hartshorne and May exposed in the 1920s and which has been confirmed by a great deal of subsequent research. That social interventions and institutional incentives shape moral action undermines Kohlberg’s moral cognitive developmentalist and the caring models just as much as it challenges traditional moral character education. Furthermore, the effectiveness in the classroom of Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental model of moral reasoning and decision making has been shown to suffer from additional problems. For the research shows that, pace Kohlberg, “only weak associations between moral reasoning and moral behavior have been detected and these associations lack practical significance among school-aged populations.”168 Hence neither approach to the training of the individual will, whether by authoritative transmission of values or by the development of reasoning skills in decision making, shows evidence of effectiveness. Lapsley and Narvaez suggest that the conclusion we ought to draw from the research into moral development is that it is “at the intersection of person and context where one looks for a coherent behavioral signature.”169 “The inextricable union of person and context,” they propose, “is the lesson both of developmental contextualism . . . and social cognitive approaches to personality.”170 As a result, “moral education can [i.e., must] never be simply about the character of children without also addressing the context of education, that is to say, the culture, climate, structure and function of classrooms and schools.”171 Lapsley and Narvaez end their essay on character education on a hopeful and instructive note, commenting that research shows there are effective ways to ameliorate just those “moral” problems that particularly conservatives identified in youth, namely, the use and abuse of alcohol, drunk driving, use of illicit drugs, early sexual intercourse, high rates of depression and suicide, violence, gambling—but the effective interventions are systemic and structural rather than individual character- or will-based.
Schools characterized by communal organization, that is, by mutually supportive relationships among teachers, administrators, and students, a commitment to common goals and norms, and a sense of collaboration, tend to have students who report an attachment to school (an emotional bond to teachers or school and a sense of belonging), a belief in the legitimacy of rules and norms, and a high value placed on work. . . . [B]onding to school, was related, in turn, to lower levels of student misconduct and victimization.172
The Seattle Social Development Research Group, for example, launched a project in 1981 in eight local public elementary schools guided by a social development model according to which it was assumed that behavior is learned within social environments rather than by adopting and applying explicit principles or values. The presupposition was that “when socialization goes well a social bond of attachment and commitment is formed . . . [which] in turn orients the child to the norms and expectations of the group to which one is attached and to the values endorsed by the group.”173 The Seattle Social Development project “demonstrated long-term positive effects on numerous adolescent health-risk behaviors (e.g., violent delinquency, heavy drinking, sexual intercourse, having multiple sex partners, pregnancy and school misconduct) and on school bonding.”174 “But is this character education?” Lapsley and Narvaez ask. They remark that the answer “depends on whether character education is defined by treatment or by outcomes.” The Seattle Social Development project has “generated [the] empirical outcomes that are claimed for character education” but has been guided by “a social development model” and not by a theoretical model “of virtue, morality, or character.”175 A similar project of the Developmental Studies Center in San Francisco has “documented the crucial role that children’s sense of community plays in promoting a wide range of outcomes commonly associated with character education, including altruistic, cooperative and helping behavior, concern for others, prosocial conflict resolution, and trust in and respect for teachers.”176 What was important about the schools in the project was that they met children’s “basic needs for belonging, autonomy, and competence.” The sense of community in the schools that took part in the project was developed through “collaborating on common academic goals; providing and receiving help from others; discussion and reflection upon the experiences of self and others as it relates to prosocial values such as fairness, social responsibility and justice; practicing social competencies; and exercising autonomy by participating in decisions about classroom life and taking responsibility for it.”177 Thus a sense of community in the schools was “promoted through [changes in the] structures of the classroom and the school.”178
Another important structural intervention studied was community service and service learning, the latter differing from the former in the extent to which it is linked to the academic curriculum. Service projects engage aspects of identity formation in adolescents and are instrumental in transforming social and moral civic identity, according to current research. These interventions, too, showed important positive outcomes in the behavioral issues identified as important by the moral character educators. So the positive outcomes in the various areas were brought about by “a developmental systems approach” to intervention in youth behavior. Lapsley and Narvaez conclude that the evidence points to using “a developmental systems approach” to moral education rather than the current “epistemological approach” of character education, which is “preoccup[ied] with core values,” adding, “A developmental systems orientation is foundational to the positive youth development perspective that has emerged as a counter to a risks-and-deficits model of adolescent development.”179 Yet “not one of the youth developmental programs apparently viewed their competency-building and prevention work in terms of moral or character development.”180 The notion of what counts as ethics and moral training is clearly caught in a religio-cultural time warp that affects not only conservatives, who are more likely at present to acknowledge their religious roots, but also liberals, who tend at present to regard their outlook as secular. While Lapsley and Narvaez do not try to account for the conceptual bind that moral education seems to be in, they do recommend that a social systems approach that explicitly recognizes what it is doing is in fact moral education ought to be developed out of the successful systems approach already well established in addressing just those youth social problems that ironically the conservatives argued are evidence of the effects of the paucity in American schools of authoritarian moral character education.
