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Journal of Moral Education

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The moral roots of citizenship: reconciling principle and character in citizenship education
David Carr
a a

University of Edinburgh, UK

Version of record first published: 28 Nov 2006.

To cite this article: David Carr (2006): The moral roots of citizenship: reconciling principle and character in citizenship education, Journal of Moral Education, 35:4, 443-456 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240601012212

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Journal of Moral Education Vol. 35, No. 4, December 2006, pp. 443456

The moral roots of citizenship: reconciling principle and character in citizenship education
David Carr*
University of Edinburgh, UK
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It seems often to have been thought that we need to make some kind of theoretical and/or practical choice between (liberal) moral, social and political conceptions of social order and citizenship focused on principles (rights and/or duties) and (communitarian or other) perspectives focused on virtue and character. This essay argues that no such tensions arise on a more universalistic virtue ethical conception of moral formation divorced from communitarian or other attachment to politics of local identity. In the course of making this claim, the paper argues that: (i) no account of social and moral responsibility and hence of citizenship could be given in terms of rights alone; (ii) virtue ethics, properly construed, is far from eschewing reference to general principles; (iii) an ethics of virtuous character can be conceived independently of communitarian or other social constructivist perspectives on the source of moral virtues and values. The paper concludes with an exploration of some implications of such a virtue ethical conception of morality for citizenship education.

Rights, duties and character Contemporary accounts of citizenship education are invariably normative and wont to stress the moral dimensions of civic membership (for a useful review of latter day work on citizenship, see McLaughlin, 2000), In turn, however, such attention to the moral dimensions of citizenship not least in the multicultural contexts of present day liberal democracies is apt to dwell on one or the other of two key features of effective civil participation. On the one hand, one meets an emphasis on respect for rights and for law as the democratically established guarantor of such rights. In this light, one might hope that responsible citizens of civil societies would be mindful at least for purposes of reasonable social concord of the needs, interests and claims of others: one might expect them, that is, to be capable of negotiating conflicts of interest in a rationally non-violent or non-coercive manner. But, on the other hand, one finds an emphasis on the formation of personal commitments rooted in the
*The Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, Charteris Land, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh, EH 8 8AQ, UK. Email: David.Carr@ed.ac.uk ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/06/040443-14 # 2006 Journal of Moral Education Ltd DOI: 10.1080/03057240601012212

444 D. Carr cultivation of good or virtuous character. In this regard, one also might hope that effective citizens are capable of ordering their conduct and pursuing their various projects in the light of some personally compelling conception of the good or of what is humanly worth achieving: citizenship, so construed, is also a matter of the formation or cultivation of significant values, virtues and attachments. Moreover, both these dimensions of moral and civil growth and functioning have been regarded as conceptually connected insofar as our ascription of rights to others our valuing them as sites of interest and need would appear linked to our recognition of other agents as sources of value and valuation (Vlastos, 1984). That said there would also appear to be some tension or opposition in contemporary moral and social theory between emphases on rights and emphases on virtue or character. On the one hand, the emphasis on rights is mainly associated with deontic perspectives deontological theories being one key species of these which give moral and social pride of place to general or universal rational principles; on the other hand, the prime emphasis on character is to be found in so-called virtue theories which are sometimes associated with a particularist denial of the moral salience of universal rules. On this second view, virtuous judgements are matters of sensitive reflection on the particularities of moral association, and as such preclude any mechanical application of general rules. Worse yet, virtue ethics has also been widely subject to a non-realist or communitarian reading of virtue traits as qualities of widely divergent local social construction. From this perspective, diverse conceptions of virtue are so deeply and implacably at odds that there cannot be much hope of their conciliation or arbitration via appeal to some cross-cultural or culture neutral conception of human justice or rights (MacIntyre 1981, 1987, 1992). In this regard, the problem is that there may be irreconcilable concepts of such key virtues as fairness and justice: though it is part of what is meant by justice in some societies that a man who has publicly disgraced himself should be forgiven or allowed to atone, it may be part of the code of honour in others that he should fall on his sword. But, if this is so, how might one construct a system of civil or civic rights and/or obligations that rationally resolved or reconciled such different conceptions of value and virtue? The limits of rights Talk of human rights is nowadays endemic: rights are deeply embedded in contemporary political constitutions, and various kinds of rights are enshrined and celebrated in global, national and local legislation. It has also been frequently observed that the latter day language of human rights has its origins in the concepts of natural law of western classical antiquity specifically in the teachings of the Stoic philosophers (see, for example, Almond, 1991; Buckle, 1991). The doctrine of natural law broadly rests on the view that the physical laws and principles by which the material universe of human experience is divinely or otherwise ordered have some kind of normative analogue in the moral rules and principles of any and all just social order. In rejecting Hobbes (1968) account of the pre-social state of nature as

