656563

research-article2016
TRE0010.1177/1477878516656563Theory and Research in EducationCopp

Article
TRE
Theory and Research in Education

Moral education versus

2016, Vol. 14(2) 149­–167
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1477878516656563
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David Copp
University of California, Davis, USA

Abstract
Moral education is open to worries about indoctrination given the controversies there are
about a wide range of ethical matters. I argue, however, that moral education is no more liable
to being ‘indoctrinal’ than education in history or science. I begin by proposing an account of
what indoctrination involves. I then note that moral education takes different forms and that
the different forms raise different concerns about the potential for indoctrination. First is ‘moral
socialization,’ which can begin before children have moral concepts. Second is ‘propositional
moral education’. Some propositional moral education occurs in the teaching of moral concepts
or as an outgrowth of moral socialization. But some addresses highly controversial issues of the
kind that raise the greatest concern about indoctrination. I argue that even in such cases, moral
education need not involve indoctrination. In concluding, I discuss the objection that my defense
of moral education relies on debatable meta-ethical assumptions.

Keywords
Indoctrination, education, values, ethics, socialization, critical thinking

The schools should be educating our children, not indoctrinating them. This precept is
widely shared among educators and citizens, at least in liberal societies. Indeed, the word
‘indoctrination’ is often understood as a pejorative, and where it is so understood, no-one
would condone indoctrination in the schools – it would be strange to do so. Moral educa-
tion may seem to be especially susceptible to worries about indoctrination, given the con-
troversies there are about a wide range of ethical matters. Many citizens want the schools
to teach ‘values’ and ‘strict standards of right and wrong’,1 but in a pluralistic society,
there is disagreement about what this would consist in.2 Religious parents may worry that
a secular school system will indoctrinate their children in values they find unacceptable,

Corresponding author:
David Copp, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Email: dcopp@ucdavis.edu

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150 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

and secular parents may have the corresponding worry from the opposite direction.3 Many
parents believe that moral education does not belong in the schools and that parents should
morally educate their own children.4 To avoid controversy, teachers may limit themselves
to teaching children to make their own choices among ethical views. But not even this
cautious approach entirely avoids worries about indoctrination ‘in the face of controversy
about the content and justification of morality’ (Hand, 2014: 2).
I shall argue that moral education is no more susceptible to being ‘indoctrinal’ than
education in other topics. Of course, I do not deny that moral education can be indoctri-
nal, or that one might have many other worries about moral education. This article has
the limited goal of addressing the concern that moral education is especially susceptible
to being indoctrinal. To that end, I begin with an examination of the distinction between
education and indoctrination, and I propose an account of what indoctrination involves.
I then turn to the relation between moral education and indoctrination. To make sense of
the issues, we need to consider different forms that moral education can take. In the first
of three sections on moral education and indoctrination, I discuss moral socialization or
character education, which can begin even before children have moral concepts. In the
next two sections, I discuss ‘propositional moral education’, beginning with the acquisi-
tion of moral concepts and moral beliefs that may be acquired in the course of acquiring
the moral concepts or as outgrowths of moral socialization. I then turn to moral educa-
tion that addresses highly controversial moral issues of the kind that raise the greatest
concern about indoctrination. I argue that even in such cases, moral education need not
involve indoctrination. In a concluding section, I discuss the objection that my defense
of moral education relies on debatable metaethical assumptions.

Indoctrination
As I indicated, I am primarily interested in the distinction between education and indoc-
trination, so I aim to understand what kinds of classroom teaching would qualify as
‘indoctrinal’. The most egregious and paradigmatic instances of indoctrination have
been the uses that states, political parties, religious groups, and others have made of ter-
ror, force, coercion, and psychological manipulation in one form or another to induce
people to accept a favored ideology (Curren, 2008; Winn, 2000; Strauss, 1978). These
extreme methods go well beyond mere indoctrination. I think we can better understand
what is involved in indoctrination in particular, if we focus on more prosaic kinds of
indoctrination that do not involve coercion, threats, the inducing of terror, or psychologi-
cal manipulation of vulnerable people.
Concerns about indoctrination in the classroom are focused on this more prosaic kind
of phenomenon. An example would be teaching in high school that the Holocaust did not
in fact occur, and that a conspiracy against Germans is behind the allegation that it
occurred, without acknowledging the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust did
occur. This teaching could be embedded in an ordinary history curriculum without histri-
onics and without the use of manipulative techniques. Indoctrination of this more prosaic
kind will be my central focus.
I take the root of the term ‘indoctrinate’ to be the Latin ‘indoctrinare’, which means to
instruct in a subject or a doctrine (Curren, 2008). I therefore think of indoctrination as a

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Copp 151

way of affecting people’s beliefs. After all, the topic of the article is the contrast between
indoctrination and education, and education consists primarily in instructing people in
various subject matters.
Educational practices can be flawed in many ways other than being indoctrinal. For
instance, schools might use the threat of corporal punishment to motivate pupils to
behave in class. Schools might use outmoded or intellectually flawed textbooks. Curricula
can leave out or simply fail to address important topics. To be sure, in some cases, prac-
tices or failings of these kinds might be motivated by the desire to shape pupils’ beliefs,
and in these cases, indoctrination or something that resembles it might be involved. For
instance, curricula might be designed to avoid certain topics with the aim that pupils
simply not acquire certain controversial beliefs. A school might fail to teach biology
because the teachers do not want to address evolutionary theory.5 A school might fail to
teach students to think critically even if it does not strictly speaking indoctrinate them.6
We need to be able to distinguish indoctrination from all the other ways that instruction
can be flawed.
One natural idea is that to indoctrinate is to take something that is controversial and
to teach people to accept it (or to believe it to be true or plausible or likely to be true).
This idea is mistaken. On one hand, widespread and successful indoctrination in the past
might mean that a doctrine is not now controversial in a given community. Lack of con-
troversy about something does not show that people have not been indoctrinated to
accept it. On the other hand, controversy can be irrational or uninformed or localized and
widely rejected. Even if something is controversial, it might be well supported or even
extremely widely accepted by everyone who has honestly and thoroughly reviewed the
evidence. There is controversy, for example, about evolutionary theory, and this does not
mean it would be indoctrinal to teach it.
Even if something is controversial, it need not be indoctrinal to teach it if there are
good reasons for accepting it and if one teaches these reasons (Hand, 2014: 2). Plausibly,
for example, it need not be indoctrinal to teach evolutionary theory because there are
good reasons for accepting it. Careful attention to these reasons would seem enough to
ensure that teaching the theory is not indoctrinal. Yet, students in the early years of sec-
ondary school might not be sophisticated enough to grasp all the reasons, and it wouldn’t
necessarily be indoctrinal to teach the theory to them. Whether teaching it would be
indoctrinal might depend on whether students are told that the theory is controversial and
whether they are taught at least the rudiments of scientific method so they can begin to
understand why scientists accept the theory. The basic point remains – that it need not be
indoctrinal to teach people to accept something that is controversial. And in some con-
texts, this would not be indoctrinal even if reasons are not given.
One might propose now that indoctrination consists in taking something about which
there is reasonable controversy – something that reasonable people could deny even
given a review of the reasons for believing it – and to teach people to accept it without
providing reasons.7 But this idea is too restrictive. It might be completely acceptable to
teach that a controversial historical event actually occurred even if the evidence leaves
room for reasonable disagreement, although perhaps this would not be acceptable if the
evidence leaves room for reasonable disagreement among professional historians.
Consider, for example, disagreement about exactly what motivated the Dieppe raid of

