The use of moral dilemmas in the Ethics education curriculum

Abstract

Ethics education is concerned with enhancing students’ moral development. This study explores the notion of moral development in attempt to understand how students in the ethics class engage in moral reasoning. Morality is concerned with values which are reflected in people’s judgments, and decision-making, problem-solving. These values are learnt and formed through experiences and influenced by the surrounding institutions in people’s lives, culture as well as subjective interpersonal factors. For this reason, moral or ethics education is a vital contributor towards students’ development of moral values like honesty, respect and responsibility. Since its inception in Maltese schools, there has been insufficient research on the pedagogical tools utilised in the ethics education lesson. This study attempts to target this gap by conducting a review of existing literature on moral education to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject while addressing strategies on how ethics education can be taught. By focusing on a pedagogy based on moral dilemmas, this study advocates how moral dilemmas can act as an excellent tool which generates moral reasoning, hence contributing to the emergence of an ethical dialogue within the community of inquiry embedded within the ethics class.