In this chapter, I argue that when common school teachers engage in moral education under conditions of deep disagreement, they cannot live up to liberal standards of justice. These standards demand that teachers treat a wide range of moral beliefs fairly. In practice, teachers who engage in moral education cannot avoid stigmatizing a range of students who hold legitimate moral beliefs. In support of this claim, I present a common approach to moral education that I regard as most likely to meet liberal standards of justice. I then argue that under conditions of deep disagreement, even the most skilled and well-intentioned teachers could not have the time or resources to treat all of their students’ views fairly. Finally, I suggest ways that teachers can mitigate the problem, in the hope that others will find better solutions.

There has been widespread consensus amongst professional philosophers on responses to initial variants of the Trolley Problem. However, those philosophers have all been from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. There is a growing literature that investigates whether judgments differ across cultures. If judgments differ, the implications for moral philosophy depend on whether this represents genuine moral disagreement and what are its causes. I survey the literature on cross-cultural variation in moral judgments in trolley problems. There is not much evidence and it is mixed. The higher acceptability of acting in Bystander compared to Footbridge is relatively consistent across cultures (small-scale societies may be an exception, but there is limited evidence); however, the level of acceptability of acting in the individual scenarios differs across cultures, especially in Footbridge. This preliminary inspection suggests that it is plausible that cross-cultural differences in judgments exist. Assessing their causes, they seem likely to be genuine moral disagreements, which result from differences in culture and institutions. This raises issues for the metaphysics and epistemology of moral judgments. If we are not to be skeptics about the existence of moral facts or the possibility of knowing them, then we may need to endorse a form of constructivist relativism.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize the argument about the conditions for the achievement of recognition that Hegel sets out from Chapters IV-VI of the Phenomenology. I consider the ways in which the conclusions of this argument are significant for the project of the text as a whole, pointing to the role of the idea of the self both in the Phenomenology’s “Preface” and account of “Absolute Knowing,” and in the Science of Logic. At the same time, I also argue that the account of reciprocal recognition is completed in Hegel’s account of “spirit,” and so does not depend on the subsequent accounts of religion or philosophical science. I conclude by stressing the precarity of relations of reciprocal recognition which are dependent on the achievement of moral agreement.

This chapter is written from Duncan Ivison’s dual perspective as a political theorist and as a senior administrator at the University of Sydney, which requires him to translate vision statements about the importance of “globalizing the curriculum” into practical reality. Ivison sets out three arguments for a globalized curriculum: the civilizational rationale, the global citizenship rationale, and the rationale of taking moral disagreement seriously. Only the last provides a strong underpinning for deparochializing a curriculum by decentering Western traditions in its core design. Like the “culture wars” of the 1990s, the civilizational rationale is an argument against decentering the West very much. Its purpose is to underscore the claim that ideas of toleration and respect for cultural diversity have their origins in Western thought traditions. The global citizenship rationale, which focuses on the kinds of knowledge students need to adapt and contribute to a globalized world, may not actually generate a strong commitment to going beyond Western traditions of cosmopolitan humanism. The best alternative is based on the reality of deep and persistent moral disagreements: if only we could learn how to hear them, we might find that sometimes cultural others have persuasive arguments against views we take for granted.