Moral Education Through the Fostering of Reasoning Skills

Abstract

The development of reasoning skills is often regarded as a central goal of ethics and philosophy classes in school education. In light of recent studies from the field of moral psychology, however, it could be objected that the promotion of such skills might fail to meet another important objective, namely the moral education of students. In this paper, I will argue against such pessimism by suggesting that the fostering of reasoning skills can still contribute to the aims of moral education. To do so, I will engage with the concept of moral education, point out different ways in which reasoning skills play an essential role in it, and support these considerations by appealing to further empirical studies. My conclusion will be that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills fulfils two important aims of moral education: First, it enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. Lastly, I will refer to education in the field of sustainable development in order to exemplify the importance of these abilities.

The development of reasoning skills is a central goal of ethics and philosophy classes in school education. The focus on the promotion of cognitive abilities, however, has been criticized for being ineffective in motivating actual moral behavior. Critics object that the promotion of reasoning skills misses the actual aim of ethics classes, namely the moral education of students.

As I will show in the following, their pessimism could even be backed up by recent studies in moral psychology. Nevertheless, I will argue that this pessimism is not justified. To do so, I will engage with the concept of moral education, point out different ways in which reasoning skills play an essential role in it, and support these considerations by appealing to further empirical studies. My conclusion will be that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills fulfils two important aims of education: First, it enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others and fosters those skills that are necessary for any successful societal discourse on moral issues.

To mention one example of the sort of criticism I refer to, consider the debate on the aim of ethics classes in Germany (grades 7 to 10). Ethics is a subject in German high schools that aims at fostering the moral education of students. The curricula of this subject focus on the development of ethical reasoning skills. However, critics object to this that the mere development of ethical reasoning skills does not contribute to the moral education of students. These critics understand moral education as a type of education that improves the moral quality of students’ actions. This is a view that can also be found in the school laws of the federal states. According to such school laws, the statutory aim of ethics classes is, for example, “to educate students to behave in a responsible and value-conscious manner” (Baden-Wurttemberg) or “to educate the students to value-aware judgment and action” (Bavaria).¹

Nevertheless, the practice of ethics teaching in European schools mostly aims at the development of reasoning skills.² Ethics classes focus on a special type of reasoning skills: the competence to reflect upon ethical questions. Developing this competence is a common goal of teaching ethics. The aim of this subject is to promote the ability to identify ethical issues in the world we live in, to deal with them in an argumentative way and to take a well-founded position on them. General argumentative competences are also fostered in ethics classes but only in the context of critical reflections of this particular kind. I will call ethics classes with such course objectives “competence-oriented”.

Sometimes, competence-oriented approaches to teaching have been sharply distinguished from approaches that focus more strongly on a transfer of knowledge. This sharp distinction is misleading, however. For example, knowledge about the difference between a normative and a descriptive proposition can also be of help in developing the competence to reflect upon ethical questions. What is characteristic for competence-oriented approaches, however, is that the transfer of propositional knowledge (about philosophical positions, for instance) is never regarded as an end in itself. Although students also become familiarized with the philosophical tradition, the ultimate goal of ethics classes is to foster their ability to philosophize autonomously.³ But what can be expected from such an approach with regard to moral education?

At first, one might think that such skills can improve the quality of the students’ moral judgments and actions. In the next section, however, this claim is called into question on the basis of particular studies from the field of moral psychology. These studies examine the moral judgments and moral actions of ethics professors and compare them to those of professors from other areas of philosophy and of other fields overall. It can be assumed that ethics professors possess in a particularly pronounced way those abilities whose promotion should take place in the ethics classroom. Despite this, the studies discussed in the next section could not find the judgments and actions of ethics professors to be of noticeably higher moral quality. This raises doubt about the ability of such competences to improve moral judgment and action overall (Sect. 1).

What other contribution can we then expect from competence-oriented approaches to moral education? Authors who point to the motivational limits of rational engagement sometimes advocate to evoke certain emotionally toned states, such as empathy, as an alternative approach. I will argue that while there are indeed some considerations speaking in favor of such approaches, it is necessary to embed emotional reactions of this kind in a process of critical reflection. More generally, a competence-oriented approach to moral education enables various forms of critical reflection and thereby contributes to the development of individual autonomy (Sect. 2).

