Pluralism, the variety of philosophical, moral, cultural and religious worldviews of contemporary society, is a characteristic of Western democracies. This places upon such societies a great challenge for the teaching of moral principles in schools and for the establishment of such principles in the public sphere. John Rawls's political idea of an overlapping consensus is a principle of decision-making that can be used as a model for arriving at principles for moral education and also as a model for moral deliberation in the public domain. Multicultural narratives can play an important role in enhancing the creation of an overlapping consensus on public moral issues in pluralistic societies. They can be examples of the kinds of challenges involved in the moral decision process and also serve to illustrate the importance of moral perception as a complement to moral reflection in the task of moral deliberation. Teaching the multicultural nature of modern civilization and also the universal incidence of the democratic council tradition can strengthen citizens' sense of mutual respect in the course of public speech. This can help to develop a culture that is more open to the formation of an overlapping consensus on matters that concern public morality.

The first contemporary approaches to moral education emphasize, moral reasoning skills and value analysis. The possible role of imagination in moral understanding is, by and large, neglected. More recent approaches suggest engaging the imagination can benefit moral education. The concept of imagination, however, remains elusive. As the capacity to consider the possible beyond the actual, imagination is a valued educational tool. It is offered that morality and the opportunity for meaningful interpretation of human experience may best be conveyed in symbolic terms. Metaphor, once viewed as an ornamental product of language, has been rediscovered; claiming a position in our comprehension of human understanding. This thesis proposes that engaging the imagination through metaphor is critical for moral education on the basis that our moral understanding is fundamentally imaginative and metaphoric in nature.

Since the "reform and opening-up" policy, Chinese society has been greatly affected by rapid industrialization, the installation of a market economy, and exposure to Western ideas and practices. These changes are having an impact on the current moral education program in varying degrees of intensity. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a framework for moral education in a meaningful and practical manner, and to provide an antidote to the current confusion regarding values in China. This thesis examines moral theories from both Eastern and Western perspectives. It focuses on Confucianism and Storytelling primarily. Confucianism, specially the Five Constant Virtues, still has practical value for a modern Chinese society. The storytelling approach, it is argued, creates the opportunity for critical thinking and self-reflection, and embraces both traditional and modern concerns. I conclude that a new moral education curriculum integrating Confucianism and storytelling is particularly promising in this regard.

In examining children's moral orientations, the study draws on the work of Carol Gilligan (1982) and Lawerence Kohlberg (1969) focusing on age and gender differences in moral development. This study sought to examine children's moral reasoning about situations involving conflicts and how they can resolve them. The present study is carried out in order to ascertain whether children's choice of moral orientations varies across individual factors such as age and gender. The study was conducted at a primary school in a working class suburb in Pietermaritzburg, province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The participants in the study were a group of 72 grade one and two learners. The participants were randomly selected from an alphabetical class list stratified by age (6, 7 and 8 year olds) and gender in that 12 boys and 12 girls were selected in each age group. The pupils were required to respond to three scenarios depicting real life dilemmas. The scenarios were used for obtaining data on the children's moral reasoning. Results have shown that children across gender and age made more care than justice orientation compared to 30% that reflected a justice orientation. An interesting finding was that across age boys' responses reflected a more care orientation (68%) than a justice orientation (32%) which is contrary to Kohlberg's view. However, across age girls' responses reflected a greater care orientation (72%) than a justice orientation (28%), as suggested by Gilligan. Both boys and girls showed a preference for the care orientation because they appear to understand the importance of solving problems in a way that considers the needs and concerns of all individuals. To understand the logic behind the learners determination of who is right and wrong and why, it was necessary to locate and follow the moral language, since the language gives meaning to the learners underlying belief system (Ward, 1988). This study also examined the responses in terms of moral operant concepts, which is defined as the ideas, beliefs, or principles that were used to organize a moral orientation. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

This thesis aims to elucidate an apparent paradox about the role of emotion in moral agency. A number of lines of concern suggest emotion may have serious negative impact on moral agency. On the other hand, there are considerations that suggest emotion also plays a crucial role in motivating, informing and even constituting moral agency. Significantly, there is a strong connection between participant reactive attitudes and ascription of moral status as agent or subject. Nonemotional agents could not hold such attitudes. Also, removing participant reactive attitudes imposes a peculiar and incoherent form of solipsism about moral agency. Given this necessary role for emotion, can we give an account of emotion that will also meet the worries? I examine, as crucial examples, three recurrent lines of concern about emotion - that it threatens our capacities for objectivity, rationality, and autonomy - to tease out the descriptive assumptions about emotion, and the normative assumptions about moral agency, that these objections are based on. I then offer three lines of argument towards resolving these worries. The first addresses the worries directly, and the other two shift blame off emotion. First, then, I argue that the normative concerns can largely be met by a descriptive account that views emotion as cognitive. However, “judgementalist” cognitive accounts that assimilate emotion to belief may make emotion metaethically respectable at the cost of making it meta-ethically redundant. Also, such accounts are descriptively less than plausible. A better approach, I argue, is to allow that belief may play a significant role in emotion but to also allow at least a quasicognitive role to the distinctively affective element in emotion: feeling. I also argue for a hrther revision of cognitive accounts to emphasise that emotions reflect features of those who feel them. If we were different, our emotions would be different. So, secondly, I argue that a number of the features that power worries about emotions have their sources in what those who feel them are like, rather than in emotions as such. However, both human nature and emotion are capable of significant plasticity and diversity. We are also capable of a considerable - but not infinite - degree of self-determination both about what we are like and what our emotions are like. Finally, I argue that the normative assumptions that power the objections to emotion are themselves in need of revision - and in some tension with each other. This leads to a McGufin-theory of emotion in moral agency: Problems with emotion’s place in moral agency serve as indicators of unresolved tensions in our thinking about moral agency, rather than just indicators of problems with emotion as such. In view of this, I also argue for caution in any attempts to change emotion to fit particular ideals of moral agency.

