Beyond Exemplification and Role Modelling for the Education of Moral Character

Abstract

This paper briefly explores the possible perception of inconsistency or contradiction between the author’s defence in a former 2007 essay of the importance of good or virtuous character and moral role-modelling for the professional practice of teachers and a more recent essay of 2023 which has taken a more cautious view of such exemplification. Basically, while admitting some recent significant change of ethical perspective, it is here argued that these two papers are not fundamentally at odds, and that the problem to which the later essay is addressed follows more from some serious overstatement of the moral educational role of character in more recent virtue ethical and moral educational literature.