A further important goal of competence-oriented approaches is to enable students to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. For example, identifying shared beliefs is an important step in resolving disputes about moral issues. As indicated by various studies, a competence-oriented philosophy and ethics education can increase the quality of the discourse on moral issues (Sect. 3).

In the last section, I will use an applied example to show why the aim of improving societal discourse is a particularly important goal. Using education in the field of sustainable development as an example, it becomes obvious that educators should not aim so much at trying to lead individual students on the right moral path. Instead, they should foster those skills that are necessary for any successful societal discourse on moral issues (Sect. 4).

1 Doing the Right Thing

To which aspect of moral education can the promotion of reasoning skills contribute? Similar to the development of other competences (for instance, scientific competences), one could think that, with an increase in cognitive abilities, moral judgments (in analogy to scientific judgments) become less prone to error. As a first step, the following section therefore examines this assumption by looking at relevant studies from the field of moral psychology.

In contrast to scientific judgments, moral judgments in particular instances are often a contentious issue even among experts. For example, has someone judged wrongly when they consider it morally acceptable to kill animals in order to eat them? This is controversial. In moral psychology, many studies dealing with the inaccuracy of moral judgments therefore avoid taking a stand on particular questions of right or wrong. To maintain moral neutrality, they only look at phenomena that can raise doubts about the reliability of moral judgments independently of what we think about the moral issues in question.

One example of a well-researched phenomenon of this kind are so-called framing effects, which result from the way in which moral problems are presented. Particular forms of such presentations can influence our moral judgments in the corresponding cases. These influences could be achieved, for example, by using a specific formulation of the moral question at issue (wording effects). A difference in moral judgment could also result from the order in which moral cases are presented (order effects). Here, judgments differ based on whether two corresponding cases A and B are presented in the order AB or in the order BA. Furthermore, moral judgments on a particular option can differ depending on whether this option is presented as part of a pair (AB) or of a sequence (ABC), which contains an additional option.

In philosophical debate, studies that deal with these effects have sometimes been interpreted as raising doubt about the reliability of our moral intuitions.⁴ According to this line of argument, such unreliability results from the fact that the moral intuitions on which we base our judgments are often influenced by factors that are quite obviously not of moral relevance for the issue in question. For example, as the order of cases and the options in-between are clearly morally irrelevant, the corresponding studies could be said to show that our intuitions are not reliable (Sinnott-Armstrong 2006, 353). Skepticism of this kind can even go so far as to question our general ability to form sound moral judgments.⁵

Now, one might be tempted to make the optimistic suggestion that the reliability of moral judgments could be increased by an enhancement of the relevant reasoning skills. Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012), however, cloud this optimism. In their study, they show that university-employed philosophers are no less affected by order effects on their judgments about moral dilemmas than non-philosophers. Schwitzgebel and Cushman tested this (among other things) on the basis of judgments about different variants of trolley cases. Such cases deal with situations in which a train would run over a group of people if an observer did not intervene. This intervention, however, would result in the death of an uninvolved person. Variants of trolley cases typically differ in the options the observer has available for intervention. The best-known options in the debate are flipping a switch (A) and pushing a person on the tracks whose body weight can stop the train (B). According to the study, the order in which A and B are presented to the participants influences how these two options happen to be morally evaluated.

Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012), however, did not find any indications that these order effects are weaker for philosophers than for other participants. These findings also remain consistent when one compares regular participants to moral philosophers. Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2015) looked at this subgroup specifically but could not identify any degree of philosophical expertise that reduced the influence of such effects. Across the board, professional philosophers showed about the same order effects as comparably educated non-philosophers. Even among philosophers who had specific expertise on the moral issues in question, these effects were not smaller.⁶ Explicit requests to think about the answers beforehand and to consider different arguments for or against the respective positions were also unable to change this result.

If philosophers’ moral judgments are also influenced by irrelevant factors such as the order in which cases are presented, this calls into question optimistic views about the relevance of philosophical skills for moral judgment. This concerns both the promotion of reasoning skills in general and the concrete discussion of moral dilemmas in particular. These studies, then, raise doubts about whether the promotion of reasoning skills can contribute in any significant way to increasing the reliability of moral judgments.