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The moral roots of citizenship 445 a condition of moral anarchy, the modern father of rights-based liberalism, John Locke (1966), characterised the state of nature as a normative ideal in which the requirements of the law of nature would be observed and respected. Locke construed such requirements primarily in terms of freedom from undue interference by the state or other civil institutions in individual affairs, and by reference to certain key rights to life, liberty and (duly merited) personal wealth and estate. Still, rights-based theories of a classical Lockian variety are morally, socially and politically problematic, and particularly hard to sustain when they focus primarily or exclusively on individual needs and interests. One difficulty is that it is hard to see how rights might be determined or delimited if identified only on the basis of apparent human need. People have numerous and diverse needs, not all of which could appropriately ground human rights. Whilst I may need, and have a corresponding right to, legal defence, health care and/or education, I could less easily be held to have any such right to private transport, intellectual ability or sexual satisfaction, however much I might desire these. Indeed, both Rousseau (1973) and Kant (1967) clearly saw that it is difficult to make much sense of the idea of rights apart from the corresponding concept of duty. On their view, it is not just that it is practically futile to lay claim to a right if no law or other agency exists to safeguard that right, it is more crucially that I could not consistently or coherently lay claim to any right that I would refuse to extend to others. Thus, for example, a slave owner could not rationally sustain any claim to (his own) freedom in the teeth of refusal to extend that same right of liberty to others: in short, rights claims entail recognition of the universality of such rights and of a corresponding duty to uphold them. In short, as has often been pointed out (see, for example, Benn & Peters, 1959), the logical form of rights claims is normative and prescriptive, rather than empirical and descriptive. Thus, on post-Kantian views of liberalism, of the sort to be found (for example) in the work of John Rawls (1985, 1993) rights are correlative to duties and cannot be understood apart from the civil obligations implicit in any assent, however tacit, to the social contract. The work of social theorists from Rousseau and Kant to Rawls may be taken to show the rational and political incoherence of the extreme neo-liberal individualism of modern market economic views that have sometimes seemed to emphasise individual endeavour and initiative at the expense of social responsibility and solidarity (as expressed, for example, in the idea that there is no such thing as society1). It may still be questioned, however, whether the duties identified by political liberals as required for rights are sufficiently robust to support any substantial citizenship. In this connection, it has been pointed out (see, for example, Raz (1984) that there is a large and important class of moral and social obligations that is not reducible to the category of duties to respect rights. For one thing, I might well feel a strong obligation to give shelter to a neighbour whose house has been destroyed by fire, but such moral compulsion could not be based upon a right that I should so treat him. Again, I could feel a strong obligation to support a political party that might increase my taxes for the purpose of re-setting the balance of wealth and opportunity in society and/or improving public services for the disadvantaged:

