what is the moral education essay

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Moral Education: Teaching Students to Become Better People

Author: Dominik Balg Categories:  Philosophy of Education , Ethics , Social and Political Philosophy Word Count: 999

Moral guidance is an integral part of primary and secondary schooling. For instance, students are praised for being helpful and kind, and told that this is right and good. They are also told not to cheat, bully, and steal, as these actions are wrong and bad.

So schools are engaged in some forms of moral education. [1]

What are the proper goals of this moral education, and how should those goals be pursued?

Theories of moral education try to answer that question: they provide ideas about how we can, and should, try to teach morality and shape students into morally better people.

This essay introduces some of the most influential theories.

1. Directive vs. Non-directive Theories of Moral Education

Theories of moral education can be divided into directive and non-directive theories. [2]  

According to directive theories, schools should directly teach students that some actions are wrong, that some actions are right, and tell them which is which and why . They should also teach students some about what’s fair and just, and some about what makes a person morally better and worse: what character traits are virtues and which are vices. 

In contrast, non-directive theories do not aim to teach any specific moral views: they focus on developing students’ abilities to discover for themselves what’s moral. These theories do, however, usually propose that moral education involves giving students some knowledge, e.g., about moral concepts and arguments.

2. Directive Theories

There are several influential directive theories, each with a different proposal for which specific moral views should be taught in educational settings:

• knowledge-transmission theories recommend that schools should teach moral views that their proponents reasonably believe are known to be true [3] ;
• transcendental theories urge the teaching of values that are presupposed by a wide variety of moral outlooks, the moral foundations that people with different moral views on broader social and political issues agree on;
• pragmatic theories propose that schools should teach those moral views that are useful for well-functioning societies. [4]

These theories share a common idea: to become functioning members of society, to make responsible decisions, and to lead good lives, students need to know something about what’s right and wrong, and good and bad. They need to understand and accept some basic rules of conduct: e.g., they need to accept that one should not be violent or treat other people unfairly. Since moral rules can conflict with students’ immediate desires and preferences, we can’t expect students to make good moral decisions without explicit instruction: directive theories attempt to provide this guidance. [5]

While this all may seem plausible, there are, however, concerns about directive approaches. Beyond many of the basic rules of conduct for functioning classrooms and societies, moral issues are often controversial. Concerning ethical questions where there are reasonable disagreements, teaching specific answers as knowledge might amount to wrongful indoctrination , not moral education. [6]  Furthermore, people often disagree on the details of which moral views everyone must accept or agree on—what might be “transcendent”—and which exact moral views people need to accept for a functioning society—what’s “pragmatic.”

Finally, even advocates of directive theories should agree students should also learn how to make responsible moral decisions independently: teaching some specific moral views won’t help them develop the skills they need to make well-reasoned moral judgments on their own. [7]

3. Non-Directive Theories

The common aim of non-directive theories of moral education is to enable students to reasonably and responsibly answer moral questions independently. Different theories propose different ways to achieve that aim.

3.1. Skill-based Theories

Skill-based theories aim at the development of critical reasoning skills. [8]  These include the ability to give reasons for one’s views, to assess the quality of different arguments, and to reconsider one’s views in light of new evidence. [9]  By developing such skills, students can better make their own reasoned moral judgments.

3.2. Emotion-based Theories

According to emotion-based theories , moral education should help students develop emotional skills that should guide their moral judgment: e.g., by engaging in role-plays or reading literary narratives and watching films, students can develop empathy and sympathy . [10]  They can also learn how to use techniques like meditation or breathing exercises to cultivate attentiveness or feelings of compassion , hopefulness, or gratitude . [11]  Such emotional skills might contribute to students’ own well-being and help them make better moral choices.

3.3. Character-based Theories

According to character-based theories , moral education should build moral character. This view is usually spelled out in terms of cultivating moral virtues such as honesty , courage , humility, and compassion [12] : by promoting the development of such virtues, teachers can help students to become better people. [13]  For example, teachers can read and discuss texts of virtuous exemplars like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King with their students to motivate them to emulate these persons’ attitudes or characters. [14]

4. Conclusion

Any particular choice between these theories of moral education must respect students’ autonomy and acknowledge that moral questions are often controversial: this will constrain the use of directive approaches, which recommend teaching specific moral views. But the fact that moral questions are often not controversial will constrain non-directive approaches also: if a student concludes from some attempt at non-directive moral education that there’s nothing ever wrong with cheating, bullying, and stealing, or that arrogance and cruelty are virtues, then that “moral education” has failed. 

A general challenge is that successful moral education should ideally not just have an impact on how students think and feel, but also on how they act . People often believe they should act a certain way, but can’t bring themselves to do so. So students not only need to be brought to have appropriate moral beliefs—which often isn’t easy—they also need to learn to put their moral beliefs into practice: that’s often even harder, for anyone, at any age, and at any level of education. [15]  

While many open questions remain, the above considerations should also give rise to some optimism: there are many theories that schools and teachers can experiment with as they try to help students become better, and hopefully genuinely good, people.

[1] This essay is about moral or ethical education, but what is morality or ethics anyway? (Philosophers often consider ethics and morality to be the same thing: what’s ethical is moral, what’s immoral is unethical, and so on.).

This is a challenging philosophical question, and one way to answer it—among many other ways—is that ethics or morality concerns behavior that ethical or moral theories would condemn as wrong, or support as right . Two influential ethical theories include consequentialism , which focusses on promoting overall good consequences, and Kant’s ethics , or Kantian deontology , which focuses on respecting persons and following rules that we’d accept that everyone follow. For introductions to these theories, see Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz and Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman.

To better understand what morality and ethics are, readers are encouraged to review these and other morally theories, and reflect on how they might be relevant to personal ethical choices and ethical questions about law and social policy: many essays in the Ethics section of 1000-Word Philosophy can provide guidance in reflecting on particular ethical issues.

[2] For a more detailed explanation of the distinction between directive and non-directive theories of moral education, see, e.g., Hand 2014, 526; 2020, 14.

[3] Advocates of knowledge-transmission theories, of course, presume that there is some moral knowledge , or that some moral claims are known . While the idea of moral knowledge is sometimes controversial, many people would think and say that they know it’s usually good to be a helpful and kind person and that it’s always wrong to bully innocent people, and that stealing is usually, if not always, wrong: so most people seem to think there is some knowledge. For introductions to moral epistemology —the application of epistemology, or theory of knowledge, to moral claims—see Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge by Thomas Metcalf and Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf.

[4] On knowledge-transmission theories see, e.g., Balg 2023. On transcendental theories, see, e.g., Hirst 1974 and Tiedemann 2019. On pragmatic theories, see, e.g., Hand 2014, 2018.

[5] For a more detailed discussion of the indispensability of moral education, see, e.g., Hand 2018, 7-10.

[6] On what indoctrination is and why it’s often problematic, see Indoctrination: What is it to Indoctrinate Someone? by Chris Ranalli. For an introductory discussion of how we might respond when reasonable people disagree in their views on an issue, see The Epistemology of Disagreement by Jonathan Matheson.

[7] See Moral Testimony by Annaleigh Curtis for a discussion of how gaining knowledge from others might not result in understanding that topic. Applied to moral education, the concern is that someone might know that some action is wrong, yet not understand why the action is wrong in a manner that will allow them to apply that understanding to other moral issues. A concern about directive theories of moral education is that they won’t provide this type of understanding.

[8] For a defense of skill-based theories, see, e.g., Meyer 2023, Musschenga 2009.

[9] See Critical Thinking: What is it to be a Critical Thinker? by Carolina Flores and Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf. These essays review critical thinking and argument analysis concepts and skills in general, and these concepts and skills can be applied to ethics and moral education.

[10] People often think of empathy as a moral virtue: it’s good to be a person who would respond with empathy. But many philosophers and psychologists define empathy as a specific emotional capability , i.e., the ability to imagine other people’s feelings (see, e.g., Eisenberg and Strayer 1987; Goldman 2006; Hoffman 2000). Against the background of such an understanding, empathy shouldn’t be conceived of as a virtue because virtues and capabilities are two different things: while the former indicate what a person would (not) do under certain circumstances, the latter indicate what a person is able to do (Battaly 2011). Given this, a person could use her empathetic capabilities for purposes that are morally problematic: e.g., to manipulate or exploit other people. So, empathy is not, in itself , a moral virtue: it is a virtue only when it is used to promote right and good ends, so to speak.

For a defense of emotion-based theories that specifically appeal to the emotion of empathy, see, e.g., Nussbaum 2003, Slote 2009. For a defense of an emotion-based theory that specifically appeals to the emotion of sympathy, see, e.g., Noddings 2002.

[11] For an emotion-based approach that specifically recommends the use of such techniques, see e.g., Ash et al. 2019.

[12] See Virtue Ethics by David Merry for a discussion of what virtues , or good character traits are

[13] For a defense of this view, see, e.g., Arthur et al. 2017, Kristjánsson 2015 or Miller 2022.

[14] For a discussion of this strategy, see, e.g., Vos 2017.

[15] Indeed, it has been observed that too many philosophers and ethicists (and other thinkers), even ones who develop moral theories and theories of moral education, sometimes have false, unjustified, or bad ethical views and/or behave badly. For discussion about how to respond to this, see Responding to Morally Flawed Historical Philosophers and Philosophies by Victor Fabian Abundez-Guerra and Nathan Nobis.

Arthur, J., Kristjánsson, K., Harrison, T., Sanderse, W., and Wright, D. (2017). Teaching Character and Virtue in Schools. Routledge: London.

Ash, M., Harrison, T., Pinto, M., DiClemente, R., and Negi, L. T. (2019). A model for cognitively‑based compassion training: theoretical underpinnings and proposed mechanisms. Social Theory & Health 19: 43–67.

Balg, D. (2023). Moral Disagreement and Moral Education: What’s the Problem? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Online first.

Battaly, H. (2011). Is empathy a Virtue? In: Amy Coplan, and Peter Goldies (ed): Empathy – Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 277-301.

Eisenberg, N., and Strayer, J. (1987). Empathy and its development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hand, M. (2014). Towards a Theory of Moral Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 48(4): 519-532.

Hand M. (2018). A Theory of Moral Education. London: Routledge.

Hand, M. (2020): Moral Education in the Community of Inquiry. Journal of Philosophy in Schools 7(2): 4-20.

Hirst, P. (1974): Moral Education in a Secular Society . London: University of London Press.

Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kristjánsson, K. (2015): Aristotelian Character Education. Routledge, New York.

Meyer, K. (2023): Moral Education Through the Fostering of Reasoning Skills. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Online first.

Miller, C. (2022): How Situationism Impacts the Goals of Character Education. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. Online first.

Musschenga, A. W. (2009). Moral Intuitions, Moral Expertise and Moral Reasoning. Journal of Philosophy of Education 43(4): 597-613.

Noddings, Nel (2002): Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Nussbaum, M. (2003): Cultivating humanity. A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Slote, M. (2009): Caring, Empathy and Moral Education. In Harvey Siegel (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, 211-226. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tiedemann, M. (2019): Philosophical Education and Transcendental Tolerance. Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis 39(2), 32-40.

