how you can improve your critical thinking skills and as well as moral reasoning

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13 Easy Steps To Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

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With the sheer volume of information that we’re bombarded with on a daily basis – and with the pervasiveness of fake news and social media bubbles – the ability to look at evidence, evaluate the trustworthiness of a source, and think critically is becoming more important than ever. This is why, for me, critical thinking is one of the most vital skills to cultivate for future success.

Critical thinking isn’t about being constantly negative or critical of everything. It’s about objectivity and having an open, inquisitive mind. To think critically is to analyze issues based on hard evidence (as opposed to personal opinions, biases, etc.) in order to build a thorough understanding of what’s really going on. And from this place of thorough understanding, you can make better decisions and solve problems more effectively.

To put it another way, critical thinking means arriving at your own carefully considered conclusions instead of taking information at face value. Here are 13 ways you can cultivate this precious skill:

1. Always vet new information with a cautious eye. Whether it’s an article someone has shared online or data that’s related to your job, always vet the information you're presented with. Good questions to ask here include, "Is this information complete and up to date?” “What evidence is being presented to support the argument?” and “Whose voice is missing here?”

2. Look at where the information has come from. Is the source trustworthy? What is their motivation for presenting this information? For example, are they trying to sell you something or get you to take a certain action (like vote for them)?

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3. Consider more than one point of view. Everyone has their own opinions and motivations – even highly intelligent people making reasonable-sounding arguments have personal opinions and biases that shape their thinking. So, when someone presents you with information, consider whether there are other sides to the story.

4. Practice active listening. Listen carefully to what others are telling you, and try to build a clear picture of their perspective. Empathy is a really useful skill here since putting yourself in another person's shoes can help you understand where they're coming from and what they might want. Try to listen without judgment – remember, critical thinking is about keeping an open mind.

5. Gather additional information where needed. Whenever you identify gaps in the information or data, do your own research to fill those gaps. The next few steps will help you do this objectively…

6. Ask lots of open-ended questions. Curiosity is a key trait of critical thinkers, so channel your inner child and ask lots of "who," "what," and "why" questions.

7. Find your own reputable sources of information, such as established news sites, nonprofit organizations, and education institutes. Try to avoid anonymous sources or sources with an ax to grind or a product to sell. Also, be sure to check when the information was published. An older source may be unintentionally offering up wrong information just because events have moved on since it was published; corroborate the info with a more recent source.

8. Try not to get your news from social media. And if you do see something on social media that grabs your interest, check the accuracy of the story (via reputable sources of information, as above) before you share it.

9. Learn to spot fake news. It's not always easy to spot false or misleading content, but a good rule of thumb is to look at the language, emotion, and tone of the piece. Is it using emotionally charged language, for instance, and trying to get you to feel a certain way? Also, look at the sources of facts, figures, images, and quotes. A legit news story will clearly state its sources.

10. Learn to spot biased information. Like fake news, biased information may seek to appeal more to your emotions than logic and/or present a limited view of the topic. So ask yourself, “Is there more to this topic than what’s being presented here?” Do your own reading around the topic to establish the full picture.

11. Question your own biases, too. Everyone has biases, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. The trick is to think objectively about your likes and dislikes, preferences, and beliefs, and consider how these might affect your thinking.

12. Form your own opinions. Remember, critical thinking is about thinking independently. So once you’ve assessed all the information, form your own conclusions about it.

13. Continue to work on your critical thinking skills. I recommend looking at online learning platforms such as Udemy and Coursera for courses on general critical thinking skills, as well as courses on specific subjects like cognitive biases.

Read more about critical thinking and other essential skills in my new book, Future Skills: The 20 Skills & Competencies Everyone Needs To Succeed In A Digital World . Written for anyone who wants to surf the wave of digital transformation – rather than be drowned by it – the book explores why these vital future skills matter and how to develop them.

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Critical Thinking

Developing the right mindset and skills.

By the Mind Tools Content Team

We make hundreds of decisions every day and, whether we realize it or not, we're all critical thinkers.

We use critical thinking each time we weigh up our options, prioritize our responsibilities, or think about the likely effects of our actions. It's a crucial skill that helps us to cut out misinformation and make wise decisions. The trouble is, we're not always very good at it!

In this article, we'll explore the key skills that you need to develop your critical thinking skills, and how to adopt a critical thinking mindset, so that you can make well-informed decisions.

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the discipline of rigorously and skillfully using information, experience, observation, and reasoning to guide your decisions, actions, and beliefs. You'll need to actively question every step of your thinking process to do it well.

Collecting, analyzing and evaluating information is an important skill in life, and a highly valued asset in the workplace. People who score highly in critical thinking assessments are also rated by their managers as having good problem-solving skills, creativity, strong decision-making skills, and good overall performance. [1]

Key Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinkers possess a set of key characteristics which help them to question information and their own thinking. Focus on the following areas to develop your critical thinking skills:

Being willing and able to explore alternative approaches and experimental ideas is crucial. Can you think through "what if" scenarios, create plausible options, and test out your theories? If not, you'll tend to write off ideas and options too soon, so you may miss the best answer to your situation.

To nurture your curiosity, stay up to date with facts and trends. You'll overlook important information if you allow yourself to become "blinkered," so always be open to new information.

But don't stop there! Look for opposing views or evidence to challenge your information, and seek clarification when things are unclear. This will help you to reassess your beliefs and make a well-informed decision later. Read our article, Opening Closed Minds , for more ways to stay receptive.

Logical Thinking

You must be skilled at reasoning and extending logic to come up with plausible options or outcomes.

It's also important to emphasize logic over emotion. Emotion can be motivating but it can also lead you to take hasty and unwise action, so control your emotions and be cautious in your judgments. Know when a conclusion is "fact" and when it is not. "Could-be-true" conclusions are based on assumptions and must be tested further. Read our article, Logical Fallacies , for help with this.

Use creative problem solving to balance cold logic. By thinking outside of the box you can identify new possible outcomes by using pieces of information that you already have.

Self-Awareness

Many of the decisions we make in life are subtly informed by our values and beliefs. These influences are called cognitive biases and it can be difficult to identify them in ourselves because they're often subconscious.

Practicing self-awareness will allow you to reflect on the beliefs you have and the choices you make. You'll then be better equipped to challenge your own thinking and make improved, unbiased decisions.

One particularly useful tool for critical thinking is the Ladder of Inference . It allows you to test and validate your thinking process, rather than jumping to poorly supported conclusions.

Developing a Critical Thinking Mindset

Combine the above skills with the right mindset so that you can make better decisions and adopt more effective courses of action. You can develop your critical thinking mindset by following this process:

Gather Information

First, collect data, opinions and facts on the issue that you need to solve. Draw on what you already know, and turn to new sources of information to help inform your understanding. Consider what gaps there are in your knowledge and seek to fill them. And look for information that challenges your assumptions and beliefs.

Be sure to verify the authority and authenticity of your sources. Not everything you read is true! Use this checklist to ensure that your information is valid:

• Are your information sources trustworthy ? (For example, well-respected authors, trusted colleagues or peers, recognized industry publications, websites, blogs, etc.)
• Is the information you have gathered up to date ?
• Has the information received any direct criticism ?
• Does the information have any errors or inaccuracies ?
• Is there any evidence to support or corroborate the information you have gathered?
• Is the information you have gathered subjective or biased in any way? (For example, is it based on opinion, rather than fact? Is any of the information you have gathered designed to promote a particular service or organization?)

If any information appears to be irrelevant or invalid, don't include it in your decision making. But don't omit information just because you disagree with it, or your final decision will be flawed and bias.

Now observe the information you have gathered, and interpret it. What are the key findings and main takeaways? What does the evidence point to? Start to build one or two possible arguments based on what you have found.

You'll need to look for the details within the mass of information, so use your powers of observation to identify any patterns or similarities. You can then analyze and extend these trends to make sensible predictions about the future.

To help you to sift through the multiple ideas and theories, it can be useful to group and order items according to their characteristics. From here, you can compare and contrast the different items. And once you've determined how similar or different things are from one another, Paired Comparison Analysis can help you to analyze them.

The final step involves challenging the information and rationalizing its arguments.

Apply the laws of reason (induction, deduction, analogy) to judge an argument and determine its merits. To do this, it's essential that you can determine the significance and validity of an argument to put it in the correct perspective. Take a look at our article, Rational Thinking , for more information about how to do this.

Once you have considered all of the arguments and options rationally, you can finally make an informed decision.

Afterward, take time to reflect on what you have learned and what you found challenging. Step back from the detail of your decision or problem, and look at the bigger picture. Record what you've learned from your observations and experience.

Critical thinking involves rigorously and skilfully using information, experience, observation, and reasoning to guide your decisions, actions and beliefs. It's a useful skill in the workplace and in life.

You'll need to be curious and creative to explore alternative possibilities, but rational to apply logic, and self-aware to identify when your beliefs could affect your decisions or actions.

You can demonstrate a high level of critical thinking by validating your information, analyzing its meaning, and finally evaluating the argument.

Critical Thinking Infographic

See Critical Thinking represented in our infographic: An Elementary Guide to Critical Thinking .

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How to build critical thinking skills for better decision-making

It’s simple in theory, but tougher in practice – here are five tips to get you started.

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Have you heard the riddle about two coins that equal thirty cents, but one of them is not a nickel? What about the one where a surgeon says they can’t operate on their own son?

Those brain teasers tap into your critical thinking skills. But your ability to think critically isn’t just helpful for solving those random puzzles – it plays a big role in your career. 

An impressive 81% of employers say critical thinking carries a lot of weight when they’re evaluating job candidates. It ranks as the top competency companies consider when hiring recent graduates (even ahead of communication ). Plus, once you’re hired, several studies show that critical thinking skills are highly correlated with better job performance.

So what exactly are critical thinking skills? And even more importantly, how do you build and improve them? 

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to evaluate facts and information, remain objective, and make a sound decision about how to move forward.

Does that sound like how you approach every decision or problem? Not so fast. Critical thinking seems simple in theory but is much tougher in practice, which helps explain why 65% of employers say their organization has a need for more critical thinking. 

In reality, critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. In order to do it well, you need to:

• Remain open-minded and inquisitive, rather than relying on assumptions or jumping to conclusions
• Ask questions and dig deep, rather than accepting information at face value
• Keep your own biases and perceptions in check to stay as objective as possible
• Rely on your emotional intelligence to fill in the blanks and gain a more well-rounded understanding of a situation

So, critical thinking isn’t just being intelligent or analytical. In many ways, it requires you to step outside of yourself, let go of your own preconceived notions, and approach a problem or situation with curiosity and fairness.

It’s a challenge, but it’s well worth it. Critical thinking skills will help you connect ideas, make reasonable decisions, and solve complex problems.

7 critical thinking skills to help you dig deeper

Critical thinking is often labeled as a skill itself (you’ll see it bulleted as a desired trait in a variety of job descriptions). But it’s better to think of critical thinking less as a distinct skill and more as a collection or category of skills. 

To think critically, you’ll need to tap into a bunch of your other soft skills. Here are seven of the most important. 

Open-mindedness

It’s important to kick off the critical thinking process with the idea that anything is possible. The more you’re able to set aside your own suspicions, beliefs, and agenda, the better prepared you are to approach the situation with the level of inquisitiveness you need. 

That means not closing yourself off to any possibilities and allowing yourself the space to pull on every thread – yes, even the ones that seem totally implausible.

As Christopher Dwyer, Ph.D. writes in a piece for Psychology Today , “Even if an idea appears foolish, sometimes its consideration can lead to an intelligent, critically considered conclusion.” He goes on to compare the critical thinking process to brainstorming . Sometimes the “bad” ideas are what lay the foundation for the good ones. 