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152 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

1942. It might be acceptable to teach that the motive was such and such even if the
teacher does not provide a serious and thorough review of the evidence. The teaching of
history would have to go into slow motion if this were required since there is reasonable
controversy about a great deal of history. So I conclude, it need not be indoctrinal to
teach students to accept something about which there is reasonable controversy even if
the teacher does not provide students with reasons for accepting the controversial thing.
To be sure, it arguably would be bad practice for a teacher not to mention the exist-
ence of controversy, where the controversy is reasonable, especially if controversy exists
among experts, such as historians. But even if a teacher ought to mention the existence
of controversy, it seems to me that a failure to do so would not necessarily make the
teaching indoctrinal. It would seem to be especially bad practice to ignore local contro-
versy about something one is teaching – controversy among the families of one’s stu-
dents or in the local community. Yet, it is not clear that it would be indoctrinal for a
teacher to ignore such controversy especially if the other side of the controversy is dog-
matic and deeply entrenched. I will return to this issue. The main point, again, is that it
would be not be indoctrinal in every context to teach something controversial without
providing reasons for believing it.
Dictionary definitions of ‘indoctrinate’ differ in significant ways. In some uses, indoc-
trination is simply equated with teaching. I won’t discuss such definitions because we are
looking for a definition according to which to indoctrinate is plausibly to teach in a way
that is objectionable. There are two families of definitions of this kind. In one family, ‘to
indoctrinate’ is defined as ‘to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view’8 or a
‘partisan or biased belief or point of view’.9 According to definitions of this kind, the
reason indoctrination is objectionable is that what is taught is objectionable because it is
‘partisan’, ‘ideological’, or ‘biased’. Call this, ‘the ideology view’. In the other family,
‘indoctrination’ is defined as a matter of inducing ‘a person or group to accept a set of
beliefs uncritically’.10 According to definitions of this kind, the reason indoctrination is
objectionable is that it explicitly or implicitly treats certain beliefs as immune from criti-
cal review and protects them from the potential undermining effect of counter-evidence
or argument. Call this, ‘the critical thinking view’.
On the ideology view, it is not possible to indoctrinate a person in anything other than
a ‘partisan ideology’. If we equate being partisan or ideological with being controversial,
then this view is the same as the position we have already discussed. But it would be
better to think of a partisan ideology as a view that is promoted for partisan reasons,
because it is characteristic of a particular group such as a religious group, a social class,
a political group, or a national group.11 Examples would be beliefs that are promoted for
political, social, psychological, or patriotic reasons. As such, a partisan ideology is pro-
moted for non-epistemic reasons – for reasons other than a desire to believe truly, to
understand, explain, or describe.
The trouble is that it is clearly possible to indoctrinate people in a theory that is not at
all partisan or ideological. For example, the theory of evolution by natural selection is
not a partisan ideology in the intended sense. It is advanced for epistemic reasons in
order to explain the proliferation of and variation among species in nature. Yet, it is
clearly possible to indoctrinate students in this theory by teaching it in a way that treats
it as a partisan matter, as something one accepts if one is ‘educated’, say. In such a case,

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Copp 153

it would be misleading to describe the theory as a partisan ideology even if it were taught
as a partisan ideology. Perhaps, then, we should revise the ideology view. We might say
that to indoctrinate is to teach something ‘as an ideology’ – it is to teach people to accept
something by giving them partisan reasons or motives for accepting what is taught – by
telling them that what they are being taught is accepted in a group with which they do or
are expected to identify.
The revised ideology view is similar to the critical thinking view in that it takes indoc-
trination to turn on how something is taught rather than on what is taught. Yet, the revised
ideology account misclassifies in both directions. On one hand, someone might teach
evolutionary theory as something that any informed scientist would accept. To do this
would be to teach the theory as a partisan matter, as characteristic of a particular group,
so the revised ideology view would say that this way of teaching it is indoctrinal. Yet,
clearly, this way of teaching the theory is compatible with teaching it in a scientifically
respectable manner. On the other hand, it seems clear that indoctrination does not require
teaching something as a partisan matter. One might teach that the Holocaust did not
occur and give a series of pseudo-historical arguments for the claim that it did not occur.
To do this would be indoctrinal even if one avoids partisan issues, such as what other
people in the community believe. For these reasons, I will set aside the revised ideology
view and turn to the critical thinking view.
On the critical thinking view, to indoctrinate is to induce ‘a person or group to
accept a set of beliefs uncritically’. This raises the question, what is it to induce people
to accept a belief uncritically? Ordinarily, this would involve inducing people to
believe something without giving them good reasons to believe it. But more or less
than this can be involved, depending on the pedagogical context and on the nature of
the thing being taught.
Consider, for instance, that mathematical axioms would ordinarily be taught as
immune to counter-evidence or argument and in a way that makes their acceptance resist-
ant to counter-evidence or argument. This suggests that what counts as teaching people
to accept things uncritically depends on the nature of the thing being taught. If the thing
being taught is an obvious mathematical truth, such as an axiom, there is no room for
rational controversy, and one can teach it as such without the teaching being uncritical.
But if the thing being taught is contingent and empirical, such as a matter of history or
science, then attention needs to be paid to the fallibility of beliefs about such matters and
reasons normally need to be provided for believing it – epistemic reasons that support the
truth of the matter, not, of course, partisan reasons. We can say that epistemic reasons
need to be provided for believing the thing that is being taught to the extent that doing so
is epistemically appropriate given the nature of the thing being taught.
We need to add a qualification. For even if reasons are provided and even if the rea-
sons are epistemic rather than partisan, they could be selected in a partisan or biased way
that does not fairly represent the balance of reasons.12 For example, a teacher might
provide selective and biased evidence to support the claim that slavery as practiced in the
southern United States was benign. We also need to restrict attention to the best ‘availa-
ble’ set of reasons or evidence since it is not indoctrinal to fail to present reasons that are
unknown. So we need to say something like this: the reasons that are provided must
fairly represent the best available epistemic case for believing or for not believing the