To mitigate this worry, however, one might point to the limited scope of Schwitzgebel and Cushman’s studies. One major reason why trolley cases have been the subject of so much philosophical debate is that they are so difficult to decide. Different moral theories each highlight different aspects most of us would take to be morally relevant: While consequentialists, for instance, typically care most about the number of people saved, some deontologists would argue that killing another person is unjustifiable no matter what. In trolley cases, it seems that there is something to be said in favor of each of the competing views.

This feature could also explain the emergence of order effects in the study just mentioned. The different order in which the cases are presented might emphasize different perspectives in such a way that the case discussed first (B, for example) could draw attention to certain aspects that might also be of moral relevance for the following case (A, for example). Pushing a person on the tracks whose body weight can stop the train (B) draws attention to the fact that, in flipping a switch (A), a human being would also be sacrificed for the lives of others. This perceived similarity could be reflected in the answers of the test participants and thereby explain why the conviction that the switch should be flipped in A decreases after the presentation of B.⁷

Trolley cases require rather artificial and difficult moral judgments on which there is not even a consensus among those who have spent years dealing with them. Despite Schwitzgebel and Cushman’s studies, one might therefore still optimistically suppose that rational engagement may well have an impact on moral judgment as long as that engagement is concrete and relevant enough. In educational contexts, this would mean that we could still assume ethics teaching to have a positive influence on students’ attitudes at least towards those moral questions they actually come across in their everyday lives.⁸

However, another study by Schwitzgebel and Rust (2014) indicates that we should not take this supposed influence on moral judgment to have an effect on moral action. Schwitzgebel and Rust examined the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of ethics professors, non-ethicist philosophers and professors in departments other than philosophy on eight different moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one’s mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. Schwitzgebel and Rust found that ethicists did not show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups with regard to any of these issues. Their conclusion reads as follows: “It remains to be shown that even a lifetime’s worth of philosophical moral reflection has any influence upon one’s real-world moral behavior” (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014, 320).

First of all, it should be noted that this study at least contains good news for the relevance of the profession in relation to moral judgments: ethics professors do express different attitudes towards those ethical questions they come across in their own lives compared to other professors. It therefore seems that years of ethical reflection have apparently influenced their moral convictions to some extent at least. For example, 89% of ethics professors rated donating 10% of one’s income to charity as morally good, whereas only 73% of professors from subjects other than philosophy agreed with this belief. When asked how much professors should donate, only 9% of ethicists responded “nothing at all”, compared to 25% of professors from other disciplines (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014, 312).

Despite these differences in moral judgments, however, the study also contains some bad news regarding moral action: the self-reported moral behavior of the different groups was nearly identical. 4% of the ethicists and 6% of the professors from other disciplines stated that they had not donated anything in 2008. Of those who had donated something, the geometric mean of the ethicists’ self-reported donation rate was 3.7% of income, compared to 3.6% in the case of professors from other subjects. Thus, non-philosophers even showed a stronger correlation between expressed normative attitudes and actual moral behavior.⁹ The moral convictions of ethicists, on the other hand, were not found to be significantly reflected in their personal actions (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014, 313).

One should be careful not to generalize the results of these particular studies. The promotion of reasoning skills could still have a positive influence on moral judgment as well as on moral action in some regard at least. A different study that focusses on students rather than on ethics professors could be seen as an indication of this (Schwitzgebel et al. 2021): Students who discussed a required reading about how it is morally wrong to eat factory farmed meat reduced their rate of meat purchases at campus dining locations from 30% of purchases overall to 23%. In this particular case, philosophical instruction in the classroom seems to have been able to influence students’ real-world behavior.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Schwitzgebel and Rust’s study still casts serious doubt on the claim that reasoning skills have a substantial positive influence on moral action.

2 Critical Reflection

In this section, I will discuss some recent proposals arguing that moral education should focus on the promotion of particular emotions rather than on cognitive skills. Then, I will emphasize the need for critical reflection on one’s emotions and the related beliefs to avoid the emergence of biased moral judgements. I will argue that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs and thereby contributes to the development of their individual autonomy.

The studies discussed in the last section indicate that rational engagement with moral issues does not have a large impact on moral action. Similar kinds of skepticism have been expressed in the philosophy of education for some time now. It has even been argued that a purely cognitive engagement with moral issues has no effects at all on personal behavior. For example, Slote finds it questionable that “any amount of sophisticated or universal moral reasoning can actually motivate someone to do what she has concluded is morally obligatory or good” (Slote 2009, 221).