Open-mindedness is challenging because it requires more effort and mental bandwidth than sticking with your own perceptions. Approaching problems or situations with true impartiality often means:

• Practicing self-regulation : Giving yourself a pause between when you feel something and when you actually react or take action.
• Challenging your own biases: Acknowledging your biases and seeking feedback are two powerful ways to get a broader understanding. 

Critical thinking example

In a team meeting, your boss mentioned that your company newsletter signups have been decreasing and she wants to figure out why.

At first, you feel offended and defensive – it feels like she’s blaming you for the dip in subscribers. You recognize and rationalize that emotion before thinking about potential causes. You have a hunch about what’s happening, but you will explore all possibilities and contributions from your team members.

Observation

Observation is, of course, your ability to notice and process the details all around you (even the subtle or seemingly inconsequential ones). Critical thinking demands that you’re flexible and willing to go beyond surface-level information, and solid observation skills help you do that.

Your observations help you pick up on clues from a variety of sources and experiences, all of which help you draw a final conclusion. After all, sometimes it’s the most minuscule realization that leads you to the strongest conclusion.

Over the next week or so, you keep a close eye on your company’s website and newsletter analytics to see if numbers are in fact declining or if your boss’s concerns were just a fluke. 

Critical thinking hinges on objectivity. And, to be objective, you need to base your judgments on the facts – which you collect through research. You’ll lean on your research skills to gather as much information as possible that’s relevant to your problem or situation. 

Keep in mind that this isn’t just about the quantity of information – quality matters too. You want to find data and details from a variety of trusted sources to drill past the surface and build a deeper understanding of what’s happening. 

You dig into your email and website analytics to identify trends in bounce rates, time on page, conversions, and more. You also review recent newsletters and email promotions to understand what customers have received, look through current customer feedback, and connect with your customer support team to learn what they’re hearing in their conversations with customers.

The critical thinking process is sort of like a treasure hunt – you’ll find some nuggets that are fundamental for your final conclusion and some that might be interesting but aren’t pertinent to the problem at hand.

That’s why you need analytical skills. They’re what help you separate the wheat from the chaff, prioritize information, identify trends or themes, and draw conclusions based on the most relevant and influential facts. 

It’s easy to confuse analytical thinking with critical thinking itself, and it’s true there is a lot of overlap between the two. But analytical thinking is just a piece of critical thinking. It focuses strictly on the facts and data, while critical thinking incorporates other factors like emotions, opinions, and experiences. 

As you analyze your research, you notice that one specific webpage has contributed to a significant decline in newsletter signups. While all of the other sources have stayed fairly steady with regard to conversions, that one has sharply decreased.

You decide to move on from your other hypotheses about newsletter quality and dig deeper into the analytics. 

One of the traps of critical thinking is that it’s easy to feel like you’re never done. There’s always more information you could collect and more rabbit holes you could fall down.

But at some point, you need to accept that you’ve done your due diligence and make a decision about how to move forward. That’s where inference comes in. It’s your ability to look at the evidence and facts available to you and draw an informed conclusion based on those. 

When you’re so focused on staying objective and pursuing all possibilities, inference can feel like the antithesis of critical thinking. But ultimately, it’s your inference skills that allow you to move out of the thinking process and onto the action steps. 

You dig deeper into the analytics for the page that hasn’t been converting and notice that the sharp drop-off happened around the same time you switched email providers.

After looking more into the backend, you realize that the signup form on that page isn’t correctly connected to your newsletter platform. It seems like anybody who has signed up on that page hasn’t been fed to your email list. 

Communication

3 ways to improve your communication skills at work

If and when you identify a solution or answer, you can’t keep it close to the vest. You’ll need to use your communication skills to share your findings with the relevant stakeholders – like your boss, team members, or anybody who needs to be involved in the next steps.

Your analysis skills will come in handy here too, as they’ll help you determine what information other people need to know so you can avoid bogging them down with unnecessary details. 

In your next team meeting, you pull up the analytics and show your team the sharp drop-off as well as the missing connection between that page and your email platform. You ask the web team to reinstall and double-check that connection and you also ask a member of the marketing team to draft an apology email to the subscribers who were missed. 

Problem-solving

Critical thinking and problem-solving are two more terms that are frequently confused. After all, when you think critically, you’re often doing so with the objective of solving a problem.

The best way to understand how problem-solving and critical thinking differ is to think of problem-solving as much more narrow. You’re focused on finding a solution.

In contrast, you can use critical thinking for a variety of use cases beyond solving a problem – like answering questions or identifying opportunities for improvement. Even so, within the critical thinking process, you’ll flex your problem-solving skills when it comes time to take action. 

Once the fix is implemented, you monitor the analytics to see if subscribers continue to increase. If not (or if they increase at a slower rate than you anticipated), you’ll roll out some other tests like changing the CTA language or the placement of the subscribe form on the page.

5 ways to improve your critical thinking skills

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Think critically about critical thinking and you’ll quickly realize that it’s not as instinctive as you’d like it to be. Fortunately, your critical thinking skills are learned competencies and not inherent gifts – and that means you can improve them. Here’s how:

• Practice active listening: Active listening helps you process and understand what other people share. That’s crucial as you aim to be open-minded and inquisitive.
• Ask open-ended questions: If your critical thinking process involves collecting feedback and opinions from others, ask open-ended questions (meaning, questions that can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”). Doing so will give you more valuable information and also prevent your own biases from influencing people’s input.
• Scrutinize your sources: Figuring out what to trust and prioritize is crucial for critical thinking. Boosting your media literacy and asking more questions will help you be more discerning about what to factor in. It’s hard to strike a balance between skepticism and open-mindedness, but approaching information with questions (rather than unquestioning trust) will help you draw better conclusions. 
• Play a game: Remember those riddles we mentioned at the beginning? As trivial as they might seem, games and exercises like those can help you boost your critical thinking skills. There are plenty of critical thinking exercises you can do individually or as a team . 
• Give yourself time: Research shows that rushed decisions are often regrettable ones. That’s likely because critical thinking takes time – you can’t do it under the wire. So, for big decisions or hairy problems, give yourself enough time and breathing room to work through the process. It’s hard enough to think critically without a countdown ticking in your brain. 

Critical thinking really is critical

The ability to think critically is important, but it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It’s just easier to stick with biases, assumptions, and surface-level information. 

But that route often leads you to rash judgments, shaky conclusions, and disappointing decisions. So here’s a conclusion we can draw without any more noodling: Even if it is more demanding on your mental resources, critical thinking is well worth the effort.

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How to develop critical thinking skills

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What are critical thinking skills?

How to develop critical thinking skills: 12 tips, how to practice critical thinking skills at work, become your own best critic.

A client requests a tight deadline on an intense project. Your childcare provider calls in sick on a day full of meetings. Payment from a contract gig is a month behind. 

Your day-to-day will always have challenges, big and small. And no matter the size and urgency, they all ask you to use critical thinking to analyze the situation and arrive at the right solution. 

Critical thinking includes a wide set of soft skills that encourage continuous learning, resilience , and self-reflection. The more you add to your professional toolbelt, the more equipped you’ll be to tackle whatever challenge presents itself. Here’s how to develop critical thinking, with examples explaining how to use it.

Critical thinking skills are the skills you use to analyze information, imagine scenarios holistically, and create rational solutions. It’s a type of emotional intelligence that stimulates effective problem-solving and decision-making . 

When you fine-tune your critical thinking skills, you seek beyond face-value observations and knee-jerk reactions. Instead, you harvest deeper insights and string together ideas and concepts in logical, sometimes out-of-the-box , ways. 

Imagine a team working on a marketing strategy for a new set of services. That team might use critical thinking to balance goals and key performance indicators , like new customer acquisition costs, average monthly sales, and net profit margins. They understand the connections between overlapping factors to build a strategy that stays within budget and attracts new sales. 

Looking for ways to improve critical thinking skills? Start by brushing up on the following soft skills that fall under this umbrella: 

• Analytical thinking: Approaching problems with an analytical eye includes breaking down complex issues into small chunks and examining their significance. An example could be organizing customer feedback to identify trends and improve your product offerings. 
• Open-mindedness: Push past cognitive biases and be receptive to different points of view and constructive feedback . Managers and team members who keep an open mind position themselves to hear new ideas that foster innovation . 
• Creative thinking: With creative thinking , you can develop several ideas to address a single problem, like brainstorming more efficient workflow best practices to boost productivity and employee morale . 
• Self-reflection: Self-reflection lets you examine your thinking and assumptions to stimulate healthier collaboration and thought processes. Maybe a bad first impression created a negative anchoring bias with a new coworker. Reflecting on your own behavior stirs up empathy and improves the relationship. 
• Evaluation: With evaluation skills, you tackle the pros and cons of a situation based on logic rather than emotion. When prioritizing tasks , you might be tempted to do the fun or easy ones first, but evaluating their urgency and importance can help you make better decisions. 

There’s no magic method to change your thinking processes. Improvement happens with small, intentional changes to your everyday habits until a more critical approach to thinking is automatic. 

Here are 12 tips for building stronger self-awareness and learning how to improve critical thinking: 

1. Be cautious

There’s nothing wrong with a little bit of skepticism. One of the core principles of critical thinking is asking questions and dissecting the available information. You might surprise yourself at what you find when you stop to think before taking action. 

Before making a decision, use evidence, logic, and deductive reasoning to support your own opinions or challenge ideas. It helps you and your team avoid falling prey to bad information or resistance to change .

2. Ask open-ended questions

“Yes” or “no” questions invite agreement rather than reflection. Instead, ask open-ended questions that force you to engage in analysis and rumination. Digging deeper can help you identify potential biases, uncover assumptions, and arrive at new hypotheses and possible solutions. 

3. Do your research

No matter your proficiency, you can always learn more. Turning to different points of view and information is a great way to develop a comprehensive understanding of a topic and make informed decisions. You’ll prioritize reliable information rather than fall into emotional or automatic decision-making. 

4. Consider several opinions

You might spend so much time on your work that it’s easy to get stuck in your own perspective, especially if you work independently on a remote team . Make an effort to reach out to colleagues to hear different ideas and thought patterns. Their input might surprise you.

If or when you disagree, remember that you and your team share a common goal. Divergent opinions are constructive, so shift the focus to finding solutions rather than defending disagreements. 

5. Learn to be quiet

Active listening is the intentional practice of concentrating on a conversation partner instead of your own thoughts. It’s about paying attention to detail and letting people know you value their opinions, which can open your mind to new perspectives and thought processes.

If you’re brainstorming with your team or having a 1:1 with a coworker , listen, ask clarifying questions, and work to understand other peoples’ viewpoints. Listening to your team will help you find fallacies in arguments to improve possible solutions.

6. Schedule reflection

Whether waking up at 5 am or using a procrastination hack, scheduling time to think puts you in a growth mindset . Your mind has natural cognitive biases to help you simplify decision-making, but squashing them is key to thinking critically and finding new solutions besides the ones you might gravitate toward. Creating time and calm space in your day gives you the chance to step back and visualize the biases that impact your decision-making. 

7. Cultivate curiosity

With so many demands and job responsibilities, it’s easy to seek solace in routine. But getting out of your comfort zone helps spark critical thinking and find more solutions than you usually might.

If curiosity doesn’t come naturally to you, cultivate a thirst for knowledge by reskilling and upskilling . Not only will you add a new skill to your resume , but expanding the limits of your professional knowledge might motivate you to ask more questions. 

You don’t have to develop critical thinking skills exclusively in the office. Whether on your break or finding a hobby to do after work, playing strategic games or filling out crosswords can prime your brain for problem-solving. 

9. Write it down

Recording your thoughts with pen and paper can lead to stronger brain activity than typing them out on a keyboard. If you’re stuck and want to think more critically about a problem, writing your ideas can help you process information more deeply.