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154 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

propositions at issue. To try to capture these ideas, I will say that the reasons must be
epistemically ‘fairly balanced’.
And we need an additional qualification. People who are being instructed in a subject
vary in their maturity, their background, and in the degree to which they are intellectually
sophisticated. So we should add that reasons need to be provided only when and to the
extent that doing so would be pedagogically appropriate. This is a complex, context-
sensitive matter. In one kind of case, available classroom time and priorities might make
it unreasonable to worry about providing reasons about certain matters. In another kind
of case, students might not have sufficient sophistication and training to grasp the epis-
temically best case for believing a proposition. It is important for students to be given
reasons that they can understand and that they can understand to be reasons for believing
what they are being taught.13
As I mentioned before, I believe it would be bad practice to ignore local controversy
about something one is teaching. Moreover, although I am uncertain about this, it seems
to me that a failure to address local controversy would count as indoctrinal, at least in
most cases. By ‘local’ controversy, I mean controversy among the families of one’s stu-
dents or in their community. When there is such controversy, objections to the truth of
what one is teaching are likely to be known by one’s students and are likely to be salient
to them. To ignore these objections would be to ignore, selectively, salient reasons to
doubt the truth of what one is teaching. And this, it seems to me, would be indoctrinal.
To be sure, there may be cases in which a locally accepted view is deeply entrenched and
held dogmatically, and in this case, it could be futile to attempt to address local contro-
versy in any detail. Also there may be cases in which a locally accepted view is not sup-
ported by any epistemically respectable reasons and in which an attempt to address the
controversy would tend to give credibility to arguments that should not be respected.
Consider, for instance, controversy about evolutionary theory. For these reasons, I speak
only of the need to ‘address’ local controversy, leaving it as a matter for judgment
whether it would be adequate merely to acknowledge the controversy or whether the
locally accepted arguments on the controversial matter need to be discussed. With these
qualifications, I believe it would be indoctrinal to fail to address local controversy about
a matter being taught.
Given all of this, I propose the following account of indoctrination, which I take to be
a development of the critical thinking view:

To induce people to believe something uncritically – or to indoctrinate them in this thing – is

to induce people to believe it, where, given its nature, there are or could be epistemic reasons
for believing it, but to do so (1) without providing epistemic reasons for believing it, [a] to the
extent that presenting such reasons would be pedagogically appropriate, reasons that are [b]
epistemically fairly balanced and [c] epistemically cogent, or (2) without addressing any local
controversy about it by acknowledging and, to the extent that is appropriate, evaluating the
different sides of the controversy.

There can be controversy, of course, in the application of this account. There can be
controversy about epistemic and pedagogical appropriateness. There can be controversy
about what reasons there are for believing something. There can be controversy as to

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Copp 155

which reasons need to be given. And there can be controversy about how best to address
local controversy. Nevertheless, I think the account plausibly captures what indoctrina-
tion consists in.14

Moral education and indoctrination I: Moral socialization

Given what we have found, the issue whether moral education must involve indoctrina-
tion, or is especially likely to, is the issue whether moral education must involve, or is
especially likely to involve, teaching people to accept various moral beliefs uncritically.
There is an important difference between, on one hand, what moral education can
involve where the pupils are very young children just beginning in school or pre-school,
and, on the other hand, what moral education can involve where the students are teenag-
ers who are nearly finished their secondary school education. With the youngest chil-
dren, the primary goal of moral education would seem to be character building. The goal
is to inculcate the values of honesty, fairness, tolerance, and the like. With older children,
the goal can shift toward helping students to understand and to think critically about
controversial and difficult moral issues.15 In this section, I focus on character building
with younger pupils. In later sections, I discuss teaching that addresses controversial
moral issues.
By moral socialization, I mean socialization that is aimed at building moral character
– at encouraging virtuous behavior and behavioral dispositions. It is a kind of socializa-
tion in which we aim to teach children to work together cooperatively and to have certain
important ‘pro-social’ or morally acceptable attitudes, including but not limited to a
cooperative attitude. Children need to be considerate of each other. They need to learn to
take turns. They need to respect each other’s learning and work, and not to interfere by,
for instance, destroying one another’s work. They need to learn not to cheat. They need
to learn appropriate ways to handle their emotions so that anger and jealousy and the like
don’t lead them to act inappropriately. They need to learn to be comfortable with differ-
ences in gender, race, religion, and the like so that they do not act out of intolerance. And
they need to learn to avoid bullying behavior, scapegoating, and so on. This is all moral
learning in a broad sense. Of course, much of this kind of learning takes place in the
home, but much of it also takes place in the schools since it is in the schools that many
children first come together in groups with a determinate purpose, to join together in
learning.
Much of the earliest moral teaching is a matter of moral socialization rather than a
matter of teaching children to have morally appropriate beliefs. The youngest children
may lack moral concepts altogether or have only rudimentary moral concepts. (I will
discuss the teaching of moral concepts in the next section.) Once children have the moral
concepts, they will begin to have moral beliefs, but the central focus of moral education
may still be to build moral character. The goal of moral socialization is, for example, that
pupils be honest, that they be tolerant of people who differ from them in gender, race,
religion, and so on. This is a different goal and perhaps a more important goal than that
of teaching pupils to believe that honesty is a virtue or that toleration is a moral
requirement.

