Between thick and thin: responding to the crisis of moral education

This article presents a moral orientation that can serve as a commonly shared foundation for developing moral consciousness in (postmodern) multicultural democratic societies. To this end, I distinguish between two prevailing generic views of moral education-'thin' and 'thick'-and claim that the tensions between them contribute to the sense of crisis of moral education (and public schooling in general). I begin by showing these tensions through a discussion of representatives of each side of the thin-thick dichotomy, as well as through Lickona's integrative account. After discussing the complications of each view, I present PARTS-Postconventional Authentic Relation-to-Self-as a normative perspective that is able to reconcile the two generic views. I show the merits of PARTS by discussing the notions of moral judgement and motivation.