Moral education in a postmodern world: continuing professional education

This paper seeks to examine the nature of moral education in a postmodern cultural context with a particular focus on continuing professional education. It is argued that postmodernity sees the radical privatisation of moral responsibility. Building upon a critique of modernist ethics and moral education, Jive types of response to that privatisation are postulated and evaluated: foundationalism, codification, egocentrism neotribalism and situationalism. Only the last of these types is seen as an acceptance of the moral responsibility of postmodernity, the other four being forms of retreat from it. Eleven dimensions of moral situationalism are presented as the sort of learning outcomes indicated by it. Those dimensions are then recast in the notion of situational sensitivity, as defining an appropriate curriculum for continuing professional education. Continuing professional moral education in particular is seen as calling for the deconstruction of modernist ethics and its reconstruction in the capabilities, understandings and dispositions involved in empathetically understanding and responding to the particularities of lived events.