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156 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

Moral socialization as such is not a kind of thing that could be indoctrinal because it
is not as such a matter of teaching children to have certain beliefs.16 Because of this, it
could not involve teaching children to accept certain beliefs uncritically. Hence, it could
not be indoctrinal.
This is not, of course, to deny that some kinds of socialization would be objectiona-
ble. Most important, first, in some cases, socialization might affect children in a way that
facilitates indoctrinal teaching. For example, in some cases, socialization might lead
children to accept uncritically whatever they are taught.17 Let us call socialization of this
kind indoctrination-serving. Second, in some cases, socialization would be objectiona-
ble for the attitudes it instills in children. It could be racist or anti-semitic. Third, sociali-
zation could be objectionable for the way it is done. It could be manipulative. Now I
agree that in some cases, moral socialization might be open to these objections, but these
are different from the mistaken objection that moral socialization is indoctrinal. In the
nature of the case, moral socialization is not indoctrinal because it is not as such a matter
of teaching children to have certain beliefs.
Moral socialization can be manipulative, but it need not be. There are important issues
about the processes through which moral socialization takes place when it goes well, and
it would be beyond the scope of this article to explore the psychological complexities. In
the best circumstances, children have the sense that they are loved and supported and
they have good role models. In contexts of this kind, successful moral socialization
involves such things as adult interventions in play that help to direct playing children in
constructive directions. It involves attempting to get children to respond empathetically
to each other.18 The important point is that none of this need be manipulative in any
objectionable way.
In addition, children can be given reasons for behaving in desirable ways, and when
moral socialization is done well, they are given reasons, at least to the extent that doing
so is pedagogically appropriate. In trying to teach children to cooperate with each other,
for example, we might ask them to think about how much more they accomplish when
they work together with each other. I will return to this point in the next section.
More important, the fundamental objection to indoctrination does not apply to moral
socialization. In general terms, the central objection to indoctrination is that it reduces
the likelihood of equipping students to be successful epistemic agents either in general or
in a particular area of thought. Education ought to equip students to engage with the
world the way it actually is and to think critically so that they can distinguish well-sup-
ported ideas about the world from mere speculation or worse. Indoctrinal teaching under-
mines this important pedagogical goal as does indoctrination-serving socialization. But
moral socialization need not be conducted in a way that undermines efforts to equip
children to be successful epistemic agents. It aims to equip children to become moral
agents, and this is compatible with equipping children to be good epistemic agents.
There is then, I am claiming, a distinction between kinds of moral education. There
is moral socialization, which consists in teaching children how to behave, including
teaching them to work together cooperatively and to have certain important ‘pro-social’
or morally acceptable attitudes. And there is propositional moral education, which con-
sists in teaching children what to believe morally, or, in less directive cases, getting
children to consider what to believe morally. It could include, for example, inviting

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Copp 157

children to explore arguments for and against capital punishment. Obviously, in prac-
tice, these two kinds of moral education often go hand in hand. Teaching children not to
cheat may go hand in hand with teaching them that cheating is wrong. But the two kinds
of moral education are distinguishable in principle. With very young children who may
lack the moral concepts, teaching them how to behave certainly is the central issue.
With older and more sophisticated children, the emphasis presumably would be on
propositional moral teaching.
Moral socialization, I say, is a matter of teaching children how to feel and how to
behave.19 As such, moral socialization is of a piece with two of the ‘three Rs’ of primary
education: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Distinguish between behavioral and skill
teaching and propositional teaching. Reading and writing are good examples of behav-
ioral and skill teaching. We aim to teach children to read and write. Mathematics teach-
ing blends behavioral and skill teaching with propositional teaching. History and science
education are examples of propositional teaching, but even here, behavioral and skill
teaching are part of the full picture. For with more sophisticated students, we aim ideally
to teach how history and science are ‘done’. We aim to teach them to be critical consum-
ers of the propositional knowledge that we teach them.
We are now in a position to draw two important conclusions. First, much moral educa-
tion is moral socialization, which aims to inculcate moral virtues such as honesty, fair-
ness, tolerance, and the like. Since it does not essentially involve teaching children to
accept certain beliefs, it is not indoctrinal. It could not be indoctrinal, given what it is to
indoctrinate and given what moral socialization involves. Second, moral socialization is
a kind of behavioral and skill teaching, and as such it is importantly similar to teaching
reading and writing and much else that is taught in the home and the schools without
being thought potentially indoctrinal. It is one of the ordinary things that are taught.
The rationale for moral socialization is easy to see. Consider physical education,
which is another example of behavioral and skill teaching that is not even potentially
indoctrinal. In physical education, we aim to teach children to exercise with enjoyment
and to play sports for enjoyment and for physical development, and we teach these things
for the sake of the children’s health and happiness. With moral socialization, we aim to
teach children to act and feel in ‘prosocial’ ways, and we teach this for the sake of their
own happiness – since fitting into groups is a precondition for finding friendships and for
having successful careers, and so on – and also for the sake of the successful functioning
of the classroom – since classroom teaching cannot succeed if the children interrupt, and
cheat, and steal from one another and so on.
We can now see that moral socialization is needed to sustain and support education,
including, of course, critical thinking, and in this way, it is a morally important counter
to indoctrination. We cannot teach anything successfully in a classroom unless the chil-
dren are cooperative and respectful of one another and of the teacher. And more than this,
we cannot teach children to reflect critically on what they are taught if they are not
respectful of diverse opinions and willing to listen to each other and to opinions that they
initially are unwilling to take seriously. So moral socialization, when done well, under-
pins the teaching of the proper critical attitude that underlies having an ‘open mind’. It is
not a candidate for indoctrination in the nature of the case. But more than that, it under-
pins the possibility of teaching that is deeply non-indoctrinal.

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158 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that moral socialization can in certain circum-

stances be indoctrination-serving. Even if moral socialization is needed to sustain educa-
tion, including propositional teaching that is non-indoctrinal, there can be cases in which
moral socialization facilitates indoctrinal teaching. Teachers need their students to be
cooperative and respectful whether they are teaching them well or indoctrinating them. I
claim, however, that moral socialization need not be indoctrination-serving. It can instead
be used to build moral character, and properly done, it involves teaching the kind of criti-
cal attitude that blocks indoctrination.

