Abstract

What is the point of taking ethics classes? In this paper, I would like to discuss a specific answer to this question, according to which ethics instruction can facilitate moral education by directly teaching students what’s morally right. More specifically, I will argue that this view is much more plausible than one might first suspect. Therefore, the widespread disregard of this view in the philosophical literature is unwarranted. To establish this claim, I will proceed in two steps. First, I will argue that the idea of educational transfers of moral knowledge is perfectly in line with specific epistemological assumptions that already underly wide parts of our educational practice. Second, I will argue that moral knowledge transfers would be a promising way of facilitating moral education in ethics classes. Having thus established the claim that the idea of moral knowledge transfers deserves closer scrutiny, I will discuss its implications in a little more detail by delineating some specific desiderata for future philosophical research that arise against the background of the previous considerations.