The act of recording ideas on paper can also improve your memory . Ideas are more likely to linger in the background of your mind, leading to deeper thinking that informs your decision-making process. 

10. Speak up

Take opportunities to share your opinion, even if it intimidates you. Whether at a networking event with new people or a meeting with close colleagues, try to engage with people who challenge or help you develop your ideas. Having conversations that force you to support your position encourages you to refine your argument and think critically. 

11. Stay humble

Ideas and concepts aren’t the same as real-life actions. There may be such a thing as negative outcomes, but there’s no such thing as a bad idea. At the brainstorming stage , don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Sometimes the best solutions come from off-the-wall, unorthodox decisions. Sit in your creativity , let ideas flow, and don’t be afraid to share them with your colleagues. Putting yourself in a creative mindset helps you see situations from new perspectives and arrive at innovative conclusions. 

12. Embrace discomfort

Get comfortable feeling uncomfortable . It isn’t easy when others challenge your ideas, but sometimes, it’s the only way to see new perspectives and think critically.

By willingly stepping into unfamiliar territory, you foster the resilience and flexibility you need to become a better thinker. You’ll learn how to pick yourself up from failure and approach problems from fresh angles. 

Thinking critically is easier said than done. To help you understand its impact (and how to use it), here are two scenarios that require critical thinking skills and provide teachable moments. 

Scenario #1: Unexpected delays and budget

Imagine your team is working on producing an event. Unexpectedly, a vendor explains they’ll be a week behind on delivering materials. Then another vendor sends a quote that’s more than you can afford. Unless you develop a creative solution, the team will have to push back deadlines and go over budget, potentially costing the client’s trust. 

Here’s how you could approach the situation with creative thinking:

• Analyze the situation holistically: Determine how the delayed materials and over-budget quote will impact the rest of your timeline and financial resources . That way, you can identify whether you need to build an entirely new plan with new vendors, or if it’s worth it to readjust time and resources. 
• Identify your alternative options: With careful assessment, your team decides that another vendor can’t provide the same materials in a quicker time frame. You’ll need to rearrange assignment schedules to complete everything on time. 
• Collaborate and adapt: Your team has an emergency meeting to rearrange your project schedule. You write down each deliverable and determine which ones you can and can’t complete by the deadline. To compensate for lost time, you rearrange your task schedule to complete everything that doesn’t need the delayed materials first, then advance as far as you can on the tasks that do. 
• Check different resources: In the meantime, you scour through your contact sheet to find alternative vendors that fit your budget. Accounting helps by providing old invoices to determine which vendors have quoted less for previous jobs. After pulling all your sources, you find a vendor that fits your budget. 
• Maintain open communication: You create a special Slack channel to keep everyone up to date on changes, challenges, and additional delays. Keeping an open line encourages transparency on the team’s progress and boosts everyone’s confidence. 

Scenario #2: Differing opinions 

A conflict arises between two team members on the best approach for a new strategy for a gaming app. One believes that small tweaks to the current content are necessary to maintain user engagement and stay within budget. The other believes a bold revamp is needed to encourage new followers and stronger sales revenue. 

Here’s how critical thinking could help this conflict:

• Listen actively: Give both team members the opportunity to present their ideas free of interruption. Encourage the entire team to ask open-ended questions to more fully understand and develop each argument. 
• Flex your analytical skills: After learning more about both ideas, everyone should objectively assess the benefits and drawbacks of each approach. Analyze each idea's risk, merits, and feasibility based on available data and the app’s goals and objectives. 
• Identify common ground: The team discusses similarities between each approach and brainstorms ways to integrate both idea s, like making small but eye-catching modifications to existing content or using the same visual design in new media formats. 
• Test new strategy: To test out the potential of a bolder strategy, the team decides to A/B test both approaches. You create a set of criteria to evenly distribute users by different demographics to analyze engagement, revenue, and customer turnover. 
• Monitor and adapt: After implementing the A/B test, the team closely monitors the results of each strategy. You regroup and optimize the changes that provide stronger results after the testing. That way, all team members understand why you’re making the changes you decide to make.

You can’t think your problems away. But you can equip yourself with skills that help you move through your biggest challenges and find innovative solutions. Learning how to develop critical thinking is the start of honing an adaptable growth mindset. 

Now that you have resources to increase critical thinking skills in your professional development, you can identify whether you embrace change or routine, are open or resistant to feedback, or turn to research or emotion will build self-awareness. From there, tweak and incorporate techniques to be a critical thinker when life presents you with a problem.

Cultivate your creativity

Foster creativity and continuous learning with guidance from our certified Coaches.

Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

How to improve your creative skills for effective problem-solving

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3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking

• Helen Lee Bouygues

But simple doesn’t mean easy.

Too many business leaders are simply not reasoning through pressing issues, and it’s hurting their organizations.  The good news is that critical thinking is a learned behavior. There are three simple things you can do to train yourself to become a more effective critical thinker: question assumptions, reason through logic, and diversify your thought and perspectives. They may sound obvious, but deliberately cultivating these three key habits of mind go a long way in helping you become better at clear and robust reasoning.

A few years ago, a CEO assured me that his company was the market leader. “Clients will not leave for competitors,” he added. “It costs too much for them to switch.” Within weeks, the manufacturing giant Procter & Gamble elected not to renew its contract with the firm. The CEO was shocked — but he shouldn’t have been.

• HB Helen Lee Bouygues is the president of the Paris-based Reboot Foundation . A former partner at McKinsey & Company, she has served as interim CEO, CFO, or COO for more than one dozen companies.

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Why Is Critical Thinking Important? A Survival Guide

Updated: December 7, 2023

Published: April 2, 2020

Why is critical thinking important? The decisions that you make affect your quality of life. And if you want to ensure that you live your best, most successful and happy life, you’re going to want to make conscious choices. That can be done with a simple thing known as critical thinking. Here’s how to improve your critical thinking skills and make decisions that you won’t regret.

What Is Critical Thinking?

You’ve surely heard of critical thinking, but you might not be entirely sure what it really means, and that’s because there are many definitions. For the most part, however, we think of critical thinking as the process of analyzing facts in order to form a judgment. Basically, it’s thinking about thinking.

How Has The Definition Evolved Over Time?

The first time critical thinking was documented is believed to be in the teachings of Socrates , recorded by Plato. But throughout history, the definition has changed.

Today it is best understood by philosophers and psychologists and it’s believed to be a highly complex concept. Some insightful modern-day critical thinking definitions include :

• “Reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.”
• “Deciding what’s true and what you should do.”

The Importance Of Critical Thinking

Why is critical thinking important? Good question! Here are a few undeniable reasons why it’s crucial to have these skills.

1. Critical Thinking Is Universal

Critical thinking is a domain-general thinking skill. What does this mean? It means that no matter what path or profession you pursue, these skills will always be relevant and will always be beneficial to your success. They are not specific to any field.

2. Crucial For The Economy

Our future depends on technology, information, and innovation. Critical thinking is needed for our fast-growing economies, to solve problems as quickly and as effectively as possible.

3. Improves Language & Presentation Skills

In order to best express ourselves, we need to know how to think clearly and systematically — meaning practice critical thinking! Critical thinking also means knowing how to break down texts, and in turn, improve our ability to comprehend.

4. Promotes Creativity

By practicing critical thinking, we are allowing ourselves not only to solve problems but also to come up with new and creative ideas to do so. Critical thinking allows us to analyze these ideas and adjust them accordingly.

5. Important For Self-Reflection

Without critical thinking, how can we really live a meaningful life? We need this skill to self-reflect and justify our ways of life and opinions. Critical thinking provides us with the tools to evaluate ourselves in the way that we need to.

6. The Basis Of Science & Democracy

In order to have a democracy and to prove scientific facts, we need critical thinking in the world. Theories must be backed up with knowledge. In order for a society to effectively function, its citizens need to establish opinions about what’s right and wrong (by using critical thinking!).

Benefits Of Critical Thinking

We know that critical thinking is good for society as a whole, but what are some benefits of critical thinking on an individual level? Why is critical thinking important for us?

1. Key For Career Success

Critical thinking is crucial for many career paths. Not just for scientists, but lawyers , doctors, reporters, engineers , accountants, and analysts (among many others) all have to use critical thinking in their positions. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, critical thinking is one of the most desirable skills to have in the workforce, as it helps analyze information, think outside the box, solve problems with innovative solutions, and plan systematically.

2. Better Decision Making

There’s no doubt about it — critical thinkers make the best choices. Critical thinking helps us deal with everyday problems as they come our way, and very often this thought process is even done subconsciously. It helps us think independently and trust our gut feeling.

3. Can Make You Happier!

While this often goes unnoticed, being in touch with yourself and having a deep understanding of why you think the way you think can really make you happier. Critical thinking can help you better understand yourself, and in turn, help you avoid any kind of negative or limiting beliefs, and focus more on your strengths. Being able to share your thoughts can increase your quality of life.

4. Form Well-Informed Opinions

There is no shortage of information coming at us from all angles. And that’s exactly why we need to use our critical thinking skills and decide for ourselves what to believe. Critical thinking allows us to ensure that our opinions are based on the facts, and help us sort through all that extra noise.

5. Better Citizens

One of the most inspiring critical thinking quotes is by former US president Thomas Jefferson: “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” What Jefferson is stressing to us here is that critical thinkers make better citizens, as they are able to see the entire picture without getting sucked into biases and propaganda.

6. Improves Relationships

While you may be convinced that being a critical thinker is bound to cause you problems in relationships, this really couldn’t be less true! Being a critical thinker can allow you to better understand the perspective of others, and can help you become more open-minded towards different views.

7. Promotes Curiosity

Critical thinkers are constantly curious about all kinds of things in life, and tend to have a wide range of interests. Critical thinking means constantly asking questions and wanting to know more, about why, what, who, where, when, and everything else that can help them make sense of a situation or concept, never taking anything at face value.

8. Allows For Creativity

Critical thinkers are also highly creative thinkers, and see themselves as limitless when it comes to possibilities. They are constantly looking to take things further, which is crucial in the workforce.

9. Enhances Problem Solving Skills

Those with critical thinking skills tend to solve problems as part of their natural instinct. Critical thinkers are patient and committed to solving the problem, similar to Albert Einstein, one of the best critical thinking examples, who said “It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Critical thinkers’ enhanced problem-solving skills makes them better at their jobs and better at solving the world’s biggest problems. Like Einstein, they have the potential to literally change the world.

10. An Activity For The Mind

Just like our muscles, in order for them to be strong, our mind also needs to be exercised and challenged. It’s safe to say that critical thinking is almost like an activity for the mind — and it needs to be practiced. Critical thinking encourages the development of many crucial skills such as logical thinking, decision making, and open-mindness.

11. Creates Independence

When we think critically, we think on our own as we trust ourselves more. Critical thinking is key to creating independence, and encouraging students to make their own decisions and form their own opinions.

12. Crucial Life Skill

Critical thinking is crucial not just for learning, but for life overall! Education isn’t just a way to prepare ourselves for life, but it’s pretty much life itself. Learning is a lifelong process that we go through each and every day.

How to Think Critically

Now that you know the benefits of thinking critically, how do you actually do it?

How To Improve Your Critical Thinking

• Define Your Question: When it comes to critical thinking, it’s important to always keep your goal in mind. Know what you’re trying to achieve, and then figure out how to best get there.
• Gather Reliable Information: Make sure that you’re using sources you can trust — biases aside. That’s how a real critical thinker operates!
• Ask The Right Questions: We all know the importance of questions, but be sure that you’re asking the right questions that are going to get you to your answer.
• Look Short & Long Term: When coming up with solutions, think about both the short- and long-term consequences. Both of them are significant in the equation.
• Explore All Sides: There is never just one simple answer, and nothing is black or white. Explore all options and think outside of the box before you come to any conclusions.

