Educating moral emotions: a praxiological analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a praxiological analysis of three everyday educational practices or strategies that can be considered as being directed at the moral formation of the emotions. The first consists in requests to imagine other's emotional reactions. The second comprises requests to imitate normative emotional reactions and the third to re-appraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response. The interest of these categories is not just that they help to organize and recognize the significance of what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of ordinary moral-educational interactions between children and educators. We suggest, further, that this analysis provides some new insight into what distinguishes the broad and recurrent conceptions of moral education from one another. Rather than being straightforwardly reducible to intractable differences over core normative or meta-ethical questions they can also be seen as correlating with different suppositions about the central role of the emotions in moral life and, correspondingly, different but to a large degree compatible interpretations of what the ''education of the moral emotions'' primarily means.

Empathy and social-emotional learning: Pitfalls and touchstones for school-based programs

“…These errors underwrite, for instance, the common discipline encounter in which an adult attempts to stimulate transgressor guilt in a victimizer by exhorting the child to "imagine how you would feel! "-that is, to perspective take with an actual or potential victim (Maxwell & Reichenbach 2007). It is also featured in Daniel Goleman' s bellwether book Emotional Intelligence (1995) and, in particular, in the case Goleman makes for why "empathy is the core of social competence."…”

Just compassion: implications for the ethics of the scarcity paradigm in clinical healthcare provision

“…Of course, ethical “requests” of this sort are not exhortations to unquestioningly follow one’s subjective inclinations 32. To be sure, the exercise of practical wisdom implies getting moral problems right, but it also implies caring about getting moral problems right, a disposition of scepticism towards one’s own moral intuitions, and the mastery of reasoning skills that help one gauge the acceptability of ethical claims 33 34.…”

A Review of Kristján Kristjánsson, 2006. Justice and Desert-Based Emotions. Aldershot: Ashgate

“…The conceptual dimensions of moral-emotion pedagogy remain relatively unexplored but as I have argued elsewhere (in Maxwell and Reichenbach 2007), moral emotion education typically takes the form of as a reason-backed request, as part of a programme of affective habituation or not, to bring a child's spontaneous emotional response into line with circumstantially prescribed norms of emotional responding. Kristjánsson seems to envision the task of basic justice education as setting up in children a general moral disposition to respond appropriately to a class of human experiences where fortune intersects with desert: to undeserved bad fortune with compassion, to undeserved good fortune with indignation and so on (cf.…”