The world is facing crises at the personal, community and national levels, disconnection from traditional value systems and loss of a guiding moral compass. While religion is certainly not the only basis for personal and societal values, religion can provide a moral system that is sorely needed. In Islam, great wisdom can be found in the holy…

From a "prima facie" point of view, Nietzsche's use of virtue may appear to be a form of virtue ethics. Certainly, this is one position that has been established within the secondary literature; however, I argue that a more fruitful philosophical reading is to view his use of virtue as a part of his "drive" psychology. Indeed,…

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among…

Richard Pring (1938-2024) was the first holder of a Chair in Education at the University of Oxford and the Editor of the present journal from 1986 to 2001. This article pays tribute to his legacy in the field of educational philosophy. After reviewing briefly some well-known recurring themes in Pring's educational philosophy, such as his busting…

Stories are widely used around the world to try to teach children moral lessons. However, it is often difficult for children to figure out how lessons from stories can be applied to real-life settings. In the present research, we tested whether encouraging children to be like the protagonists helps explain the success of positive moral stories…

This study investigates the life purposes and values of higher education students in the Netherlands and Finland (n[subscript Dutch] = 663, n[subscript Fin] = 846). The theoretical framework is built on the conceptualisation of life purpose by Damon et al. as well as Schwartz's values model. The study adopted a convergent mixed methods design…

This review examines the critical importance of ethical values for future leaders in South African higher learning institutions, focusing on academic jealousy. Higher Education (HE) institutions play a pivotal role in shaping society; therefore, future leaders need a strong ethical foundation to navigate academic complexities. Academic jealousy,…

There could hardly have been a more influential twentieth-century philosophical essay than Elizabeth Anscombe's 'Modern moral philosophy', in which she condemned the prevailing and competing ethics of duty and utility of her day and urged moral philosophers to abandon the search for any general conception of 'morality' in favour of return to…

Given much-discussed innovations in Virtual Reality as the 'ultimate empathy machine', we offer three provocations regarding the use of Virtual Reality to cultivate empathy: is empathy possible? Is empathy enough? Who controls how empathy is produced, and who is left out? As a case study, we examine the VR films that the United Nations High…

Virtual reality (VR) is an increasingly popular artificially mediated, immersive experience that is accessed through a headset. Recent research is starting to provide evidence about the positive impact that virtual reality technology can have on teaching and learning. This research, to date, has been primarily undertaken in higher education and in…

The cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) have relevance within the areas of character education and integral or comprehensive formation. In recent years, there has been growing interest and a great deal of literature produced on character education and its measurement. In this paper, we propose a questionnaire (a…

In this empirical study, we investigate "what" and "how" teachers in Dutch universities of applied sciences (UAS) think they contribute to the development of students' ethical compasses. Six focus groups were conducted with teachers across three programmes: Initial Teaching Education, Business Services, and Information and…

This paper reports a validation study based on descriptive multidimensional item response theory (DMIRT), implemented in the R package "D3mirt" by using the ERS-C, an extended version of the Relevance subscale from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire including two new items for collectivism (17 items in total). Two latent models are…

The analysis undertaken in this article pertain to the challenge faced by education, which consists of overcoming the negative aspects of contemporary individualism, such as the building of instrumental relationships by people maturing in a culture permeated with it. Consequently, there is limited responsibility taken for the other people…

"Humanitarian giftedness" is the deployment of one's gifts and talents in a way that, at some level, benefits humanity. Humanitarian giftedness involves sharing one's gifts with others in a way that makes the world a better place. It is not something people are born with--they develop it in the same way other forms of expertise are…