Abstract
Although there has been considerable debate in contemporary literature on the erosion of public good in higher education, most of it has concentrated on the word ‘public’ in the phrase rather than on the notion of ‘good’. A focus on the ‘good’ is attempted here, and the distinctions between inherent, intrinsic and instrumental are used in a framework devised by Audi (The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition in Intrinsic Value. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004) to develop the following ideas: that education is inherently good; that aspects of its practice are feasibly intrinsically good; and the institutions in which the practice of higher education is delivered is contributive and thus of instrumental value. For if education is intrinsically good then it is something we can all hope for as a common good.
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Notes
- 1.
A much fuller discussion can be found in Korsgaard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996) around a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values as distinct from instrumental and final value.
- 2.
The opposite, applying to bad values and uses.
- 3.
Nicomachean Ethics, 1097a, pp. 25–30.
- 4.
I have gone further elsewhere and argued that this stance ought to lead to one’s contentment and suggested that higher education can play a part in this.
- 5.
This raises issue of the right to education, which I will discuss in another section.
- 6.
Page numbers of the White Paper.
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Gibbs, P. (2019). Is Higher Education Inherently Good, Educative Practices Intrinsically Good and Universities Instrumentally Good? What Should We Hope For?. In: Gibbs, P., Peterson, A. (eds) Higher Education and Hope. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13566-9_11
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