How Is Critical Thinking Developed At School?

Critical thinking is developed in nearly everything we do. However, much of this important skill is encouraged to be practiced at school, and rightfully so! Critical thinking goes beyond just thinking clearly — it’s also about thinking for yourself.

When a teacher asks a question in class, students are given the chance to answer for themselves and think critically about what they learned and what they believe to be accurate. When students work in groups and are forced to engage in discussion, this is also a great chance to expand their thinking and use their critical thinking skills.

How Does Critical Thinking Apply To Your Career?

Once you’ve finished school and entered the workforce, your critical thinking journey only expands and grows from here!

Impress Your Employer

Employers value employees who are critical thinkers, ask questions, offer creative ideas, and are always ready to offer innovation against the competition. No matter what your position or role in a company may be, critical thinking will always give you the power to stand out and make a difference.

Careers That Require Critical Thinking

Some of many examples of careers that require critical thinking include:

• Human resources specialist
• Marketing associate
• Business analyst

Truth be told however, it’s probably harder to come up with a professional field that doesn’t require any critical thinking!

Photo by  Oladimeji Ajegbile  from  Pexels

What is someone with critical thinking skills capable of doing.

Someone with critical thinking skills is able to think rationally and clearly about what they should or not believe. They are capable of engaging in their own thoughts, and doing some reflection in order to come to a well-informed conclusion.

A critical thinker understands the connections between ideas, and is able to construct arguments based on facts, as well as find mistakes in reasoning.

The Process Of Critical Thinking

The process of critical thinking is highly systematic.

What Are Your Goals?

Critical thinking starts by defining your goals, and knowing what you are ultimately trying to achieve.

Once you know what you are trying to conclude, you can foresee your solution to the problem and play it out in your head from all perspectives.

What Does The Future Of Critical Thinking Hold?

The future of critical thinking is the equivalent of the future of jobs. In 2020, critical thinking was ranked as the 2nd top skill (following complex problem solving) by the World Economic Forum .

We are dealing with constant unprecedented changes, and what success is today, might not be considered success tomorrow — making critical thinking a key skill for the future workforce.

Why Is Critical Thinking So Important?

Why is critical thinking important? Critical thinking is more than just important! It’s one of the most crucial cognitive skills one can develop.

By practicing well-thought-out thinking, both your thoughts and decisions can make a positive change in your life, on both a professional and personal level. You can hugely improve your life by working on your critical thinking skills as often as you can.

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Critical Thinking and Moral Reasoning: Can You Have One without the Other?

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Mark Weinstein

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International Journal of Philosophical Practice

Maria daVenza Tillmanns

This paper explores the relationship between thinking and acting morally. Can we transfer critical thinking skills to real life situations? Philosophical practice with clients as well as with school children creates a context for not only being a critical and reflective thinker but also a self -critical thinker and self -reflective thinker. In his book On Dialogue, David Bohm explores the notion of proprioception of thinking; focusing on thinking as a movement. The tacit, concrete process of thinking informs our actions in a way that rational thinking by itself cannot. We can try to impose rational thinking on our tacit, concrete process of thinking but knowing how to be just abstractly, for example, does not necessarily make us act justly in the moment. Philosophical practice puts us in touch with our own tacit, concrete process of thinking. Through dialogue (Bohm, Buber) we become more than skilled rational thinkers ; we become skilled thinking beings.

AD ALTA: 11/02

Martina Kosturková

Introduction: Since both components critical thinking and moral reasoning are considered to be major phenomena, the development of which is a priority of all world education policies, they are paid a lot of attention in foreign countries. However, foreign studies have only made a little mention of examining their relationship and integrity as well as until recently, each dimension has been examined separately in Slovakia and there is no piece of evidence showing the relationship between them. Based on this, we have formulated the following scientific problem: Is there a relationship between critical thinking and moral reasoning? Methods and respondents: The basic measurement tool of our research was the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal used to determine the level of critical thinking. The level of moral reasoning was investigated by Lind´s Moral Competence Test. The examined sample consisted of the available selection of the 2nd and 3rd year teacher study programme students...

The Review of Higher Education

Tricia Seifert

Journal of Moral Education

Professor Terry Hyland

Moral education programmes which concentrate exclusively on the process of developing critical thinking skills are criticized for their one-sided and incomplete conception of the rational enterprise. Rational moral thinking calls for both criticism and conformity to standards, and critical thinking is vacuous and impotent until it is linked with the prima facie intuitions which constitute a moral way of life. The fostering of rational moral behaviour, therefore, requires – in addition to the development of critical skills – an element of instruction and attention to moral content. Moral instruction is a necessary component of moral education programmes, and can help educators to promote rational morality and encourage pupils to avoid the extremes of moral bigotry and nihilism.

Larry Nucci

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• How to apply critical thinking in learning

Sometimes your university classes might feel like a maze of information. Consider critical thinking skills like a map that can lead the way.

Why do we need critical thinking?  

Critical thinking is a type of thinking that requires continuous questioning, exploring answers, and making judgments. Critical thinking can help you: 

• analyze information to comprehend more thoroughly
• approach problems systematically, identify root causes, and explore potential solutions 
• make informed decisions by weighing various perspectives 
• promote intellectual curiosity and self-reflection, leading to continuous learning, innovation, and personal development 

What is the process of critical thinking? 

1. understand  .

Critical thinking starts with understanding the content that you are learning.

This step involves clarifying the logic and interrelations of the content by actively engaging with the materials (e.g., text, articles, and research papers). You can take notes, highlight key points, and make connections with prior knowledge to help you engage.

Ask yourself these questions to help you build your understanding:  

• What is the structure?
• What is the main idea of the content?  
• What is the evidence that supports any arguments?
• What is the conclusion?

2. Analyze  

You need to assess the credibility, validity, and relevance of the information presented in the content. Consider the authors’ biases and potential limitations in the evidence. 

Ask yourself questions in terms of why and how:

• What is the supporting evidence?  
• Why do they use it as evidence?   
• How does the data present support the conclusions?  
• What method was used? Was it appropriate?  

 3.  Evaluate   

After analyzing the data and evidence you collected, make your evaluation of the evidence, results, and conclusions made in the content.

Consider the weaknesses and strengths of the ideas presented in the content to make informed decisions or suggest alternative solutions:

• What is the gap between the evidence and the conclusion?  
• What is my position on the subject?  
• What other approaches can I use?  

When do you apply critical thinking and how can you improve these skills?   

1. reading academic texts, articles, and research papers.

• analyze arguments
• assess the credibility and validity of evidence
• consider potential biases presented
• question the assumptions, methodologies, and the way they generate conclusions

2. Writing essays and theses

• demonstrate your understanding of the information, logic of evidence, and position on the topic
• include evidence or examples to support your ideas
• make your standing points clear by presenting information and providing reasons to support your arguments
• address potential counterarguments or opposing viewpoints
• explain why your perspective is more compelling than the opposing viewpoints

3. Attending lectures

• understand the content by previewing, active listening , and taking notes
• analyze your lecturer’s viewpoints by seeking whether sufficient data and resources are provided
• think about whether the ideas presented by the lecturer align with your values and beliefs
• talk about other perspectives with peers in discussions

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Why Critical Thinking Is Important (& How to Improve It)

Last updated May 1, 2023. Edited and medically reviewed by Patrick Alban, DC . Written by Deane Alban .

By improving the quality of your thoughts and your decisions, better critical thinking skills can bring about a big positive change in your life. Learn how.

The quality of your life largely depends on the quality of the decisions you make.

Amazingly, the average person makes roughly 35,000 conscious decisions every day! 

Imagine how much better your life would be if there were a way to make better decisions, day in and day out?

Well, there is and you do it by boosting a skill called critical thinking .

Learning to master critical thinking can have a profoundly positive impact on nearly every aspect of your life.

What Exactly Is Critical Thinking?

The first documented account of critical thinking is the teachings of Socrates as recorded by Plato. 

Over time, the definition of critical thinking has evolved.

Most definitions of critical thinking are fairly complex and best understood by philosophy majors or psychologists.

For example, the Foundation for Critical Thinking , a nonprofit think tank, offers this definition:

“Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

If that makes your head spin, here are some definitions that you may relate to more easily.

Critical thinking is “reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.”

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Or, a catchy way of defining critical thinking is “deciding what’s true and what you should do.”

But my favorite uber-simple definition is that critical thinking is simply “thinking about thinking.”

6 Major Benefits of Good Critical Thinking Skills

Whether or not you think critically can make the difference between success and failure in just about every area of your life.

Our human brains are imperfect and prone to irrationality, distortions, prejudices, and cognitive biases .

Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of irrational thinking.

While the number of cognitive biases varies depending on the source, Wikipedia, for example, lists nearly 200 of them ! 

Some of the most well-known cognitive biases include:

• catastrophic thinking
• confirmation bias
• fear of missing out (FOMO)

Critical thinking will help you move past the limitations of irrational thinking.

Here are some of the most important ways critical thinking can impact your life.

1. Critical Thinking Is a Key to Career Success

There are many professions where critical thinking is an absolute must.

Lawyers, analysts, accountants, doctors, engineers, reporters, and scientists of all kinds must apply critical thinking frequently.

But critical thinking is a skill set that is becoming increasingly valuable in a growing number of professions.

Critical thinking can help you in any profession where you must:

• analyze information
• systematically solve problems
• generate innovative solutions
• plan strategically
• think creatively
• present your work or ideas to others in a way that can be readily understood

And, as we enter the fourth industrial revolution , critical thinking has become one of the most sought-after skills.

According to the World Economic Forum , critical thinking and complex problem-solving are the two top in-demand skills that employers look for. 

Critical thinking is considered a soft or enterprise skill — a core attribute required to succeed in the workplace . 

NUTRITION FOR THE MIND/BODY CONNECTION

It’s almost impossible to live a lifestyle that provides all the nutrients needed for good brain health and performance. The reason? All of us confront multiple nutrient thieves — stress, poor diet, insomnia, pharmaceuticals, pollution, and more — that steal nutrients that the brain needs to thrive.

• Provides the building blocks to create new brain cells and brain chemicals
• Helps increase resilience to stress to avoid mental burnout
• Supplies the brain with the fuel it needs for mental energy

A foundational principle of mental health and cognitive performance is to supply the body with the best nutrition possible. And, when you buy a 3-month supply of any Performance Lab supplement, you get 1 extra month free . See why I recommend Performance Lab.

According to The University of Arizona, other soft skills include : 

• interpersonal skills
• communication skills
• digital literacy

Critical thinking can help you develop the rest of these soft skills.

Developing your critical thinking can help you land a job since many employers will ask you interview questions or even give you a test to determine how well you can think critically.

It can also help you continually succeed in your career, since being a critical thinker is a powerful predictor of long-term success.

2. Critical Thinkers Make Better Decisions

Every day you make thousands of decisions.

Most of them are made by your subconscious , are not very important, and don’t require much thought, such as what to wear or what to have for lunch. 

But the most important decisions you make can be hard and require a lot of thought, such as when or if you should change jobs, relocate to a new city, buy a house, get married, or have kids.

At work, you may have to make decisions that can alter the course of your career or the lives of others.

Critical thinking helps you cope with everyday problems as they arise.

It promotes independent thinking and strengthens your inner “BS detector.”

It helps you make sense of the glut of data and information available, making you a smarter consumer who is less likely to fall for advertising hype, peer pressure, or scams.

3. Critical Thinking Can Make You Happier

Knowing and understanding yourself is an underappreciated path to happiness. 

We’ve already shown how your quality of life largely depends on the quality of your decisions, but equally as important is the quality of your thoughts.

Critical thinking is an excellent tool to help you better understand yourself and to learn to master your thoughts.

