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Contemporary ethical issues effect everyone. We all have to make choices about the way we live. To help us make moral ones we need to be aware of the choices available and the assumptions on which they are built. Vague concepts like ‘shared moral values’ give little help and can be distractions.
The educational authorities do not ensure that the necessary background information is given in schools for young people to be able to make informed ethical choices. For example, the British government forces schools to provide Religious Education at all levels for pupils in England and Wales from the ages of 4˝ to 16, but there is no provision in the basic or the National Curriculum for the study of moral philosophy. Religious Education is built exclusively on theology, and excludes the systematic study of moral philosophy. There are abstruse legal provisions for withdrawal from Religious Education for pupils and teachers - see below.
Religions are in, philosophies are out! Can this properly be described as education?
The ethical teachings of Isaiah Berlin, Epicurus, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell, to name but a few, are not coherently studied in UK schools. Ask any school leaver!
On What Do We Base Our Moral Values?
The questions moral philosophers attempt to answer are what is right or wrong, and what makes it so.
There are two possible foundations - the material, and the incorporeal - on which to build any approach to the subject. Or as Epicurus expressed it “There are two kinds of enquiry, the one concerned with things, the other with nothing but words”.
This is the first choice we have to make - which approach comes closest to reality as we experience it. We can then decide on the validity of the options on offer in each area.
The Material Choice
On this assumption only atoms and void exist (the fundamental particles of atoms, and void space). It is then necessary to relate moral values to physical phenomena and explain why we should make certain choices and not others. This is done by philosophers in the Humanist tradition.
The Incorporeal Choice
Philosophers (including those calling themselves theologians) who subscribe to this tradition have to provide evidence of the existence of beings beyond the physical world - incorporeal beings such as God, or Ideas as entities - and to relate moral values to them.
Theologians maintain that without religion there is no basis for morals. To do this they have to try to show that God is:
(1) always acting morally whatever He does, or,
(2) He never does anything immoral.
Both of these suppositions are disproved by the contents of the Bible and the Koran.
A survey of 15,361 British schoolchildren aged 13 to 15 in February 1995 found that one in three are agnostics and a further one in four are atheists, i.e. 58%. So it seems that as the basis for making their moral judgements, 58% of older school pupils in the UK make the material choice, and reject the incorporeal one.
Nevertheless only the theories of theologians must, by law, be used in UK schools as the basis for ethical education and examinations.
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