Slote suggests that an evocation of empathy is more conducive to achieving the goals of moral education than an enhancement of rational competences. Intuitively, he argues, there is a close psychological connection between empathy and active care about moral issues, which is why schools should also be concerned with the promotion of empathy (Slote 2009, 221). But is there any empirical evidence that empathic responses actually have such effects on personal behavior? And should teaching ethics therefore aim at the promotion of empathy?

Moral psychology has largely been concerned with the influence of emotional and intuitive responses on moral judgment. However, there is also some research on the relationship between various emotions and moral action. Here, one can indeed find some indications of the effects of empathy on acting in favor of others (Denham 2017). For example, it could be shown that empathy is positively correlated with helpfulness towards strangers. Furthermore, the presence of empathy increases interpersonal cooperation. It can also have a positive influence on the outcomes of negotiations between parties with competing goals. In a corresponding study, both sides achieved better outcomes compared to a control group when feeling empathic towards each other (Galinsky et al. 2008). In prisoner’s dilemma games, subjects cooperated on the basis of empathic responses even when they knew that their game partner had betrayed them (Batson and Ahmad 2001). These and other examples show that empathy can indeed have a positive impact on behavior in favor of others.

However, one should keep in mind that empathic responses are subject to a number of biases. This means that individuals who are in similar need of help are not always met with a similar degree of empathy. For instance, one empathizes more with people in spatial and temporal proximity. In addition, empathy is more pronounced towards those who are similar to oneself in some regard (Prinz 2011). This becomes also important when we think of promoting empathic responses by means of education. To mitigate this effect, a critical reflection on the partiality of empathic reactions should be a subject of ethics classes as well. The reading of literary narratives has been a recommended means of stimulating empathic responses in the context of moral education (Nussbaum 2003, 99–100). However, the empathic responses that such texts evoke should pass a process of reflection in order to counteract the potential partiality typical for empathic reactions in this way.¹¹ When reading narrative texts in ethics classes, the aim should be to stimulate shared reflections on the respective empathic reactions evoked by these texts.

Moreover, questions about the consistency of moral judgments could be used to reflect on the emotions that underlie such judgments. Thereby, circumstances of the following kind could be addressed in ethics classes: Why do we think we are obligated to help someone in need when this person is nearby, whereas we do not consider ourselves to be obligated to help those who live far away? Why are the moral standards for keeping dogs as pets often higher than those for keeping pigs for meat production? Is this also due to differing empathic reactions to the suffering of dogs and pigs? Could our different empathic reactions explain these judgments – and do we thereby have contradicting beliefs? Such reflective processes can also be stimulated by using narrative texts to evoke empathic responses that are in tension with prior moral judgments. Literary texts that irritate the reader can be especially suitable for this particular reason (Nussbaum 2003, 98).

Empirical studies also show that empathy is very easily exhausted. Overall, empathic responses are rather unstable. If we cannot help one person, we jump to the conclusion that we cannot help anyone else either. Negative emotions that result from not being able to help one person reduce positive feelings towards a person we could actually help (Västfjäll et al. 2015). Thus, while emotions such as empathy can motivate action in favor of others, we should keep in mind that empathic responses are highly susceptible to disruption. A critical reflection on these processes could counteract the fact that empathy is spatio-temporally biased and unstable, and it could contribute to developing a more reflective form of empathy.

Singer and Klimecki (2014) point out that an empathic response to suffering can result in two kinds of reactions: empathic distress and compassion. Empathic distress is accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from negative feelings. Compassion, on the other hand, is conceived of as a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering, which is accompanied by the motivation to help. Their own studies and studies by colleagues lead Singer and Klimecki to the optimistic assumption that compassion can be trained (Singer and Klimecki 2014, 876). However, since compassion results from empathic responses, it also lacks a moral compass, which means that it could be in need of supervision by reason due to its potential biases (Persson and Savulescu 2018). Stimulating such processes and imparting the skills necessary for them is therefore an essential task of ethics education.

