Virtue ethics and its pedagogic implications

Year 2016, , 103 - 109, 03.01.2016

Barış Mutlu

https://doi.org/10.24289/ijsser.279089

Abstract

We have started to forget some ancient values such as virtues including courage, self-control, modesty/temperance, benevolence, honesty, and truthfulness, justice in our current lives which have very strong self-interested, and egoistic relationships. Especially because of having different good life conceptions in our daily lives, we try to solve those problems by focusing on common political rules which are generally very abstract. But we have never thought that those rules will not be strong enough to fight against some political and ethical problems because of our selfish and non-altruistic emotions. So virtue ethics which start to become a tradition in the discussions and approaches of ethical philosophy, has been brought important and strong arguments which focus on virtues, social practices, and dependency and those arguments will be different from Kantian and Utilitarian ethics’ arguments which are based on abstract moral rules. Even they have very different readings, philosophers like A. MacIntyre, B.Williams, and M. Nussbaum address to our present problems by going back to past, tradition and by this way the virtue ethics tradition has been revived. Now there have been many studies on virtue ethics for our crucial problems such as identity problems, environmental problems, and our interest in other beings, old age, and disease. In this paper, I want to discuss some impacts and values of virtue ethics on education and what kind of tradition it’s trying to build within education by making our duty to fight against some contemporary problems cherishing some non-altruistic emotions such as egoism.

Keywords

Virtue Ethics, Character, Morality, Education