Vos, P. H. (2017): Learning from exemplars: emulation, character formation and the complexities of ordinary life. Journal of Beliefs & Values 29(1): 17-28.

Related Essays

Critical Thinking: What is it to be a Critical Thinker? by Carolina Flores

Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? by Thomas Metcalf

Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz

Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman

Virtue Ethics by David Merry

Epistemology, or Theory of Knowledge by Thomas Metcalf

Ethical Realism by Thomas Metcalf

The Epistemology of Disagreement by Jonathan Matheson

Indoctrination: What is it to Indoctrinate Someone? By Chris Ranalli

Moral Testimony by Annaleigh Curtis

Philosophical Inquiry in Childhood by Jana Mohr Lone

Responding to Morally Flawed Historical Philosophers and Philosophies by Victor Fabian Abundez-Guerra and Nathan Nobis

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About the Author

Dominik Balg is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mainz. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cologne. He specializes in philosophy of education and philosophical issues in teaching philosophy. philpeople.org/profiles/dominik-balg

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Moral Education

A brief history of moral education, the return of character education, current approaches to moral education.

Only a handful of educational theorists hold the view that if only the adult world would get out of the way, children would ripen into fully realized people. Most thinkers, educational practitioners, and parents acknowledge that children are born helpless and need the care and guidance of adults into their teens and often beyond. More specifically, children need to learn how to live harmoniously in society. Historically, the mission of schools has been to develop in the young both the intellectual and the moral virtues. Concern for the moral virtues, such as honesty, responsibility, and respect for others, is the domain of moral education.

Moral education, then, refers to helping children acquire those virtues or moral habits that will help them individually live good lives and at the same time become productive, contributing members of their communities. In this view, moral education should contribute not only to the students as individuals, but also to the social cohesion of a community. The word moral comes from a Latin root ( mos, moris ) and means the code or customs of a people, the social glue that defines how individuals should live together.

A Brief History of Moral Education

Every enduring community has a moral code and it is the responsibility and the concern of its adults to instill this code in the hearts and minds of its young. Since the advent of schooling, adults have expected the schools to contribute positively to the moral education of children. When the first common schools were founded in the New World, moral education was the prime concern. New England Puritans believed the moral code resided in the Bible. Therefore, it was imperative that children be taught to read, thus having access to its grounding wisdom. As early as 1642 the colony of Massachusetts passed a law requiring parents to educate their children. In 1647 the famous Old Deluder Satan Act strengthened the law. Without the ability to read the Scriptures, children would be prey to the snares of Satan.

The colonial period. As common school spread throughout the colonies, the moral education of children was taken for granted. Formal education had a distinctly moral and religion emphasis. Harvard College was founded to prepare clergy for their work. Those men who carved out the United States from the British crown risked their fortunes, their families, and their very lives with their seditious rebellion. Most of them were classically educated in philosophy, theology, and political science, so they had learned that history's great thinkers held democracy in low regard. They knew that democracy contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction and could degenerate into mobocracy with the many preying on the few and with political leaders pandering to the citizenry's hunger for bread and circuses. The founders' writings, particularly those of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, are filled with admonitions that their new country make education a high priority. While the early leaders saw economic reasons for more and longer schooling, they were convinced that the form of government they were adopting was, at heart, a moral compact among people.

Nineteenth century. As the young republic took shape, schooling was promoted for both secular and moral reasons. In 1832, a time when some of the Founding Fathers were still alive, Abraham Lincoln wrote, in his first political announcement (March 9,1832), "I desire to see a time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry, shall become much more general than at present." Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century champion of the common schools, strongly advocated for moral education. He and his followers were worried by the widespread drunkenness, crime, and poverty during the Jacksonian period in which they lived. Of concern, too, were the waves of immigrants flooding into cities, unprepared for urban life and particularly unprepared to participate in democratic civic life. Mann and his supporters saw free public schools as the ethical leaven of society. In 1849, in his twelfth and final report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, he wrote that if children age four to sixteen could experience "the elevating influences of good schools, the dark host of private vices and public crimes, which now embitter domestic peace and stain the civilization of the age, might, in 99 cases in every 100, be banished from the world"(p. 96).

In the nineteenth century, teachers were hired and trained with the clear expectation that they would advance the moral mission of the school and attend to character formation. Literature, biography, and history were taught with the explicit intention of infusing children with high moral standards and good examples to guide their lives. Students' copybook headings offered morally uplifting thoughts: "Quarrelsome persons are always dangerous companions" and "Praise follows exertion." The most successful textbooks during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the famed McGuffey readers, which were filled with moral stories, urgings, and lessons. During this period of our evolution as a nation, moral education was deep in the very fabric of our schools.

There was, however, something else in the fabric of moral education that caused it to become problematic: religion. In the United States, as a group of colonies and later as a new nation, the overwhelming dominant religion was Protestantism. While not as prominent as during the Puritan era, the King James Bible was, nevertheless, a staple of U.S. public schools. The root of the moral code was seen as residing there. However, as waves of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy came to the country from the mid-nineteenth century forward, the pan-Protestant tone and orthodoxy of the schools came under scrutiny and a reaction set in. Concerned that their children would be weaned from their faith, Catholics developed their own school system. Later in the twentieth century, other religious groups, such as Jews, Muslims, and even various Protestant denominations, formed their own schools. Each group desired, and continues to desire, that its moral education be rooted in its respective faith or code.

Twentieth century. During this same late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century period, there was also a growing reaction against organized religion and the belief in a spiritual dimension of human existence. Intellectual leaders and writers were deeply influenced by the ideas of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, the German political philosopher Karl Marx, the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and the German philosopher and poet Friedrich Nietzsche, and by a growing strict interpretation of the separation of church and state doctrine. This trend increased after World War II and was further intensified by what appeared to be the large cracks in the nation's moral consensus in the late 1960s. Since for so many Americans the strongest roots of moral truths reside in their religious beliefs, educators and others became wary of using the schools for moral education. More and more this was seen to be the province of the family and the church. Some educators became proponents of "value-free" schooling, ignoring the fact that it is impossible to create a school devoid of ethical issues, lessons, and controversies.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, as many schools attempted to ignore the moral dimension of schooling, three things happened: Achievement scores began to decline, discipline and behavior problems increased, and voices were raised accusing the schools of teaching secular humanism. As the same time, educators were encouraged to address the moral concerns of students using two approaches: values clarification and cognitive developmental moral education.

The first, values clarification, rests on little theory other than the assumption that students need practice choosing among moral alternatives and that teachers should be facilitators of the clarification process rather than indoctrinators of particular moral ideas or value choices. This approach, although widely practiced, came under strong criticism for, among other things, promoting moral relativism among students. While currently few educators confidently advocate values clarification, its residue of teacher neutrality and hesitance to actively address ethical issues and the moral domain persists.

The second approach, cognitive developmental moral education, sprang from the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and was further developed by Lawrence Kohlberg. In contrast to values clarification, cognitive moral development is heavy on theory and light on classroom applications. In its most popular form, Kohlberg posited six sequential stages of moral development, which potentially individuals could achieve. Each stage represents a distinctive way an individual thinks about a moral situation or problem. Teachers are encouraged to engage students from an early age and throughout their schooling in discussion of moral issues and dilemmas. In the later years of his life, Kohlberg was urging educators to transform their schools into "just communities," environments within which students' moral stage development would accelerate.

The Return of Character Education

In the early 1980s, amid the widespread concern over students' poor academic achievements and behavior, educators rediscovered the word character. Moral education had a religious tinge, which made many uneasy. Character with its emphasis on forming good habits and eliminating poor habits struck a popular and traditional chord. The word character has a Greek root, coming from the verb "to engrave." Thus character speaks to the active process of making marks or signs (i.e., good habits) on one's person. The early formation of good habits is widely acknowledged to be in the best interests of both the individual and society.

In addition, character formation is recognized as something that parents begin early, but the work is hardly completed when a child goes to school. Implicit in the concept of character is the recognition that adults begin the engraving process of habituation to consideration of others, self-control, and responsibility, then teachers and others contribute to the work, but eventually the young person takes over the engraving or formation of his own character. Clearly, though, with their learning demands and taxing events, children's school years are a prime opportunity for positive and negative (i.e., virtues and vices) character formation.

The impetus and energy behind the return of character education to American schools did not come from within the educational community. It has been fueled, first, by parental desire for orderly schools where standards of behavior and good habits are stressed, and, second, by state and national politicians who responded to these anxious concerns of parents. During his presidency, William Clinton hosted five conferences on character education. President George W. Bush expanded on the programs of the previous administration and made character education a major focus of his educational reform agenda. One of the politically appealing aspects of character education, as opposed to moral education with its religious overtones, is that character education speaks more to the formation of a good citizen. A widely repeated definition (i.e., character education is helping a child to know the good, to desire the good, and to do the good) straddles this issue. For some people the internal focus of character education comfortably can be both religious and civic and for others the focus can be strictly civic, dealing exclusively on the formation of the good citizen.

Current Approaches to Moral Education

The overwhelming percentage of efforts within public education to address the moral domain currently march under the flag of character education. Further, since these conscious efforts at addressing issues of character formation are relatively recent, they are often called character education programs. The term program suggests, however, discrete initiatives that replace an activity or that are added to the school's curriculum (e.g., a new reading program or mathematics program). And, although there are character education programs available, commercially and otherwise, most advocates urge the public schools to take an infusion approach to educating for character.

The infusion approach. In general, an infusion approach to character education aims to restore the formation of students' characters to a central place in schooling. Rather than simply adding on character formation to the other responsibilities of schools, such as numeracy, literacy, career education, health education, and other goals, a focus on good character permeates the entire school experience. In essence, character education joins intellectual development as the overarching goals of the school. Further, character education is seen, not in competition with or ancillary to knowledge- and skill-acquisition goals, but as an important contributor to these goals. To create a healthy learning environment, students need to develop the virtues of responsibility and respect for others. They must eliminate habits of laziness and sloppiness and acquire habits of self-control and diligence. The infusion approach is based on the view that the good habits that contribute to the formation of character in turn contribute directly to the academic goals of schooling.

A mainstay of the infusion approach is the recovery, recasting, or creating of a school's mission statement, one that reflects the priority placed on the development of good character. Such a statement legitimizes the attention of adults and students alike to this educational goal. It tells administrators that teachers and staff should be hired with good character as a criterion; it tells teachers that not only should character be stressed to students but also their own characters are on display; it tells coaches that athletics should be seen through the lens of sportsmanship rather than winning and losing; and it tells students that their efforts and difficulties, their successes and disappointments are all part of a larger process, the formation of their characters.