Beyond a reflection on empathic reactions, philosophy and ethics classes can stimulate further reflection processes on a range of other emotions. Students should learn to critically assess their emotions because these do not always point in the right direction. Moral misconduct can be especially the result of emotions such as anger, aggression and disgust.¹² It is important to be able to reflect on one’s emotional reactions in certain situations because unreflected emotions can change one’s own actions and judgments in problematic ways. Thus, one should be able to make oneself aware of such processes. Philosophy and ethics classes foster this kind of reflective ability.

Ethical reflections on the concept of “naturalness” are an example of this. There is nothing inherently positive about the fact that something is (allegedly) natural. Moreover, the evaluation of something that is dismissed as “unnatural” is often paired with a form of emotionally toned aversion. For instance, moral judgments in the field of sexual ethics often correlate with feelings of disgust.¹³ A competence-oriented approach to ethics and philosophy teaching can foster reasoning skills that contribute to a critical examination of such emotions and the related beliefs.¹⁴

Reflecting on one’s own beliefs, however, is not only important in cases in which they happen to be emotionally toned. In order to demonstrate intellectual independence one should reflect upon one’s own beliefs as well as on those of others. This process involves the examination and, if necessary, revision of personal beliefs, an avoidance of unreflected adoptions of the positions of others and a reasonable trust in the findings of experts. For this, certain skills are necessary. To mention a few examples, one must be able to identify false conclusions as such, to correctly classify alleged empirical evidence and to remain unimpressed by mere recourse to supposed authorities or reactions to one’s own opinions that have nothing to do with the issue itself. Competence-oriented approaches to philosophy and ethics teaching are designed precisely to promote abilities of these particular kinds.¹⁵

The promotion of ethical reasoning skills also contributes to students’ individual autonomy. Various conceptions of individual autonomy include the independence of one’s deliberation from manipulation by others and the avoidance of an uncritical adoption of the positions of others, including their positions on morality. Such forms of intellectual independence can also be a goal of ethics classes. As Hand (2018, 11) puts it: “[O]ur job as educators is to cultivate moral autonomy by enabling children to make their own independent judgements on the content and justification of morality.”¹⁶

However, ethics classes do not only deal with moral issues in the narrower sense. They also include broader discussions on the content of a good life and allow ample scope for reflective processes. When we ask ourselves how we want to live, there is not just the one reasonable way to reply to this. Rather, there is a wide range of possibilities for each person to answer such questions autonomously. An autonomous person chooses on her own how to live, and this implies that she is not just drifting through life.¹⁷ Instead, she reflects on what is important to her in life. Ethics classes improve student’s ability to reflect on the content of a good life and facilitate the capacity to choose on their own how to live. This contributes to their individual autonomy.

In summary, then, philosophy and ethics classes seem particularly well-suited to enable students to critically reflect on their own emotional reactions and ethical beliefs. For example, critical reflection on dubious standards of naturalness and associated feelings of disgust may change their individual moral judgments. Moreover, in enabling students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs, ethics teaching also contributes to the development of their individual autonomy.

3 Moral Discourse

Reflective skills, however, are central not only to thinking for oneself but also to discussing various issues with others. In modern societies, a number of moral questions arise that cannot simply be decided on an individual basis. Examples of this are how we evaluate the possibilities of human genetics or discussions about compulsory vaccination against certain diseases. In schools, students should acquire the skills necessary for participating in dialogues on moral issues of this kind.¹⁸

Philosophy and ethics education could contribute this. Students should be enabled to engage with socio-politically relevant topics that have normative dimensions. For this purpose, it is important that they can identify the norms and values on which the different relevant arguments are based. To be aware of central positions in moral philosophy could help in such contexts to structure ethical discussions more clearly and to identify sources of dissent more easily.¹⁹ For example, a controversy over how to allocate scarce medical resources may arise from the endorsement of consequentialist and non-consequentialist considerations by different parties. In order to identify such positions, even the prior examination of trolley cases could be a helpful methodological tool.

However, teaching ethics is not just a matter of uncovering dissent. Sometimes, it can seem that there is a lot that separates us due to the plurality of opinions in our societies or simply because of misunderstandings. Philosophy and ethics classes could help here to uncover some common ground. This includes developing the ability to recognize certain conflicts as moral conflicts in the first place. In addition, students should learn to distinguish between different presuppositions made in such conflicts (e.g., concerning the moral status of embryos) and the argumentative result about which there is disagreement (e.g., the moral permissibility of abortion). It is not unusual that even opposing parties happen to agree on some of the premises of their arguments. Those who have learned to distinguish between premises and conclusions need not restrict their focus on the result of an argumentation but can also reflect on the presuppositions made. In this way, students should learn that there can be beliefs we all agree on even in cases of dissent. Seeing which of these beliefs one actually shares is an important step in every reasonable conversation. Ethics education could promote such insights by fostering the ability to critically engage with moral argumentations.

