Los Valores De La Educación

E NCYCLOPAEDIA OF P HILOSOPHY OF E DUCATION

Ethics and Education
Felicity Haynes

University Western of Australia

IA/ ED A OP CL CY /ENfor previously marginalised voices, to Educators in particular are exhorted to make space r t.h recognise values other than their own. But to what extent can they question the value of their values? Inability to move outside one’s contingent practices andassumptions can .ffs oppressive practices, especially their own. Yet recogprevent teachers from recognizing wwto a terror of exercising independent judgement, so that one nising relativism can lead :/in/w rules of others, the dominant local conventions. This professional takes refuge p the implementation of the conventional rules and sanctions of the system can ironically be htt

Though Plato(through Kant) and Aristotle have been the major influences on ethical theories over time, there are problems with grounding ethics either in Kantian essentialist principles or in an Aristotelian realism. Ethics are after all concerned with choices about interhuman relationships (Barrow 1982) and we are now situated in a multi-cultural massmedia global culture in which we cannot avoid confrontationwith values other than the dominant bourgeois patriarchal Western values which we learnt as unconditional truths of logic or fact.

unethical, leading to impositions of power which can be seen as unfair if routinely applied. Authoritarian control lies directly counter to a view of ethics as professional powersharing, though it is compatible with and often concealed within an economic rationalistframework of increased and controlled efficiency. Any systematic ethical theory runs the risk of being labelled modernist, dogmatic or insensitive to other cultures. The Kantian shift to idealist categorical imperatives, or an Aristotelian appeal to ends which justify means seem to militate against simplistic appeal to logic or fact. Professional ethics requires ongoing judgements, interpretationsof codes of conduct. Where will the educator locate ethical codes of conduct or guiding rules for conduct? In ethics, we build up a rational frame composed of concepts such as good, honesty, justice, blame, , bullying, which help us to see connections between certain types of action
ˇ M. Peters, P. Ghiraldelli, B. Zarni´ , A. Gibbons (eds.) c Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Educationhttp://www.ffst.hr/ENCYCLOPAEDIA

and practices and for which often tacitly we generalise rules for good and bad behaviour through social agreements. These concepts may well be transcendentally necessary before we can get any notion of a social being off the ground. As Rawls (1989) noted while we can agree about concepts, the conceptions which link these to our daily practices are more culturallycontingent. What makes ethics more than a matter of mere ”intuition” or haphazard choice is that it is connected by these common concepts, which means that we can talk about our different conceptions by using a vocabulary of shared concepts, showing by examples what we mean by our conceptions. Ethical explanations and theory are traditionally polarised: the Aristotelians versus the Platonists, theutilitarians versus the Kantians, or the consequentialists versus the deontologists (Stout 1988; Strike et al 1988; Frankena 1963). In a postmodern era, it is less useful to treat them as oppositional theories, than as frameworks which simply identify different aspects of morality.

IA/ ED A OP CL CY /EN r t.h .ffs wwfrom the deontic, private from public, intra-moral from extraTo separate out w ethical:// the moral, however temporarily, may distract us from seeing their interdependence. An aup tonomous or self-actualised person must have a personal commitment to public duty for htt
Wren (1993:81) identified two major forms of morality: the deontic and ethical. The central features of the deontic group, he says, are keyed to the notion of right action (relatively impersonal features such as...