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[Expositions 14.1 (2020) 34–50] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment 
 
REBECCA KONYNDYK DEYOUNG 
Calvin University 
 
 

[I]t is perhaps the principal task of the political and moral theorist to enable rational 

agents to learn what they need to learn from the social and cultural tradition that 

they inherit, while becoming able to put in question that particular tradition’s 

distortions and errors and so, often enough, engaging in a quarrel with some 

dominant forms of their own political moral culture.1 

 

What would a course on ethics look like if it took into account Alasdair MacIntyre’s concerns 

about actually teaching students ethical practices? How could professors induct students into 

practices that prompt both reflection on their cultural formation and self-knowledge of the ways 

they have been formed by it? According to MacIntyre, such elements are prerequisites for an 

adequate moral education. His criticism of what he terms “Morality” includes the claim that most 

courses don’t even try to teach the right things. He charges that academic teaching has little if 

anything to do with character formation, whereas thick practices can transform lives in ways mere 

argument can never do.2 Even those of us who appreciate his arguments and agree with his 

criticisms, however, may find implementing more adequate forms of ethical instruction in the 

university classroom a tall order. 

My goal in this essay is to provide a sketch of my own experimental course on normative ethics 

in order to illustrate what teaching according to a more MacIntyrean program might look like. 

Following the lead of MacIntyre’s After Virtue trilogy and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self,3 

my course undertakes a review of ethical theories along narrative-historical lines, explicitly framed 

as a form of reflective self-awareness and dialogical identity-formation. The purpose of such a 

frame is to help students recognize, articulate, and assess the coherence and cogency of their own 

moral inheritances. At the same time, students engage in week-long formative practices, reflecting 

on their own character formation at the end of each. From a better grasp of their own situation, 

they are able to evaluate their own practical commitments and be more intentional about the habits 

and virtues they need going forward. 



35  DeYoung 

 
 

Because only so much can be accomplished in a single semester, the course gives students a 

healthy introduction to such a project, aiming to incentive its ongoing development. That is, I hope 

to give them an initial appreciation of the long-term payoff, while equipping them with the 

motivation and tools they would need to continue the project after the course was over. Moreover, 

because I teach the course at a Christian liberal arts university,4 I have additional theoretical and 

practical resources at my disposal. Namely, I can articulate substantive goods and a thick 

anthropology my students already assume, I can incorporate spiritual disciplines into the structure 

of the course, and I can point students to existing Christian churches as communities of practice 

that students could join. Nevertheless, as a philosopher, I am keen to approach even these matters 

through reflection and reasoned argument. 

In Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre stresses that moral education requires that 

students learn “the disciplines of reflective practice.”5 My course is built on that theme, following 

ideas I had experimented with previously.6 So, on the first day of class, we begin with a reflection 

on the state of moral theory and how it informs the standard way of teaching ethics, which I call 

the “Moral Cafeteria” approach. When adopting this approach, textbooks on moral theory typically 

outline three to five moral theories and then apply them to various case studies, moral dilemmas, 

or controversial social issues. Such approaches present normative ethics as a body of theoretical 

knowledge and technical expertise that anyone can apply, regardless of their moral character or 

stage of moral development.7 In the standard approach’s theory-application model, students learn 

each theory and attempt to apply it to case studies or moral dilemmas. However, the textbooks 

then leave them to choose, without any overarching criteria, between the array of theories, and to 

justify their choices in terms of the theory that best captures their pre-reflective intuitions about 

how hard cases should be handled. Where those intuitions came from and how they are formed is 

left unaddressed and unquestioned. If different theories justify different outcomes in various cases, 

students tend to adopt a cafeteria-like approach to the theories, tending toward whatever theoretical 

justification suits their needs to solve a given moral problem. 

My criticism of this approach includes the following MacIntyrean objections: (a) it makes the 

basis of morality seem arbitrary, or reliant on individual preference (or current social consensus); 

(b) there do not seem to be any rational criteria on offer to adjudicate between theories; and (c) it 

is not clear to students why or how they should evaluate moral theories rationally other than by 

appeal to, say, the standard of internal consistency (and they aren’t sure why internal consistency 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  36 

should trump their own consciences or their sometimes-conflicting moral intuitions about what is 

right). Furthermore, (d) why this particular set of theoretical options is the correct one or the only 

one on offer remains mysterious, since the standard approach presents them as an ahistorical array 

of alternatives. Both MacIntyre and Taylor contend that, without any historical background, we 

are at a loss to explain which systems seem appealing, what counts as an ethical problem, and 

which moral concepts might be used to frame a situation (adequately or inadequately). Our answers 

to these questions depend on where we stand in the narrative of human history and culture. As a 

last point of objection, (e) moral judgment and choice cannot be captured in or taught as technique 

to be applied by just anyone (e.g., just any college undergraduate), regardless of moral character 

or experience. It matters whether people are experts in practical wisdom, or undeveloped 

apprentices with immature desires, or people whose eyes have been steadily corrupted by vice. 