Moreover, philosophy and ethics classes might help students to adopt a questioning view on the world that appreciates the limits of one’s own knowledge while still being aimed at understanding. This attitude is characterized by the readiness to revise previous convictions, an acknowledgment of new information and, ultimately, the willingness to be convinced by successful argumentation. What is at issue here, in other words, is the promotion of an attitude that not only aims at convincing others but also considers the possibility of being convinced oneself.

Sometimes, we fail to overcome disagreements despite having found some common ground. However, discussions of this kind could still prove to be very fruitful because they allow us to become aware of the basis of our disagreement. It may also become clear that the disagreement hinges on certain presuppositions that are controversial but not open to further discussion. One cannot expect to reach consensus on every morally relevant question. For example, controversial religious or ideological assumptions may be central to giving an answer to the question at issue. Nevertheless, developing an understanding of what divides us could also make our relations to one another better and more peaceful (for instance by reaching an agreement on how to deal with such conflicts).

Can philosophy and ethics classes really contribute to the achievement of such ambitious goals? In what follows, I will highlight some studies that actually point in this direction. They reveal that such classes can indeed fulfil high expectations and thereby indicate that fostering reasoning skills can achieve important goals of moral education.

Studies of the effects of competence-oriented philosophy instruction in middle schools showed that students felt to a greater extent than before that it was worthwhile to seriously discuss moral questions with their classmates. And their assessment was actually justified. After two years of philosophy education, the students had indeed learned to pay closer attention to the arguments of others and to reply to them with fitting objections. At the same time, they were increasingly able to evaluate their own claims more adequately. This gain in skills not only improved their own arguments but also their ability to reflect on the argumentative exchange from a meta-perspective. Such reflections were also increasingly articulated by the students in statements such as “You have a point.”, to which dialogue partners then often replied with their own meta-comments. Over time, meta-talk also became more reciprocal in nature. Whereas students initially ignored rare meta-level utterances, such meta statements were likely to initiate discussions later on (Kuhn et al. 2013b, 263 f.).

Due to this, the students’ development of new skills was identifiable in their argumentation itself but also in the meta-level communication they engaged in with one another. Students gradually began to communicate explicitly about epistemic norms that they expected one another to uphold by making remarks of the following kind: ‘‘What is your evidence for that?’’ or ‘‘Please respond to our argument. Do not make a completely new argument.’’ or “I know what side you’re on, but what I’m saying is that you aren’t seeing both sides of the argument.” (Kuhn et al. 2013a, 474). Overall, this led both to a further development of the quality of the discourse and, on a meta-level, to a better understanding of what characterizes a successful argumentative exchange.

As the philosophy course proceeded, the students developed greater specificity and skill to address direct counter-argumentation. When their opponents attempted to sidestep an argument, the students came back and reiterated the claim, asking again for their partner to respond to it. Moreover, they began to address the opponent’s broader position rather than to focus narrowly on the opponent’s immediately preceding utterance (Crowell and Kuhn 2014, 376).

A successful argumentative exchange does not just profit from the development of rather formal reasoning skills but also from a closer look at the content, such as a clearer focus on the question at stake. In this respect, the role of more sophisticated philosophical skills also became obvious in an earlier study (Kuhn 1991). Here, it was striking that doctoral students of philosophy were particularly good at grasping the complexity of an ethical problem and at identifying possible reasons for dissent. They saw one such reason, for example, in the fact that the question at issue was formulated imprecisely and could thus be understood and answered differently (Kuhn 1991, 262).

These studies therefore provide some reason for optimism. Judging by their findings, a competence-oriented philosophy and ethics education can at least increase the quality of the discourse on moral issues.²⁰

4 Education for Sustainable Development

Finally, an example will be used to show how important promoting the ability to engage in moral discourse can be. The upshot here is that even if it were true that a competence-oriented approach is unsuited to directly influence individuals to act morally better, it could still contribute to a no less important goal by improving societal discourse overall. This will be demonstrated by looking at a form of moral education that has been increasingly called for in recent years: environmental and climate education.