The conceptual framework for character education is adequately anticipated by a commitment to a developmental systems orientation. A developmental systems approach to [moral] character education draws attention to embedded and overlapping systems of influence that exist at multiple levels; to the fact that dispositional coherence is a joint product of personal and contextual factors that are in dynamic interaction across the lifetime.181
It turns out, in fact, that many schools have recently adopted a more systems-oriented approach to changing the culture of their school—and they have done so because it works. The Character Education Partnership now gives public recognition, through its National Schools of Character designation, to schools that use eclectic approaches as well as to those that implement the original character education model that was a revival of early twentieth-century moral education. When I met with Merle Schwartz, director of education and research at the Character Education Partnership in Washington, D.C., she talked a great deal about “school climate” as well as about moral behavior. Part of Schwartz’s job is to go to schools all over the country as a consultant, helping to diagnose their problems and working with school representatives—administrators, teachers, students, staff, and parents—to devise situation-specific remedies that can help change both school climate and student behavior. I also visited several schools that had introduced mixed models, in which kids seemed engaged and happy rather than subdued and sullen, as they were in the Fillmore School. Nevertheless, the theoretical philosophical move that Narvaez and Lapsley recommend—redefining what ethics is about, what its domain is, and what moral development entails—is more a hope than a present reality.
Narvaez and Lapsley also propose adding to the structural intervention in social climate a new (or, really, the revival of an ancient Greek) approach to individual personal ethics. Rather than the pervasive model of instilling conformity to a set of objective virtues or principles, as standard character education envisions, or an open-ended discussion of the right ways to think about and determine right actions in various situations, as in values clarification and Kohlbergian rational decision-making models, Lapsley and Narvaez recommend the introduction into the moral education curriculum of an Aristotelian-type exploration of human flourishing—virtue in the real Aristotelian sense. Teachers, they say, should be asking the questions that occupied the Greek philosophers: What makes for a deeply satisfying human life? What does it mean for a given person or for people in general to flourish and thrive, and what does it take for that to happen? They suggest that the educational research on moral development now shows that the notion of thriving within a given context (the current buzzword is developmental contextualism) is the proper “basis for understanding the role of adaptive person-context relations in human development.”182 They conclude their essay on an Aristotelian note: “Perhaps a life course perspective on character will require additional constructs such as wisdom . . . , purpose . . . , personal goals . . . , spirituality and self-transcendence . . . , ecological citizenship . . . , and character strengths . . . to capture adequately the complexity of phaserelevant dispositional coherence and human flourishing.”183
We have seen through this brief account of moral education in schools that in recent decades in America both conservatives and liberals have focused on the individual rather than the community as the site, source, and focus of morals. For conservatives the focus is the training of the individual will, an emphasis seen from the earliest moral training in the adoption of the catechism to the various more recent forms of character education, while for liberals it is the more recent rational decision-making approach and its variants, which highlight individual free will. The only structural approach in moral education was that introduced in the early twentieth century by John Dewey and others influenced by him, and it is still evident in a certain tendency of Kohlberg’s to introduce democratic structures that in turn underlie rational decision making. That approach persists today in some pockets of experiment: the democratic and caring school movements, and also the many service projects that connect students to the larger society and the world. The more liberal the model of moral education in a given school, the more likely it is to emphasize social service rather than the acquisition of individual character virtues. Nevertheless, the theoretical underpinnings of that aspect of character education are largely absent or unacknowledged, and such programs of social service continue to appear within a discourse of the training of individual moral character and will in the virtues. Historically, social structural interventions focusing on the group and the community have been seen only rarely, such as in the progressive movement in education in the mid-twentieth century.184
