While commitment to a universal entitlement to education is highly desirable, some significant limitations have been identified in the right to education as currently expressed and implemented. This article assesses the contribution that the capabilities approach can make in this regard. While some proponents have suggested that capabilities…

This article presents a moral analysis of the limitations upon legitimate authority to suspend and expel students in K-12 public schools, and it brings this analysis to bear on a pair of difficult disciplinary cases. The analysis is grounded in a defense of a child's right to receive a public education. It identifies the minimum content of that…

An overarching epistemological goal of science is to develop a comprehensive, systematic, empirically grounded understanding of nature. Two obstacles stand in the way: (1) Nature is enormously complicated. (2) Findings are fallible: no matter how well established a conclusion is, it still might be wrong. To pursue this goal in light of the…

Political liberalism, conceived of as a response to the diversity of conceptions of the good in multicultural societies, aims to put forward a proposal for how to organize political institutions that is acceptable to a wide range of citizens. It does so by remaining neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good while giving all citizens a…

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward,…

Education is a primary way to equip children with the knowledge, skills, and competences necessary to live a life of harmonious relationships with diverse human beings. The escalating violence in the name of religion and ethnicity in Indonesia and other parts of the world is worrying, and one potential long-term solution is to educate school…

One central aspect of a healthy democracy is the practice of democratic dissent. For the first time in many years, dissent is being widely practiced in town hall meetings and on street corners across the United States. Despite this presence, dissent is often suppressed or omitted in the prescribed, tested, hidden, and external curriculum of US…

Beginning in the 1970s, many school US school districts reallocated their already scarce resources from local schools to specially created magnet schools. Many of these magnet schools have some sort of entrance exam, portfolio, or audition requirement that students must pass in order to gain admission. These selective magnet schools are predicated…

Education has become one of the foremost arenas in which political liberals attempt to differentiate their account from that of comprehensive liberals. Rawls posits that the requirements of his theory, as laid out in "Political Liberalism," will be far less stringent than those of liberals such as Kant, Mill or Joseph Raz. However, a number of…

Teachers sometimes shut students up for the sake of civility. My question is whether silencing for the sake of civility can be morally justified when a student derogates fellow students as members of some widely stigmatized group, and the offending speech is not for any further reason to be deplored, for example, as a personally targeted insult.…

Michael Slote's very interesting work on moral sentimentalism and moral education raises some important questions on the meaning of empathy, the limitations of "inductions", and the development of moral education from the perspective of care ethics. These questions are addressed in this commentary. (Contains 5 notes.)

Although I think most of what Michael Slote asserts in his article "Sentimentalist moral education" is correct, I worry about three important ideas that are conspicuous by their absence. The first is the possibility that human emotions and feelings are inherently cognitive, which is never considered in his psychological account of empathy. The…

Moral educators have little to learn from the moral theories in which philosophers routinely trade. These theories--including those by Slote, Hume, and Kant--leave behind the concrete world in which the moral educator labors. As interesting as they may be, they merely devise alternative routes to the same destination--to the main general features…

I respond to Noddings with further clarification of the notion of empathy and also argue that previous care ethics has put too much of an exclusive emphasis on relationships. I respond to Darwall by pointing out some implausible implications of his own and Kantian views about respect and by showing how a sentimentalist approach can avoid those…

Care ethics, and moral sentimentalism more generally, have not developed a picture of moral education that is comparable in scope or depth to the rationalist/Kantian/Rawlsian account of moral education that has been offered by Lawrence Kohlberg. But it is possible to do so if one borrows from the work of Martin Hoffman and makes systematic use of…