Teaching moral philosophy in schools: Dynamic systems theory, teacher education & the issue of universality versus cultural diversity

Given renewed interest in teaching moral philosophy in schools, especially in Australia, perhaps it is time to reconsider its place in teacher education and revisit the longstanding universality/cultural diversity dichotomy in moral development theory. Put simply, does a child’s morality develop in a universal way through invariant stages as Kohlberg argued and, if so, how can we explain different moral behaviour and reasoning from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds? This paper argues, in keeping with dynamic systems theory, that moral development is always the product of the historical and social contexts in which an individual organism’s development takes places. From this perspective, it is not the forms or stages of moral reasoning that are universally the same, but the dynamic process of emergent self-organisation, which is historically and socially situated, and the organism’s in-built predilection to value. So, there are similarities across time and place in the processes of development, but the product of those processes is regionally and culturally diverse. Moreover, as emergent self-organisation operates both individually and at a group level, diversity is manifested within and across regions and cultures. Dynamic systems theory provides a better platform for teaching moral philosophy in schools than either the doctrines of universalism or cultural diversity.