In this paper, I explore the characteristic reason that motivates a virtuously honest person to perform honest actions. I critically examine previous accounts of honesty's characteristic motivating reason, including Christian Miller's pluralistic account, which allows various virtuous motivating reasons to count as honesty's motivation. I then…

Richard Pring (1938-2024) was the first holder of a Chair in Education at the University of Oxford and the Editor of the present journal from 1986 to 2001. This article pays tribute to his legacy in the field of educational philosophy. After reviewing briefly some well-known recurring themes in Pring's educational philosophy, such as his busting…

There could hardly have been a more influential twentieth-century philosophical essay than Elizabeth Anscombe's 'Modern moral philosophy', in which she condemned the prevailing and competing ethics of duty and utility of her day and urged moral philosophers to abandon the search for any general conception of 'morality' in favour of return to…

Mindfulness is an umbrella term for a set of practices and strategies related to attention and non-critical awareness of our thoughts. Mindfulness is currently having a moment in popular culture and in clinical psychology for its many perceived benefits. However, there are reasons to worry about whether certain commitments and strategies of…

The literature on teacher leadership tends to omit mention of the dark side of leadership. This is troubling since, after all, examples of bad leaders come readily to mind. This paper delves into the literature on bad leadership, illuminating it with reference to Iris Murdoch's moral psychology, to elaborate an explanation as to why leaders often…

Self-determination theory, like other psychological theories that study eudaimonia, focuses on general processes of growth and self-realization. An aspect that tends to be sidelined in the relevant literature is virtue. We propose that special focus needs to be placed on moral virtue and its development. We review different types of moral…

We appreciate and respond to Cokelet's thoughtful criticisms of our book. First, he points to deliberative forms of practical wisdom as objectionable to anti-rationalist's. In response, we point to non-conscious (yet complex) forms of deliberation that occur as individuals automatically process and respond to virtue-relevant stimuli. Second,…

In this article I develop ideas for supporting character education through sociology and virtue ethics philosophy. A combination of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus together with (neo) Aristotelian virtue ethics philosophy is used to promote a critical form of character education--one that accents the individual as well as the social context…

Moral development is crucial for a meaningful life. Many well-founded approaches and models are present in the moral development literature, which is a very diverse and populated field. The model of a 'person of moral growth' presented in this paper is a contribution to moral growth research based on personalist virtue ethics. Personalist virtue…

There is more to the moral life than mere adherence to a set of moral rules or principles to which the moral agent has autonomously subscribed. Something more fundamental is required for moral personhood, requiring explication in terms of 'sensitive perception' in relation to the particularities pertaining to any given set of circumstances…

There is a tendency for research on morality to focus on the individual, sometimes at the expense of context, using overly individual notions of the person. To some extent, this is an understandable consequence of disciplinary focus, and a scientific need to break phenomena down into manageable parts. I will advocate incorporating sociological…

Much of K-12 teaching privileges White, upper-middle-class ways of being, thinking, feeling, and interacting. Integrating arguments from moral philosophy and empirical work on teaching and teacher learning, we (a) conceptualize transformative practice, including its moral rewards; (b) frame teacher dispositional virtues that modify their practice;…

Religious and Moral Education (RME) in primary schools has been an under-researched aspect of state-funded schooling in Scotland. It has received little scholarly comment, and even less empirical research has been conducted on the extent and nature of provision since the implementation of Scotland's "Curriculum for Excellence" from 2010…

In the past few years, we have seen emerging new work that brings into focus the role of historical change and its moral implications in Iris Murdoch's philosophy. This paper strengthens this reading of her work and investigates the implications of this aspect of Murdoch's thinking for education in general and for moral education in particular. It…

Psychological research has revealed that there is a strong tendency for people to believe that they have a 'true self', and to believe that this true self is inherently morally good. This would seemingly be very good news for virtue theorists, since this may help to promote virtue development. While there are some obvious benefits to people having…