The initial thrust toward a social structural approach, at least to moral education, did not meet its demise because of the triumph of liberalism.185 Rather, UCLA philosopher John McCumber has put together considerable evidence that the social philosophy of Dewey and others was eclipsed because of the McCarthy era’s pointed attacks on philosophy departments and especially on those philosophers who taught and engaged in social philosophy.186 To write about or teach social philosophy and to address issues of ethics in terms of social structure as formative of moral action became anathema in the political climate of the 1950s; what subsequently ensued was a period of forgetting, a forgetting that now allows social conservatives to attack liberals for decimating and fragmenting the social arena when, in fact, that occurred in part as a result of a right-wing attack on Communists, Socialists, and their sympathizers in universities.187 Nevertheless, the fragility of social philosophy and moral education models based on it bespeaks the foundational nature of the free will perspective in America. Narvaez and Lapsley are trying in a small way to revive social philosophy as a basis for rethinking what ethics is really about and how virtue can be taught.
While space and time do not permit an extended account of how professional schools in law, business, medicine, and government, for example, teach ethics to their students, we can take a peek into their practices of teaching ethics to gain some general impressions. I began my investigation of how ethics is taught in practical contexts with an Ethics Awareness Training workshop offered by Lockheed Martin’s Utica, New York, office to students and faculty at Hamilton College, where I teach. Lockheed Martin is the largest defense contractor in the United States and is involved in such projects as replacing all the assets of the U.S. Coast Guard and designing and manufacturing launch platforms. The workshop was sponsored by the college’s dean of multicultural affairs, and its purpose was to give students, and especially students of color, a sense of Lockheed Martin’s commitment to nondiscrimination and multicultural fairness in the workplace. The Lockheed Martin trainers were the resource manager and a manager of the electronics section. They told us that we were attending exactly the same kind of workshop that every company employee is required to attend each year. Also, each manager in the company is required to offer one session of the ethics workshop every year. Lockheed Martin’s ethics code focuses on six values: honesty, integrity, trust, respect, responsibility, and citizenship. “These values,” the trainer suggested, “are the same as in your family.”
After an introduction, we watched a video that began with the CEO of the company speaking about ethics. There followed a wide range of reenactments of actual case studies in eight ethical areas: changing practices, interpersonal relationships/harassment, retaliation, computer misuse, information security, competitive information, and international business courtesies. For each case study, after the problem was initially presented, we were given the opportunity to discuss the ethical issues involved and how we thought the situation should be resolved before we were shown how the situation was actually resolved. I found it notable that neither the company’s lobbying of Congress nor its treatment of whistle-blowers, two topics about which I inquired, were part of ethics training or the domain of ethical concern at the company. Nor were issues of quality control or the substance of what the company was contracted to do. All the issues highlighted in the presentation involved only matters either of respectful personal behavior toward others in the workplace or of not using the company in any way for personal gain. The substance of the work, either its quality or its nature, was not to be subject to moral evaluation or criticism. Here we see the same kind of personalizing and individualizing of the ethical domain—analogous to the nuclear family—that we saw in standard character education and which is a product of the contemporary withdrawal of moral concern from the public arena to a narrow concern for only the private domain of personal relationships. And we also see here that character education in schools has become the model for the workplace as well: a code of personal virtues to which every employee is to commit him- or herself is the centerpiece of a program that then offers teaching examples of how to apply the principles so that individual employees can make the right decisions in similar situations.