Critical to the infusion approach is using the curriculum as a source of character education. This is particularly true of the language arts, social studies, and history curricula. The primary focus of these subjects is the study of human beings, real and fictitious. Our great narrative tales carry moral lessons. They convey to the young vivid images of the kinds of people our culture admires and wants them to emulate. These subjects also show them how lives can be wasted, or worse, how people can betray themselves and their communities. Learning about the heroism of former slave Sojourner Truth, who became an evangelist and reformer, and the treachery of Benedict Arnold, the American army officer who betrayed his country to the British, is more than picking up historical information. Encountering these lives fires the student's moral imagination and deepens his understanding of what constitutes a life of character. Other subjects, such as mathematics and science, can teach students the necessity of intellectual honesty. The curricula of our schools not only contain the core knowledge of our culture but also our moral heritage.

In addition to the formal or overt curriculum, schools and classrooms also have a hidden or covert curriculum. A school's rituals, traditions, rules, and procedures have an impact on students' sense of what is right and wrong and what is desired and undesired behavior. So, too, does the school's student culture. What goes on in the lunchroom, the bathrooms, the locker rooms, and on the bus conveys powerful messages to students. This ethos or moral climate of a school is difficult to observe and neatly categorize. Nevertheless, it is the focus of serious attention by educators committed to an infusion approach.

An important element of the infusion approach is the language with which a school community addresses issues of character and the moral domain. Teachers and administrators committed to an infusion approach use the language of virtues and speak of good and poor behavior and of right and wrong. Words such as responsibility, respect, honesty, and perseverance are part of the working vocabulary of adults and students alike.

Other approaches. One of the most popular approaches to character education is service learning. Sometimes called community service, this approach is a conscious effort to give students opportunities, guidance, and practice at being moral actors. Based on the Greek philosopher Aristotle's concept of character formation (e.g., a man becomes virtuous by performing virtuous deeds; brave by doing brave deeds), many schools and school districts have comprehensive programs of service learning. Starting in kindergarten, children are given small chores such as feeding the classroom's gerbil or straightening the desks and chairs. They later move on to tutoring younger students and eventually work up to more demanding service activities in the final years of high school. Typically, these high-school level service-learning activities are off-campus at a home for the blind, a hospital, or a day-care center. Besides placement, the school provides training, guidance, and problem-solving support to students as they encounter problems and difficulties.

In recent years, schools across the country have adopted the virtue (or value) of the month approach, where the entire school community gives particular attention to a quality such as cooperation or kindness. Consideration of the virtue for that particular month is reflected in the curriculum, in special assemblies, in hallway and classroom displays, and in school-home newsletters. Related to this are schoolwide programs, such as no put-downs projects, where attention is focused on the destructive and hurtful effects of sarcasm and insulting language and students are taught to replace put-downs with civil forms of communication.

There are several skill-development and classroom strategies that are often related to character formation. Among the more widespread are teaching mediation and conflict-resolution skills, where students are given direct teaching in how to deal with disagreements and potential fights among fellow students. Many advocates of cooperative learning assert that instructing students using this instructional process has the added benefit of teaching students habits of helping others and forming friendships among students with whom they otherwise would not mix.

Issues and Controversies

The moral education of children is a matter of deep concern to everyone from parents to civic and religious leaders. It is no accident, then, that this subject has been a matter of apprehension and controversy throughout the history of American schools. Issues of morality touch an individual's most fundamental beliefs. Since Americans are by international standards both quite religiously observant and quite religiously diverse, it is not surprising that moral and character education controversies often have a religious source. Particularly after a period when moral education was not on the agenda of most public schools, its return is unsettling to some citizens. Many who are hostile to religion see this renewed interest in moral education as bringing religious perspectives back into the school "through the back door." On the other hand, many religious people are suspicious of its return because they perceive it to be an attempt to undermine their family's religious-based training with a state-sponsored secular humanism. As of the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the renewed attention to this area has been relatively free of controversy.

Contributing to the positive climate is the use of the term character rather than moral. While moral carries religious overtones for many, the word character speaks to good habits and the civic virtues, which hold a community together and allow us to live together in harmony.

A second issue relates to the level of schools and the age of students. The revival of character education in our schools has been evident to a much greater degree in elementary schools. Here schools can concentrate on the moral basics for which there is wide public consensus. The same is true, but to a somewhat lesser degree, for middle and junior high schools. And although there are many positive examples of secondary schools that have implemented broad and effective character education programs, secondary school faculties are hesitant to embrace character education. Part of it is the departmental structures and the time demands of the curriculum; part of it is the age and sophistication of their students; and part of it is that few secondary school teachers believe they have a clear mandate to deal with issues of morality and character.

A third issue relates to the education of teachers. Whereas once teachers in training took philosophy and history of education–courses that introduced them to the American school's traditional involvement with moral and character education–now few states require these courses. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the American schools are seeing the large-scale retirement of career teachers and their replacement with large numbers of new teachers. These young teachers tend to be products of elementary and secondary schools where teachers gave little or no direct attention to moral and character education. In addition, a 1999 study by the Character Education Partnership of half of the nation's teacher education institutions showed that although over 90 percent of the leaders of these programs thought character education ought to be a priority in the preparation of teachers, only 13 percent were satisfied with their institution's efforts.

Evaluation of Moral and Character Education

There are a few character education programs with encouraging evaluation results. The Character Development Project (CDP) has more than 18 years of involvement in several K–6 schools, and in those schools where teachers received staff development and on-site support over 52 percent of the student outcome variables showed significant differences. The Boy Scouts of America developed the Learning For Life Curriculum in the early 1990s for elementary schools. This commercially available, stand-alone curriculum teaches core moral values, such as honesty and responsibility. In a large-scale controlled experiment involving fifty-nine schools, students exposed to the Learning For Life materials showed significant gains on their understanding of the curriculum's core values, but they were also judged by their teachers to have gained greater self-discipline and ability to stay on a task.

Still, evaluation and assessment in character and moral education is best described as a work in progress. The field is held back by the lack of an accepted battery of reliable instruments, a lack of wide agreement on individual or schoolwide outcomes, and by the short-term nature of most of the existent studies. Complicating these limitations is a larger one: the lack of theoretical agreement of what character is. Human character is one of those overarching entities that is the subject of disciples from philosophy to theology, from psychology to sociology. Further, even within these disciplines there are competing and conflicting theories and understandings of the nature of human character. But although the evaluation challenges are daunting, they are dwarfed by the magnitude of the adult community's desire to see that our children possess a moral compass and the good habits basic to sound character.

See also: C HARACTER D EVELOPMENT ; E LEMENTARY E DUCATION , subentries on C URRENT T RENDS , H ISTORY OF ; E THICS, subentry on S CHOOL T EACHING ; S CHOOL R EFORM ; S ECONDARY E DUCATION, subentries on C URRENT T RENDS , H ISTORY OF .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

B ERKOWITZ , M ARVIN W., and O SER , F RITZ , eds. 1985. Moral Education: Theory and Application. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

C HAZAN , B ARRY . 1985. Contemporary Approaches to Moral Education: Analyzing Alternative Theories. New York: Teachers College Press.

C OLES , R OBERT . 1989. The Call of Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

D AMON , W ILLIAM . 1995. Greater Expectations: Over-coming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools. New York: Free Press.

E BERLY , D ON E., ed. 1995. America's Character: Recovering Civic Virtue. Lanham, MD: Madison.

H IMMELFARB , G ERTRUDE . 1995. The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. New York: Knopf.

K ILPATRICK , W ILLIAM K. 1992. Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: Moral Literacy and the Case for Character Education. New York: Simonand Schuster.

K REEFT , P ETER . 1986. Back to Virtue. San Francisco: Ignatius.

L EWIS , C LIVE S. 1947. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillian.

L ICKONA , T HOMAS . 1991. Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility. New York: Bantam.

M ACINTYRE , A LASDAIR . 1981. After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.

M ANN , H ORACE . 1849. Twelfth Annual Report of the Board of Education together with the Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education. Boston: Dutton and Wentworth.

N UCCI , L ARRY P., ed. 1989. Moral Development and Character Education: A Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

P OWER , F. C LARK ; H IGGINS , A NN ; and K OHLBERG , L AWRENCE . 1989. Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education. New York: Columbia University Press.

P RITCHARD , I VOR . 1998. Good Education: The Virtues of Learning. Norwalk, CT: Judd.

R YAN , K EVIN , and B OHLIN , K AREN . 1999. Building Character in Schools: Practical Ways to Bring Moral Instruction to Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

W ILSON , J AMES Q. 1993. The Moral Sense. New York: Free Press.

W RIGHT , R OBERT . 1994. The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. New York: Pantheon.

K EVIN R YAN

Additional topics

• Henry C. Morrison (1871–1945)
• Moral Development - Lawrence Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development and Education

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A Moral Education

In praise of filth.

Milena Mihaylova, Silence Creative Commons

I: THE DILEMMA

Here’s a way of putting the problem: on one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean. Not just to mean, but to be meaningful—to be useful for, and so maybe responsible to, other realms of life: our sense of community, say, or politics, our moral relations. As often happens when competing positions have claims to truth, the pendulum of consensus swings between them, and the pendulum has swung quite far, in recent years, toward the pole of responsibility and holding art to account. Within the small world of people who care about literature and art, the culture is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime: witness our polemics about who has the right to what subject matter, our conviction that art has a duty to right representational wrongs, that poems or novels or films can be guilty of a violence that seems ever less metaphorical against an audience construed as ever more vulner­able. We have a sense that the most important questions we can ask about a work of art are whether and to what extent it furthers extra-artistic aims, to what extent it serves a world outside itself. The idea that artists should make what they feel compelled to make, regardless of such considerations, that in fact art should be pro­tected from responsibilities of this kind, seems part and parcel of a discredited Romantic model of the artist as exempt from workaday morality, licensed by genius to act badly, or at least to disregard the claims of others. When I work with students now, graduate or undergraduate, their primary mode of engagement with a text often seems to be a particular kind of moral judgment, as though before they can see anything else in stories or poems they have to sort them into piles of the righteous and the problematic. These responses sometimes seem to me an index of an anxiety I see more and more in my students, in my friends and myself, a kind of para­noia about our own moral status, a desire to demonstrate our per­sonal righteousness in our response to art.