Moral education and indoctrination II: Propositional moral

education
Turn now to propositional moral education. The issue is whether propositional moral edu-
cation must involve, or is especially likely to involve, teaching people to accept various
moral beliefs uncritically. Clearly it can involve this, but virtually any topic can be taught
uncritically. The fact that moral principles can be taught uncritically is not interesting.
To have an interesting claim about propositional moral education and its susceptibil-
ity to being indoctrinal, one would need to show that it is especially susceptible to this.
To think about this, I want to distinguish between, on one hand, propositional moral
teaching that is in an important way an ‘extension’ of what is learned and taught in moral
socialization, and, on the other hand, other cases of propositional moral teaching. Call
this the distinction between ‘socializing’ and ‘broad’ propositional moral teaching. Let
me explain this.
In moral socialization, among the things we aim to teach children is not to bully, not
to cheat, and not to take advantage of others. We can do this in ways that do not involve
teaching children what to believe. We can involve them in games that require coopera-
tion, for instance. We can issue imperatives, such as ‘Don’t do that!’ We can punish those
who bully, cheat, and take advantage and reward those who refrain from these behaviors.
But as children become more mature, moral socialization will become more explicit and
it will begin to involve describing the kinds of behavior we want or don’t want to see. We
can say things like ‘That was unkind’ or ‘That would be selfish’. We can say ‘Good chil-
dren don’t act that way!’ or ‘It is wrong to do that!’ Indeed, it seems to me, the moral
concepts are taught in the course of moral socialization. We try to teach children not to
be bullies and in the process we teach them that bullying is wrong and that good children
do not act as bullies. It is in this sense that, I shall say, teaching children that bullying is
wrong is an extension of the moral socialization that teaches children not to bully.
Similarly for teaching that cooperation is good, that stealing is wrong, that cheating is
wrong, that toleration is good, that scapegoating is bad, and so on. To teach these things
is to engage in the kind of socializing propositional moral teaching that is an extension
of moral socialization.
Propositional moral teaching of precepts of this kind need not be involved in moral
socialization, and with the youngest children, it wouldn’t be, but as children mature, it
tends to go hand in hand with moral socialization. One might worry that such teaching is
unavoidably indoctrinal since, as I said, it is an extension of moral socialization – it
makes explicit what was taught in moral socialization – and since children are not given

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epistemic reasons for acquiring the attitudes and behavioral dispositions they acquire in
moral socialization.20 This worry strikes me as implausible. There are three reasons for
this. Most important, good teachers do give reasons in support of the moral precepts that
children learn in moral socialization. I begin with the other two reasons.
First, the goal of moral socialization and of socializing propositional moral teaching
alike is to teach children to cooperate, not to be bullies, and so on. With children who
have the concept of wrongness, it would be odd and artificial to refrain from teaching
that bullying is wrong if one is aiming to teach children not to bully. The focus is on the
behavior, however, not on the precepts which, after all, are taught mainly as a way of
bringing the children’s attention to the behavior that is to be avoided. The precepts that
may be taught in socializing moral teaching are taught as a part of moral socialization,
which is not as such even potentially indoctrinal in its nature. The teaching of precepts
of this kind is best viewed as being like moral socialization in being outside the proper
scope of worries about indoctrination. After all, cooperative behavior is a precondition of
any successful classroom teaching, whether indoctrinal or not, so teaching children that
cooperation is good is prior to the kinds of teaching that might sensibly be evaluated as
indoctrinal or not.
Second, children learn the moral concepts in moral socialization through the teaching
of moral precepts, such as that bullying is wrong. Bullying and cheating and the like are
given as examples of wrongdoing in order to get children to grasp the concept.
Cooperation and toleration are given as examples of good things. One cannot teach a
concept in using certain examples if one treats the examples as contentious. In biology,
we teach children the concept of a stamen by showing them examples and telling them
what stamens are. And the same is true, I think, in the moral case. Certain examples need
to be taken as paradigm cases of wrongness, of good things, and the like if children are
to grasp the concepts.21
Third, as I said before, and notwithstanding what I have been claiming, pedagogically
appropriate reasons do tend to be given in moral socialization when it is done well. When
moral socialization is done well, parents and teachers try to teach children to understand
why they must not behave in certain ways and why it is good to behave in other ways. In
trying to teach children not to bully other children, for example, we might ask them to
think of how the victim would feel. Reasons of this kind not to bully other children are
reasons to think bullying is wrong, and it is pedagogically appropriate to give reasons of
this kind even if bullying is being used as a paradigm example of wrongdoing. So rea-
sons are given, and when this kind of teaching is done well, the reasons that are given are
pedagogically appropriate, given the degree of sophistication of the children. This is
enough to support the idea that socializing propositional moral education need not be
indoctrinal.
Socializing propositional moral teaching is not the whole story, however, for there is
also the broader moral teaching that aims to teach children to accept moral propositions
and principles that are not simply direct evaluations of the kinds of behaviors that are the
objects of concern in moral socialization. For example, war would be discussed in his-
tory classes as would issues such as human rights, economic inequality, and democracy.
In these cases, it would be expected that ethical issues would be raised and discussed. It
would be artificial if they were not discussed. But if students are taught in health class

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160 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

that, say, people ought morally to get themselves vaccinated against influenza, this is not
a case of socializing propositional moral education since it is not a mere extension of
moral socialization.
It is nevertheless important to understand that in many cases of this kind of broad
propositional moral education, the things children have learned in moral socialization
can be drawn upon in considering other moral issues. Consider for instance that a history
class might discuss the use of torture in the inquisition. Obviously, moral socialization
has more normal and simple aims than to deal with torture! Yet, some children might
realize that some of the propositions they have learned through their moral socialization
apply to torture. For torture is a kind of bullying. So some children might infer that tor-
ture is wrong from the propositions they already have learned, that bullying is wrong and
that toleration is good. Or they might have these connections pointed out to them by their
teacher. This would be an example of broad propositional moral teaching that is not
indoctrinal. It would not be indoctrinal, for students would be encouraged to draw on
what they have already learned to infer on their own that torture is wrong. They would
be taught to assess the issue critically.
This is not to deny of course that this kind of broad moral education can be indoctri-
nal. As we saw, virtually any topic can be taught uncritically.