The standard approach therefore frequently breeds cynicism, heightens students’ already highly 

subjective approach to moral questions, and makes them despair of having any good reason to be 

moral, even if they assume they can “master” a moral system’s technical demands. Importantly, 

the standard approach also neglects altogether several important moral features of the lives of 

MacIntyre’s “plain persons,” a category that includes my students. For example, missing topics 

include what role friendship and common projects might play in a good life,8 and how moral 

development happens over time (vs. a present-moment “snapshot” conception of moral choices). 

Further, this approach fails to reflect that most of our moral lives centers not on crisis situations or 

intractable dilemmas, but rather everyday routines and the implicit formation that comes from 

participating in certain types of communities or institutions. Finally, it is notable that ethics 

textbooks fail to mention how the ethical life relates to religious commitments and the formative 

influence of religious communities. 

I introduce our course as an intentional contrast to the standard approach. Thus we examine our 

own moral situation and identity as the result of a long history of inheritances (some of which 

content is now highly de-contextualized). This means taking a historical approach to our current 

predicament and fragmented moral identity, following the example of MacIntyre’s After Virtue 

and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. In a parallel way, we assume that our moral lives are 

themselves an unfolding narrative of formative practices and reflective evaluation in which 

character develops within a community over time. We assume, too, that we inhabit a metaphysical 

stance toward goodness and truth that not only enables us to evaluate the deficiencies of modern 



37  DeYoung 

 
 

moral theories (and their common assumptions about morality), but shows how a religious ethical 

tradition has the resources to rationally assess the strengths and weaknesses of its rivals, while 

acknowledging its own status as a self-critical community of practitioners. This is possible in large 

part because as a tradition—in MacIntyre’s sense—its lived articulation of the human good is 

carried on cross-culturally and over a long history, it depends on transcendent standards, and it 

includes as its main goal personal transformation and apprenticeship into a certain kind of 

communal life. Because most of the students identify as members of this tradition already, they 

have some of the moral training and experience needed to see where theorizing makes sense of (or 

fails to make sense of) the shared practices of their families, churches, and communities.9 

MacIntyre insists that students—as practical reasoners and moral agents—will need self-

awareness and self-knowledge to reflect and learn from past mistakes as mistakes, especially since 

we often recognize these only retrospectively. This point inspires our first class exercise. Students 

are given twenty to thirty minutes to work on a “memento mori” exercise.10 In this assignment, 

they imagine and then write out the eulogy that might be given at their funeral by an honest friend 

or family member. Funerals are one of the few places in contemporary life where people focus on 

personal character, assessed from a whole-life perspective. (This in contrast to retirement or 

graduation parties, where successful performances or achievements are the main focus.) The 

assignment prompts students to ask and answer two questions: Who have I become so far in my 

life?—an assessment of current character—and, Who might I wish to become if I had more 

time?—an articulation of aspirational character. 

Many of the students find themselves unaccustomed to reflection on their lives as a whole, 

unfamiliar with character assessment in general, and inarticulate about virtue terms and concepts 

with which someone might capture a person’s character. The exercise implicitly raises questions 

about the difference between personality traits and virtues of character, how students’ current 

character might have been formed, who might have most influenced their formation, and what 

sorts of traits or virtues are worth cultivating going forward. In the discussion after the exercise, I 

make these points explicit via conversation prompts: 

 

1. How does this exercise focus on different things from a graduation ceremony? 

2. How has the family you are a part of, or the school or church community you are a part 

of, or the culture around you, shaped the character you observe in yourself? 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  38 

3. What makes a trait a virtue vs. a characteristic part of your personality (such as being 

sarcastic, or optimistic, or being organized, or a leader)? 

