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EDUCATION’S ULTIMATE AIMS AND FREEDOM TO DO OTHERWISE*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2014
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- Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2014
Footnotes
*
I extend many thanks to Al Mele for his insightful remarks on Motivation/Ability. I’m very grateful to Michael McKenna for his instructive comments and suggestions. Credit is owed, too, to the other contributors to this volume for their valuable discussion; I much appreciate their feedback.
References
1 A useful collection of essays on educational aims is Marples, Roger, ed., The Aims of Education (London: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar. A number of essays in this volume, including those of Curren, Ebels-Duggan, Morton, and Weithman also address education’s aims.
2 Siegel, Harvey, Educating Reason: Rationality, Critical Thinking, and Education (New York: Routledge, 1988), 137.Google Scholar
3 Ibid.
4 Siegel continues to endorse the view “that the fostering of rationality and critical thinking is the central aim, and the overriding ideal, of education” in Rationality Redeemed? Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. He writes, “this ideal is by far the one most widely advocated in the history of philosophy of education, from Plato to Dewey and beyond” (p. 189, n. 1).
5 John, White, “In Defense of Liberal Aims in Education,” in Marples, Roger, ed., The Aims of Education, 193.Google Scholar
6 Toward the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the best life is the life of theoria, or philosophical contemplation.
7 I use “wrong” and “impermissible” interchangeably, as I do “right” and “permissible.”
8 Haji, Ishtiyaque, Reason’s Debt to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 See ibid. See, also, Haji, Ishtiyaque, “Semicompatibilism’s Scope,” in Haji, Ishtiyaque and Caouette, Justin, eds., Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).Google Scholar
10 See, e.g., Frankfurt, Harry G., “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” The Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kane, Robert, The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Fischer, John M. and Ravizza, Mark, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fischer, John M., My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fischer, John M., “Frankfurt-Type Examples and Semi-Compatibilism: New Work,” in Kane, Robert, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Mele, Alfred, Free Will and Luck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Zimmerman, Michael J., The Concept of Moral Obligation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Some might prefer explicating the relevant issue concerning “can” in this way: What sort of possibility does “can” express? Elsewhere (Deontic Morality and Control [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]), I have proposed that the “can” in Kant’s Law does not imply that S has a dual ability to do A and to refrain from doing A; it is the “can” of ability and opportunity and not the “can” of metaphysical or physical possibility; and that the ability at issue is not a general but a specific ability to do A. Here, I focus on this last feature.
13 In the relevant discussion to follow concerning general ability, the pertinent considerations that tell against construing the “can” in Kant’s Law as expressing general ability also tell against construing “can” in this law as expressing any broad ability that entails that in this Frankfurt predicament, Augustine has the broad ability to refrain from pushing the child off the cliff although he cannot (in his situation) bring about his refraining from pushing the child.
14 Other costs are discussed in Haji, “Blameworthiness and Alternate Possibilities,” Journal of Value Inquiry, forthcoming.
15 See Feldman, Fred, Doing The Best We Can (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986), 11–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 As quoted by Peter van Inwagen in his An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983), 63–64.
17 A principle roughly along these lines is discussed in Peter van Inwagen, “When is the Will Free?” Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989): 399–422, and John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza, “When the Will is Free,” Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1992): 423–51.
18 Fischer, John M. and Ravizza, Mark, “When the Will is Free,” 423–51, 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 An insightful paper on abilities and intentional action is Alfred Mele, “Agents’ Abilities,” Nous 37 (2003): 447–70.
20 Zimmerman, Michael J., “Moral Luck: A Partial Map,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (2006): 585–608 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 595, 602; and Living With Uncertainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 90–91, 149–50.
21 I thank Al Mele for this point.
22 See, e.g., Camus, Albert, The Stranger, trans. Gilbert, Stuart (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946)Google Scholar and Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1956), 617–18.Google Scholar
23 Zimmerman, Michael J., “The Range of Options,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990): 345–55.Google Scholar
24 Ibid, 350.
25 See, e.g., Zimmerman, Michael J., The Concept of Moral Obligation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 98–100 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haji, Ishtiyaque, Deontic Morality and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 47–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vranas, Peter, “I Ought, Therefore I Can,” Philosophical Studies 136 (2007): 167–216, 175–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Noddings, Nel and Slote, Michael, “Changing Notions of the Moral and of Moral Education,” in Blake, Nigel, Smeyers, Paul, Smith, Richard, and Standish, Paul, eds., The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 349.Google Scholar
27 White, John, Education and the Good Life. Beyond the National Curriculum (London: Kogan Page, 1990), 36.Google Scholar
28 Callan, E. and White, J., “Liberalism and Communitarianism” in Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P., eds., The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 97.Google Scholar
29 Both Ebels-Duggan and Weithman (this volume) discuss autonomy as an aim of education.
30 See, e.g., Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control. Mele discusses both compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts of autonomy in Autonomous Agents.
31 See Haji, Reason’s Debt to Freedom, sec. 4.6, on lack of freedom to do otherwise and the truth of judgments of virtue.
32 See, e.g., Pereboom, Derk, “Determinism Al Dente ,” Noûs 29 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 21–45; Living Without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
33 E.g, Haji, Ishtiyaque and Cuypers, Stefaan, Moral Responsibility, Authenticity, and Education (New York: Routledge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Haji, Ishtiyaque, Reason’s Debt to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 Pereboom, Derk, “Determinism Al Dente ,” 21–45, 40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 Nelkin, Dana, “Freedom and Forgiveness” in Haji, Ishtiyaque and Caouette, Justin, eds., Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013).Google Scholar
36 See, e.g., Haji, Ishtiyaque, Moral Appraisability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deontic Morality and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Reason’s Debt to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).