You can use critical thinking to free yourself from cognitive biases, negative thinking , and limiting beliefs that are holding you back in any area of your life.

Critical thinking can help you assess your strengths and weaknesses so that you know what you have to offer others and where you could use improvement.

Critical thinking will enable you to better express your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs.

Better communication helps others to understand you better, resulting in less frustration for both of you.

Critical thinking fosters creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that can be applied to any area of your life.

It gives you a process you can rely on, making decisions less stressful.

4. Critical Thinking Ensures That Your Opinions Are Well-Informed

We have access to more information than ever before .

Astoundingly, more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of mankind. 

Critical thinking can help you sort through the noise.

American politician, sociologist, and diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked , “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” 

Critical thinking ensures your opinions are well-informed and based on the best available facts.

You’ll get a boost in confidence when you see that those around you trust your well-considered opinions.

5. Critical Thinking Improves Relationships

You might be concerned that critical thinking will turn you into a Spock-like character who is not very good at relationships.

But, in fact, the opposite is true.

Employing critical thinking makes you more open-minded and better able to understand others’ points of view.

Critical thinkers are more empathetic and in a better position to get along with different kinds of people.

Critical thinking keeps you from jumping to conclusions.

You can be counted on to be the voice of reason when arguments get heated.

You’ll be better able to detect when others:

• are being disingenuous
• don’t have your best interests at heart
• try to take advantage of or manipulate you

6. Critical Thinking Makes You a Better, More Informed Citizen

“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

This quote has been incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson , but regardless of the source, these words of wisdom are more relevant than ever. 

Critical thinkers are able to see both sides of any issue and are more likely to generate bipartisan solutions.

They are less likely to be swayed by propaganda or get swept up in mass hysteria.

They are in a better position to spot fake news when they see it.

5 Steps to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Some people already have well-developed critical thinking skills.

These people are analytical, inquisitive, and open to new ideas.

And, even though they are confident in their own opinions, they seek the truth, even if it proves their existing ideas to be wrong.

They are able to connect the dots between ideas and detect inconsistencies in others’ thinking.

But regardless of the state of your critical thinking skills today, it’s a skill set you can develop.

While there are many techniques for thinking rationally, here’s a classic 5-step critical thinking process . 

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Clearly define your question or problem.

This step is so important that Albert Einstein famously quipped:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Gather Information to Help You Weigh the Options

Consider only the most useful and reliable information from the most reputable sources.

Disregard the rest.

Apply the Information and Ask Critical Questions

Scrutinize all information carefully with a skeptic’s eye.

Not sure what questions to ask?

You can’t go wrong starting with the “5 Ws” that any good investigator asks: Who? What? Where? When? Why?

Then finish by asking “How?”

You’ll find more thought-provoking questions on this Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet .

Consider the Implications

Look for potential unintended consequences.

Do a thought experiment about how your solution could play out in both the short term and the long run.

Explore the Full Spectrum of Viewpoints

Examine why others are drawn to differing points of view.

This will help you objectively evaluate your own viewpoint.

You may find critical thinkers who take an opposing view and this can help you find gaps in your own logic.

Watch the Video

This TED-Ed video on YouTube elaborates on the five steps to improve your critical thinking.

Recommended: Upgrading brain health is key to making your brain work better.

• Improve your mental clarity and focus.
• Boost your memory and your ability to learn.
• Increase your capacity to think critically, solve problems, and make decisions.

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How to Improve Reasoning Skills

Last Updated: May 4, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Erin Conlon, PCC, JD . Erin Conlon is an Executive Life Coach, the Founder of Erin Conlon Coaching, and the host of the podcast "This is Not Advice." She specializes in aiding leaders and executives to thrive in their career and personal lives. In addition to her private coaching practice, she teaches and trains coaches and develops and revises training materials to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. She holds a BA in Communications and History and a JD from The University of Michigan. Erin is a Professional Certified Coach with The International Coaching Federation. There are 13 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 240,089 times.

Improving your reasoning skills can help you make good decisions, solve problems faster, and avoid irrational thoughts that get in your way of achieving your goals, and it's easy to get started. To help you out, we've gathered proven, effective strategies for improving your reasoning skills, from activities you can do at home to ways you can alter your thought patterns and avoid irrational thinking. Keep reading to get started improving your reasoning skills today.

Engaging in Activities that Require Critical Thought

• Pick activities that are vastly different from one another. If you're already an outdoor enthusiast, instead of taking up hiking consider learning to crochet. If you're big into crafts and working with your hands, consider trying to do crossword puzzles or Sudoku in your spare time.
• Take classes if possible. Taking a pottery class or poetry class at a local community center can be a fun way to challenge your brain and encourage you to try new things.

• Writing is an active endeavor. It forces you to expand and explore your thoughts. Keeping a journal that details your day, your feelings, and anything you thought about throughout the day can make you a more introspective, aware person. [3] X Trustworthy Source University of Rochester Medical Center Leading academic medical center in the U.S. focused on clinical care and research Go to source This can lead to higher reasoning skills.
• Make time to journal every day. Schedule regular journaling time into your day-to-day life as you would brushing your teeth, showering, and eating dinner. It may be helpful to schedule journal time after an activity you're accustom to doing every day, as this will make it easier to remember to keep up with your journal.

• Fiction can force you to become more insightful about other perspectives due to the focus on character. This can make you more in tune to the cultures, belief systems, and skill sets of those around you. You may be better at, say, reasoning with those around you as you'll have a greater capacity for empathy.
• Black and white thinking is also lessened through reading fiction. People who read fiction over time may have more sophisticated thought patterns as they're able to navigate and accept the ambiguity in a variety of situations.

• Look for board games that rely on more than just look. Explore in depth strategy games where decision making is a key part of the process. Schedule a regular game night with friends and aim to play games that require thought and attention. Clue and Risk require critical thought. Games like Scrabble and Boggle teach you to analyze information quickly. [6] X Research source
• Chess and checkers all require reasoning skills. Consider joining or starting a chess club. [7] X Research source
• Consider games you can play on your own. You can play certain card games alone online. Purchase a Rubik's Cube and spend time trying to solve it. [8] X Research source

Our Family Plays Games

Board games stimulate your brain. Engaging in strategic thinking and problem-solving while playing board games can trigger cognitive functions like memory and planning. Over time, these mental workouts can even enhance your cognitive agility. In sum, board games offer a fun and engaging way to keep your mind sharp!

Altering Thought Patterns

• Focus on larger goals at work or school. Where do you want to be in five years? Two years? One year? How are you current actions serving this goal? Do your actions make sense reasonably given your larger purpose? Answering these questions can help you improve your reasoning skills. [10] X Research source

• A major bias is that people often only consider a situation or a problem from one point of view. When dealing with an issue at work, school, or home pause and ask yourself a few questions before taking action. Ask, "What do I believe about the situation? Why do I believe this? What assumptions might I be making about the thoughts and ideas of others?" [14] X Research source
• It's important to take steps to be self-aware of your own biases. This can help you avoid having those biases obstruct your judgment. [15] X Research source It may even be helpful to ask a close friend about your gaps in thinking. Approach a friend with a question like, "What are some ways I sometimes behave irrationally?" Ask for honesty and openness.

• Use your imagination. Before making a choice in a given situation, pause to imagine a variety of possible outcomes. How do you feel about these outcomes? What's the worst case scenario? Best case scenario? What is reasonably most likely to happen? Why? [16] X Research source
• Also, do not neglect to consider the viewpoints of others affected by your decision. This can help you explore your decision through a variety of angles. [17] X Research source

Recognizing Irrational Thoughts

• Over-generalizations are taking one particular event and seeing it as evidence of how things have always been or always will be. For example, if you do bad on one test you may think, "I'm stupid and always fail at school." In making this statement, you're glossing other academic success you have had in the past in the light of one event. [18] X Research source
• All-or-nothing thinking is a form of generalizing where you see things in black and white terms. All-or-nothing thinking places things in only one or two categories: good or bad, success or failure, etc. This results in missing the shades of gray in a situation. For example, if you get a mixed review of your performance at work you may see yourself as a failure. In reality, you're likely a competent worker with some areas that need improvement. [19] X Research source
• Filtering out positive is a thought pattern in which too much focus is placed on the bad aspects of a situation. If 20 good things happen in a day followed by 1 bad thing, you may focus entirely on the negative. For example, say you make a single mistake during a musical performance but otherwise play perfectly. You might be tempted to declare the performance a disaster. In reality, you are probably the only person who noticed a single wrong note. [20] X Research source

• Sometimes, people engage in mind-reading. That is, you make assumptions about what others think of your or a situation. In reality, it's impossible to know what another person is thinking without asking. For example, you may find yourself thinking "I bet everyone thought I was an idiot in that meeting" or "I bet that co-worker thinks I talk too much." If you notice yourself engaging in such thoughts, try to remind yourself that you are probably not as good at reading people's opinions as you think you are. [21] X Research source
• Fortune telling is a form of thinking where you think you know what will happen in the future. This can be in the form of a defeatist attitude. For example, "I'll never be able to stick to a diet and lose weight" or "I know I'm going to sound like an idiot during my presentation tomorrow." Keep in mind that, in reality, you cannot know what will happen tomorrow or in the coming weeks. [22] X Research source

• Labeling is the tendency to put a name on a situation. For example, "This person made a mistake" or "I made a bad choice." This leads you to put people and situations into categories based on solitary instances. Try your best not to categorize and avoid the temptation to judge. [25] X Research source
• Personalization is the tendency to take situations and other people's reactions personally. For example, you may assume a co-worker is mad at you if she doesn't stop to chat in the break room. In reality, she may just be busy. Try not to take situations personally. [26] X Research source
• Oftentimes, you hold yourself to an unreal ideal. You might see someone else's success as evidence of your shortcoming. Try to keep in mind everyone is different and moves at a different pace. [27] X Research source

How Do You Improve Critical Thinking Skills?

Expert Q&A

• Read up on different kinds of logical fallacies to avoid, such as the Straw Man or the slippery slope fallacy. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• Learn to open your mind outside of reasoning as practice more or less. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/features/physical-activity-brain-health/index.html
• ↑ https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_journaling_can_help_you_in_hard_times
• ↑ https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentID=4552&ContentTypeID=1
• ↑ https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-case-for-reading-fiction
• ↑ https://www.digitalcitizenship.nsw.edu.au/articles/the-benefits-of-playing-online-games
• ↑ https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/how-to-develop-critical-thinking-skills-before-college
• ↑ https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/strengthen-logical-thinking-skills
• ↑ https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226484
• ↑ Erin Conlon, PCC, JD. Executive Life Coach. Expert Interview. 31 August 2021.
• ↑ https://dictionary.apa.org/overgeneralization
• ↑ https://psychcentral.com/health/all-or-nothing-thinking-examples
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/201501/10-thinking-errors-will-crush-your-mental-strength
• ↑ https://psychcentral.com/blog/catastrophic-thinking-when-your-mind-clings-to-worst-case-scenarios

About This Article

To improve your reasoning skills, play strategy games like chess and Scrabble. Journaling is another way to improve critical thinking skills since it involves reflection and exploration of your thoughts and feelings. Finally, try new things to increase encourage critical thinking! Pick activities that are different from each other, like biking and crochet, for fun, challenging ways to stimulate your mind. To learn how to improve your reasoning skills through exercise, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills

Traditional tools and new technologies..

Posted September 29, 2023 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Technology provides access to vast information and makes daily life easier. Yet, too much reliance on technology potentially interferes with the acquisition and maintenance of critical thinking skills in several ways:

1. Information Overload : The constant influx of data can discourage deep critical thinking as we may come to rely on quick, surface-level information rather than delving deeply into a subject.