 

The exercise raises questions of virtue and character to prompt students to recognize for 

themselves that these sorts of “big picture” questions are both curiously missing from most moral 

discourse and theorizing and nonetheless implicitly assumed in their own daily practice. Through 

the assignment, they become aware that they have already given—in fact, are already living out—

an answer to the question about what is a worthwhile way to live as a human being. Their own 

choices have accumulated into character traits that likely reflect some ordering of goods. As 

MacIntyre remarks, “Reflective agents thus increasingly understand themselves and others in 

terms of a certain kind of narrative, a story in which they as agents direct themselves or fail to 

direct themselves toward a final end, the nature of which they initially apprehend in and through 

their activities as rational agents.”11 He goes on to say this means that 

 

the initial task of theoretical enquiry is to articulate and develop further what is 

implicit in or presupposed by practice. And it needs to be stressed once again that 

agents engaged in such theoretical reflection continue to need to learn from each 

other, albeit not primarily as fellow students of theory, but as fellow agents engaged 

in achieving common goods in the practice and productive activities of everyday 

life, so that their moral and political education needs to be very different from that 

of the academic theorist.12 

 

This college ethics course gives them, like Aristotle’s students in the Nichomachean Ethics, a 

chance to reflect on their formation so far. After appropriate self-study, they can either endorse 

what they have become and carry that project forward, or they can embark on further 

transformation in a revised direction—assuming there are practicing communities to which they 

can appropriately apprentice themselves.  

The next section of the course is therefore offered as a response to the existential questions of 

plain persons: e.g. What sort of person am I becoming? Is that a good kind of human being to 

become? What sort of life am I already living, and what goods does it prioritize? What sorts of 

character traits does it encourage and reward? Is that kind of life in fact a good human life? What 



39  DeYoung 

 
 

reasons might I give for this picture of the good life being adequate? Why do I find obvious the 

answers that I give to those questions (or that my culture or community gives)? What sorts of 

reasons do I have that might not be accessible outside my way of life? What alternatives have I 

not considered? Do my answers seem coherent and correct? 

In part one of the course, we begin with primary sources in eudaimonist (virtue) ethics. First, 

we read sections of Plato’s Republic that portray philosophy (i.e., striving after the common goods 

of wisdom and virtue) as a rival way of life to pleonexia (i.e., acquisitiveness regarding competitive 

goods). Each life has a contrasting ordering of goods and incompatible programs of desire and 

habit formation. We also study Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, focusing on the training of 

appetite required for proper self-love, the inter-relationship of virtues of character and practical 

wisdom, and the friendship books. Secondary sources, such as chapters on ancient philosophy and 

Christianity as “spiritual exercises” in Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life,13 chapters on 

“the need to learn and the drive to aspire” in Julia Annas’s Intelligent Virtue, and Myles Burnyeat’s 

paper “Aristotle on Learning to be Good” on the stages of moral education,14 are also 

recommended supplementary readings on the syllabus at this point. Further, we consider three 

examples of “cultural translation” of Aristotle in later historical periods,15 all from the Christian 

tradition. First, Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice, offers a narrative portrayal of the three 

marriages that exemplify Aristotle’s three types of friendships based on pleasure, utility, and 

virtue.16 Then we consider what intellectual virtue looks like in Augustine (i.e., the well-ordered 

desire for knowledge vs. curiositas, its prideful and possessive opposite17), and how courage is 

reshaped by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love in Aquinas. Exemplars of virtue shift 

accordingly: both the citizen-soldier advancing the civic good despite painful obstacles and the 

martyr who endures persecution, holding fast to the eternal good, meet the Aristotelian definition 

of courage, even if the latter does so in ways that Aristotle would not have recognized.18 Such 

examples show how later thinkers both appropriated and adapted this ancient tradition in new 

social, historical, and religious contexts. Moreover, we note ways in which later thinkers worked 

from vantage points that enabled criticism and correction of earlier versions of a virtuous life. For 

example, Augustinian humility pushes in one way against Platonic hubris, and in another way 

against modern humanism. 

While we study appropriations of Aristotle, we engage in a week-long practice exercise, 

documenting our own daily efforts to practice the virtue of temperance. The instructions prompt 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  40 

the students to contrast temperance (the virtue) with mere self-control. Students also follow 

instructions to heed Aristotle’s advice about hitting the mean of virtue in Nicomachean Ethics 2.9 

by compensating for both human nature (most notably, tendencies toward excess pleasure-seeking) 

and their own personal proclivities. At the end of a week, they have to submit their journal (a daily 

log and brief reflection). Then they answer open-ended follow-up questions together in classroom 

discussion groups. In other words, students practice the type of Aristotelian virtue cultivation they 

read about, while reflecting individually and corporately on a specific practice that comprises part 

of an Aristotelian virtue cultivation program. From previous experience, many of the students 

“knew” that they tended to eat poorly when tired, but the week-long exercise seemed to illuminate 

and internalize this point: they came away from the week planning ways to mitigate this situation 

and its attendant temptations. That meant that reshaping their desires for food meant reshaping 

much more of their lives: eating at more regular times, sharing meals with others/eating 

communally, cooking food they had purchased themselves, getting more regular sleep, and so on. 