Moral education and indoctrination III: The heart of the

matter
Let me now therefore restrict attention to the kind of broad propositional moral teaching
that addresses topics that are not arguably cases of socializing propositional moral teach-
ing, which I have already discussed, and that also are not topics that are easily assessable
on the basis of precepts learned in socializing moral teaching. This is the kind of moral
teaching that is at the heart of the matter. It includes topics such as the morality of con-
traception and abortion, the morality of war, the nature of human rights, the justice of
economic inequality, and the moral basis of democracy.
Propositional moral teaching need not consist in attempting to get students to believe
certain things. It need not be directive. It might instead, and more properly, consist in
attempting to get students to consider what to believe, by exploring moral issues of the
kinds I have listed. But it seems to me that not even the more directive kind of moral
teaching must be indoctrinal.22
I said before that to have an interesting claim about propositional moral education and
its susceptibility to being indoctrinal, one would need to claim that it is especially sus-
ceptible to this. One would need to show that propositional moral content cannot be
taught critically or that it is especially difficult to teach critically.23 The account of indoc-
trination that I proposed before can help us to think about this. On this account, to induce
people to accept a moral claim uncritically is, roughly, to induce them to accept it (1)
without providing epistemic reasons for believing it that are (a) pedagogically appropri-
ate, (b) epistemically fairly balanced, and (c) epistemically cogent or (2) without address-
ing local controversy. So the issues are whether propositional moral teaching is special
in that, perhaps (1) epistemic reasons cannot be provided for believing moral proposi-
tions or (1a) pedagogically appropriate reasons cannot be provided or (1b and 1c) fairly

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Copp 161

balanced epistemically cogent reasons cannot be provided or (2) local controversy can-
not be adequately addressed. Is propositional moral teaching different in any of these
ways from teaching, say, evolutionary theory?
I think that the only real issue is whether it is possible to provide epistemically appro-
priate reasons for believing moral propositions. Epistemic reasons are reasons that sup-
port belief by supporting the truth or plausibility of what is believed. Even if other kinds
of reasons could be provided for having a certain moral belief – perhaps, for instance, it
is discomforting to have different moral beliefs than one’s neighbors have – prudential or
practical reasons of this kind for moral belief are not relevant to the issue whether moral
ideas can be taught critically. And if it is possible to provide epistemically appropriate
reasons, there surely would be no special problem in providing epistemically fairly bal-
anced reasons that are pedagogically appropriate to one’s students. Nor would there be a
special problem in addressing local controversy. So I will restrict attention to the issue
whether it is possible to provide epistemically appropriate reasons for believing moral
propositions.
The answer seems obvious, given the large literature in moral and political philoso-
phy on topics of the kind I listed: the morality of contraception and abortion, the morality
of war, the nature of human rights, the justice of economic inequality, and the moral basis
of democracy. This literature considers the reasons for and against a variety of moral
claims. One might, of course, deny that any of this writing actually provides epistemic
reasons for a moral claim. But on the face of it, we have people debating a variety of
moral claims by providing reasons for believing one thing or another. This is prima facie
evidence that one can provide epistemically appropriate reasons for believing moral
propositions. And let me add three considerations.
First, it would not of course be pedagogically appropriate in most primary or second-
ary schools to bring the kinds of arguments that are found in these philosophical litera-
tures into the classroom. These arguments might be too sophisticated. Teachers would
need to ask themselves how to tailor the arguments that are available and that they could
in principle discuss with their students to the students’ level of education and degree of
sophistication. But this is not a special problem with moral education. It is also some-
thing that science and history teachers must wrestle with.
Second, local controversy about moral issues often extends to the premises that would
be invoked in the philosophical arguments. In many communities, moral thinking is
grounded in religious texts that are taken to be sacred and it often would be pedagogi-
cally inappropriate to examine these texts and the idea that they are sacred. The schools
typically and appropriately do not challenge students’ religious views. This may make it
very difficult to respond to local controversy about moral views. But this again is not a
special problem for moral education. It is also something that must be wrestled with by
teachers of science and history. Those who read Genesis literally will have views that
conflict with what science and history can teach us.
Third, the philosophical literature on deeply controversial or difficult moral topics
shows that there is pervasive and deep disagreement about those topics. Moreover, the
arguments given in the literature never prove the truth of any interesting moral claim. But
it would be implausible to say that the existence of disagreement and the lack of proof
means that moral teaching must be indoctrinal. There is also pervasive and deep

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162 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

disagreement about certain historical topics. So again, disagreement and the absence of
proof are not special problems for moral education. They must also be wrestled with by
teachers of history. Moreover, the existence of deep and pervasive disagreement about
the most difficult issues is no reason to think that all issues are similarly affected by this
kind of disagreement.
Obviously, I am not saying that since these issues are also issues in teaching history
and science they can be ignored. They certainly cannot be ignored. In fact, I think they
are among the most important challenges facing educators in pluralistic societies. But
they do not show that moral teaching faces a special problem.
Moreover, these problems of wrestling with issues about pedagogically appropriate
reasons and arguments and about the educational appropriateness of challenging religion
are not such as to undermine the possibility of non-indoctrinal propositional moral teach-
ing. Suppose that we teach a health class about the importance of having oneself vacci-
nated against influenza by talking about the minimal health risks of vaccination and
about the way in which one who is not vaccinated free-loads on those who are vacci-
nated. This is ethical teaching, and it is non-indoctrinal. It provides reasons for the view
being promoted – that people ought to get themselves vaccinated – and reasons that are
both epistemically and pedagogically appropriate. If there is controversy in the local
community, teachers can look at the claims made by those who reject vaccination and
discuss the medical evidence with their students. Nothing here is problematic. Nothing is
indoctrinal.

