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| Justice, Virtue and Education |
| David Carr |
| （Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom） |
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| Guide Justice has been a perennial topic of philosophical concern, since – at least in the west – the great Greek founding fathers of western philosophy Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. For Socrates, the main moral end in life was the cultivation of virtue as wisdom conceived as very much concerned with justice; the central virtue for Plato’s politics is clearly justice; and Aristotle devotes much space to justice as both a general moral principle and an individual (cardinal) virtue. To say this, however, is not to say that these philosophers were in full or much agreement about the precise meaning of justice, and Plato and Aristotle certainly appear to have differed on certain fundamental questions of the individual citizen’s relationship – or obligations – to the state, and vice versa. Moreover, Aristotle’s shrewd observation in his Politics (1941a)[1] that it is no less unjust to treat unequals equally than to treat equals unequally suggests at the very least that determining what counts as justice in any particular case is no easy matter. |
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Abstract Given that justice is a fundamental principle or dimension of human moral association, it would also seem to be of some educational concern: in short, we should want to educate children and young people to be just or fair. However, this is not something that not something we may be hope to achieve by teaching theories of justice – since, as this paper indicates – such theories are often concerned with securing some measure of justice in circumstances where people cannot always be expected to be just or fair as individual citizens. Thus, educating for justice would seem to be more a matter of cultivating the virtue of justice. In this light, the paper proceeds to consider how this might be at least partly assisted by the moral exploration of imaginative literature.
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Received: 26 October 2014
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2015, Vol. 12 