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In this dissertation, I propose a new method of dealing with moral relativism. This method, which I call the 'parallel arguments' approach, has the unusual feature that -- if successful -- it neutralizes the force of relativistic arguments in metaethics without making commitments to any particular (or even general) antirelativist position. While other writers have employed this approach in limited ways, I believe that this is the first self-conscious and systematic use of this approach in the particular area I deal with. The bulk of the dissertation is devoted to a demonstration of the 'parallel arguments' approach against the arguments for moral relativism advocated by one of its most famous contemporary proponents, Gilbert Harman.The aim of the introduction is to motivate the overall project by showing why a new approach seems to be desirable in dealing with moral relativism. In the introduction, I clarify and justify the 'parallel arguments' approach that will be employed in the chapters to come. The first chapter sets out the target of the dissertation: the relativistic arguments of Gilbert Harman. In order for the 'parallel arguments' approach to be applied to these arguments, they must first be clarified and cleansed of simpler oversights. For that reason, while the first chapter contains an attempt at an exegesis of all Harman's arguments for moral relativism, that exegesis is accompanied throughout with a critical philosophical gloss. In that gloss, I present and discuss a number of textual and argumentative difficulties in Harman's writings that seem to have been missed by previous critics. The second chapter is the beginning of the application of the 'parallel arguments' approach to Harman's case for relativism. The chapter is devoted to those relativistic arguments for which Harman is most famous: namely, arguments for moral relativism that stem from an analogy or disanalogy between morality and science. I deal with the first of these arguments quickly, and spend the bulk of the second chapter discussing Harman's most famous relativistic argument. This argument of Harman's is based on a disanalogy between the discovery that there is a proton in a cloud chamber and the discovery that the burning of a cat is immoral. After clarifying more clearly what is at issue in this argument, I present and discuss two distinct 'parallel arguments' responses to it. The third chapter deals with the other two arguments Harman presents for moral relativism: the argument from moral disagreement and what I call the 'argument from moral reasons'. I clarify both arguments and, again, present a 'parallel arguments' response to each. In the conclusion, I return to an issue that was raised in the introduction: might there not be ethicists of a particular philosophical temperament such that they could rightly reject the 'parallel arguments' approach as ineffective? I argue in response that, while this is possible, it does not seem to be a problem for my project. / Graduate

In metaethics, moral irrealists argue that moral facts are neither ontologically real nor mind-independent. In moral semantics, irrealists who are descriptivist error theorists argue that typical moral claims attempt to report descriptive moral facts but that such facts do not exist, so typical moral claims are descriptively false or erroneous. Moral irrealists who are non-descriptivists, such as Mark Timmons, argue for a different function of moral claims. Timmons argues that moral claims attempt to guide action. He further maintains that moral claims can be true or false, but not according to a descriptivist function (he affirms cognitivism but denies descriptivism). I lay out Timmons‘ semantics and grapple with a number of objections to his view. I conclude that Timmons ought to discard his contextual truth-apt semantics and his non-descriptivism; instead he should defend the prescriptive, or evaluative, function of moral claims within an overarching descriptivist error theory. / Graduate / 0422

This thesis is about the character of the non-cognitivist theory of ethics and its practical impact on contemporary moral and political life, It is suggested that non-cognitivism, understood as a distinct style of ethical theorising advanced most notably by Ayer, Stevenson, Hare and Mackie, has both a philosophical character, and an ideological character of a liberal-individualist kind. In the first four chapters the philosophical nature of the non-cognitivist account of ethics is critically examined. In chapters five and six it is argued, following Maclntyre, that there is a need to sketch out the historical context of the emergence of the theory in order to gain a complete understanding of its character. This is undertaken by drawing upon previously unpublished or unavailable material by such thinkers as Duncan-Jones, Barnes and Stevenson. In chapters seven and eight the ideological character of the theory is examined by indicating that philosophy and ideology constitute two logically different forms of understanding. It is suggested that the philosophical arguments advanced within non-cognitivism serve the purpose of giving coherent expression to a presumed ideological liberal-individualist conception of man and his relation to others in the world. Chapters nine and ten considers the implications for contemporary liberal theory of the non-cognitivist dominance of the moral philosophy and political practices of the Western democracies. It is claimed that the attempts of Dunn, Forty and Rawls to justify liberal theory and practice are unsuccessful because non-cognim has effectively undermined the distinction between morality and prudence upon which such a justification is grounded. The conclusion reached is that liberalism is in a state of crisis.