Moral education and metaethics

I have contended that although propositional moral teaching can be indoctrinal, it is not
especially susceptible to being indoctrinal. It is not, I argued, more susceptible to being
indoctrinal than the teaching of history and science. My argument depends on an analysis
of what indoctrination consists in as well as my contention that it is possible to provide
epistemically appropriate reasons for believing moral propositions. Certain metaethical
views would reject the latter contention, and certain views would need to deny my
account of what indoctrination consists in, unless they also deny that moral education
can be indoctrinal. My argument therefore seems to conflict with certain metaethical
views and one might take this to be an objection to the argument. It is not clear to me,
however, that this is an objection to my argument rather than an objection to these meta-
ethical views.
In brief, my argument is as follows. First, to indoctrinate people in something is,
roughly, to teach them to accept it without providing epistemic reasons for believing it,
where there are or could be epistemically appropriate reasons for believing it. And sec-
ond, it is possible to provide epistemically appropriate reasons for moral belief. Therefore,
propositional moral teaching need not be indoctrinal.
At first look, non-cognitivist or expressivist metaethical views seem to be committed
to denying both premises of my argument. For, first, they contend that moral ‘judg-
ments’ are not ordinary beliefs that represent moral states of affairs. They are instead
desire-like, intention-like, or plan-like states of mind. Allan Gibbard (2003) holds, for
example, that moral judgments are, roughly, states of planning to act in certain ways. To

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Copp 163

judge that torture is wrong on such a view might be construed as having a plan or a
standing policy to avoid and oppose torture. The trouble is that, it seems, there cannot
be epistemic reasons for being in a desire-like, intention-like, or plan-like state of
mind.24 Epistemic reasons are considerations that support the truth or likely truth of a
belief.25 So the second premise of my argument seems to presuppose that no non-cogni-
tivist view is correct. It seems to presuppose that the states of mind that we express in
voicing moral judgments are or essentially involve beliefs that represent the way things
are morally and that are capable of being true or false. Otherwise, any reasons we could
provide for such states of mind would not be epistemic reasons. Furthermore, second,
given my account of indoctrination, non-cognitivist views seem to imply that moral
indoctrination is not possible since, on my account, to indoctrinate, one must induce
acceptance of something for which there are or could be epistemic reasons. To allow for
the possibility of moral indoctrination, it seems that a non-cognitivist would need to
reject my account of indoctrination.
One might, of course, deny that moral indoctrination is possible. Anthony Flew seems
to deny this, for instance.26 Yet, manipulative moral teaching would seem to be a para-
digm example of indoctrination. I think that an acceptable view must explain what indoc-
trination is and do so in a way that shows moral indoctrination is at least possible. People
who worry about moral indoctrination have a legitimate concern.
If I am correct to say this, then a non-cognitivist must either explain how to make
sense of the idea that there can be epistemic reasons for moral belief – despite the kind
of thing a moral belief is, according to non-cognitivism – or offer a plausible rival to my
epistemic account of the nature of indoctrination. Obviously, I cannot explore these
options in detail in this article. I shall set aside the issue whether a non-cognitivist could
successfully defend a non-epistemic account of indoctrination since I argued for my
account in the first section of the article. I will here limit myself to a brief discussion of
the question whether a non-cognitivist can make sense of there being epistemic reasons
for moral belief.
I do not say this cannot be done since the past 25 years have seen the development of
highly sophisticated versions of non-cognitivism. Perhaps, someone will come forward
to propose an account of epistemic reasons for moral belief that is compatible with non-
cognitivism. Or perhaps such an account has already been proposed.
Here is a suggestion. Simon Blackburn (2006) has argued that a non-cognitivist can
allow that it is appropriate in ordinary English to speak of moral ‘beliefs’. And Blackburn
(2006) has also argued that non-cognitivism can be combined with a ‘deflationary’
account of the semantics of ‘true’ according to which moral judgments can correctly be
judged true. According to such an account, roughly, to call something true is to express
one’s agreement with it; and since I can agree or disagree with your moral judgments, I
can appropriately call them true or false. Following Blackburn’s lead, one might propose
that an epistemic reason for a moral belief is a consideration that would appropriately
lead someone to (tend to) agree with that belief. The appropriateness here would have to
be moral appropriateness, it seems to me, since the claim that the reason supports the
belief would be a moral claim. Similarly, the claim that, for example, some evidence sup-
ports evolutionary theory would be a scientific claim. So, the proposal says, for you to
think that I have reason to believe that torture is wrong is for you to judge that it was

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164 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

morally appropriate for me to be led to have this belief (or to have an increased likeli-
hood of having it) by the consideration that so led me. This is a non-cognitivist account
of the idea of an epistemic reason for moral belief, and it seems to me that it is in the
spirit of non-cognitivism.
It would be premature to take the availability of the above proposal to mean that my
argument is not, after all, open to the objection that it depends on a rejection of non-
cognitivism. For there are serious problems with the proposal, it seems to me. According
to the proposal, an epistemic reason for a moral belief that thus-and-so is a consideration
that would lead one in a morally appropriate way to (tend to) agree that thus and so. The
problem is that considerations that would make it morally appropriate to have a given
moral belief need not be epistemic reasons. It may be morally appropriate for me to think
that my friend is not capable of dishonesty, for instance, because it would be disloyal to
think otherwise. But this reason has nothing to do with whether I have evidence of dis-
honesty. The example shows that considerations that would lead one in a morally appro-
priate way to accept a moral claim need not be epistemic reasons.
The fundamental problem, I believe, is that there cannot be epistemic reasons for hav-
ing a plan or for being in a desire-like or intention-like state of mind. This is of the nature
of such states of mind.27 If this is correct, then, if moral judgments are plan-like, desire-
like, or intention-like states of mind, there cannot be epistemic reasons for moral belief.
Unfortunately, these considerations leave it unclear whether the central argument of
this article is incompatible with non-cognitivism. On one hand, if a non-cognitivist
were to accept my proposed non-cognitivist account of epistemic reasons for moral
belief, she could then also accept my account of the nature of indoctrination, and she
could agree with me that moral teaching need not be indoctrinal. On the other hand, if
my worries about my proposed account of epistemic reasons are correct, and if no better
account is available, then a non-cognitivist may be committed to rejecting my claim that
it is possible to provide epistemically appropriate reasons for moral judgments. In this
case, my argument would be open to the objection that it conflicts with non-cognitiv-
ism. Of course, since I reject non-cognitivism, I would prefer to turn the objection
around. If my argument conflicts with non-cognitivism, I would see this as an objection
to non-cognitivism.