2. Shortened Attention Span: Frequent digital distractions can disrupt our ability for the sustained focus and concentration required for critical thinking.

3. Confirmatory Bias and Echo Chambers: Technology, including social media and personalized content algorithms, can reinforce confirmation bias . People are often exposed to information that aligns with their beliefs and opinions, making them less likely to encounter diverse perspectives and engage in critical thinking about opposing views.

4. Reduced Problem-Solving Opportunities: Technology often provides quick solutions to problems. While this benefits efficiency, it may discourage individuals from engaging in complex problem-solving, a fundamental aspect of critical thinking.

5. Loss of Research Skills: The ease of accessing information online can diminish traditional research skills, such as library research or in-depth reading. These skills are essential for critical thinking, as they involve evaluating sources, synthesizing information, and analyzing complex texts.

While technology can pose challenges to developing critical thinking skills, it's important to note that technology can also be a valuable tool for learning and skill development. It can provide access to educational resources, facilitate collaboration , and support critical thinking when used thoughtfully and intentionally. Balancing technology use with activities that encourage deep thinking and analysis is vital to lessening its potential adverse effects on critical thinking.

Writing is a traditional and powerful tool to exercise and improve your critical thinking skills. Consider these ways writing can help enhance critical thinking:

1. Clarity of Thought: Writing requires that you articulate your thoughts clearly and coherently. When you need to put your ideas on paper, you must organize them logically, which requires a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

2. Analysis and Evaluation: Critical thinking involves analyzing and evaluating information. When you write, you often need to assess the validity and relevance of different sources, arguments, or pieces of evidence, which hone your critical thinking skills.

3. Problem-Solving: Writing can be a problem-solving exercise in itself. Whether crafting an argument, developing a thesis, or finding the right words to express your ideas, writing requires thinking critically about approaching these challenges effectively.

4. Research Skills: Good writing often involves research, and research requires critical thinking. You need to assess the credibility of sources, synthesize information, and draw conclusions based on the evidence you gather.

5. Argumentation: Constructing a persuasive argument in writing is a complex process requiring critical thinking. You must anticipate counterarguments, provide evidence to support your claims, and address potential weaknesses in your reasoning.

6. Revision and Editing: To be an influential writer, you must learn to read your work critically. Editing and revising requires evaluating your writing objectively, identifying areas that need improvement, and refining your ideas and arguments.

7. Problem Identification: In some cases, writing can help you identify problems or gaps in your thinking. As you write, you might realize that your arguments are not as strong as you initially thought or that you need more information to support your claims. This recognition of limitations is a crucial aspect of critical thinking.

Writing is a dynamic process that engages multiple facets of critical thinking. It has been a valuable tool used in education , business, and personal development for centuries.

Yet, this traditional approach of self-generated written thoughts is rapidly being supplanted by AI -generated writing tools like Chat GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer. With over 100 million users of Chat GPT alone, we cannot ignore its potential impact. How might the increasing reliance on AI-generated writing tools influence our critical thinking skills? The impact can vary depending on how the tools are used and the context in which they are employed.

Critical thinking involves evaluating information sources for credibility, relevance, and bias. If individuals consistently trust the information provided by chatbots without critically assessing its quality, it can hinder their development of critical thinking skills. This is especially true if they depend on the chatbot to provide answers without questioning or verifying the information. Relying solely on chatbots for answers may also reduce people's effort in problem-solving. Critical thinking often requires wrestling with complex problems, considering multiple perspectives, and generating creative solutions. If we default to chatbots for quick answers, we may miss opportunities to develop these skills.

However, it's essential to note that the impact of chatbots on critical thinking skills may not be entirely negative. These tools can also have positive effects:

1. Chatbots provide quick access to vast information, which can benefit research and problem-solving. When used as a supplement to critical thinking, they can enhance the efficiency of information retrieval.

2. Chatbots can sometimes assist in complex tasks by providing relevant data or suggestions. When individuals critically evaluate and integrate this information into their decision-making process, it can enhance their critical thinking.

3. Chatbots can be used as learning aids. They can provide explanations, examples, and guidance, which can support skill development and, when used effectively, encourage critical thinking.

In summary, the impact of chatbots on critical thinking skills depends on how we use them. The effect will be harmful if they become a crutch to avoid independent thought or analysis. However, they can be valuable resources when used as tools to facilitate and augment critical thinking and writing processes. Individuals must balance leveraging the convenience of chatbots and actively engaging in independent critical thinking and problem-solving to maintain and enhance their cognitive abilities. You can do that effectively through writing regularly.

Copyright 2023 Tara Well, PhD

Tara Well, Ph.D. , is a professor in the department of psychology at Barnard College of Columbia University.

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• Developing ethical reasoning and/or ethical decision making

Author : Robert J. Sternberg, Cornell University

Why this Learning Objective Matters

Colleges and universities today, in their testing and even their teaching, place great emphasis on academic content knowledge, as they should. But when one considers the causes, later in people’s lives, behind failed job performance, failed relations with friends and colleagues, and even failed marriages, one is likely to find the root cause of the failure to lie not in content knowledge or even academic reasoning but rather in ethical reasoning (1).

One can have a degree in business, medicine, law, psychology, or education, and be familiar with the knowledge base of the profession, but nevertheless act in an unethical manner that undermines the utility of that knowledge. For example, if one looks at four huge and widely publicized business failures by CEOs (Kenneth Lay at Enron, Bernard Ebbers at Worldcom, Conrad Black at Hollinger International, Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco), all were related to ethics (2). Some of the CEOs took their business down with them. Then there are the huge scientific frauds, such as that of experimental psychologist Diederick Stapel, who simply made up his data (3), and even frauds in education, including Corinthian Colleges (4), which deceived students regarding graduation and job-placement rates. There are even severe ethical violations in the ministry, as shown by the denials and cover-ups of child-abuse that have made headlines over the years (5). Much of this ethically-compromised behavior starts early, when students are in school. In one survey, 86% of high school students agreed that students cheat at some point in their high-school careers (6). Great professionals, citizens, and leaders in any field of endeavor are ethical people (7). They need to learn to reason ethically before they go out in the work force and start influencing and even controlling the fate of others (8).

Colleges should teach ethical reasoning rather than just ethical principles. Ethics is a set of principles for what constitutes right and wrong behavior. These principles are generally taught in the home, through religious training in a special school, or through learning in the course of one’s life. It is challenging (although certainly not impossible) to teach ethics directly in a secular school, because different religious, cultural, and other groups have somewhat different ideas about what is right and wrong under different circumstances. There are, however, core values that are common to almost all these religions and ethical systems that schools do teach and reinforce, for example, reciprocity (the golden rule), honesty, sincerity, compassion in the face of human suffering. In addition, many professions have codes of ethics that professionals are encouraged to follow, and sometimes, are bound to follow by contract or law. But even when given a set of ethical precepts to follow, be they personal/religious or professional, knowing what to do in a particular situation is not always clear. For instance, many professions have a code of ethics that discourages conflict of interest between personal and organizational activities. But exactly what constitutes a conflict of interest is not always apparent. Is having lunch with someone who seeks to influence you a conflict of interest? In some situations, it might be. But in other situations something more egregious, such as receiving a large gift, might be necessary to be considered a violation. So the problem is not usually in knowing the precepts but in knowing how to apply them. This is especially true when there are conflicting demands being made upon one’s actions, such as one person wanting you to do one thing and another wanting you to do something else. That is why instruction in ethical reasoning is of paramount importance over just teaching a set of ethical precepts.

Ethical reasoning is how to think about issues of right or wrong. Processes of reasoning can be taught, and the college or university is an appropriate place to teach these processes because so often it is taught no place else, and because it is essential for a successful adulthood. Although parents and especially religious institutions may teach ethics, they do not always teach ethical reasoning. Academic courses are the logical place to teach the cognitive process of reasoning especially as ethical issues relate to the content of a particular discipline. No matter how knowledgeable one is about their profession, if the knowledge is not backed by ethical reasoning, long-term success in the career is likely to be severely compromised.

Can ethical reasoning actually be taught with any success? Apparently so. Richard Paul (9), of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, devised a program whereby principles of critical thinking were applied specifically to teaching ethical reasoning to young people Robert DeHaan and colleagues at Emory University successfully taught ethical reasoning to high school students (10). Catherine Myser of the University of Newcastle and her colleagues have successfully taught ethics to medical students (11). And James Weber of Marquette University found that teaching ethical awareness and reasoning to business-school students can help their ethical reasoning, although the improvements are not always long-term (12).

Ethical reasoning is hard because there are so many ways to fail. Ethical behavior is far harder to display than one would expect simply on the basis of what we learn from our parents, from school, and from our religious training (13). To intervene, individuals must go through a series of steps, and unless all of the steps are completed, they are not likely to behave in an ethical way, regardless of the amount of training they have received in ethics, and regardless of their levels of other types of skills.

Consider the skills in this model and how they apply in an ethical dilemma—whether a student, James, should turn in a fellow student, Ben, whom he saw purchase answers from an upcoming examination from an ethically compromised Internet site:

• Recognize that there is an event to which to react . James has to observe Ben purchase the answers and decide that it is a situation in which he potentially might have some role other than being a passive observer.
• Define the event as having an ethical dimension . James has to define the cheating as unethical. Students do not always see cheating—such as purchasing answers in advance of a test–as unethical. Many students do so; but some others may see it as a practical or utilitarian matter. On this view, it is ok if Ben or anyone else can get away with it.
• Decide that the ethical dimension is significant . James has to decide that Ben’s purchasing the answers for the test is a big enough deal that it is worth James’s paying attention to it. Some students may see Bens’ purchase of the answers as an ethical issue, but not as one of sufficient importance that it is worth their doing anything about it.
• Take personal responsibility for generating an ethical solution to the problem . James may decide that there is an ethical problem here, perhaps even a major big one, but that the problem is not his concern. For example, James may view it as the teacher’s responsibility, not his, to do something about Ben. Or James may believe that he cannot be responsible for the behavior because he doesn’t really know or care much about Ben.
• Figure out what abstract ethical rule(s) might apply to the problem (including any codes of ethics relevant to the situation) . What rule applies? If there is no honor code, is there an institutional rule by which James should turn in Ben? Is he under any obligation? Perhaps James believes, on the contrary, that the rule is to mind his own business, or to avoid cheating himself, but not to turn in Ben. Or James may believe that student solidarity takes precedence over turning in cheaters.
• Decide how these abstract ethical rules actually apply to the problem so as to suggest a concrete solution . Perhaps James believes that, in general, one should turn in cheaters, but that he cannot apply the rule in this situation, realizing that he could not prove that Ben cheated. After all, what if the supposed answers are not really answers to the test? Or what if some of them are wrong? Or perhaps he does not want to try to prove Ben cheated, feeling he has more important things to do with his time.
• Prepare to counteract contextual forces that might lead one not to act in an ethical manner . James may be reluctant to turn in Ben because he believes that other students, including but not limited to Ben, will shun him or retaliate against him for being a “snitch.” And of course, he may be right. Acting ethically often comes at a cost.
• Act . In the end, what matters is not how one thinks, but rather what one does. It can be very difficult to translate thought into action. Nevertheless, the ultimate test of ethical reasoning is not just in how one thinks, but also in how one acts. James may believe he should turn in Bill but just not get up the guts actually to do it.

This model applies not only to judging others but to evaluating one’s own ethical reasoning. When confronted with a situation having a potential ethical dimension, students can learn literally to go through the steps of the model and ask how they apply to a given situation. For example, suppose James himself committed an ethical transgression and now regrets it. What can he do to make amends or otherwise set things right?

