Higher education

Sociology

Pedagogy

Key (lock)

Virtue

Injustice

Liberal arts education

Liberal education

Biology

Epistemology

Philosophy

Political science

Paleontology

Psychology

Philosophy of education

Consequentialism

Context (archaeology)

Computer science

Moral disengagement

Moral development

Moral education

Computer security

Social psychology

Ethics and Education

This paper takes issue with the exemplarist strategy of fostering virtue development with the specific goal of improving its applicability in the context of education. I argue that, for what matters educationally, we have good reasons to endorse a liberal account of moral exemplarity. Specifically, I challenge two key assumptions of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory, namely that moral exemplars are exceptionally virtuous agents and that imitating their behavior is the main strategy for acquiring the virtues. I will introduce and discuss the notions of enkratic exemplars and injustice illuminators and show that we have good reasons to consider them moral exemplars although they fail to satisfy (either of) the key assumptions.

Moral exemplars in education: a liberal account