H11. The virtues of educating for justice in a diverse society

Omschrijving

As a political philosophy, liberalism has both flourished and taken diverse shapes in Western societies over the last three centuries. One prominent version locates commitments to justice as the normative center of how citizens in a democratic society should regulate their interactions. And few would disagree with the claim that one of the most important spokespersons for this view in the 20th century was John Rawls (1971, 1993). When one reads many of the papers contributed to the field of philosophy of education by Ben Spiecker, in particular those that deal centrally with issues concerning liberal democratic education and multiculturalism, one question that might be asked of them is: What conception of justice informs and shapes how these issues are interpreted and addressed? One of the strengths of Spiecker’s work is the clarity and consistency of his argument with regard to this question: it rests explicitly and unwaveringly on Rawls’ liberal theory of justice.
What Spiecker’s work has given us is a clear elaboration of some of the implications that the adoption of this view of justice would have for education. This paper will start by identifying some of the crucial points of the philosophical framework on which Spiecker draws. With this as a backdrop, it will then focus on his discussion of the kind of virtues, both moral and intellectual, that citizens need to embody if a society is to be organized and maintained with this normative vision as a guide. The aim will be to explore what might be left out of this picture that should also claim our moral/political attention. It will be argued that there might also be additions to Spiecker’s list of moral and/or intellectual virtues that would be significantly different and equally important to education if a different kind of diversity were to be considered, and thus a broader conception of justice were to be the starting point.