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446 D. Carr but equally clearly the disadvantaged have no right that could compel such commitment on my part. It is on such grounds that communitarians and other social theorists have regarded liberal perspectives irrespective of any appreciation of the dependence of rights on duties as precluding normatively substantial conceptions of moral and civil commitment. Their key point would seem to be that the cohesion, maintenance and flourishing of anything worth calling a civil society depends upon the cultivation of moral and social values and commitments that are not exhausted by duties to respect rights. Moral commitment beyond respect for rights What, however, could be the normative source of such moral values and commitments if it is not in those strict obligations to universal principles dear to liberal deontologists? One plausible answer is that such values have origins in human culture. Thus, whilst it is true that not all present or past human societies are or have been civil societies in the sense of contemporary democracies, it is true that they have all been more or less developed cultures, that many of the values of present day civil societies have been shaped by those of traditional pre-civil cultures, and that such cultures have often aspired to far more substantial moral ideals than those generally required of modern liberal citizens. That said, it is no less clear that with regard to the issue of the normative basis of civil society not least in conditions of cultural pluralism such traditional moral perspectives can also appear problematic. First, they may be problematic precisely because they are too demanding: although someone from a particular religious culture may have been raised to believe that blasphemy and adultery are absolutely wrong, such conduct could hardly be a matter of legal prohibition for those who do not believe in God or who may regard marriage as a dissoluble civil contract. Secondly, traditional values may not be demanding enough for liberals if, say, constructed upon forms of tribalism that enjoin attitudes of racial superiority towards or even persecution of those who are not of ones own kind. It may also be that the values of some socially dysfunctional or brutalized subcultures fall well short of the minimal standards of interpersonal respect we should require for anything worth calling civilized association. In short, the trouble for liberals with many traditional moral or social commitments is just precisely that they are not always apt for deontic codification as universal rights or duties. The key importance of rights is that they serve to preserve and safeguard certain fundamental conditions of justice and flourishing against various vested interests: from this viewpoint, rights-regarding duties need wide promotion in order to ensure that citizens respect the entitlement of all to these basic conditions, even where such respect may not be part of the normative apparatus of a given local culture. Modern liberals are prone to regard local cultural values as unreliable normative bases for liberal legislation, for much the same reason that Kant (1967) regarded personal feelings and inclinations as unreliable sources of individual moral judgement namely, on the grounds that they are implicated in attachments that are insufficiently stable, impartial and/or disinterested. Just as, for
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The moral roots of citizenship 447 Kant, a moral rule should be one that can be fully universalized free, in short, from personal bias or special pleading so, for liberals, civil legislation needs to be formed from that impartial or disinterested standpoint that Rawls (1985) identifies with judgements made from the original position, or from behind the veil of ignorance. From this viewpoint, the culturally formed dispositions and states of character that latter day communitarians have been wont to identify with moral virtues, are held to reflect those variable local values that are inappropriate for the grounding of either liberal civil law or educational policy. Virtues and values revisited Thus, on the face of it, any perceived opposition between liberal social, civil and political dispensations grounded in rights and duties to respect rights, and communitarian or other advocacy of more substantial moral commitments to local virtues and values, rests on regarding liberal principles as too attenuated and/or impersonal for the desired level of moral commitment, and the virtues and values as too local and particular for use as more general currency of moral and political association not least in conditions of cultural pluralism. On the one hand, the lesson that respect for the rights of others is a logical precondition of any rational entry into the social contract may be rather hard and abstract to get across to many young people particularly those who have been poorly socialized, if at all, into any modes of moral reflection or practice (and who may also see that they have been materially on the short end of any benefits of civil participation). On the other, it is arguably not appropriate to try to initiate all young people (in the common school) into more locally substantial virtues, precisely because this may be perceived as indoctrinating them into controversial moral positions. In short, so the story goes, I cannot teach children to be just and fair citizens without teaching them particular controversial notions of fairness, or to be courageous without teaching them particular contestable ideals of courage. It is arguable, however, that this dichotomy is more apparent than real: that, indeed, any case for such stark opposition between universal principles and local values and virtues is actually fairly implausible. In arguing against any such polarization, we might first address the widespread belief that communitarian or other ethics of virtue are concerned with character or disposition rather than rational principle (see, for example, Flanagan, 1991). Since there are at least two significant respects in which virtues in the mainstream tradition of virtue ethics clearly involve appeal to general principle, any such claim would seem hard to sustain. The first, rather broader, respect in which a virtue ethics involves reference to principle is that which requires any and all morally salient dispositions to be ordered as means between unacceptable extremes of affective excess and defect. To be sure, in so far as such unacceptable extremes may resist determination by any mechanical application of general rules, it is common for virtue ethics to be regarded as an ethics of judgement as opposed to the more deontically principled ethics of duty and utility. But it should nevertheless be clear
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448 D. Carr that virtue ethical reflection is rationally principled in just this broader sense: the temperate are those who avoid extremes of self-denial and indulgence, the courageous are those who avoid extremes of fear and recklessness, the generous are those who avoid extremes of meanness and extravagance, and so on. However, it should also be clear that virtue ethics is principled in the somewhat narrower sense of holding some moral conduct to be specifiable in the form of absolute prescriptions or prohibitions. Thus, for example, Aristotle (1925) held such conduct as adultery, murder and lying to be always morally wrong, and more recent virtue ethicists (such as Geach, 1977; Hursthouse, 1999) have insisted that commitments to absolute prescriptions and/or prohibitions are key structural features of virtue and virtues. This point is sometimes missed because virtue ethicists may also, like utilitarians, hold that in cases where moral imperatives conflict, and it is not possible to obey the one without disobeying the other, virtuous agents may have to choose the lesser of two evils perhaps, for example, to lie in order to save lives (on this, see Carr, 2003.) However, unlike utilitarians, who may regard such choices and actions as morally vindicated by their beneficial consequences, virtue ethical agents are nevertheless committed to viewing them as always and inherently wrong. This point, that the mainstream Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics is not just an ethics of principle but an ethics of general principle, can hardly be overstated in the context of contemporary moral, social and political debates that invariably focus on the particularity of the judgements of virtuous agents (see, on a related issue, Kristjansson, 2005). For, in the event, any such particularity is largely contextual. When Aristotle (1925) and his successors insist that virtuous agents are those who act at the right time, in relation to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive and in the right way, they are claiming only that justice or friendship (for example) may be variably expressed in different contexts not that justice takes on an entirely new meaning in different contexts. It does not follow from different treatment of my friends in different circumstances that I treat one or the other of them unjustly precisely because diverse contexts and circumstances of friendship place different demands on the quality of interpersonal association. Irrespective of this, however, the virtuous agent will always be required to be courageous, selfcontrolled and to respect truth, justice and the needs and feelings of other people. It is also far from clear, contrary to what some latter day communitarians appear to have held, that there can be no teaching of honesty, fairness or courage that does not involve partisan initiation into some particular normative perspectives. To be sure, it is commonly held that virtuous dispositions or habits are best acquired in contexts of cultural formation in which there is significant exemplification of such virtues on the part of parents or guardians: but it does not follow that this would have to involve the inculcation of the faiths or other worldviews of the guardians in question. In the familiar screen portrayal of the life of Mahatma Gandhi (Ghandi, Attenborough, 1982), the Indian saint and statesman is depicted as instructing the Hindu slayer of a Muslim childs parents that he should adopt the child and bring him up as a Muslim. There is no suggestion that this would not be to bring him up to be courageous, temperate, honest and just: indeed, the implication is that the only way in which true