MacIntyre highlights “the importance of such habits and their relationship to those institutionalized 

routines that structure our everyday lives.”19 Ideally, such reflection leads both to new personal 

habits and different communal routines and ways of life. 

A second practice exercise focuses on the intellectual virtues and the formation of the mind and 

imagination. Iris Murdoch makes the point in “Vision and Choice in Morality” that, by the moment 

any specific moral decision-making happens, most of the moral work has already been done.20 

Which goods one has in view (in light of a life well lived), the motivations and emotions that vision 

cultivates and cues up, which situations present themselves as imaginatively possible or as 

requiring a response from us, all frame the content and character of decisions of the moment—

indeed, they have often already sorted whether an explicit decision needs to be made at all. Moral 

philosophy must begin, therefore, by cultivating the moral imagination, by presenting the good, 

the true, and the beautiful as cornerstones of our characteristic motivational structure and as 

attractive and inspiring ends to be desired. No moral theory is complete without a “vision of the 

good,” says Murdoch. A principle-application model is therefore only a truncated formal system 

of decision-making technique. It either lacks such a vision, or (as in MacIntyre’s depiction of the 

market) depends on one that is implicit. What possibilities and goods we envision, picture through 

role models or narratives, and articulate with thick moral concepts deeply form our character and 

the concrete choices that follow from it. For my students, the worlds of possible human experience 



41  DeYoung 

 
 

they have imaginatively inhabited and the goods they therefore long for are already set by the films 

they have watched, the advertisements they think they have become inured to, and the images of 

a successful life their communities have championed (or omitted). Any “mere” decision-making 

technique will work from and within these ideals, rather than challenging them or reflectively 

examining their value. Inmates I also teach could not envision, or even imagine, at age eighteen or 

nineteen, when they committed their crimes, that there was a way of life that included lifelong 

religious commitments, sacrifice of their immediate desires, or educational endeavors that they 

could find worthwhile and pursue successfully, nor did they have pictures of fatherhood that 

involved mentoring, attention, prayer, patience, and so on. Moreover, such visions are best 

“caught” and not merely theoretically “taught.” Ancient ethics took these visions of the good 

seriously as the groundwork from which the moral life begins, and it did not confine them to ethics 

classrooms. This is why Plato cares so deeply about poetry and music, and why Aristotle thinks 

pleasure- and emotion-training is essential to character development: we have to learn to long for 

and delight in the right sorts of goods in order to have practical reason’s “good eye” in the moment 

of deliberation. 

The next practice exercise engages Augustine on intellectual virtue. In his view, the well-

ordered pursuit of knowledge as a gift involves humble and delighted participation in God’s 

knowledge, a paradigm that contrasts with human mastery of instrumentally valuable but otherwise 

inert subject matter. Along with the readings, students spend a week memorizing 1 Corinthians 13 

(on love as the “most excellent way” of life). They are given the option of reading the whole 

chapter slowly and then memorizing only verses 4–8a, or memorizing the whole chapter. The 

exercise is called “Contemplation as an Act of Love.” Its purpose is to dwell on the same ideas 

and the same text by repeating them slowly, memorizing and internalizing what we read, and 

meditating on or contemplating key phrases. Most of the reading students do is on screens, in skim-

and-scroll, rapid information-gathering mode. Contemplative reading is a counter-cultural, re-

formational practice designed to slow them down and get them to sit with a text, returning to it 

multiple times to see if different insights emerge from multiple readings. The practice is a way of 

apprenticing oneself to the wisdom of the text, in a mode of receptivity to unfolding revelation, 

rather than a mode of mastery, possession, and disposable use. Much of the content of the passage, 

moreover, concerns the relationship between knowledge and love (e.g., knowledge without love is 

empty and vain; knowledge is partial in this life; love brings knowledge to perfection “face to 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  42 

face”). So the act of contemplating a text on love, as itself an act of love, holds together the practice 

and reflection on it. In this section of the course, we therefore try to understand and live into ways 

that key figures in the Christian tradition translated the ancient eudaimonist/virtue paradigm into 

its own idiom and framework, theoretically and practically. 

