Advances in artificial intelligence technology (AI) have significantly impacted education in practice. Such a trend is also becoming prevalent in moral and character education. In this paper, I will argue whether moral and character educators will remain as irreplaceable educational agents in the era of AI. For the discussion, I will examine whether AI agents will be able to become sole teachers or mentors while considering three aspects of ethics education: (1) Phronesis cultivation; (2) Promotion of moral and positive youth development; and (3) Development of autonomy and agency for the wise and ethical use of AI. I will refer to relevant theoretical and empirical studies on moral development and education to examine AI's potential capacity related to the three aspects of moral education. Finally, I will briefly discuss how the role of human moral and character educators needs to be reshaped during the era of AI.
Virtue science has expanded in recent decades but has focused largely on individual-level measurement, overlooking the environments that shape character formation. To address this gap, we developed and validated the Character Climate Scale (CCS) to assess the moral ecology of higher education settings. Across four studies (N > 1,400) at three U.S. institutions, the CCS was developed and refined to capture students' perceptions of their university's moral ecology as expressed through peers, professors, courses, extra-curricular activities, and personal experiences. The CCS demonstrated strong psychometric performance, including a stable general factor and five-factor structure, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent, discriminant, and concurrent criterion validity. The final 23-item CCS offers a robust, practical tool for assessing and tracking the moral ecology of educational environments. It also enables institutions to evaluate virtue-development efforts, identify strengths and growth areas, and monitor change over time, advancing virtue science by situating moral development within its environmental context.
This study examined the relation between cultural context and theory of mind (ToM) and children's moral evaluations of truth-telling and lying about charitable giving. Canadian (n = 121; Mage = 10.08 years, SD = 2.59 years) and Persian (n = 100; Mage = 9.98 years, SD = 2.23 years) children aged 6-14 completed ToM tasks and rated 16 vignettes depicting truth-telling or lying about donating to child-welfare or animal-welfare charities, with information receivers counter-balanced between friends and teachers. Across samples, truth-telling was judged more positively than lying. Cultural differences emerged as Canadian children valued honesty, whereas Persian children were more accepting of lying to cover charitable giving. There were also significant differences according to the identity of the information recipient, with Persian participants judging lies to teachers more harshly than lies to friends. Higher ToM scores and age were modestly associated with stronger preferences for truth-telling. Findings demonstrate how cultural norms, relational contexts, and social-cognitive development shape children's moral reasoning, with implications for moral education.
This theoretical article argues that education for purpose should not merely aim at fostering purposes that students find subjectively meaningful but also help them evaluate the objective value and particularly the objective meaningfulness of various purposes. We take Damon’s meaningful-to-the-self and beyond-the-self criteria as starting points and argue that these should be complemented by objective perspectives. Meaning in life is understood as an overarching value that is conferred by engagements with epistemic (the ‘true’), moral (the ‘good’), and aesthetic (the ‘beautiful’) values. Education for meaningful purposes should apply both directive and non-directive approaches. Students should be taught to understand why meaningful purposes must have epistemic and moral (and possibly aesthetic) quality and to evaluate potential purposes considering moral, epistemic, and aesthetic values. However, students themselves should reflectively decide whether they want to pursue goals that explicitly aim at realizing epistemic, moral, or aesthetic value.
