Intermezzo on Moral Emotion Education: Imagination, Imitation, and Reappraisal

Education understood as an ensemble of techniques, devices, strategies, and approaches used by educators to attain their educational goals has the unusual characteristic of being purposely and perhaps even constitutionally deficient. It has, as Luhmann and Schorr (1894/1982) put it, a “technological deficit”: to the extent that education approximates the ideal of efficiency and effectiveness in attaining its goals the ideal of an autonomous learner or of a subject endowed with a free will, a central supposition of the modern liberal “pedagogies of autonomy”, is put into question. If in fact such educational technology were possible, it would not just be undesirable but would be subject to what Benner (1979) called the “technology constraint”. This ethical limit imposed on contemporary educational practice is an expression of the pedagogical antinomy of modern educational thought which Kant (1803/1992) famously formulated in the question: “How can freedom be cultivated through constraint?” (Wie kultiviere ich die Freiheit bei dem Zwange?). The question has always been one of how to get children and adolescents to voluntarily do the things that they ought do and voluntarily avoid doing the things that they ought not to do. The answer is, of course, that we do not really know and the modern ethical insight that goes along with it tells us that we might not want to know. The technological deficit and technology constraint in contemporary pedagogy do not of course render attempts at education, moral or otherwise, entirely ineffective or even pointless. We have enough empirical evidence to regard this as false (cf. Lempert’s 1989 review). But the distinction between educational strategies and strategies of social control still goes a long way towards capturing the substance of the pedagogically permissible. In short, if it is possible to educate emotions, the question of whether it is ethically acceptable to engage in emotion education turns on whether there can be genuinely educational strategies of emotion education. This chapter identifies three broad classes of moral emotion strategies which seem to fit this bill: requests to imagine other’s emotional reactions, requests to imitate normative emotional reactions, and requests to reappraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response.1 In the next and last chapter of this work (Chapter 7), the distinction is reintroduced as an organizing principle. There I comment on the foregoing studies’ implications for contemporary practices of professional and practical ethics education in terms of their relevance to each of these dimensions of emotion education.