We devote an entire class period to discussing in small groups what the practice exercises 

illuminated about our habits and implicit view of the good. The exercises are designed to develop 

self-knowledge and to raise awareness of how our own formation had been culturally (or 

“sociologically”) influenced, for better or worse. Students often discover, as MacIntyre predicts, 

that “the transformation of ourselves that is involved is significantly different from what we had 

expected.”21 Many students take the occasion to comment on how the exercise changed their view 

of themselves or made them consider more intentionally what goods were worth pursuing. Like 

my incarcerated students, many often conclude that such goods are currently unattainable, since 

they require maturity that only comes with more practice. The exercise serves as an occasion to 

self-identify as apprentices in a larger moral community of more seasoned practitioners. This takes 

humility and trust, since “some of our important ends are such that it would be a mistake to think 

of them as adequately specifiable by us in advance of and independently of our involvement in 

those activities through which we try to realize them.”22 Furthermore, to achieve certain ends, we 

at the same time need to become the right sort of person. 

Lastly, David Solomon’s “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics” raises objections to the 

virtue/eudaimonist approach to ethics.23 This essay also includes one “external” criticism of virtue 

ethics, or at least to an Aristotelian (or Platonic) version of it. The objection is that such a moral 

program requires adherence to a substantive and teleological conception of human nature and the 

human good. But, Solomon notes, ancient conceptions have been roundly rejected, and attempts 

to find substitutes have ended in hopeless controversy—either metaphysical, theological, or both. 

MacIntyre sets out the alternatives as “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” precisely because such debates 

have typically ended in the conclusion that, because no natures and no objective truth about goods 

exist, everyone should be left to follow her own preferred “revaluation of values.”24 Virtue ethics’ 

choice of virtues and human goodness seems to require one to inhabit a thick tradition, and one 

often equally at odds with contemporary ways of life and their theoretical assumptions about 

morality. 



43  DeYoung 

 
 

In the next two sections of the course, we track the major ethical theories of the modern period, 

Kantian deontology and variants of consequentialism in Hume, Bentham, and Mill. In keeping 

with our narrative approach to these ethical developments, we consider each alternative not as an 

abstract slate of theories, but via primary texts situated in their respective historical and 

sociological contexts. Each theory was developed in response to a particular historical moment 

and rival ideas. So, for example, Kant’s construction of formal systems reacts to post-Reformation 

intractable religious conflict and the inadequacies of resting universal moral norms on 

Humean/human material contingencies, such as feelings of sympathy, desires for social approval, 

and considerations of utility. Both Kant and Mill think they can capture the vast part of the content 

of what was previously a Christian ethic, while rejecting its (and Aristotle’s) metaphysical 

baggage. Again, reading assignments canvas contemporary appropriations, in part to appreciate 

that functionally we (that is, contemporary North Americans) have already incorporated this 

approach, its characteristic reasoning, and its conclusions into certain parts of our own identities 

and spheres of contemporary life. For example, debates about abortion and gun ownership are 

carried out almost exclusively in terms of rights talk, which is grounded in the inviolable dignity 

and autonomy of each human being and likewise in the sovereignty of rational persons’ free choice 

of the will. Likewise, implicitly and operationally we tend to identify ourselves as individual 

choosers, autonomous agents, and bearers of rights. This is evident, for example, in the ways we 

experience angry entitlement (behind the wheel, in the political arena), shopping and consumer 

habits that revolve around individual choice, and our attitudes toward personal relationships as 

contracts of consent. Students read both Thomas Hill’s essay on self-respect as a Kantian duty 

(treating Hill as a contemporary appropriator of Kantian deontology) and Robin Dillon’s essay (as 

a critic) on how self-respect duly cultivated depends on a unduly masculinist view of a respect-

worthy moral self.25 Dillon’s essay points out the implicit cultural picture of idealized human 

nature behind the moral obligations set forth. At the end of her article, Dillon comments that human 

beings learn to respect themselves by being respected by others in a community—an insight that 

hints at more Aristotelian approaches to moral development. We note the ways that key aspects of 

eudaimonist ethics (virtues and character development over time, friendship and community) seem 

absent without a second thought in a deontological system. 

Our moral inheritances and sense of self are further shaped by consequentialist 

conceptualizations of the moral life. From their initial home in social reform movements of the 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  44 

1800s, utilitarian attempts to increase and maximize human welfare were increasingly 

bureaucratized. Especially when dealing with social systems (e.g., health care) and economic 

distribution over large-scale populations, we now tend to default into consequentialist-style 

reasoning. It feels natural to us to think that we should weigh or sum overall outcomes when 

debating what policies to implement. Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is a 

signature piece of such reasoning.26 Students usually find it intuitively appealing prior to reflection. 