Other field trips took me to an ethics and leadership camp for public officials that was held at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics of Santa Clara University; to a meeting with an expert on legal ethics and the director of Stanford University’s Center on Ethics; and to a discussion of medical ethics with a philosopher who is part of an ethical decision-making team at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, New York. I kept finding the same situation everywhere: that the domain of ethics was narrowed to issues of respectful personal behavior toward others and to avoiding conflicts of interest or personal gain, and that there were codes of professional ethics that offered the list of virtues we have seen in character education plus detailed rules about how to avoid conflicts of interest and not use the workplace for personal benefit. In every case structural issues—that is to say, issues that concerned the moral substance of the workplace’s or profession’s endeavors—were off the table. In law, for example, the substance of laws was not considered to be within the profession’s ethical domain, and neither was the structure of delivery and access to legal services. In medicine, individual medical decisions on life and death and treatment issues were on the table, but the issue of how medical care is influenced by the pharmaceutical companies and the makers of medical equipment, as well as whether all should receive the same medical care regardless of race, income, and other inequalities, were off the table. The individualizing of ethics to matters of personal decisions and relationships fragmented the moral domain, thereby eclipsing the most egregious wrongs and short-circuiting critique. As a result, the moral critique of substantive projects or of structural incentives is limited to those who are most invested in the status quo (those high up in the hierarchy) or else to individual whistle-blowers who have to take on the whole system as a personal mission and who have and derive no protection from the various codes of ethics.
In the workshop at Santa Clara University I was persona non grata for raising the criticism that the ethics code and statement of values trumpeted by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics did not pass what I call the “Holocaust test”—that is, even if all government employees obeyed the ethics codes that the center has been introducing into local governments, nevertheless those same employees would, without violating a single moral rule, be able to implement the kind of programs that the Nazis had the German civil service engage in, programs that contributed to the murder of millions of Jews and others. For example, government employees would be able to register and round up Jews, confiscate their property, and arrange for their transport to the gas chambers without violating “ethics” because they would not be doing it for personal gain nor would they be treating other employees or even individual members of the public discourteously. I began to see in this how it was possible for German bureaucrats to think they were carrying out their jobs ethically while contributing to mass murder: their moral objections to their substantive assignments in the bureaucratic machinery of mass murder were privatized, taken out of the ethical domain of the workplace. Individuals who tried to do otherwise could be accused of bringing allegedly “private” moral concerns into the workplace. The way that ethics is defined in both its operation and scope sets the stage for what can happen. It could happen here. And it is happening here in lesser ways right now. Look at health care, whose worst abuses are dramatically illustrated in Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary film Sicko. Those abuses are clearly the result of institutional and corporate incentives and practices expressive of implicit social, cultural, and political values, not of aggregates of failed personal moral decision making.
The approach to ethics all around us not only trivializes our moral concerns but also lets us off the hook by nullifying our shared social and political responsibility for the moral content of our common ventures, projects and structures and policies that we didn’t create but which we nevertheless maintain. As Randy Cohen, a writer of “The Ethicist,” a column in the New York Times Magazine, put it:
One way to understand right conduct is to imagine it on a continuum—etiquette, ethics, politics. . . . But I maintain that the difference between the two is artificial, if indeed there is a significant difference at all. . . .
An ethics that eschewed . . . nominally political questions would not be ethics at all, but mere rule following. It would be the ethics of the slave dealer, advocating that one always be honest about a slave’s health and always pay his bills promptly. But surely any ethics worth discussing must condemn the slave trade absolutely, not quibble about its business practices.188
I have spent this chapter introducing our assumptions about our ethical capacity and how we think we make our children into moral people. We found that our assumptions about our own moral capacity and about how our children come to be moral revolve largely around the notions of free will, personal decision making, and individual commitment. In the next chapter I turn to the Holocaust to investigate perpetrators and rescuers. I raise the question of whether choosing the good by an act of the free resolution of the will can explain the goodness of the rescuers, and whether the failure to abide by a free commitment and resolve to do the good can explain the perpetrators. The Holocaust will be the test case for a reevaluation of free will as the basis for moral agency.