Conclusion
I began with an investigation of what educational indoctrination consists in, and I sug-
gested that it consists in teaching people to accept certain things uncritically. I then sug-
gested that teaching people to accept things uncritically consists, roughly, in teaching
people to accept things without providing fairly balanced epistemic reasons for accepting
these things – at least to the extent that presenting such reasons would be pedagogically
appropriate – or without addressing local controversy about these things. I argued that
socializing moral education as such is not indoctrinal because it is best understood to be
a matter of inculcating virtues rather than beliefs. And I argued that propositional moral
education need not be indoctrinal because such teaching need not involve persuading
children to accept moral claims uncritically. I argued that moral education is not more
susceptible to being indoctrinal than is the teaching of history or science.

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Copp 165

Acknowledgements
Versions of this article were presented in June 2015 to the Philosophy of Education Society of
Great Britain Conference on Moral Education and Metaethics, held at the University of
Birmingham, and to the Ninth Conference on Moral Theory and its Applications, Beaune, France.
The author is grateful to the participants in the discussions on both of these occasions for highly
useful comments and suggestions. He is especially grateful to Randall Curren, Michael Hand, Ben
Kotzee, Henry Richardson, and three anonymous referees. He thanks Michael Hand for encourag-
ing him to write about moral education. The author is grateful to the University of California,
Davis for providing him with a sabbatical leave during the academic year, 2015-2016, which gave
him the time to complete this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
 1. According to Richard Weissbourd (2012), ‘Polls indicate that about 70 percent of public
school parents want schools to teach strict standards of right and wrong:, and 85 percent want
schools to teach values’.
  2. Alan Montefiore (1965: 440) remarks, ‘Who is to say what these so-called moral facts are?
The Party or the church? One’s parents or the village elder?’ See also many of the on-line
responses to Tait (2015).
  3. For an example, see the online publicity for the 2011 film, ‘IndoctriNation’: ‘Under the guise
of education the publicly funded monopoly of Government schools has engaged in a vast
program of social engineering designed to eradicate the Christian faith from American life’.
Available at: www.youtube.com/user/IndoctriNationMovie
  4. A reader of Tait (2015) wrote, in an online comment, ‘If there is one thing that moral and ethics
should teach one it is that parents are the only ones with the moral authority to do this’ – that
is to engage in moral education. Another wrote, ‘Schools cannot be given the job of raising
children, or of inculcating them with “values” deemed desirable by the state’.
  5. I owe the idea behind the example to John Skorupski (in discussion).
  6. I owe this point to Henry Richardson (in discussion).
  7. This was suggested by Michael Hand (in discussion).
 8. See The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, third edition (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992).
  9. Available at: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indoctrinate
10. Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/indoctrinate
11. See The Oxford English dictionary online definition of ‘ideology’: Available at: http://www.
oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/ideology
12. Randall Curren and John Skorupski drew my attention to this point.
13. I thank Gary Watson for helpful discussion of this point.
14. John Skorupski objected (in discussion) that it may be indoctrinal to fail to teach something.
Yet, a failure to teach something is not in itself indoctrinal since no doctrine is thereby taught.
Failing to teach something can nevertheless be part of a process of indoctrinating people to
accept some other belief. For instance, one might fail to mention slavery in a history course
aimed at teaching students the causes of the US Civil War.
15. For this distinction, see Nord and Haynes (1998), Chapter 9.

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166 Theory and Research in Education 14(2)

16. One might object that it is not possible to teach children to behave in morally good ways with-
out getting them to believe that these ways of behaving are good. This is a dubious claim. We
might teach children to be cooperative by involving them in games that require cooperation.
Such activities could be accompanied by remarks about how good it is to do these things, but
they need not be.
17. I owe this point to Ben Kotzee.
18. I thank Imola Ilyes for helpful discussion of this issue.
19. It might seem that I am here taking a controversial position in the debate about know-how.
Moral socialization could be described – misleadingly I think – as teaching children to know
how to behave. And there is the view that know-how reduces to propositional knowledge so
that there is not a genuine distinction between know-how and propositional knowledge. But
this issue about know-how is a red herring, for moral socialization is not a matter of teaching
children to know how to behave. It is a matter of teaching them how to behave, which is some-
thing different. In moral socialization, for example, we aim to teach children to be tolerant
and not to cheat.
20. Henry Richardson raised this worry (in discussion).
21. I discuss the teaching of moral concepts in Copp (2007).
22. Tori McGeer suggested (in discussion) that directive moral teaching would be more likely to
be objectionable than directive teaching in science or history, even if directive moral teaching
is not inevitably indoctrinal. People are morally expected to think through their moral views
and to have reasons for these views, but this is not generally the case in other fields. For this
reason, she suggested, there is a greater need in teaching moral issues to encourage students
to think critically and to make up their own minds, and more attention needs to be paid to
discussing reasons for belief, than there is in teaching in other fields. I am in broad agreement
with these ideas.
23. Philip Pettit suggested (in discussion) that religion and morality are especially liable to be
taught in a partisan or ideological manner because social groups tend to treat the sharing of
religious and moral viewpoints as criteria of belonging. However, the sharing of ‘historical’
and ‘scientific’ viewpoints can also be treated by groups as criteria of belonging. Nationalists
can insist on certain views about the founding of a state, racist groups can press unscientific
views about race, and religious sects can insist on unscientific and ahistorical views about the
age of the planet.
24. There can be an indirect epistemic reason to have a plan or a desire or to form an intention.
What I have in mind is that there cannot be a reason to have a plan or a desire or intention that
supports the truth of this state of mind.
25. That is, they support the truth or likely truth of a proposition, or of the propositional object of
a belief.
26. Flew (2010) argued that morals ‘provide a possible content for indoctrination only to the
extent that they are, wrongly, thought to be a presented as a kind of fact’. Quoted in Snook
(2010: 4).
27. The explanation for this, one might think, is that plan-like states of mind are not truth-apt (see
Smith et al., 1994).

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Author biography
David Copp is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis. He is
author of Morality, Normativity, and Society (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Morality in a
Natural World (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and he has edited several anthologies, includ-
ing The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (OUP, 2006). He is editor of a monograph series with
OUP called ‘Oxford Moral Theory’. He has published and lectured widely on topics in moral and
political philosophy.

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