Human welfare is the focus of moral obligation, and costs and benefits must be weighed in a world 

of scarce resources to maximize overall outcomes. Strikingly, Singer’s essay is also representative 

of consequentialists’ gravitation toward consideration of physical needs, in part because these are 

observable and quantifiable measures of well-being (by contrast, consider MacIntyre’s 

commentary on the World Happiness Database),27 but also because decision-making is thereby 

done from an ostensibly value-neutral, naturalistic perspective using only instrumental reasoning. 

From such a (limited) perspective, physical well-being might be one of the few things we can agree 

are part of the human good. Singer’s piece also provides a textbook case of the tyranny of the 

moral over all other concerns and MacIntyre’s own description of “Morality,” which names a 

specialized sphere of obligation that trumps other concerns and overrides all other goods. Despite 

the criticism lodged against the consequentialist point of view (we also read Bernard Williams on 

the virtue of integrity—a virtue unintelligible to utilitarian reasoners), part of the point of this 

section of the course, like the other two, is to recognize that utilitarian intuitions and patterns of 

thinking are in fact already partially formative of our own default moral identities. 

To prompt critical reflection on utilitarian approaches to the distribution of goods, we practice 

a week of gratitude. The exercise is framed by Robert C. Roberts’ chapter on gratitude in Spiritual 

Emotions.28 The exercise is designed not only to have students practice expressing gratitude for 

the good things in their lives, but also to give them eyes to see the world in terms of gifts and 

goodness they have been (gratuitously) given. The religious perspective Roberts articulates shows 

students the difference between a stance of entitlement amid scarce resources and a stance of 

grateful receptivity, and the ways in which detachment and attachment to contingent and 

ephemeral worldly goods are radically reconceived from a Christian point of view. In that view, 

the ultimate and unconditionally given gift of a love relationship to the Giver remains the point of 

central concern, not the accumulation of good things or contingent blessings in this life.29 Further, 

as in Griffiths’ work on a rightly-ordered desire for knowledge, the primary stance of the recipient 



45  DeYoung 

 
 

should be wise stewardship of whatever gifts she has in service of the common good. Unlike the 

model of privately isolated or exclusive ownership, goods are meant to benefit the whole 

community. Not surprisingly, this frame might well lead to similar conclusions as Singer’s (i.e., 

practices of radical giving), but in very different ways, with very different motives. The take-away 

from the gratitude exercise is that not all practices that appear to be externally similar are the same 

activities with the same formative effect on desire or the same good as their telos. Again, we are 

trying to capture Aristotelian insights: virtue habituation must transcend mere imitation, must be 

modeled by the practically wise who have a good eye both for ends and means because of their 

rightly trained emotional attachments and aversions, and must include knowledge of both what 

one is doing and why. 

At this point in the course, I sketch out key features of each view, the places in our lives when 

each moral modus operandi seems natural to us (individually and as political communities) to 

default to, and the incompatibilities between them. This summation captures the “sociological self-

knowledge” that MacIntyre commends.30 Students have now come to see their own identity as a 

conglomeration of practices and points of views that don’t all cohere and sometimes compete with 

each other. But they have also been shown that this identity—however fragmented31—feeds and 

forms their practice. It shapes the character and value of their lives as human beings. If this needs 

to become more explicit, a reprise of the eulogy exercise can be helpful. The existential 

predicament for students is now two-fold: first, how can I make my own identity and character 

coherent, instead of fragmented, and second, around which sort of picture of the human good can 

I build such a life (with adequate justification)? 

Returning to Solomon’s external objection, I raise the concern that we can’t resolve disputes 

without digging down to metaphysical commitments, but I also suggest a MacIntyrean way to go 

forward rationally in the face of incompatible options. We read MacIntyre’s paper 

“Epistemological Crises”32 to explore the thesis that often the only rational way to make such 

evaluative judgments is to live inside a tradition and see which problems it can solve, which 

pseudo-problems from other views it can successfully resolve or reconfigure, and which lacunas 

and insoluble puzzles of its own remain. In addition, I stress, in light of the practice exercises, that 

every way forward requires both intellectual and practical commitments. Given the dialogical 

character of identity formation and all the implicit formation that shapes our moral character, we 

can’t live out any option without practice and a thick community of practitioners. 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  46 

The last section of the course revisits the virtue/eudaimonist tradition, but this time from a 