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The moral roots of citizenship 449 courage might here be shown and justice be served is for the Hindu to rear the child in a rival system of belief. In this respect, more recent communitarian or social constructivist conceptions of virtue have tended to obscure the main concerns of mid-twentieth century champions of virtue ethics (Anscombe, 1981; Geach, 1977; Foot 1978; see also Foot, 2001), which was precisely to propose a naturalist alternative to both the ethical solipsism of moral non-cognitivists (notably Hare, 1952) and the ethical relativism of neo-Wittgensteinian moral consensualists (notably Phillips & Mounce, 1969) the precise point was that moral responses are not just expressions of principled personal commitment or local social consensus, but natural general or universal human dispositions apt for rational adaptation to the needs of any local cultural context. Still, this might be held to miss the key point that virtues of courage, temperance, honesty and justice would still have to be acquired in some or other context of normative commitment: in short, it might be insisted that the orphan boy of the Gandhi episode would still have to acquire his moral dispositions in some Muslim, Hindu or other context of value, rather than in no context at all. But whilst at one level this point seems little more than trivially true for since virtues are traits of character concerned with moral choice, it is hard to see how they might be cultivated or exhibited apart from some normative perspective the point seems to have been wildly overstated on those social theoretical perspectives that give radical local social definition to virtues. Indeed, it is far from obvious that adherence to any particular values or principles is either necessary or sufficient for the acquisition of virtues of fairness or justice. First, the acquisition of a particular set of moral values is clearly not sufficient for virtuous character, since one might well have been brought up to subscribe quite dogmatically to certain principles of justice, and yet lack the virtue of justice needed to uphold such principles. Thus, for example, a weak willed and adulterous Roman Catholic could be said to subscribe, quite sincerely, to the value of marital fidelity without actually possessing the virtue of fidelity: it would surely be unreasonably stipulative to insist that in lacking the virtue he or she could not therefore be held to subscribe to the value. Secondly, though this is admittedly more contentious, it is far from obvious why one could not be brought up to be a courageous or fair person without adherence to any particular value system at any rate in any normatively dogmatic form. Indeed, it might ultimately be the mark of fair, just or tolerant agents that they are precisely open to different moral possibilities in precisely the way approved by liberal theorists. Hence, if I really wish to cultivate the virtues of justice and fairness in my offspring it might just be more appropriate to raise them in a climate of unprejudiced liberal agnosticism, or at least openness to a variety of normative viewpoints. Certainly, it is not at all obvious that commitment to this or that set of values at all events in any extreme partisan sense is needed for the cultivation or practice of virtue, or why we should feel compelled to say that some local conception of justice (X) would have to be regarded as a different virtue from some rival conception (not X or Y). Indeed, put this way, the difficulty clearly turns on some equivocation over the term justice, which is sometimes employed to refer to a specific

