Communitarian and Liberal Themes in Moral Agency and Education

Philosophers and psychologists have been vigorously examining the psychological capacities that realize our moral agency. Our purpose is to take some of this work and present its implications for moral education. To connect recent work with more long-standing debates in moral education, we frame this discussion with Helen Haste's 1996 examination of liberal and communitarian positions on moral agency and education. We argue that contemporary research does not confirm the descriptive theory of moral agency offered by either liberal theorists or communitarians, but nonetheless the prescriptive theory of liberal moral education can be vindicated. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.