Christian perspective—a historical tradition embodied in thick communities of distinctive liturgies 

and practices. We read essays on Christian virtues and chapters on vices, including pieces on the 

vice of vainglory and “liturgical sincerity” (i.e., sincerity as a virtue desired in worship practices),33 

viewed through this historical and communal lens and undergirded by a picture of human nature 

and the human good. At the same time, we engage in one last practice exercise, which is the 

culmination of a daily practice we’ve done together all semester. From the first day of the course, 

we spend the first three minutes of class time in silence together. I do not guide this practice much, 

but only instruct students to breathe deeply and be still. If nothing else, I tell them, this will give 

them practice in pausing before a task to calmly center their attention and intentionally ready 

themselves for it; ideally, it will be an exercise in living against the culture of busy achievement 

and the deluge of information that they inhabit the rest of the day. (As one student put it, “I realized 

that it was the only time of day that I ever stopped doing something.”) We sit together, awkwardly 

at first, in total silence—without music, a news feed, phone alerts, or conversation. As the semester 

wears on, the students begin to appreciate and look forward to that time. But during the reading on 

the vice of vainglory, we try the ancient Christian practice of silence for a full week. The 

instructions give students the option to try a modified form of it—a week of silencing self-talk—

to make it possible to live on a college campus and still do the assignment with integrity. In one 

form or the other, this week is a more intensive version of what we’d been practicing all semester. 

The insights that come in a week of intentional individual practice are typically different from 

those that come from intentionally guided communal practice over several months’ time. 

The upshot of the course is, with MacIntyre and Nietzsche, to reject modern “Morality,” or at 

least put it into serious question, especially in the fragmented, incoherent version of it without 

adequate foundations that we have inherited and currently practice. But rather than leave students 

at sea looking for an adequate alternative, we end the course with the theoretical and practical 

resources of Christian theology, inviting students to explore its resources. Can this appropriation 

and translation of the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition give us metaphysical foundations, in the form 

of a satisfying view of human nature and the human good (as social beings created for a fellowship 

of love with God and each other)? Can its view of human nature offer reasons why pleonexic 

expressivist individualism and Nietzchean self-creation will not ultimately satisfy us? Can it 

provide—in the form of the local and global church—an arena for embodying virtue practices and 



47  DeYoung 

 
 

carrying on the tradition (in intergenerational ways that can be adapted across cultures and eras of 

history)? And, most important, can students envision themselves as its apprentices (now) and its 

future role models and articulators (later), formed by its signature virtues (faith, hope, and love) 

and striving to better understand how to live them well? 

There are obvious limits to what anyone could accomplish in a liberal arts classroom in a single 

semester. I take MacIntyre’s point that academic instruction cannot substitute for life-long 

character formation even in the best of settings. In the worst, it remains “irrelevant.” My goal with 

the course is to move our study of normative ethics—in terms of the way people live their ordinary 

lives and engage in daily formative practices—closer to being relevant to moral formation. You 

might think of the course as a lived experiment into the limits of the potential of the contemporary 

college classroom experience. A classroom community is comparatively thin; it is also constrained 

and motivated by powerful external goods—grades, financial aid, scholarships, and student debt, 

institutional rubrics of success that measure only quantitative results, and other demands on 

students’ time—that press hard on students’ ability to invest in learning for the sake of lifelong 

character formation and a well-lived human life. Such goods, as MacIntyre rightly points out in 

“The Irrelevance of Ethics,” do not weigh heavily on the scales of short-term gains and are hard 

to capture in learning outcomes. To compensate, the end of the course does not leave students on 

their own, but instead points them toward thick communities of practice already in place. Such 

communities, already committed to robust common goods and dedicated to the cultivation of 

virtue, can plausibly provide opportunities and occasions for the long-term training needed to 

develop students’ character more fully. 

In the meantime, the fact that the students and I have been training (with successes and failures) 

and reflecting regularly on our training together provides a sort of communal bonding experience. 

Many students cite adjusting past the awkwardness of practicing silence together as a challenging 

but trust-building moment. The class exercises are meant to give them an insider’s view of the 

power of such disciplines to transform their lives and the benefits of submitting to them. Reflection 

on the practices (in small groups, after each week-long exercise, guided by readings and discussion 

prompts) points students to how dramatically counter-cultural and intentionally carried out their 

formation will have to be in some cases. If my experiment to craft a more MacIntyrean model of 

ethical instruction is ultimately successful, it incentivizes that project and points students to places 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  48 

where they can continue it—well beyond the walls of the classroom and the time frame of the 

semester—to make character formation in virtue a way of life. 

 

Notes 

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 2016), 76–77. Further citations will be to ECM. 