Such responses can sometimes place me in what seems an anti­pathetic relationship to my students as they fail to respond as I wish they would to books that I love. But this is a false antipathy, or a mis­placed one; really my students and I share the most important val­ues, and our visions of a desirable world, and even of the place of art within it, overlap far more than they diverge. When I was beginning my literary education in the 1990s, the pendulum hovered close to the other pole; at least among a certain cadre of poets and literary scholars, maybe in response to moralistic crusades of the ’70s and ’80s, a doctrine of ars gratia artis reigned. I chafed against that, too. To treat art as purely aesthetic, a question merely of formal explora­tion and sensuous experience, is one way to preempt the claims of moralism, as is treating art as exclusively play, a stage for invention and virtuosity. (To be clear, I think art can be all these things, all of them valuable.) Another, more extreme claim for the freedom of art is articulated in Maggie Nelson’s “Art Song,” which entertains a con­ception of art as “a metabolic activity, a ‘way of churning the world.’” In my darker moments I sometimes think it’s true that art is simply a biological process, shorn of significance; but I’m not sure it’s a truth I can live with, a story to tell about myself that I can bear. Certainly it’s not an adequate account of my experience of art, of what I would continue to call “great” art, though greatness is another idea called into question in our anti-exceptionalist moment. Maybe it’s a delu­sion to think that the central activity of my life, art making, has more significance than digestion; maybe it’s a saving delusion. One reason a particular strain of our current moralism—the strain that would subject artists to tests of acceptability, that says we shouldn’t con­sume art made by bad people—is so dismaying is that it sees works of art as endlessly fungible, just another commodity on the market. There’s so much art available to us, this reasoning goes; there’s noth­ing Lolita or The Enigma of Arrival or Wise Blood might offer that we can’t find in a writer less problematic than Nabokov or Naipaul or O’Connor. But a profound experience of art is an experience of something like love, which is to say of singularity; when you’ve had a profound encounter with Giovanni’s Room , say, or a portrait by Alice Neel, you can’t imagine swapping it out for something more conveniently affirming of social values we cherish. This affinity is more mysterious than evaluation or ranking or canon-formation; it seems to me analogous to other relationships we form. The love I feel for my partner or my friends isn’t the result of comparative eval­uation, it isn’t founded on a claim that of all candidates I’ve judged them worthiest. The question of comparison doesn’t enter; they are simply themselves, incommensurate, irreplaceable. My life wouldn’t be my life without them, as my life wouldn’t be my life without any number of artists who failed, in various ways large and small, to be excellent outside their art.

The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, we’ve made a mistake about what moral engagement is , and so what art’s role in it might be.

The value I find in the art I love seems different from and greater than formal experiment or technical display, greater than play, certainly greater than “metabolic churning.” Art has a value that seems to me moral, and, like my students, like much of what we’ve taken to calling The Discourse, with its purity tests and can­celations, its groupthink and dismissal, I want to think of art mak­ing as an activity with moral implications. More, I want to place it at the heart of one way of striving toward a moral life, by which I mean at the heart of our attempt to live flourishingly with oth­ers, or at least bearably and with minimal harm. The problem is that, in much of our discussion of art, I think we’ve made a mis­take about what moral engagement is , and so what art’s role in it might be. In much of our commentary, there’s a desire for art to be exemplary, to present a world the moral valence of which, whether positive or negative, is easily legible; there’s a desire for the work of art to provide an index of judgment clearly predicated on val­ues the reader can approve. We want the work to give us a place to stand that grants access to righteousness, a place from which to judge a work or its characters. But more and more I question the role of this kind of judgment in moral life. I don’t mean the constant, shifting, provisional evaluations we make moment-to-moment, the moral echolocation by which we position ourselves and our actions. I mean the act of coming to judgment, to a verdict: of assigning someone a durable or even permanent moral status. This is sometimes necessary, of course, though maybe less often than we suspect; it’s what we do, hopefully with some seriousness, in courts of law, and what we do sometimes flippantly, recklessly, in social media campaigns for de-platforming and cancelation. The seriousness of our verdicts depends in large part on the density of their contextualization; and, since the context of a human life is so nearly depthless and made up of such incommensurable ele­ments, ideally righteous judgment is impossible. To be bearable, to be plausibly adequate, even our imperfect, sublunary judgments require an immense amount of work; the idea that we might carry that work out on social media is one of the genuinely repulsive aspects of our moment. I am immensely grateful, every day, that judging others in this way is not my job. The best thing about being a novelist, in fact, is that my job is actively to resist coming to such judgment. Plausibly adequate verdicts may be a necessary fea­ture of the real world, but they are never necessary in matters of art.

When we place this kind of definitive moral judgment at the heart of our engagement with others, assigning a person or a work a status as problematic or righteous, we make a mistake about what a moral relationship to another is , I think. If a moral rela­tionship means to live with or beside another in such a way as to recognize the value of their life as being equal to and independent of our own—that impossible, necessary Kantian standard—then passing judgment is the abrogation of that relationship: it destroys the reciprocity necessary for moral relation, it establishes a hier­archy utterly corrosive of it. This is another reason to reject the idea that we should only consume art made by good people: Who am I to judge the goodness of another? (For all the ravages of Calvinism in America, one misses a sense of the inscrutability of election.) Coming to judgment in this way is anathema to the nov­elist because the task of art isn’t to judge, but to know, to observe, to carry out research into the human—and passing judgment is a radically impoverished form of knowledge. An important part of the moral work of art is to teach us how much richer and more capacious our engagement with others can be.

This essay is an attempt to clarify my sense of what the relation­ship between art and morality might be, since the loudest accounts of that relationship in our moment seem to me inadequate. To help think that through, I want to consider how a book that flouts all our pieties about decency and responsibility, about sociality and moral uplift, a novel about a rancidly obscene, sexually voracious, invet­erately grieving puppeteer—Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater , prob­ably the filthiest major American novel I know—seems to me as powerful an example of morally engaged art as English-language literature can offer. More, I want to test my intuition that it is pre­cisely the book’s obscenity, its determination to shock and affront, to “let the repellent in” (“fuck the laudable ideologies,” cries its hero), that, far from hindering the moral work it does, is central to that work. If the great moral question is how to live bearably with others, Sabbath’s Theater pursues an answer through the very things that make the novel’s protagonist morally repulsive—the very things that, by our current standards of what is acceptable in art, should place the novel beyond our regard. A moral education depends not on condemning or averting our gaze from filth, the novel suggests, but on diving wholeheartedly into it.

FILTH 1: AN ETYMOLOGY At the center of Roth’s novel, which chronicles three days in the breakdown of Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced, arthritic, sixty-four-year-old puppeteer, is Sabbath’s grief for the loss of Drenka Balich, the married Croatian innkeeper with whom he had a thirteen-year affair until her death, of a ferociously swift cancer, six months before the novel’s present action begins. If this present-day time­line pulls the novel forward, however, the bulk of the narrative is entirely unmoored in time, roaming over Sabbath’s past with special attention to his relationships with women: the prostitutes who provided his sexual initiation as an adolescent in the mer­chant marines; his first wife, whose disappearance haunts him; the undergraduate whose recording of their phone sex has made him a pariah; his current, despised wife, Roseanna, a recovering alcoholic who is bracing herself to separate from him. Expelled from his home, Sabbath returns to the landscapes of his past: New York City and, in the book’s astonishing final movement, the Jersey Shore, where his idyllic childhood, what he characterizes as an expe­rience of endlessness, was shattered by his beloved brother’s death in World War II. The novel is a fulfillment of currents already pres­ent in Roth’s work—Sabbath is a Portnoy without the complaint, all erotic id without any tortured compulsion to be good—and also it represents something entirely new. It has a formal freedom and linguistic virtuosity unmatched in his earlier books, and a profun­dity in grappling with the absolutes of existence—sex, love, need, the urge to make, the irrevocability of death and the inescapability of grief—I’m not sure Roth ever achieved again. It is also, maybe it doesn’t quite go without saying, very, very funny.

A source of both the humor and the profundity is how seriously the book takes obscenity and the desire that fuels it. Here’s a sen­tence from very early on:

Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of exuberant , which is itself ex plus uberare , to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.

The audacity of the sentence lies in the huge tonal registers it crosses: from the high literary “uberous,” with the pedantic, schol­arly excursus into Latin, and the even higher reference to myth and Tintoretto, to the vertiginous drop to the carnal in “cunt,” to the truly shocking, wildly inappropriate exit from scene with the memory of his mother. The exit is given an amazing adjectival flourish with “late little mother,” swooping from Drenka’s por­nographic exclamation to an affect we conventionally take as the opposite of sexual: that of filial devotion. The “little” is wonderful: English doesn’t have ready access to diminutives, a temperature that many other languages can avail themselves of, like Spanish and Bulgarian and German and Yiddish, which is the immediate referent here; suddenly we are in the linguistic world of Sabbath’s childhood, hearing an echo of his father’s immigrant past.

Shock is a characteristic aesthetic maneuver in Sabbath’s Theater , but Roth avoids the deadening effect that usually accompanies repeated shocks by distributing their weight in unexpected ways. The sudden turn of this sentence— turn is too pale a word: the sud­den whipping of the sentence, the sudden lash—comes not with “cunt” but with the last three words: bizarrely, it is not “I feel it deep in my cunt” but “late little mother” that seems obscene. This feels electrically fresh to me. The effect is only strengthened with greater familiarity with the novel, in which “cunt” appears dozens of times, and so loses its sense of taboo. It’s a word Roth loves, both for its visceral force and also, I think, for its history. Roth isn’t often thought of as a writer who lingers over etymologies, but he should be—that’s another reason this sentence is instructive—and his use of “cunt” is redolent with the history of the word, a history that goes hand in hand with that of the word quaint, which was its synonym in Middle English. The word runs through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which Roth first encountered in high school and lines from which he could still recite late in life. “The Miller’s Tale” can read like a meditation on queynte, which means, as a noun, “cunt,” and also, as an adjective, “intricate,” “elegant,” “pleasant”; also “myste­rious,” “queer.” This history encapsulates something important in the relationship between Drenka and Sabbath, which is predicated on sex, the wilder the better—their shenanigans allow each of them to tolerate intolerable marriages—and also profoundly affirmative of whatever we might mean by an ethical relationship with another. It’s hard for me to imagine that Roth didn’t have the history of cunt/queynte in mind in this very beautiful passage, which Drenka delivers after a threesome Sabbath has arranged with Christa, a much younger woman:

I find the cunt actually quite beautiful. I never would have thought that looking in the mirror. You come with your shame to look at yourself and you look at your sexual organs and they are not acceptable from the aesthetic perspective. But in this setting, I can see the whole thing, and although it is a mystique that I am a part of, it’s a mystery to me, a total mystery.

I understand “mystery” here to mean something like “possessed of a significance, a value, that is bottomless, that can’t be measured.” Through sex, through her erotic life, Drenka transforms shame—a sense that the meaning of her body is known, fixed, finite—into mystery, a sense of a surplus of meaning, an uncountable worth. This is an extravagant claim to make for the work sex can do, in literature and in life; I think Roth means to make it. The proxim­ity of flesh and spirit is one of the animating paradoxes of sex; it seems plausible that orgasm, that tiny replicable shattering of self, is the source of all our metaphysics. Any writer attempting a sex scene has to manage the relationship between the horizontal axis of bodies in space—the logistics of sexual acts—and the vertical axis sex makes available, an intimation of something, spirit or soul, that exceeds the body. Roth is a remarkably unmetaphysical writer, and his treatment of sex is often marked by a resolute refusal to entertain the vertical axis; this too makes Sabbath’s Theater unique among his books. In the first passage quoted above, transcendence is all over the sentence: sex is written into myth; Drenka is made a goddess; she and Sabbath fuck among the stars. Five months after her agonizing death from cancer, months he has spent in night­time graveyard masturbation, Sabbath falls prostrate over Drenka’s grave and cries, “You filthy, wonderful Drenka cunt!” Both the filth and the wonder are real; the wonder proceeds from the filth. How else should we think of this, if not as a work of love?