In the fall of 2015, the United Nations adopted a global sustainability agenda, the so-called Agenda 2030, which also explicitly mentions education in the field of sustainable development as one of its goals. At first, one could again assume that the primary aim of such education is to get people to act morally. Due to the dangers of climate change, they should save emissions and reduce their individual consumption. In this way, they could meet justified moral demands, such as demands for intergenerational justice. One could therefore think that the point of such forms of education is an insight into justified moral demands in order to make people act accordingly.

Since certain emotions have been shown to be relevant for individual moral action, one could also assume that appealing to such emotions would be a good strategy to motivate the desired environmental action among students. There are indeed a number of empirical studies indicating an influence of emotions on certain forms of environmental action.²¹ However, it has also been shown that these effects are quick to fizzle out. For example, a video with sad background music showing how polar bears and penguins are affected by global warming led to a higher willingness to donate immediately after watching the film. Just one hour later, however, this effect was already diminished significantly. The viewers’ willingness to act was only being increased during the period in which the emotions were still present (Schwartz and Loewenstein 2017).

Instead, one could hope that an argumentative engagement with the ethical dimension of climate change would have a more stable and lasting influence on individual action. However, the question arises at this point whether there really is such a strong connection between argumentatively influenced moral judgments and individual action. Even if one were skeptical in that regard, however, this would not matter as much as one might be initially tempted to think. After all, education in the field of sustainable development should not only aim at influencing individual consumer choices. Rather, an important goal is to improve the societal discourse on sustainability issues on a more general basis. Philosophy and ethics classes can make an important contribution to this.

Of course, an examination of the reasons speaking in favor of sustainable action would give students the opportunity to adopt these reasons and to make their own actions more sustainable. However, they can also acquire a skill that goes beyond this. By engaging with these issues argumentatively, they gain the ability to take a well-founded position on environmental and climate protection issues in discussions with others. This allows them not only to decide for themselves how important climate protection is to them but also to participate in societal discourses dealing with moral issues of this kind.

Such joint reflection is a prerequisite for any democratic community’s ability to adequately respond to various challenges. As the implementation of the 2030 Agenda requires socio-political decision-making on a larger scale, it takes competent citizens who have the abilities needed to contribute to this. They must learn to formulate shared positions and also be able to discuss the viability of their normative foundations. Questions of sustainability are often linked, for example, to the importance one is willing to grant to the demands of future generations. Therefore, among other things, one must enter into a conversation about such questions of intergenerational justice. Once again, philosophy and ethics classes can provide the necessary skills for this.

Within a society, a prerequisite for agreements on certain positions is a conversation among reasonable participants. Such exchanges can lead to joint decisions that have the ability to endure in the long term and that are supported by as many people as possible. This is also particularly important for education in the field of sustainable development. Ultimately, the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development cannot be achieved by merely changing individual consumer behavior but only through a transformation supported by a major part of our society. As we have seen, competence-oriented philosophy and ethics teaching can indeed make a valuable contribution to this.

5 Conclusion

A societal expectation often placed on ethics education is that it should make the individual actions of students morally better. To this, I have replied by pointing out other important goals of philosophy and ethics education. The teaching of these subjects should enable students to reflect critically on their own ethical beliefs, to deal with moral questions in a well-founded way and to take a position on them. If ethics teaching succeeds in this, it also contributes to the development of individual autonomy.

In addition, ethics and philosophy classes can enable students to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. One should have the skills necessary to identify such questions, refine questions that are too general, find shared presuppositions despite different answers to these questions and formulate solutions to remaining dissents. Such skills are important for the functioning of our democracy, and ethics and philosophy teaching can make an important contribution to their development among students. Thereby, school education can not only counteract hardened ideological fronts that stand in the way of reasonable discourse but also impart those skills necessary for the interlocutors to develop together with each other.

Thus, even if selected studies in moral psychology cast doubt on the idea that the promotion of argumentative competences makes individual action morally better, there still remain other goals of a competence-oriented approach of teaching ethics and philosophy that are not called into question by such studies. First, such an approach enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others and fosters those skills that are necessary for any successful societal discourse on moral issues. Both are particularly important goals of moral education anyway.