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” in Virtue and the Economy: Essays on 

Morality and Markets, eds. Andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight (New York: Routledge, 

2015), 8–9. 

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 

1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and 

Tradition, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); Charles 

Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 

4. I might add that Calvin University explicitly self-identifies as part of a historical tradition 

(“the Reformed tradition”). 

5. MacIntyre, ECM, 90. 

6. See Rebecca K. DeYoung, “Pedagogical Rhythms: Practices and Reflections on Practice,” 

in Teaching and Christian Practices, eds. David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith (Grand 

Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 24–42. 

7. Edmund Pincoffs called doing ethics via hard cases of application “quandary ethics.” In 

different ways, Julia Annas (Intelligent Virtue, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Linda 

Zagzebski (Exemplarist Moral Theory, Oxford University Press, 2017) have challenged 

this case-study approach and provided constructive alternatives to it. 

8. Robert Adams, A Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 6. 

9. ECM, 71 and 76. MacIntyre criticizes moral theorizing as isolated from “political and 

moral practice” and from inherited “social and cultural tradition[s].” 

10. In several semesters when the weather permitted, we drove to a local cemetery, fanned out 

across the gravestones to find individual quiet spots, and wrote our eulogies there. When I 

have to do the exercise in the classroom, I play selections from John Rutter’s Requiem mass 

(e.g., the “Pie Jesu”) to set the mood. 



49  DeYoung 

 
 

11. MacIntyre, ECM, 54. 

12. MacIntyre, ECM, 111. 

13. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold Davidson 

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 

14. Myles Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. 

A. O. Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), 69–92. 

15. MacIntyre, ECM, 87. 

16. Austen’s example of the virtue friendship between her two main characters, Elizabeth 

Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy, shows how moral development requires contrition as well 

as moral conversion in ways that move her account beyond Aristotle into a Christian key. 

17. Augustine’s account shows how the creation-Creator relationship makes knowledge a 

common and participated good, rather than a possession to master and own and display. 

See Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of 

America Press, 2009) and The Vice of Curiosity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2018). 

18. Rebecca K. DeYoung, “Power Made Perfect in Weakness: Aquinas’s Transformation of 

the Virtue of Courage,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 11.2 (2003): 147–180. 

19. MacIntyre, ECM, 7. 

20. See excerpt found in The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy: After Kant, vol. 2, eds. 

James Conant and Jay Elliott (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017), see especially 1404. 

21. MacIntyre, ECM, 51. 

22. MacIntyre, ECM, 50. Both Talbot Brewer’s The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2011) and the recent philosophical literature on “transformative 

experiences” echo this point in different ways. See L. A. Paul, Transformative Experience 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 

23. David Solomon, “Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 

vol. XIII, Ethical Theory, Character, and Virtue, eds. Peter French et al. (Notre Dame, IN: 

University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 428–441.  

24. MacIntyre, After Virtue, chapter 9. See also Charles Taylor’s analysis in The Ethics of 

Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 

25. Thomas E. Hill, Jr. “Servility and Self-Respect,” The Monist 57.1 (1973): 87–104; Robin 

S. Dillon, “Toward a Feminist Conception of Self-Respect,” Hypatia 7/1 (1992): 52–69. 



Moral Education in the Classroom: A Lived Experiment  50 

26. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1.1 

(1972): 229–243. 

27. MacIntyre, ECM, 194–196. 

28. Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Grand Rapids, 

MI: Eerdmans, 2007), chapter 9. We compare and contrast his approach to that of Robert 

Emmons’ work in positive psychology; see for example the work of The Greater Good 

Institute, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/gratitude. Roberts thinks, for example, 

that gratitude involves not just the appreciation of good things one has, but also their 

attribution to a giver, as well as an ordering of goods one is grateful for (some transcend 

changes in circumstances, others do not). 

29. For example, in the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, the gracious father’s reply to 

the eldest son’s complaints about distribution of the inheritance is, in part, that “you have 

always had me with you.” Both sons mistake the nature of the real gift—it’s a relationship 

of love with their father, not possession of his material wealth. 

30. MacIntyre, ECM, 112–113. 

31. See the preface to After Virtue. 

32. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of 

Science,” The Monist, 60.4 (1977): 453–472. 

33. We use chapters from my Glittering Vices (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009 [revised and 

expanded 2nd edition 2020]) and Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice (Grand Rapids, MI: 

Eerdmans, 2014). See also John D. Witvliet, “The Mysteries of Liturgical Sincerity,” 

Worship, May 2018, excerpted at  

https://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2018/04/26/the-mysteries-of-liturgical-

sincerity/. 


