Enriching Ethical Judgments in History Education

Advances in ethics education in the history classroom: after intersections of moral and historical consciousness

“…As history teachers may not have special knowledge in ethics or moral philosophy, they may have difficulty processing the moral aspect in topics of controversial history. A systematic use of the concepts and perspectives of moral philosophy would be useful, as for example suggested by Milligan, Gibson, and Peck (2018). Enriching students' ethical reasoning with the help of concepts and theories of moral philosophy would provide students with better tools to discuss moral dilemmas and, very importantly, help them keep the focus more on the process, rather than the outcome of moral judgmentmaking when discussing historicaland also contemporarymoral dilemmas.…”

“…(historical consciousness and its moral dimension). Milligan et al (2018) have provided an example of how to enrich students' ethical reasoning in history teaching. The case in their example is the ship MS St. Louis that carried mainly Jewish refugees from Europe in 1939, but was refused landing in Canada, the US, and Cuba.…”

“…During WWII many former MS St. Louis passangers perished when Germany occupied their asylum country. In their paper, Milligan et al (2018) have suggested questions that can be posed in the history classroom. For example, they include: 'How should we decide who was morally responsible for the lives of the Jewish refugees?…”

“…The list of questions suggested by Milligan et al (2018) reflects the authors' interest in the development of students' reasoning on ethical problems. It is argued here that if we also want to understand students' response to cases like MS St. Louis and their moral judgment-making, these questions posed by Milligan et al (2018) are not sufficient. Moral judgment-making includes also perspective-taking and affectiveemotional response (Hoffman 2000;Pizarro 2000;ten Have 2020).…”

“…Students' answers can be typologised, for example, using models like Kohlberg's (1984) or Rest's (Rest et al 1999) where the central concern is difference between arguments referring to personal interest, maintaining norms, and ethical principles. As suggested by Milligan et al (2018), the philosophical study of ethics can provide tools for students' moral judgment, and their judgments of Major Trapp may include utilitarian, deontological, care ethical, or virtue ethical arguments, for example (see Edling et al 2020). In the research, moral judgment-making occurred in the main in response to question 1 and sporadically in answers to other questions.…”