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450 D. Carr conception of fair treatment, but at others to refer to a particular character disposition. But in the dispositional rather than the normatively substantial sense of justice, it is surely implausible to suppose that any practical initiation into this conception of fairness would necessarily yield a different virtue from initiation into that one. Indeed, it seems natural to appeal to the notion of virtue to explain something that could otherwise appear inexplicable: namely, the conversion of a moral agent from one set of ethical standards or principles to another. We might seek to explain why agents encouraged by a particular religious upbringing to hold that justice is best served by strict adherence to certain principles (enjoining strict prohibition on divorce, moral disapproval of homosexuality or ostracism of allegedly inferior castes) may yet be brought to reject such norms in favour of others, precisely in terms of their recognition that such values are deeply at odds with any notion of justice formed in the light of subsequent reflection. Agents do precisely undergo such moral conversions without necessarily undergoing any change of basic moral character. From this viewpoint, it is arguable that the language of virtue and virtuous character offers a readily intelligible cross-cultural currency of moral evaluation that does in fact cut across local variations of moral principle: I may judge a Muslim shopkeeper or a Chinese ambassador to be a morally good or a bad person, less in terms of what he or she actually believes, more in terms of his or her dispositions to honesty or dishonesty, fairness and unfairness, courage or cowardice. Much the same also seems to apply to the moral assessment of (ones own or other) cultures, which are also often virtue ethically evaluated as just or unjust, kind or cruel, tolerant or intolerant, temperate or intemperate. Virtue ethical principle and commitment Thus far, it would appear that while those moral qualities of character, commonly referred to as virtues, entail or are not inconsistent with such moral (liberal or other) values and principles as honesty, justice, loyalty and integrity, there is also rather more to them than such values and principles in so far as they entail positive commitments and dispositions to act honestly, justly, loyally and conscientiously. Both these points are of the highest significance for the promotion of appropriate moral citizenship in liberal-democratic or other polities. First, with regard to the entailment by virtues of general moral values: if it is true that the virtues are not tethered to any normative system in particular so that there can be honest, just and courageous communists and atheists no less than honest, just and courageous Catholics and Hindus it cannot yet be the case that virtuous conduct is consistent with any set of values or principles. Thus, although such qualities of character may be cultivated in a variety of contexts of religious or other moral nurture, there are surely normative contexts in which the virtues could not be nurtured: it seems difficult in any meaningful sense, for example, to speak of Nazi, Ku Klux Klan or Mafia virtues precisely to the extent that such perspectives are hardly consistent with honesty, justice, temperance and compassion. Thus, although there may indeed be Catholic, Muslim or humanist virtues, these are not virtues because they are