Applying this Learning Objective in the Classroom

Ideally, ethics is taught not just in a course on ethics but in any course in which ethics might potentially apply. Otherwise, there is the risk that what the students learn will be inert—that students will not see how to apply it outside the one course on ethics. Students need to learn how to apply ethical principles, as well as being inoculated against pressures to behave unethically, by being confronted with ethical problems in a variety of domains.

How does one actually teach ethical reasoning in the classroom? The most effective way to teach ethical reasoning is through the case-study method, but it is important that students generate their own case studies from their own experience as well, and then apply the steps of the model to their own problems. They need to be actively involved in seeing how the steps of the model apply to their own individual problems.

A famous, perhaps now classical, case study for teaching ethical reasoning is the following (14):

A train has gone out of control and is hurtling down the tracks toward four people who are strangers. You are too far away, so that if you call out to the people, they will not hear you, and you definitely cannot get them off the tracks. However, it is in your power to pull a lever that will divert the train. But there is a problem. There is a person on the tracks onto which you would divert the train. This person will be killed if you divert the train. Thus you can touch the controls and divert the train, resulting in the death of one person; alternatively, you could not touch the controls, and four people will die. What should you do?

Consider other more realistic problems:

• Your friend Jack confides to you that he has a drug problem. He begs you not to tell anyone. He says he just needs someone in whom to confide. He does not plan to stop using drugs but wants you to know in case things go badly for him. What are possible courses of action for you? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one?
• You have just found out that there is a school prize for which you are eligible. For some reason, the prize has not been well publicized. You know that your best friend Jane is also eligible. You also know that if she applies her chances of winning the prize might be better than yours. You are debating with yourself whether to tell her about the prize. What are possible courses of action for you? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one?
• You are really interested in your best friend’s significant other. The significant other has just confessed to you a secret interest in you. What are possible courses of action for you? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one?

Through grappling with these kinds of issues through case studies, students apply ethical principles and ethical reasoning. If students are not explicitly given these kinds of ethical dilemmas to confront, they will not learn to apply process of ethical reasoning. You would not just tell algebra students about a formula for solving some mathematical question, and then move on to the next topic. You would get them to apply, to use, that formula to solve multiple problems to ensure they understand it and can use it. Likewise, it is the process of applying ethical reasoning that is the primary outcome here. Because of this, the conclusions students come to are often less important than their reasoning processes in coming to those conclusions.

There are no easy answers to any of these problems, but that is the point: Teaching ethical reasoning is not about teaching what one should do in particular circumstances, it is about teaching students how wisely to make very difficult decisions involving ethical considerations where the answers are anything but clear cut. Students need actively to discuss problems, possible solutions, and the advantages and disadvantages of these potential solutions. Then they have to decide how they would act.

Through the use of ethical case studies, students discuss various solutions to cases as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various courses of action. This can be done through structured classroom discussion, written assignments, or presentations. Using this method, students are invited to critique each other’s ideas constructively and to improve on each other’s ideas. In addition, always ensure that some of the cases are built around problems the students themselves pose. In this way students can see how what they learn is relevant not only to other people’s problems, but also to their own.

Students will enter different occupations and will need to learn the particular code of ethics for their occupation as well as how to apply that code. For example, the National Education Association Code of Ethics (15) contains two main principles: commitment to the student and commitment to the profession. The first obligation to the student is that the teacher “shall not unreasonably restrain the student from independent action in the pursuit of learning.” In higher level courses in a major, these codes can be explored and applied to case studies. In lower level courses, because students will go into different professions, it will not be possible to take account of all codes. But it would be useful, in class, to take at least one code of ethics, and use it to examine problem cases. Using the National Education Association Code of Ethics, for instance, students could explore how well the teachers they have had fulfilled the code? Where, specifically, did they succeed or fail? What could they have done better? What can the student learn from the code that would apply to his or her own life? See the list of discipline-specific codes in the resources section below.

Applying this Learning Objective Online

Teaching ethical reasoning online presents its own particular challenges. Learning how to reason ethically is a dialectical, back-and-forth process. Simply delivering content through lectures and readings are at best supplementary forms of instruction. The primary form of instruction needs to be interactive because students need to present ideas, get feedback on those ideas, and then try out re-formed ideas that themselves will be subject to further modification. So because learning ethical reasoning requires active, not passive learning (16), particular care must be given to ensuring that online courses are designed with opportunities for rich interaction between students as well as between students and instructors. Discussion boards appear to be the most common way of achieving these interactions, but doing so requires particular attention to certain dynamics:

• Learning is asynchronous in most cases . There is a difference between the immediacy of a classroom discussion and the asynchronous responses in an online discussion. But given that responses are not immediate, as they are in a face to face classroom, online responses have time to “mature.” Students can think through what other students have said, and hopefully, provide more thoughtful, well-reasoned responses. So delays may actually help students do the deeper and sometimes more time-consuming reasoning that ethical problems require in comparison with many other kinds of problems.
• The feeling of anonymity may lead some students to be less careful in what they say . Anyone who has dealt with online trolls knows that people often feel anonymous over the Internet, whether they are or not. Avoid this by ensuring such online discussions are not setup for anonymity, and remind students about “netiquette” in your course. You may also devise your own guidelines for appropriate, and constructive, online discussions in this context. You should identify yourself in all threads and remember that there is a record of these threads.
• With discussion of ethical issues, responses can often get into matters of unreasoned opinion quite easily. In order to keep students focused on the application of ethical reasoning, and avoiding pure, personal opinion, construct online discussions deliberately with specific guidelines on what kind of responses are expected. Rubrics are often used for this purpose so that students have a clearer understanding of what is expected and how they will be graded.
• Some students may be afraid to divulge much about their own ethical challenges because their statements become part of an identifiable written record . You should emphasize that one best can cope with ethical challenges if one is willing to share those challenges and solicit feedback. But students should also be informed that, if they are uncomfortable sharing something, they just should not share it.
• Students may be uncomfortable sharing thoughts on ethics with people they do not know . To facilitate this, be sure to include introductory, group-building exercises early in a course.

Assessing this Learning Objective

Ethical reasoning is best evaluated through essays or oral examinations in response to specific ethical problems. They do not lend themselves well to multiple-choice or short-answer assessments. For example, a simple ethical problem is, “James saw Ben purchase answers for an exam from an Internet site. What should James do? Please give alternative courses of action for James, and the potential advantages and disadvantages of each course of action.” A strong essay in response to this problem might look like this:

“James has to decide what to do in response to Ben’s having cheated. Ben could do several things:

• James could turn in Ben. The advantage is that he has not let Ben get away with unethical behavior. The disadvantage is that Ben will almost certainly get mad at James and may also turn friends against James. James could turn him in secretly but that seems sleazy—like James does not want to take responsibility. Another disadvantage is that James may have thought Ben cheated but it might turn out he didn’t cheat after all.
• James could do nothing. The advantage is that James stays out of the whole thing and does not get anyone, including himself, into trouble. The disadvantage is that he has failed to respond to an ethical challenge, burying it instead.
• James could talk to Ben and tell him what he saw and that if he sees it again he will turn Ben in. The advantage of this course of action is that James does not do anything to hurt Ben’s future. The disadvantage is that Ben may be offended, may deny everything, and may turn against James, just as he would have if James had turned him in.
• James could seek advice from a faculty member. The advantage is that James gets the opinion of someone with more experience than he has. The disadvantage is that after a delay, he still has to decide what to do and faces the same problems as before. The second disadvantage is that if James mentions Ben’s name, James’s options may be foreclosed by the faculty member.
• James could tell Ben that unless Ben does some specific thing for James, James will turn him in. This solution has no advantages. The disadvantage is that he compounds Ben’s unethical behavior with unethical blackmail of his own.

In the end, I would suggest James tell the faculty member exactly what he saw and then leave it to the faculty member to decide what to do. Ben is hurting not only himself by the cheating, but everyone else, and he ought to learn sooner rather than later not to cheat.”

Use ethical dilemmas that address those issues that are more applicable to your particular discipline and address the ethical codes of behavior most salient in your discipline (see the list of resources below for discipline-specific ideas). When using discipline codes of ethics, you should ask three questions:

• How does this ethical guideline apply to behavior on the job?
• How am I applying the guideline or not applying it?
• If I am applying it, how can I do better?

For example, an ethical guideline for a health-care professional might be “Building relationships of trust with patients is fundamental to ethical practice in medicine.” Now you ask first if the ethical guideline applies to your behavior on the job. Certainly it does for any health-care professional. Second, are you applying the guideline? If you are spending the time with patients that they need, if you are listening attentively to them and answering their questions, if you are keeping their information confidential, and if you are giving them the very best treatment you can, you might say that, yes, you are applying the guideline. But what could you do better? Perhaps you are not always as willing to discuss very difficult issues with patients as you should be, whether for lack of time or for lack of enthusiasm to engage in difficult conversations, such as in planning for serious side effects of medication or even death. In that case, you might work on this issue in order better to apply the guideline.

In assessing quality of ethical reasoning, the key principle for instructors to remember is that you should score for quality of reasoning, not for agreement with the conclusions the student reaches. We tend to like people who are similar to, and who agree with us (17, 18), which can introduce bias into grading. So as teachers, we have to be scrupulous to make sure we are grading for quality of reasoning, not for agreement with our set of values or perspectives. What matters is how well students reason, not the exact content of what they say.

When students have written essays showing their ethical reasoning, there are some general attributes of the essays to look for, and some specific attributes as well. The general attributes are those that would apply to essays of almost any kind including how logical, coherent, organized, and persuasive the essay is. The specific attributes are relevant in particular to ethical reasoning.

• The first attribute is the number of alternative solutions to an ethical problem that the student proposes. How many different solutions can the student find? It is a bad sign when a student can see only one possible solution and a good sign when the student can see multiple possible solutions.
• The second attribute is the student’s evaluations of the quality of each of the solutions. Can the student differentiate better solutions from poorer ones, or does the student fall into the trap of viewing all solutions as roughly equal in quality; or worse, does the student see poorer solutions as being better ones? As noted above, you are looking not for your agreement with the student’s evaluations but rather the quality of argument for the evaluations of the potential solutions.
• The third attribute is the student’s overall evaluation of what to do. Did the student well use his or her own analysis of the ethical problem to reach a high-quality solution to the ethical problem?

The sample essay above is a strong one, because it presents four alternative solutions as well as a fifth that is recognized as unethical, and it considers both the advantages and disadvantages of each potential solution.

