Education in moral rules

Abstract

In order to justify the importance of educating on and researching ethics in education, this paper explores the possible origins of moral behavior from the perspective of sociobiology and the social mechanisms that sustain this form of action through verbal regulation and meta-rules. The approach is analyzed as compared to the state of the art of ethics in educational research and the methodological approaches followed to carry out these studies. The results of this analysis show that there is not a lot of research work on this field, particularly in Latin America. Most of the existing work corresponds to reflection essays and, to a lesser degree, the testing of theoretical models to prove the effectiveness of the researcher’s ethical training. We propose teaching individuals about moral rules throughout their life cycle, in different social institutions and in their experience as researchers, as well as guiding research towards the most efficient way to educate on moral rules that lead to self-regulation.