II: DISIDENTIFICATION sabbath’s theater is not a story of moral reform; from beginning to end Sabbath does very bad things. Some of these are played for laughs, as when he deliberately humiliates Drenka’s husband or spends an entire night and morning ransacking the bedroom of a friend’s college-age daughter, searching for evidence of her erotic life. Elsewhere Sabbath is less entertainingly repulsive. An extended sequence early in the novel’s second half concerns Kathy Goolsbee, an undergraduate in Sabbath’s puppetry workshop, who records (without his knowledge, as Sabbath also records it without hers) one of several phone sex sessions they have, a recording that, perhaps accidentally, perhaps by design, makes it to the college’s administration. (It is then appropriated by a feminist action group and played on a loop for anyone who calls in to a local phone num­ber, a bit of Rothian satire that raises harrowing questions about whose exploitation of Kathy is more destructive, and whether, in a context where everyone claims to be educating her, anyone is con­cerned for her well-being.) Sabbath has made dozens of tapes of conversations with the six students with whom, over the years, he’s had similar relationships, thinking of the recordings as testaments to a pedagogy of liberation and as works of art. Destroying those tapes, he thinks—they are, after all, evidence—would be “like defil­ing a Picasso. Because there was in these tapes a kind of art in the way that he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of inno­cence.” As part of his indignant self-defense, he places his tapes in the lineage of literary filth, alongside Réage, Miller, Lawrence, Joyce, Cleland, and the Earl of Rochester.

The episode with Kathy occurs five years before the primary action of Sabbath’s Theater , but it sets in motion crucial elements of the plot: Sabbath’s disgrace and increasing penury after he loses his teaching job; his wife Roseanna’s breakdown, subsequent recovery from alcoholism, and increasing independence. In the book’s sin­gle scene between Sabbath and Kathy, we see Sabbath at his worst, or close to it. Enraged at Kathy, whom he holds responsible for Roseanna’s breakdown and apparent suicide attempt, he intends—it’s not clear how seriously—to kill the student, who weepingly denies her guilt and begs to give Sabbath a blow job. Beneath this scene, in a twenty-one-page footnote, Roth provides a transcript of the call Kathy recorded, which is decidedly, cannily, not art on the order of Lawrence or Colette. One of the challenges of writing sex is to create, using the formal resources of the novelist, some approximation of the atmosphere of desire, in which acts and proc­lamations that, viewed dispassionately, might be merely ridiculous can be transfigured by passion. In presenting a transcript shorn of scene and verbal artfulness, banality (“Oh God. I’m going to come. / You’re going to come?”) remains simply banal, underscoring Sabbath’s delusion that these exchanges are either art or education. In the scene that runs above the transcript, Sabbath alternately sus­pects Kathy of entrapment and entertains the possibility of accept­ing her propositions, imagining the satisfaction of the act:

To peer down at her head cradled in your lap, your cock encir­cled by her foaming lips, and to watch her blowing you in tears, to patiently lather that undissipated face with that sticky con­fection of spit, semen, and tears, a delicate meringue icing her freckles—could life bestow any more wonderful last thing?

Sex as vengeance and humiliation: the discomfort of the moment is deepened by the fact that the passage is addressed (“Maestro, what would you do?”) to the memory of an old puppeteer Sabbath met while studying in Italy, who interrogated Sabbath about his lovers and their ages and then, in satisfaction, boasted that his own girlfriend was fifteen, though “Of course I’ve known her since she’s twelve.” (This becomes even more discomfiting in the light of Blake Bailey’s 2021 biography of Roth, which recounts an almost verbatim exchange Roth had with the Czech novelist Jiří Mucha, decades before Sabbath’s Theater was published.) It’s hard to recu­perate anything redemptive—anything even morally complex—from this vision of eros.

In his many quarrels with Roseanna, Sabbath mocks her devo­tion both to AA-speak and to what she calls “the story format”: “‘But what happens with the story format,’ she went on, oblivious not merely to his sarcasm but to the look in his eyes of someone who had taken too many sedative pills, ‘is that you can identify.’” The question of identification has a central role in our current debates about what art is worth our attention and the work that it should do. The role of literature, these conversations presume, is to show us a certain kind of image of ourselves, an image often character­ized as positive or affirming or empowering. I take the desire for representation seriously, and I take seriously the consequences of living in a culture that doesn’t provide bearable images of oneself. My concern is that we take too prescriptive a view of what consti­tutes affirmation. None of the books that gave me succor as a gay kid in the pre-internet American South—novels by Yukio Mishima, James Baldwin, Edmund White, André Gide—would pass muster if judged by today’s standards of positive representation. The moral seriousness of those books, it seems to me now, lies in their refusal of an image one might identify with in any frictionless, any merely self-comforting way. Roth’s novel does something similar, I think: Sabbath is magnetic, fascinating, irresistible; it is impossible to look away from him. But he is not, in the simplistic, flat sense often invoked in our discussions of literature, sympathetic. Roth’s novel stands distinct from much of recent American narrative practice in its model of narrative as dis identification, in the way Sabbath constantly rejects our sympathy, throwing up roadblocks to identi­fication, rubbing his repulsiveness in our face.

But the novel wouldn’t be so discomfiting if this were all it did. Sabbath can reject our sympathy only once the novel has tempted us into it; Roth invites us to condemn Sabbath only to push us past our condemnation. Roth’s manipulation of these responses—the way he shows Sabbath as alternately repulsive and pitiable, enter­taining and horrifying, destructive and grievously wounded—is key to the novel’s moral force. When he first arrives in New York, angling to be taken in by a friend, Sabbath finds himself weep­ing uncontrollably over his various losses, while also telling him­self he’s performing grief as an elaborate manipulation. “Sabbath didn’t believe a word he said and hadn’t for years.…True lives belonged to others, or so others believed.” And yet, as Sabbath breaks down repeatedly, even he begins to be convinced: “He was crying now the way anyone cries who has had it. There was passion in his crying—terror, great sadness, and defeat.” And then, after a paragraph break: “Or was there?” In the way the scene makes these turns again and again, dizzyingly convincing us of sincer­ity and professing insincerity, it is a microcosm of the entire novel. Finally, Sabbath is as unsure as we are of the moral status of his tears. Perhaps, he thinks, his weeping is less “to be chalked up to guile than to the fact that the inner reason for his being—whatever the hell that might be, perhaps guile itself—had ceased to exist.” The story Sabbath has told about himself, told to himself, proves inadequate; the meaning he had considered fixed gives way to mystery. If this is a novel of (partial, constantly backsliding) moral education, it begins and ends in bewilderment.

FILTH 2: DIRTY THOUGHTS drenka is the fullest, richest realization of one of Roth’s female character types: the eager, indulgent lover. Roseanna, for the first half of the novel, seems like a strikingly thin embodiment of another: the long-suffering, long-suffered, shrewish wife. One of the marvels of the novel is how, over the book’s second half, both the reader’s and Sabbath’s vision of Roseanna is sharpened, deep­ened, as she emerges into a complexity the book’s first half denied her. The catalyst for this transformation—a transformation not of Roseanna, but of Sabbath’s understanding of her—is a peculiarly charged species of fiction: sexual fantasy. Sabbath is nominally a puppeteer, but the kind of artist he most resembles is a novel­ist—a novelist, it might be said, of a Rothian sort. Like any good writer he’s an alert perceiver, “ever vigilant to all stimuli”; he’s also equipped with a remarkable ability to use his observations to con­struct complex inner lives. Take for example Michelle Cowan, a rich and ambivalent minor character, electrically vivid though she appears in a single scene. Sabbath is dazzled by her; as her houseguest he watches her with an attention whetted by appetite but not, perhaps, reducible to it, observing her so intently that he times her hot flashes. He loves her laugh, a sound that he endows with a novelistically dense inner life:

The laugh said that she was sick of staying, sick of plotting leaving, sick of unsatisfied dreams, sick of satisfied dreams, sick of adapting, sick of not adapting, sick of just about everything except existing. Exulting in existing while being sick of every­thing— that’s what was in that laugh! A semidefeated, semi­amused, semiaggrieved, semiamazed, seminegative, hilarious big laugh.

The novel is exquisitely ambivalent on the question of whether Sabbath’s portrait of Michelle is right . He flirts with her throughout dinner, even playing footsie with her—he thinks—throughout the meal (the foot turns out to be her husband’s), and later, when she shows up at his door in a kimono (after Sabbath has gone on a rac­ist tirade against the Japanese, whom he holds accountable for his brother’s death), it’s not at all clear what she’s after. Sabbath propo­sitions her, and she puts him off, seeming to make a date for several days later. He grows increasingly manic until, in a very beautiful moment, anything at all seems possible between them: “‘Christ…’ she said and allowed her forehead to fall forward onto his. To rest there. It was a moment unlike any he’d had all day. Week. Month. Year. He calmed down.” But immediately after this, when Sabbath exposes himself, Roth says that Michelle recoils , a word that sug­gests not a willed but a reflexive action, though what it signifies is unclear. Shock? Alarm? Disgust? We can’t know, just as Sabbath can’t know whether the story he tells about her is correct.

But then we can never know whether such stories are correct; human life, human relation is precisely not knowing. Fiction is all we can have. In his next novel, American Pastoral (1997), Roth goes even further: “Getting people right is not what living is all about anyway,” he writes there. “It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.” So maybe it doesn’t matter if Sabbath is right, or maybe what matters more is the richness with which he imagines the lives of others, the extent to which what he imagines is excessive is any simply self-serving fantasy. This is the case with Michelle, I think: he endows her with a complexity, a self-division (“semidefeated, semiamused, semi­aggrieved, semiamazed, seminegative”) that exceeds, that may in fact impede , any version of her that would merely serve his own interests. Maybe what matters, in our dealings with others, is not whether what we imagine is fiction or reality, but whether it is an easy or a demanding fiction, I mean whether it is easy on ourselves or hard, whether it serves self-flattery or demands self-correction.

For decades Sabbath has been telling himself a self-serving story about his wife. The reader’s sense of her begins to change in a long flashback of Sabbath visiting her in the hospital, where she is recovering from her breakdown. She has asked him to bring letters her father wrote to her when she was a child, in the year he commit­ted suicide. Against her stated wishes, Sabbath reads these letters, as well as a journal she has left unguarded in her room. The novel reproduces all of these texts, which are excruciating to read—the father’s letters especially, with their banality, their cruelty, their ter­rible need—and which fundamentally and durably revise our sense of Roseanna, of what she has been through and what resilience she has required. “She came by her pain honestly,” one of her fellow patients tells Sabbath. Opening her journals, Sabbath expects to read about himself; in the simplistic, flattening story he has told himself about her, he is the malignant defining feature of her life, the grand antagonist. Instead, he finds that he is never mentioned. “What a bother we are to one another,” he muses, “while actually nonexistent to one another, unreal specters compared to whoever originally sabotaged the sacred trust.”

