Ethics in School
A study of the foundation and methods for value communication.
Viktor Gardelli1, Anders Persson, Liza Haglund, & Ylva Backman
1. Introduction
This article is about a project concerning a coherentist approach to ethics in school. The project has two main parts; one theoretical and one empirical. The former focuses on philosophical problems and issues concerning coherentism as a metaethical position in general, and particularly when applied to the field of value education, and the latter aims to study some consequences of a coherentist approach to the study of discussing ethical matters with children.
2. Coherentism
Coherentism is an epistemological theory in the philosophical field of inquiry concerning justification of beliefs, propositions and statements. The main alternative to coherentism is called foundationalism, and it has been the
historically dominant position. What is justification, and what is its relevance? A justification of a certain belief is some reason to uphold the belief, i.e. it is a good reason to believe the thing in question. For example, we might believe, similarly to a physics professor, that the sun is a sphere of gas. There are some differences in the two cases, though, being that the physics professor is more justified in his belief than we are. She can probably give a lot of arguments for believing that the sun consists of gas. These arguments are taken to justify her belief.
According to foundationalism, there are two radically different kinds of
1 Corresponding author: Viktor Gardelli, Luleå University of Technology (www.ltu.se). Email: viktor.gardelli@ltu.se.
beliefs: foundational ones and non‐foundational ones (Fumerton, 2002; Goldman
& Pust, 1998; Levin, 2005). The non‐foundational ones are justified in case they are justified by foundational beliefs (or by other non‐foundational beliefs which are in turn justified by foundational beliefs, i.e. transitively justified, in the end by foundational beliefs). There are different positions regarding the foundational beliefs, which lead to different kinds of foundationalism (Fumerton, 2002). These theories have theoretical problems that needs to be solved. Common to all of them is the idea that some beliefs, the foundational ones, necessarily stand in a justification‐relation to other beliefs (non‐foundational ones) in only one direction. We can, somewhat metaphorically, imagine the belief system as a tower, where the base supports the top, but not the opposite. Justification goes bottom‐up (at least regarding the foundational layer).
Coherentists, in opposition to foundationalists, deny the distinction between foundational and non‐foundational beliefs (Fumerton, 2002). A coherentist claims that every belief in a belief system needs justification, and indeed can get justification, from other beliefs in the system (Goodman, 1965). One might speak of such a coherentistic system of beliefs as a web of belief, where there might be more or less central beliefs, but where the justification relation (possibly) holds both ways between any two statements.
According to at least some coherentists, a system of beliefs can cohere in different degrees, and a certain belief can cohere in different degrees to a certain set of other beliefs. A specific belief is more justified (to a person) the more it coheres with his or hers system of beliefs (maybe given that the system has reached some certain standard, or such that it is more justified given the same amount of coherence, the higher status, due to e. g. being bigger and more
coherent, the system has). We strive, one could say, towards a state where every statement coheres to a high degree with the system. This is called a reflective equilibrium (Daniels, 1979; Goodman, 1965; Rawls, 1971; Tersman, 1993). It is therefore of great importance that we can specify this coherence‐relation. Many have attempted to do this, but there are controversies regarding which account is correct.
Metaethical coherentism is a position in the discussion about justification of moral judgements. Metaethics can be said to be the study of second‐order ethical questions, i.e. questions about and regarding (first‐order) ethical questions, known as normative ethical questions, such as “Is it morally acceptable to kill and eat animals?”, “Ought one to give to the poor?”, “Is war morally wrong?”,
“What is global justice?”, “What is the value of liberty?” and so on (Miller, 2003;
Singer, 1994; Tännsjö, 2000). The metaethical questions are such questions as
“What does ‘morally wrong’ mean?” “Is there such a thing as moral facts?”, “What is value?” and “Can we have moral knowledge, and if so, what is justification in ethics?”, which arises about the field of normative ethics (Bergström, 2004;
Miller, 2003). Metaethical coherentism is concerned with the last half of the last of these questions. Analogously with ordinary epistemological coherentism, metaethical coherentism holds that moral judgements are justified if they cohere with the agent’s web of judgements (Bergström, 2004).
3. Ethical conflicts in School
In Sweden, one of the main purposes of the educational system is to mediate a
‘value foundation’ (or value fundament) based on Christian ethical tradition and western humanism to the pupils (Lpo94). Suppose now that you have a
foundationalist approach to ethical discussion in schools, as many seem to have had historically (and which seems to correspond well with the idea of a value foundation or fundament). Suppose furthermore that some pupil expresses the judgement that some of his classmates have a lower value than him, due to e.g.
the classmate being a girl. Hence, it seems the boy does not believe in equality in value concerning gender. This seemingly anti‐egalitarian judgement conflicts with the judgement that gender does not have any bearing on ones value, which is included in the value foundation of the educational system. The teacher is supposed to mediate to this pupil the values supported by the educational system. But how is this done? What are the features of this situation? According
to a foundationalist, we here have a conflict between foundational values, or so we can suppose. In this case, there is nothing obvious to do to resolve this conflict, because the foundational values cannot be justified; it is supposed that we simply realise the correctness of them by our moral intuition, or something like this. Therefore, there is a conflict between what the teacher ought to do and what she in fact can do.2
A coherentist, in contrast to the foundationalist, could point to how the two different judgements in our hypothetic example gain different amount of justification from other judgements, and thereby hopefully find consensus, and hence dissolve the conflict. Hopefully, by dialogue, the pupil can realise that his idea of the different values of him and his classmate does not cohere as well with his value system as does the idea of gender equality and the insignificance of sex in regard to value, or, if this is not the case, that the value system of his teacher is more coherent than his.
The ability to (at least theoretically) resolve ethical disputes and conflicts seems to speak in favour of coherentism. As noted above, coherentism is not theoretically unproblematic, though. One problem is how to understand the justification‐relation. What does it mean that two propositions justify each other? What is coherence? Philosophers have discussed several different
proposals (Fumerton, 2002). One of the aims of the further work in this project is to propose and evaluate such a definition of coherence.
With regard to methods for ethical discussion in relation to a coherentistic approach, it seems as a “philosophy with children” (Børresen & Malmhester, 2004; Haglund & Persson, 2004; Juuso, 2007; Lipman, 2003; Malmhester &
Ohlsson, 1999) approach will seem reasonable and fitting.
2 And according to the Kantian principle that ought implies can, it seems as if this shows that if you are a foundationalist, you must conclude that it cannot be the goal for the teacher to mediate these values, hence the foundationalist seems forced to believe that the idea behind the value foundation is misguided. This speaks in disfavour of foundationalism.
4. References
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