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The moral roots of citizenship 451 defined by and/or consistent with these particular value perspectives: on the contrary, such perspectives are morally acceptable only in so far as they are consistent with honesty, justice, temperance and other key virtue dispositions. Contrary to a widespread contemporary view, it is the virtues properly considered that are regulative of substantial moral perspective, more than vice versa. In sum, as the virtue ethical mainstream from Aristotle to the present day has maintained, cultivation of the virtues understood as the common conceptual currency of objective moral evaluation cannot but lie at the core of any and all personal development and responsible citizenship worth their salt. The trouble with those varieties of communitarian virtue ethics that relativise virtues to rival social traditions is that they risk some moral validation of the most barbaric and repulsive of past or present culturally sanctioned human conduct to the point, indeed, of suggesting that those who refuse to admit the albeit primitive heroism or nobility of Homeric or Aztec ritual murder or torture are guilty of moral colonialism or parochialism. Once again, any such view would appear to be at odds with the virtue ethical mainstream from classical antiquity to the present. In this ethical tradition, there can be no genuine courage in pursuit of unjust or wicked ends (Geach, 1977), and the Homeric warrior who risks his life putting the women and children to the sword from greed for booty, vengeance or mere sadism, far from exhibiting an ethically alternative form of virtue, is fairly clearly the vicious perpetrator of evil. Indeed, it is here hard to avoid the late Elizabeth Anscombes (1981) conclusion on a different albeit related issue that any and all arguments to the contrary are evidence more of corrupt sensibility than moral edification. In the second place, however, responsible liberal democratic (or other) citizenship cannot be just a matter of notional respect for abstractly conceived rights and obligations, but needs to be firmly entrenched in such virtue ethical dispositions, qualities of character or commitments as honesty, justice (fairness, tolerance), temperance, courage, compassion. But although such qualities need nurture and training (as Aristotle maintained), and while such initiation may best succeed in circumstances where there is some consistent local (family or community) commitment to a specific set or system of religious or other cultural values, it does not in the least follow that an individuals virtues are once and for always determined by such initiation and that, to be sure, it would not then be possible for an individual to convert to some other value perspective. On the contrary, just as we should expect those who have acquired habits of honesty, fairness and openmindedness to be at least open to such development, so we might also doubt whether those who cling dogmatically to the beliefs and values into which they were first initiated without willingness to entertain any questions about such beliefs have in any significant sense acquired such qualities of virtuous character. Virtue ethical citizenship education We should now say something about the implications of these theoretical points for the practice of citizenship education. In the space that remains, these may be