Only at the very end of the novel does Sabbath fully realize how profoundly ignorant he is of his wife; from a story whose mean­ing he has long exhausted, she becomes an utter mystery. Having become custodian of a box of his brother’s things, each of them a banal, precious reminder of a world that seemed whole, Sabbath finds that he cannot kill himself, as he had imagined doing. Instead, he returns home and sits in his car at the bottom of his drive­way, entertaining the possibility of reconciling with his wife. His thoughts take the form of an elaborate fantasy, a meticulous imag­ining of Roseanna masturbating. The equation of marriage with erotic death is a recurring theme in the novel—marital intercourse is the one taboo he resists breaking—but now he imagines her in their bed, reading, and then distracted from her reading as she begins to play with herself. Sabbath’s fiction is precise, methodical, with the kind of exact logistical description we expect from Roth: “Circular movement of the fingers, and soon the pelvis in a circular movement, too. Middle finger on the button—not the tip of the finger, the ball of the finger.” But he doesn’t imagine merely as a voyeur; he enters into Roseanna’s experience, with intimacy and density of texture: “It changes what she feels when she introduces her finger into her cunt—on the button it’s very precise, but with the finger in her cunt the feeling is distributed, and that’s what she wants: the distribution of the feeling .” A virtuoso performance, Sabbath thinks; still in his car, still at the bottom of the driveway, he applauds and cheers. “His wife. He’d forgotten all about her. Twelve, fifteen years since she let me watch. What would it be like to fuck Roseanna?”

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This passage might give us pause. Surely there’s something objectionable here, an infringement on Roseanna’s privacy, even a violation—a reduction of her to a sexual object, an appropria­tion of her experience in a fantasy that must be essentially, if not quite literally, masturbatory for Sabbath. “What would it be like to fuck Roseanna?” is not exactly, a certain kind of argument might run, a sign of profound moral engagement with another person. But what if it is? It seems at least plausible to view it generously, and I find myself wanting to defend Sabbath, to argue that there’s something morally ample in imagining Roseanna in the fullness of her sexuality, and in an experience in which she exists for her­self, bringing about her own pleasure, an image of intrinsic, non-instrumental value. There’s something moving, I want to argue, in seeing Sabbath rediscover his spouse as an erotic being. But defending Sabbath isn’t the point; it may be as much a trap as con­demning him, since it presumes precisely the idea the experience of the novel contests: that Sabbath possesses a moral status we can fix. What’s more, Sabbath’s sympathetic or generous view of Roseanna is short-lived. In a characteristic move, his experience of plenitude—his reawakened interest in his wife, the prospect of a reconciliation with home—is brutally snatched away: in a baroque, Rothian fillip of a plot twist, he discovers that Roseanna is having playful, passionate, ecstatic sex with Christa, the young woman Sabbath and Drenka invited into their bed. Sabbath, after listening to them make love, turns monstrous, an embodiment of male jeal­ousy and rage. Roaring, he pounds on the bedroom window until it crashes in on the terrified lovers. So much for moral education.

III: AN APOPHATIC THEORY in 1999, the romanian novelist Norman Manea taught a course on Roth’s work at Bard College. Each week, after a day in which Manea discussed one of Roth’s novels with the students, Roth would join for questions and further discussion. According to Bailey’s biography, the final session, on I Married a Communist (1998), was rancorous, with the students objecting to the novel’s portrayal of women. Roth frequently found himself on the wrong side of righteousness, hectored early in his career as an anti-Semite, and criticized later for misogyny. The latter charge has stuck, and not without reason. I’ve argued that Drenka and Roseanna, while recognizable Rothian feminine types, have a richness and complex­ity that render them compellingly human. In certain of Roth’s other novels, female characters can collapse into stereotype, evacuated of the mystery and depth he frequently lavishes on his male pro­tagonists—though Roth himself mocked this kind of criticism as “puritanical feminism.” In I Married a Communist , the book under discussion in Manea’s class, Eve Frame is a particularly stark exam­ple of this flattening approach to female characters, a transparent caricature of Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, whose memoir Leaving a Doll’s House (1996) he saw as a betrayal. Anticipating trouble, and perhaps prepared by the previous week’s discussion of Sabbath’s Theater , Roth arrived at the final session of Manea’s class armed with the book On Trial: The Case of Sinyavsky and Daniel (1967), a collection of documents relating to the prosecution of two writers by the Soviet regime. Roth produced the book after a male student offered an “excruciatingly careful” comment in the class, using it to draw a comparison between what he called the “intimidating atmosphere” of the undergraduate seminar and the censorship and prosecution carried out by the Communist state.

The students weren’t having it: “We don’t want to arrest you and put you on trial,” one not unreasonably retorted. It’s striking how closely this exchange parallels debates we’re having twenty years later, in which intellectuals committed to the classical val­ues of liberalism, chief among them free speech, seem as alarmed by the left’s supposed cancel culture as by the right’s attacks on democratic institutions. How dismaying these debates are, not only because they serve to fracture possible coalitions among peo­ple who to a very great extent share a vision of a desirable world, but also because there is so much bad faith on all sides. Assertions that Twitter cancelation campaigns or undergraduate seminars are equivalent to totalitarian persecution are prima facie absurd; so are claims that cancel culture is a figment of the right’s imagination, that social media pillorying doesn’t have real, grievous, and often unjust consequences, or that the specter of those consequences has not had a chilling effect on cultural life. Every artist I know is conscious of a new and mounting pressure to police their work for potentially objectionable elements; many have abandoned proj­ects; nearly all have undergone what I think of as crises of rele­vance: a sense that the art they want to make will fail to speak to our moment in a way that can cut through the noise of incessant, hectoring, social-media-amplified topical debate. One longs for a lessening of that noise, for space to recognize the validity of com­peting values, the need to accommodate multiple claims.

What I want, really, is an escape from argument altogether. We need a way to think without the kind of untrammeled assertion that characterizes public discourse, especially on social media, which has, to the detriment of our institutions and ourselves, become pub­lic discourse. Much of the value of art for me lies in its ability to provide a space free of such argument. Turning from Twitter to Henry James, say—an early and enduring influence on Roth—I’m amazed by how much more spacious thinking feels in his sentences, not for their length exactly but for their avoidance of plain asser­tion, for their endless qualifications and corrections, their syntax of scruple. We have created a public discourse in which one’s ability to be heard depends on speaking with a certainty, a lack of nuance, a stridency utterly inadequate to reality. When I consider debates about the relationship between art and morality, what I long for is an apophatic theory of that relation—a theory that would allow us to explore the moral work of art without limiting or prescribing that work, as certain theologians attempt to develop ways to think about God without defining God in a manner that would violate God’s freedom. What I want is a kind of syntax, which is to say a kind of thinking, that appears more and more frequently in the final pages of Sabbath’s Theater , a syntax of paradox and negation, which gives Roth access to a kind of affirmation utterly unprec­edented in his work—an affirmation, uniquely for this resolutely secular writer, that I think can properly be called theological.

FILTH 3: PISSING, A THEOLOGY if i’m right that Sabbath’s Theater gains access to a theological dimension, it’s Sabbath’s devotion to filth, his determination “to affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaf­fronted,” that provides it. Religious allusion is everywhere in the novel, much of it of an ironic, Wildean, transvaluation-of-values kind, at least at first glance. “You must devote yourself to fuck­ing the way a monk devotes himself to God,” Sabbath muses early on. The appeal of statements like this is a comedy of transgres­sion, a blasphemous thrill. But blasphemy is unstable; the circuit it establishes between apparently incompatible terms can sacralize as easily at it desecrates. Roth’s novel treats sex as a kind of limit-experience, an ultimate thing; as religious allusions pile up, the comic, ironic application of religious concepts comes to seem less ironic. Or maybe it’s truer to say that the irony seems less totalizing, it leaves open the possibility of earnestness. “If anything served Sabbath as an argument for the existence of God,” the book tells us, musing on the clitoris, “it was the thousands upon thousands of orgasms dancing on the head of that pin.” Is this an instance of sex undermining religion, or of religion illuminating sex? As Sabbath listens to Roseanna and Christa making love, he reaches again for a religious amplitude: “They had taken unto themselves the task of divinity and were laying bare the rapture with their tongues.” The tone of this isn’t earnest, exactly: the exaltation (“taken unto themselves”) offers the cover of irony. But neither is it dismissive; the sacred does seem the proper frame of reference for what these women are doing. And then there is Sabbath himself: the name, of course, but also the odd ways in which he comes to seem a holy figure, with his Old-Testament-prophet beard, his truth-telling (when he isn’t telling lies), his destitution. Sabbath’s transvalua­tion of values can be comic and Wildean; it can also be beatitudi­nal. This is especially clear in his sense of the moral authority of abjection, which is the only moral authority he claims. “You have kindhearted liberal comprehension,” Sabbath says to a friend who has attempted to rescue him, “but I am flowing swiftly along the curbs of life, I am merely debris, in possession of nothing to inter­fere with an objective reading of the shit.” Here is something like a formula for sainthood, wherein abjection and utter powerless­ness confer privileged knowledge. Sabbath, with his fondness for prostitutes, his preference for the homeless and destitute over the affluent and comfortable, his utter rejection of the secular logic of the world—what is all of this if not saintly, even Christ-like? I don’t think the novel lets us feel settled about how seriously we should take this, and Sabbath himself seems unsure: “Can it be that there is something religious about me?” he wonders. “Has what I’ve done—i.e., failed to do—been saintly?”

The odd hitch in that sentence, the revision or correction, the flip into negation—“what I’ve done, i.e., failed to do”—is a feature that appears more and more frequently in the book’s final pages. Faced with the irresolvable dilemma of his life, Sabbath finds him­self increasingly turning to negative formulations: “There was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life.” The tactic of using negation to seek a way through insolu­ble dilemma has a long tradition, one that, by the end of Sabbath’s Theater , it seems clear Roth is drawing from. At the heart of this apophatic tradition, the tradition of mystic thought, is the hope that the relentless pursuit of negativity will somehow arrive at an experience of affirmation. I’ve never read a better account of how that process might work than this passage from Roth’s novel, about oral sex with Roseanna:

The swampy scent Roseanna exuded in her twenties, most unique, not at all fishy but vegetative, rooty, in the muck with the rot. Loved it. Took you right to the edge of gagging, and then, in its depths something so sinister that, boom-o, beyond repugnance into the promised land, to where all one’s being resides in one’s nose, where existence amounts to nothing more or less than the feral, foaming cunt, where the thing that matters most in the world— is the world—is the frenzy that’s in your face.

“Boom-o”: sex is the key that unlocks the mystic’s logic, releasing some mechanism of grace that flips the values of the workaday world on their head and delivers one, inexplicably, to an experience of plenitude and bliss. In the novel’s final scene Sabbath returns to Drenka’s gravesite, where he has spent so many nights weeping and masturbating, and the book’s engagement with the negative syntax and paradoxical image repertoire of mysticism reaches its peak. “Imagine a stone carrying itself,” Roth instructs his reader as he describes Sabbath climbing the hill to Drenka’s grave. And then, once he reaches the final resting place of the woman he loved—in many ways the entire book has been a cry of grief for her—he pro­ceeds to piss on it.

“It’s not hard not to be terrible” is a sentiment I see floating down my social media feeds with alarming regularity. But I am a novelist because I think it is hard not to be terrible.

It’s worth pausing to note that Sabbath is a remarkably liquid man, constantly spouting fluids: his ejaculations and tears, his three-times-nightly trips to piss, not to mention the words that come, endless, fluent, from an apparently limitless source. And yet now, as he tries to piss over Drenka, he finds himself dry: “He was fearful at first that he was asking of himself the impossible and that there was, in him, nothing left of him.” His watering of Drenka’s grave, which he imagines as an “anointing,” recalls an earlier scene in which Drenka, on her deathbed, relives with Sabbath an afternoon when they pissed over each other. Roth considered this scene one of the two greatest he wrote in his career; it’s the most extraordinary sex scene I know. In remembering, re-narrating, re-experiencing this scene, a memory of kinky erotic experience—of transgression, of generosity to each other (“Why not?” Drenka responds to Sabbath’s request, “Life is so crazy anyway.”)—allows them to mourn together Drenka’s imminent death, and also gen­erates an expansiveness that transcends their current situation and its limits. “It was like we were forever united in that,” Drenka says to him. “We were. We are,” Sabbath replies, turning piss-play into a sacrament—a kind of marriage—that affirms a scale of temporal­ity not typically available in Roth’s novels: everlastingness. Hoping to commemorate this moment, Sabbath finds himself unable to piss, literally out of juice. “Perfect metaphor,” he thinks, “empty vessel.” I’m not sure how to understand this emptiness except as an example of kenosis , the self-emptying necessary before the aspi­rant can be filled up in divine union. “There was, in him, nothing left of him.” And, as is the mystic’s hope, emptiness is followed by plenitude; Sabbath begins not just to piss but to gush, to over­flow, in something that seems like a violation of the natural order of things—that seems, I mean to say, miraculous. “Sabbath was peeing with a power that surprised even him, the way strangers to grief can be astounded by the unstoppable copiousness of their river of tears.” He finds he can’t stop; in another mystically charged image—Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich both figure Christ as a nursing mother—he becomes “to urine what a wet nurse is to milk.” He imagines his urine drilling a hole to Drenka’s lips, reviv­ing her, bringing her miraculously to life—but here the book closes the door on the transcendence it has courted: “he could never again reach her in any way…nobody dead can live again.” Again and again in the novel, Roth gives only to take away; he opens a door and then slams it shut. And yet the very restlessness of the book calls all finality into question, even the finality of finality itself. Maybe the door isn’t shut forever.

IV: A MORAL EDUCATION sabbath isn’t alone at Drenka’s grave, as it turns out: his mirac­ulous flow of urine finally stops when he is accosted—swung around by his prophet’s beard—by Matthew, Drenka’s grieving and aggrieved policeman son. To Matthew, locked out of the cir­cuit of desire and devotion that transforms what looks like an act of degradation into a sacrament, Sabbath can only be what he seems: an old adulterer pissing on his mother’s grave. “What are you?” Michael asks when Sabbath refuses to be penitent, refuses even to put his dribbling cock back in his pants. “This is a religious act,” Sabbath insists, a claim he only somewhat revises a few pages later: “I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious.” But Matthew has his own grief and his own devotion; his tears, his forbearance as Sabbath baits him, wanting to make him his final puppet, the instrument of his suicide, carry a moral force that make his reading of Sabbath’s act undismissable. The power of this final scene lies in its presentation of radically incommensurable interpretive frames, and in the novel’s refusal to reconcile them. We feel the force of both meanings: Sabbath piss­ing on Drenka’s grave is a sacred act and an act of desecration, an act of love for Drenka on the part of her grieving, beloved lover and an act of cruelty against her grieving, beloved son. In a world of conflicting authoritative interpretive frames there is no final judg­ment we can pass. Whatever calculus might make the competing claims of Sabbath and Matthew commensurate, and so allow us to weigh one against the other, is unavailable to us, in the novel as in life. The novel forces us to experience both meanings, to live in the dilemma of their conflict.

Confronting us with that dilemma is crucial to the moral edu­cation art can offer. How should one judge Sabbath, who has done so many things that are, by any reasonable standard, unforgivable? The wonder of Sabbath’s Theater , the measure of its achievement, is that after 450 pages with this intolerable man I don’t want to turn my back on him. I can’t, because I’ve come to cherish him. This posture, of finding another intolerable and at the same time cher­ishing their existence, is deeply uncomfortable and urgently neces­sary. Because, at least in part: what’s the alternative? What do we do with people who refuse to act in accordance with our standards, our sense of decency, who have no interest in being reformed? Lock them all up? Exterminate them? (People who commit sexual crimes should be locked up forever, some of my friends believe, who also believe that prisons should be abolished.) I am a decided atheist, as was Roth, and I also, as perhaps Roth did, feel nostal­gia for certain theological concepts. Chief among these is the idea of the Imago Dei —that no matter what someone might do, they are still possessed of an inalienable dignity, an infinite value that derives from the divine image in which they are made. Roth said that Sabbath was his most autobiographical character, which one can see both as a puckish provocation—Sabbath is 5'5", fat, desti­tute, a failed artist, a much less obvious surrogate than Portnoy or Zuckerman or Kepesh—and also as not entirely untrue. Roth also said that were Sabbath sitting on the couch next to him, he would kick him out of his house. In life, we bear what we can bear and risk what we can risk, and make our necessary accommodations. But in art we don’t have to make those accommodations: we can bear things in art we can’t bear in real life, and so art can offer us a crucial moral training, placing us in the impossible position, which is also the only morally defensible position, of cherishing the existence of others we cannot bear. By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath and then inviting us past that judgment, Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts. Had I turned my back on Sabbath at his first indefensible act, had I canceled him or blocked him or deplatformed him, had I cast aside the book as terminally problematic, I would have missed much that has felt useful to me, in the not-quite-articulable way art is useful: the sense of life, of manic energy, the texture of existence and the terror of the abyss. Our current obsession with purity, our sense that we cannot associate with others who do not share our politi­cal and social values, our intolerance of disagreement are not just corrosive of civil society and democratic discourse. They are also impoverishing of ourselves. I feel the appeal of that intolerance. Sabbath’s Theater helps me to resist it.

The ability of art to do this moral work, the work I think it is uniquely equipped to do, depends on our acknowledging the power of a frame as a kind of magic circle separating the world of art from the actual world. I don’t mean to suggest that art is cut off from politics or history, or that this separation is absolute. I mean that representation has a fundamentally different moral and existential status from that of reality. This is a point that needs defending. The moral and political demands currently placed on art, the charge that art has responsibilities and consequences as grave as actions in the world beyond the frame, the conflation of art and activism, don’t just mistake the nature of art and art mak­ing. They make it impossible for art to do the moral work proper to it. I can’t imagine a book like Sabbath’s Theater being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature—and, since Toni Morrison’s passing, it’s not clear to me that there are any writers of Roth’s stature. The idea that art should address the monstrous, that much of the moral office of art might lie in mak­ing us identify with the monstrous—identification not as consola­tion but as indictment—is entirely foreign to our current thinking. Terence’s famous line, humani nihil a me alienum puto , nothing human is alien to me, which Hardy’s Jude echoes when he says, “I have the germs of every human infirmity in me”—well, that seems nearly unsayable now, nearly unthinkable. These days we’re des­perate to claim the opposite: “It’s not hard not to be terrible” is a sentiment I see floating down my social media feeds with alarming regularity. But I am a novelist because I think it is hard not to be terrible. I think it’s the work of a life, and most of us fail at it almost all the time. Certainly I do. The greatness of Sabbath’s Theater lies in its assertion that the human is ample and impure beyond all codes of conduct, and in its challenge not to reject or unmake that humanity, but instead to acknowledge it ours.

The Shapes of Grief

Writing in pictures, garth greenwell, you might also like, three queer writers on craft and cruising, philip roth, landlord, how should one read a book, new perspectives, enduring writing.

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The Importance of Moral Education in Developing a Just Society

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The development of moral education, the role of moral education in character development, the importance of empathy and compassion in moral education, the contribution of moral education to a just society.

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Defining Moral Education

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What might a moral education worthy of the name actually look like? While we cannot answer all of the questions, nor confront the full dimensions of the moral education debate, we can outline some key features of moral education in our own time and place. What follows reflects our own conversations and disagreements and reveals both the common ground we have come to occupy and the divergent commitments we continue to bring to the moral education debate.

The question is not whether colleges and universities should pursue moral education, but how. Moral (or perhaps immoral) education goes on constantly, if not always self-consciously. Aristotle captured this insight when he argued that every association has a moral end, a hierarchy of values, which is cultivated through its everyday norms and practices. Colleges and universities, too, have such moral ends and purposes, expressed not only through institutional mission statements and curriculums but also, and often more powerfully, through the hidden curriculum of everyday campus life. The more these commitments remain unarticulated the less they can be subject to scrutiny and the more ignorant we remain of the ends that animate our actions and lives.

One task for moral education in the modern college or university, then, is to articulate and scrutinize the moral ends of our shared enterprise. Truth seeking, a willingness to think deeply about alternative positions and arguments, to be swayed by evidence and argument, to acknowledge our intellectual debts to others, and to judge others on the quality of their work and not their family background, skin color, or political affiliation: these are a few of the moral commitments central to academic life that we need to articulate and explore. Other moral ends and commitments may be specific to particular institutions. But the task of critical self-reflection and appreciation remains the same, as does the importance that students experience higher education as an enterprise committed to high ideals, thoughtfully pursued.

This suggests a deeper point about moral judgment. It is a commonplace today for students (and faculty) to exclaim ‘‘Who am I to judge?’’ But of course that, too, is a moral judgment. We make normative judgments all the time, so the question again is not whether to make them but on what basis or grounds we do so. If we cannot offer such grounds, then we may be making judgments, or acting, in ways that contradict our most basic moral commitments and ends. A second task for moral education, then, is to challenge moral evasions, whether in the classroom or the streets, and to teach the practical wisdom that enables us to discern and explore the grounds of the judgments we are making.

It is important to recognize that argument and debate play a key role in pursuing both tasks we have outlined so far. Critics of moral education contend that ethics cannot be central to the university’s mission because this would require a substantive moral consensus that is contrary to critical inquiry and academic freedom. Yet these same critics acknowledge that universities pursue intellectual excellence not by deciding in advance which of the competing views of such excellence is right but by continuous argument over what’s true, right, and persuasive, including argument over what the standards should be for good intellectual work. Similarly, argument about and over ethics, and about the ethical ideals and norms we should teach and promote, is not inimical to, but actually helps constitute, the pursuit of moral education.

Indeed, arguing over what’s right, fair, and just is one of the central ways in which human beings “do ethics.” This reaches across cultures and religions, from traditions of ethical argument expressed in Talmud, in the Islamic ulama, or in the common law, as well as in fundamental moral confrontations such as those between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. We enact new forms of this tradition when we invite students to engage debates and controversies, asking them, for instance, to argue for or against human rights, stem cell research, or the International Criminal Court, or to assess different interpretations of Antigone, or weigh alternative approaches to educational policy.