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452 D. Carr addressed under three key headings: (i) Aristotelian practice; (ii) moral modelling and exemplification; and (iii) the narrative sources of practical wisdom and emotional education. Starting with (i), it is well known that in the Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle insists that the cultivation of moral virtue is at least initially a matter of practical training and habituation: one becomes courageous and just, much as one comes to be a good builder or musician in large part through practice. However, it may not be too wide of the mark to take Aristotles emphasis on practice to be mainly concerned with the cultivation of basic temperance or self-control. Indeed, from a pre-theoretical or common-sense viewpoint, it seems hard to see how children or young people might acquire more complex virtues of practical wisdom, justice and even courage, in the absence of some appropriate degree of control over their desires, passions and appetites. On the face of it, however, rising contemporary levels of obesity, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, alcohol and drug abuse and drunken street violence in many economically developed and liberal polities including the UK would suggest widespread neglect of such cultivation of self-discipline in homes, schools and other contexts of upbringing. Indeed, there cannot be much doubt that such tendencies are driven by a variety of current social and cultural trends which include, besides irresponsible parenting, the equally irresponsible commercial exploitation of violence, sexuality and drug culture by the popular entertainment industry, increasingly open access to pornography, narcotics and alcohol and little or no positive example on the part of those popular musical and sporting celebrities to whom many young people are drawn for role models. While there is much agreement about the social and cultural gravity of this situation and about the ruinous effect that this circumstance is having on the lives of successive generations of young people there is also much disagreement about what should be done. However, although it is fairly clear that much problematic social behaviour on the part of young and not so young is directly related to poor self-control, there would also seem to be some liberal reluctance to admit that this is so and indeed, calls for greater discipline from more politically or religiously conservative quarters are apt to be derided as unacceptably illiberal or repressive. As we have argued in this essay, however, in so far as it is possible to disconnect the virtue ethical point that personal self-discipline is the bedrock of virtue from any conservative (or other) religious or political agendas any such reaction quite fatally misses the key moral point. Such responses fail to recognise as Aristotle and his more recent virtue-ethical heirs have appreciated that no social principles and practices that are not consistent with or grounded in fundamental dispositions to appropriate self-control and concern for self and others in the light of some responsible reflection, can conduce to individual or social human flourishing. In brief, one does not have to be a fundamentalist religious fanatic to see that raising ones offspring to be persons capable of some orderly restraint of their basic instincts and appetites cannot but conduce to their individual welfare as well as that of any society of which they may be members.

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The moral roots of citizenship 453 Moreover, it is important to appreciate that such self-control need not indeed should not be fostered by repression or coercion. In this light, to be sure, the stances of the authoritarian political or religious right and the libertarian left suggest something of a false dichotomy. Here, as so often, Aristotles ethics shows us that virtue even in the case of such virtues of self-control as temperance is not the same as continence, and should not be conceived as a function of external coercion or repression. On the contrary, virtues are concerned with the proper ordering of appetites, instincts and desires in the interests of their healthy individual and social expression, and they are best cultivated in positive parental and educational climates of encouragement, love and support in which the key psychological and pedagogical mechanism would appear to be modelling or exemplification. Aristotles account of virtue here seems generally consistent with a time-honoured view of moral education as matter of the setting by parents and teachers of appropriate examples of good or virtuous thought and conduct for the young. From this viewpoint, the primary concern in teaching positive behaviour in general and self-control in particular is not that of devising techniques of moral discipline for external imposition on youth, but that of the self-cultivation by parents, teachers and other guardians themselves of positive moral dispositions. Thus, if we are to make good citizens of the young, and a precondition of good citizenry is a virtuously ordered character, then the guardians and teachers of the young need themselves to be models of such good character. Clearly, however, moral habituation under the influence of mentor exemplification could not be sufficient for virtue and the question now arises of what could be held to inform a virtuous agents and hence a virtuous citizens conception of character and/or moral flourishing. For Aristotle, the key to development of the full virtue for which moral habituation can only be regarded as foundational lies in the cultivation of a particular form of reason or deliberation to which he refers as phronesis or practical wisdom. In the Nicomachean ethics, this is also fairly sharply distinguished from theoretical and technical knowledge as concerned with deliberation, choice and decision of a primarily normative or moral kind. But this still raises the question of the rational or evidential grounds of any such reason and this is also a question that is of the highest import for understanding citizenship. For practical moral reason has often been held by modern or post-enlightenment moral philosophers at least by those who do not deny that moral claims have any rational basis whatsoever to be largely or primarily concerned with the formulation of general rules of moral and political association and with the development of procedures for the fair and equitable negotiation of conflicting social interests. In this light, citizenship education might be held to be primarily a matter of initiation into modes of public discourse concerned with the formulation of impartial rules and procedures which are also as Kant, one of the prime architects of this conception of practical reason, seems to have thought sui generis or hived off from other modes of enquiry (for latter day discussion and criticism of such disassociated views of political reflection, see Sandel, 1982, 1984; Mulhall & Swift, 1992). This can and I think has led to modern conceptions of citizenship as a kind of bolt-on addition to

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454 D. Carr the common school curriculum largely concerned with promoting knowledge of political processes and the skills of democratic participation. However, although Aristotle did argue that the moral wisdom of virtue is to be formally distinguished from other (theoretical and technical) forms of enquiry, it is equally clear that he did not regard it as quite independent of other forms and, indeed, that he held it to be precisely in need of nourishment by the wider reflection and contemplation he regarded as the crowning glory of a flourishing life. It is clear from Aristotles Poetics, for example, that he regarded imaginative literature and the arts, no less than such academic forms of study as history, as key sources of normative enquiry. However, Aristotles appreciation of the normative significance of literature and the arts, has been greatly reinforced by more recent virtue ethicists (for example, MacIntyre, 1981, 1987, 1992) who have argued that human selfunderstanding is fundamentally narratival: that, in short, the only way in which human agents can come to an appropriate understanding of themselves as individual or social selves acting in the world is through the narrative modes of history, religious myth, imaginative literature and so on. On this view, also defended by key champions of liberal education from at least the nineteenth century to the present day (see, most notably, Arnold in Gribble, 1967; more recently, Williams, 2002), literature and the arts are not just educationally peripheral or frivolous pursuits but genuine forms of knowledge and understanding with enormous potential for the understanding by humans of themselves and their relations with others. But now the best grounding for the practical wisdom required for the cultivation of moral or virtuous citizenship would seem to be just that kind of liberal education which has traditionally given pride of place to the arts and humanities and it is precisely this that has been eloquently advocated as the best basis for moral citizenship by recent critics of more remedial or ad hoc approaches to citizenship education (see, especially, in this connection: Pring, 1999; also 2001). The arts and humanities have also been traditionally I think rightly (see Carr 2005) regarded as key source of emotional education. One possible trouble with conceptions of normative enquiry focused upon the formulation of impersonal rules of association or impartial negotiation important as such rules can be in human affairs is not just that they may fail to engage the interests of would-be citizens, but that their very abstraction can and has sometimes conduced to the perpetration of dispassionate cruelties. While the application of impartial and impersonal principles may in the right political conditions lead to greater distributive fairness and justice, it can in the wrong political conditions where rulers regard the ruled as faceless numbers to be manipulated lead to monstrous injustice, slavery and tyranny. On the other hand, a virtue ethical normative education for citizenship that successfully avoids any assimilation of arts and humanities to narrow agendas of local identity politics, has not only potential to foster the robust commitment to ideals that is clearly important for genuine citizenship and which has also been regarded as a key goal of education as such (see De Ruyter, 2003) but may also be conducive to cultivation of the kind of moral imagination that enables all of us to empathise and sympathise with others by putting ourselves in their shoes. Indeed, through an

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The moral roots of citizenship 455 education in citizenship grounded in contemplation of the world and our place in it through arts and humanities, we might yet hope in the words of Shakespeares King Lear (3.4.3334) to take physic(and) feel what wretches feel. Acknowledgement This is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at a conference on character, rights and education, hosted by Academia Sinica, Taiwan in 2004. I am most grateful to the organizers of that conference especially to Professor Jauwei Dan for the kind invitation to present on that occasion. This revised version is also indebted to the extremely discerning comments of two anonymous JME reviewers.
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Note
1. This much quoted comment on the fictitious nature of society was made by the British Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, in the course of an interview by the UK magazine, Womens Own, under the title Aids, education and the year 2000, 31 October, 1987, pp. 810.

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