But rigor and argument are not enough. Ethics cannot be reduced to analytical argument but needs to be attentive to the broader variety and complexity of moral life. Argument alone does not capture the moral insights of great literature, nor does it yield the lessons present in a work like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt argues that Eichmann was thoughtless; that he was unable to put himself in another person’s shoes. What Eichmann lacked was moral imagination, which in Arendt’s terms requires the ability and willingness to go visiting another. You do not move in with them, or stand in their place, but next to them. The prominence of the Golden Rule in so many moral and religious traditions points to the centrality of moral reciprocity and the qualities of curiosity, compassion, and imagination it requires. The cultivation of a capacious moral imagination is a third task for moral education.

But ethics is more than a set of questions to debate or even of imaginative perspectives to adopt. To take ethics seriously requires us not only to engage in ethical critique and debate but to come to moral judgments, to take a stand. If cultivation of the capacity for ethical commitment is a fourth task of moral education, then we need to focus on the interplay of principles and actions, both for our students and ourselves. But what constitutes a moral commitment? The great moral teachers have generally insisted on certain truths of moral life. Socrates, for instance, professed that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, that virtue is knowledge, and that what you do to others you do to yourself. But justice, knowledge, and truth did not function as ‘‘shut up words’’ because he was also willing to acknowledge that the truths for which he was willing to die might be shown to be faulty in the next dialogic encounter; that he might have missed something in the world or the argument that would force him to modify what he had come to believe with such conviction. Socrates is a valuable exemplar because he showed what it means to combine a capacity to be self-critical with a willingness to affirm moral commitments and stand up for them. It is by navigating that tension ourselves that we can do our best as teachers of ethics.

What are the implications of these four tasks for how we should teach ethics in colleges and universities today? We applaud the pedagogical pluralism that characterizes the return to ethics and see a valuable role for a variety of curricular and co-curricular approaches, from the interpretation of canonical texts and popular culture to case studies to service-learning to student-run honor codes. An appreciation for the role of ethical reflection, deliberation, imagination, and practice is both a key contemporary insight and a welcome revival of cultures and traditions of ethical argument such as those expressed in the Talmud.

A plurality of approaches does not, however, imply that any pedagogical technique is as good as any other in achieving each of the aims of moral education. Different pedagogies have particular strengths and characteristic weaknesses. Take, for example, the conventional ‘‘Introduction to Moral Philosophy’’ course. It has the great advantage of providing students with systematic frameworks for assessing moral judgments. But its focus on critique can leave students with a dizzying and potentially demoralizing sense that there are no defensible moral positions, or that ethics has to do with canonical debates but not with their own lives. Conversely, the case study method, or a conventional service-learning course, will expose students to a variety of powerful practical moral issues and dilemmas, from questions of personal motivation and virtue to issues of organizational ethics, politics, and policy. All too often, however, such courses can leave students floundering in aimless exchanges of personal opinion without providing them with ways to organize and assess their judgments. What’s needed are integrated approaches that combine theory and practice, imagination and justification.

We also believe that moral education -- whether in a philosophy classroom, a judicial affairs hearing room, or a sociology service-learning class — should be dialogical, by which we mean that there should be a degree of reciprocity between students and teachers, a sense of shared vulnerability in the pursuit of an ethical life. This does not mean that every view is entitled to an equal hearing: students have to make arguments, offer evidence, show they are listening to others and reading the texts with care. But without such reciprocity the enterprise of moral education lacks vigor and seriousness. The centrality of dialogue to moral education in democracies acknowledges the degree to which ethical life is necessarily collective and enhances moral imagination by enabling student and teacher alike to see the world from one another’s point of view.

This emphasis on taking a dialogical, rather than didactic, approach to moral education does not mean that universities, or individual faculty, cannot profess moral commitments. The vexed issue of whether teachers of ethics should reveal their own moral commitments to students or adopt a neutral stance to moral questions seems to us wrongly posed. For one thing, genuine moral neutrality is both devilishly difficult to achieve and counterproductive for moral education: what, after all, are students likely to learn about moral stances from someone who claims that, for the purposes of the classroom, he or she has none? At the same time, a general expectation that one will confess one’s moral commitments is hardly more attractive (for one thing, it is likely to leave out those deepest convictions that cannot be easily articulated, since most of us remain to some degree mysteries to ourselves). The issue seems to us to be primarily pedagogic: what creates a classroom atmosphere in which students are encouraged to think deeply, to pose tough questions, and to vigorously disagree with the teacher and with their fellow students? We suspect that respect and humility, humor and friendship, curiosity and collaboration play key roles in creating such a classroom.

This brings us, finally, to the question of what makes someone a good teacher of ethics. Here, we are inclined to believe that there is an important relationship between who we are, what we teach, and how we teach it. In other words, both the character of the teacher and the performative dimensions of his or her teaching are central rather than marginal aspects of moral education. We all have colleagues who teach in a way that undermines the arguments they make, as when a teacher of democratic education teaches in a thoroughly authoritarian way. But unlike Tolstoy’s quip about happy families all being alike, we suspect there is no single model of excellence among teachers of ethics but rather a cluster of traits that good teachers of ethics exhibit to varying degrees. We are unsure, however, if these traits can be taught as a pedagogic practice, or if they are fundamentally idiosyncratic. But these questions, however difficult, must remain central to any debate about moral education.

In the end, the value of today’s return to ethics will rest on whether it serves to reveal important questions and possibilities that have otherwise been ignored or have gone unrecognized. On this score, it appears to have had some success, for it has made us more aware of how moral teaching and learning occur and has revived the perennial question of what the aims of moral education, and indeed of all education, should be.

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Why moral education should involve moral philosophy

Moral Philosopher, Griffith University, Griffith University

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Ethics are increasingly a part of the school curriculum, and practical introductory classes in applied ethics are part of the training that nurses, scientists and soldiers undergo.

Ethical education is ubiquitous, even though it may not always involve complicated theoretical debates – but should it include a dose of philosophy? There are powerful reasons for looking to moral philosophy to learn about real-world ethical action – and of course, there are risks too.

Why we can’t do without moral philosophy

Moral education draws on the philosophical method. This method requires understanding concepts and distinctions, knowing what makes arguments valid, and attending to counter-arguments. Those skills are vital in the age-old business of moral argument, which involves considering moral principles, appealing to reasons, and comparing analogous cases. Because moral norms are not tangible or scientifically testable, we need conceptual clarity to avoid talking past each other. As well, being philosophically consistent can prevent us from making exceptions for ourselves (a common form of hypocrisy).

But why is moral argument itself a good thing? Moral argument allows us to keep engaging with others even when we disagree about values. Values are not simply “given”, but can turn out to be amenable to reasoned discussion.

Moral philosophy also helps us question unhelpful assumptions and informs us about the ways our values connect to our descriptive beliefs, such as scientific hypotheses about human psychology.

Notwithstanding all the endless debates – and some debates really have been going on for millennia – advances do occur. Natural rights theories were philosophical systems long before human rights laws protected people’s equal rights. Many would agree human rights constitute genuine moral progress. Moral philosophy stands as an enduring record of what we have learnt so far.

Moral philosophy empowers us through its method and substance to reflect upon and talk about challenging moral issues. Studying ethics can even propel a personal journey, where we learn about ourselves and the way we think. We might even learn that others think in different ways.

Moral philosophy tends to focus on areas of disagreement. Applied ethics classes explore disputed issues such as abortion and euthanasia, rather than discussing the many issues on which we all agree. Furthermore, moral philosophy explores our reasons for being moral. But often we can agree on the right thing to do even when we disagree on the underlying principles.

Jacques Maritain captured this theme during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when he summed up the UNESCO philosophy group’s thoughts by saying: “Yes, we agree about the rights, but on condition no-one asks us why”.

The further we follow the trail of breadcrumbs into philosophical rabbit-warrens, the more morality threatens to become the domain of experts. Once we move from basic moral argument to high theory, philosophy becomes hard – an elite domain for those with the mental aptitude and the time to master the extensive knowledge required.

When the philosophical going gets tough, those without this acquired expertise can easily feel out of their depth. For them, philosophical argument may seem as much a weapon of intimidation as a tool of mutual exploration.

Much moral philosophy involves studying comprehensive moral theories, such as those fashioned by Aristotle (virtue theory), Kant (deontology) and Mill (utilitarianism). Philosophers have good reasons to develop these complex systems. Theories provide systematic ways of explaining, describing and justifying moral action.

Simply put, we cannot do moral philosophy without moral theories.

But full-blown philosophical theorising harbours a darker side. Accepting one theory means rejecting all the others, and the unique insights they can offer. Further, because each theory’s advocates demand they have reason to believe their theory, they can become intolerant.

They might demand that their arguments must be answered and (if not demonstrated as false) accepted. They can be tempted to conclude that all non-believers are unreasonable dogmatists. Worse still, sometimes courses can expose students to just one type of moral theory, without learning about other alternatives. Far from expanding those students’ moral horizons, exposure to high theory narrows them.

If moral education needs moral philosophy, and moral philosophy needs high theory, how should we proceed? I offer just one suggestion.

Most moral theories build on a core insight. Utilitarianism tells us consequences for others’ wellbeing matter. Deontology stresses that morality requires each person accepting they are duty-bound to act in certain ways towards other people. Virtue theory reminds us that character drives action, and that ethical life carries its own rewards. These insights all provide valuable perspectives on the larger mosaic of human moral life. Moral education is at its best when it introduces students to these different perspectives, and their unique insights.

For ordinary people trying to think through practical moral questions, it is the insights (and not the theories) that matter most.

This is part of a series on public morality in 21st century Australia. We’ll be publishing regular articles on morality on The Conversation in the coming weeks.

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Moral education may be defined as helping children and young people to acquire a set of beliefs and values regarding what is right and wrong. This set of beliefs guides their intentions, attitudes and behaviors towards others and their environment. Moral education also helps children develop the disposition to act in accordance with such beliefs and values. More fundamentally, it encourages children to reflect on how they should behave and what sort of people they should be. For many people, these questions are linked to religious belief, but moral education programs treat religion and morality as conceptually distinct.

Moral educators believe that many young people living in the contemporary world can become morally confused by exposure to factors that may destabilize their moral values, including television, print media, the Internet, social changes in family structures, poor role models in public life, the prioritization of economic values and continuing gender and ethnic...

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Halstead, J. M., & McLaughlin, T. H. (Eds.) (1999). Education in morality . London: Routledge.

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Jackson, P. W., Boostrom, R. E., & Hansen, D. T. (1993). The moral life of schools . San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Journal of Moral Education – quarterly journal published by Routledge Journals (Taylor and Francis).

Association of Moral Education website — http://www.amenetwork.org/

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Halstead, J.M. (2010). Moral Education. In: Clauss-Ehlers, C.S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71799-9_260

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