• Sternberg, R. J. (2012). A model for ethical reasoning. Review of General Psychology, 16 , 319-326.
• Investopedia (2013). 5 most publicized ethics violations by CEOs. Forbes . http://www.forbes.com/sites/investopedia/2013/02/05/5-most-publicized-ethics-violations-by-ceos/#3c3ec7e92799 .
• Bhattacharjee, Y. (2013). The mind of a con man. New York Times . http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 .
• Nasiripour, S. (2015). Corinthian Colleges files for bankruptcy. Huffington Post . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/04/corinthian-colleges-bankruptcy_n_7205344.html .
• Tchividjian, B. (2014). Startling statistics: Child abuse and what the church can begin doing about it. Religion News . http://religionnews.com/2014/01/09/startling-statistics/ .
• Educational Testing Service (1999). Cheating is a personal foul. http://www.glass-castle.com/clients/www-nocheating-org/adcouncil/research/cheatingfactsheet.html .
• Sternberg, R. J. (2003). WICS: A model for leadership in organizations. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2 , 386–401.
• Antonakis, J., Cianciolo, A. T., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2004). Leadership: Past, present, and future. In J. Antonakis, A. T. Cianciolo, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.) The nature of leadership (pp. 3–15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2005). Critical thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life (2nd ed.) . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• DeHaan, R., & Narayan, K. M. (Eds.) (2007). Education for innovation . Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
• Myser, C., Kerridge, I. H., & Mitchell, K. R. (1995). Teaching clinical ethics as a professional skill: bridging the gap between knowledge about ethics and its use in clinical practice. Journal of Medical Ethics, 21 (2), 97-103.
• Weber, J. (1993). Exploring the relationship between personal values and moral reasoning. Human Relations, 46 , 435-463.
• Sternberg, R. J. (2009a). A new model for teaching ethical behavior. Chronicle of Higher Education, 55 (33), April 24, B14-B15.
• Foot, P. (1978). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect in virtues and vices . Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
• National Education Association. Code of Ethics . http://www.nea.org/home/30442.htm .
• Sternberg, R. J. (2009). We need to teach for ethical conduct. The Educational Forum, 73 (3), 190-198.
• Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Liking versus loving: A comparative evaluation of theories. Psychological Bulletin, 102 , 331–345.
• Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Cupid’s arrow: The course of love through time . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Further Online Resources

• Ethics Resource Center (ERC). www.ethics.org .
• EthicsWeb. http://www.ethicsweb.ca/resources/

Discipline-specific Codes of Ethics and Resources

• Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS)
• American Advertising Federation (AAF) http://www.aaf.org/imis/_PDF/AAF%20Website%20Content/513_Ethics/IAE_Principles_Practices.pdf
• The American Chemical Society https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/careers/career-services/ethics/the-chemical-professionals-code-of-conduct.html
• The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Code of Ethics http://www.aia.org/about/ethicsandbylaws/
• American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) http://www.aicpa.org/Pages/default.aspx
• American Library Association http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics
• American Medical Association Code of Medical Ethics http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics.page
• American Philosophical Practitioners Association https://www.appa.edu/code.htm
• American Psychological Association. Ethics Resources. http://www.apa.org/ethics/resources/
• American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology http://www.asbmb.org/Advocacy/CodeOfEthics/?terms=ethics
• American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) http://www.aspanet.org/public/ASPA/Code%20of%20Ethics/ASPA/Resources/Code_of_Ethics/Code_of_Ethics1.aspx?hkey=7d5473b7-b98a-48a4-b409-3efb4ceaa006
• Association for Computing Machinery https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-code-of-ethics-and-professional-conduct
• Association of Information Technology Professionals https://www.aitp.org/?page=EthicsConduct
• Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) http://www.apap365.org/CONNECTIONS/Documents/CODE%20OF%20ETHICS%20–2014.pdf
• College Art Association (CAA) http://www.collegeart.org/guidelines/practices
• Construction Management Association of America (CMAA) http://cmaanet.org/code-of-ethics
• Educators http://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/about-us/aae-code-of-ethics
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
• Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) http://www.mtna.org/about-mtna/code-of-ethics/
• The National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP) http://www.naep.org/code-of-ethics
• National Association of Social Workers https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English
• National Education Association http://www.nea.org/home/30442.htm
• National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics
• North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) Ethical Creed https://www.nassm.com/InfoAbout/NASSM/Creed
• Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) https://www.prsa.org/aboutprsa/ethics/codeenglish#.V4-eOLgrKM8
• Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
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Moral Reasoning

While moral reasoning can be undertaken on another’s behalf, it is paradigmatically an agent’s first-personal (individual or collective) practical reasoning about what, morally, they ought to do. Philosophical examination of moral reasoning faces both distinctive puzzles – about how we recognize moral considerations and cope with conflicts among them and about how they move us to act – and distinctive opportunities for gleaning insight about what we ought to do from how we reason about what we ought to do.

Part I of this article characterizes moral reasoning more fully, situates it in relation both to first-order accounts of what morality requires of us and to philosophical accounts of the metaphysics of morality, and explains the interest of the topic. Part II then takes up a series of philosophical questions about moral reasoning, so understood and so situated.

1.1 Defining “Moral Reasoning”

1.2 empirical challenges to moral reasoning, 1.3 situating moral reasoning, 1.4 gaining moral insight from studying moral reasoning, 1.5 how distinct is moral reasoning from practical reasoning in general, 2.1 moral uptake, 2.2 moral principles, 2.3 sorting out which considerations are most relevant, 2.4 moral reasoning and moral psychology, 2.5 modeling conflicting moral considerations, 2.6 moral learning and the revision of moral views, 2.7 how can we reason, morally, with one another, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the philosophical importance of moral reasoning.

This article takes up moral reasoning as a species of practical reasoning – that is, as a type of reasoning directed towards deciding what to do and, when successful, issuing in an intention (see entry on practical reason ). Of course, we also reason theoretically about what morality requires of us; but the nature of purely theoretical reasoning about ethics is adequately addressed in the various articles on ethics . It is also true that, on some understandings, moral reasoning directed towards deciding what to do involves forming judgments about what one ought, morally, to do. On these understandings, asking what one ought (morally) to do can be a practical question, a certain way of asking about what to do. (See section 1.5 on the question of whether this is a distinctive practical question.) In order to do justice to the full range of philosophical views about moral reasoning, we will need to have a capacious understanding of what counts as a moral question. For instance, since a prominent position about moral reasoning is that the relevant considerations are not codifiable, we would beg a central question if we here defined “ morality ” as involving codifiable principles or rules. For present purposes, we may understand issues about what is right or wrong, or virtuous or vicious, as raising moral questions.

Even when moral questions explicitly arise in daily life, just as when we are faced with child-rearing, agricultural, and business questions, sometimes we act impulsively or instinctively rather than pausing to reason, not just about what to do, but about what we ought to do. Jean-Paul Sartre described a case of one of his students who came to him in occupied Paris during World War II, asking advice about whether to stay by his mother, who otherwise would have been left alone, or rather to go join the forces of the Free French, then massing in England (Sartre 1975). In the capacious sense just described, this is probably a moral question; and the young man paused long enough to ask Sartre’s advice. Does that mean that this young man was reasoning about his practical question? Not necessarily. Indeed, Sartre used the case to expound his skepticism about the possibility of addressing such a practical question by reasoning. But what is reasoning?

Reasoning, of the sort discussed here, is active or explicit thinking, in which the reasoner, responsibly guided by her assessments of her reasons (Kolodny 2005) and of any applicable requirements of rationality (Broome 2009, 2013), attempts to reach a well-supported answer to a well-defined question (Hieronymi 2013). For Sartre’s student, at least such a question had arisen. Indeed, the question was relatively definite, implying that the student had already engaged in some reflection about the various alternatives available to him – a process that has well been described as an important phase of practical reasoning, one that aptly precedes the effort to make up one’s mind (Harman 1986, 2).

Characterizing reasoning as responsibly conducted thinking of course does not suffice to analyze the notion. For one thing, it fails to address the fraught question of reasoning’s relation to inference (Harman 1986, Broome 2009). In addition, it does not settle whether formulating an intention about what to do suffices to conclude practical reasoning or whether such intentions cannot be adequately worked out except by starting to act. Perhaps one cannot adequately reason about how to repair a stone wall or how to make an omelet with the available ingredients without actually starting to repair or to cook (cf. Fernandez 2016). Still, it will do for present purposes. It suffices to make clear that the idea of reasoning involves norms of thinking. These norms of aptness or correctness in practical thinking surely do not require us to think along a single prescribed pathway, but rather permit only certain pathways and not others (Broome 2013, 219). Even so, we doubtless often fail to live up to them.

Our thinking, including our moral thinking, is often not explicit. We could say that we also reason tacitly, thinking in much the same way as during explicit reasoning, but without any explicit attempt to reach well-supported answers. In some situations, even moral ones, we might be ill-advised to attempt to answer our practical questions by explicit reasoning. In others, it might even be a mistake to reason tacitly – because, say, we face a pressing emergency. “Sometimes we should not deliberate about what to do, and just drive” (Arpaly and Schroeder 2014, 50). Yet even if we are not called upon to think through our options in all situations, and even if sometimes it would be positively better if we did not, still, if we are called upon to do so, then we should conduct our thinking responsibly: we should reason.

Recent work in empirical ethics has indicated that even when we are called upon to reason morally, we often do so badly. When asked to give reasons for our moral intuitions, we are often “dumbfounded,” finding nothing to say in their defense (Haidt 2001). Our thinking about hypothetical moral scenarios has been shown to be highly sensitive to arbitrary variations, such as in the order of presentation. Even professional philosophers have been found to be prone to such lapses of clear thinking (e.g., Schwitzgebel & Cushman 2012). Some of our dumbfounding and confusion has been laid at the feet of our having both a fast, more emotional way of processing moral stimuli and a slow, more cognitive way (e.g., Greene 2014). An alternative explanation of moral dumbfounding looks to social norms of moral reasoning (Sneddon 2007). And a more optimistic reaction to our confusion sees our established patterns of “moral consistency reasoning” as being well-suited to cope with the clashing input generated by our fast and slow systems (Campbell & Kumar 2012) or as constituting “a flexible learning system that generates and updates a multidimensional evaluative landscape to guide decision and action” (Railton, 2014, 813).

Eventually, such empirical work on our moral reasoning may yield revisions in our norms of moral reasoning. This has not yet happened. This article is principally concerned with philosophical issues posed by our current norms of moral reasoning. For example, given those norms and assuming that they are more or less followed, how do moral considerations enter into moral reasoning, get sorted out by it when they clash, and lead to action? And what do those norms indicate about what we ought to do do?

The topic of moral reasoning lies in between two other commonly addressed topics in moral philosophy. On the one side, there is the first-order question of what moral truths there are, if any. For instance, are there any true general principles of morality, and if so, what are they? At this level utilitarianism competes with Kantianism, for instance, and both compete with anti-theorists of various stripes, who recognize only particular truths about morality (Clarke & Simpson 1989). On the other side, a quite different sort of question arises from seeking to give a metaphysical grounding for moral truths or for the claim that there are none. Supposing there are some moral truths, what makes them true? What account can be given of the truth-conditions of moral statements? Here arise familiar questions of moral skepticism and moral relativism ; here, the idea of “a reason” is wielded by many hoping to defend a non-skeptical moral metaphysics (e.g., Smith 2013). The topic of moral reasoning lies in between these two other familiar topics in the following simple sense: moral reasoners operate with what they take to be morally true but, instead of asking what makes their moral beliefs true, they proceed responsibly to attempt to figure out what to do in light of those considerations. The philosophical study of moral reasoning concerns itself with the nature of these attempts.

These three topics clearly interrelate. Conceivably, the relations between them would be so tight as to rule out any independent interest in the topic of moral reasoning. For instance, if all that could usefully be said about moral reasoning were that it is a matter of attending to the moral facts, then all interest would devolve upon the question of what those facts are – with some residual focus on the idea of moral attention (McNaughton 1988). Alternatively, it might be thought that moral reasoning is simply a matter of applying the correct moral theory via ordinary modes of deductive and empirical reasoning. Again, if that were true, one’s sufficient goal would be to find that theory and get the non-moral facts right. Neither of these reductive extremes seems plausible, however. Take the potential reduction to getting the facts right, first.

Contemporary advocates of the importance of correctly perceiving the morally relevant facts tend to focus on facts that we can perceive using our ordinary sense faculties and our ordinary capacities of recognition, such as that this person has an infection or that this person needs my medical help . On such a footing, it is possible to launch powerful arguments against the claim that moral principles undergird every moral truth (Dancy 1993) and for the claim that we can sometimes perfectly well decide what to do by acting on the reasons we perceive instinctively – or as we have been trained – without engaging in any moral reasoning. Yet this is not a sound footing for arguing that moral reasoning, beyond simply attending to the moral facts, is always unnecessary. On the contrary, we often find ourselves facing novel perplexities and moral conflicts in which our moral perception is an inadequate guide. In addressing the moral questions surrounding whether society ought to enforce surrogate-motherhood contracts, for instance, the scientific and technological novelties involved make our moral perceptions unreliable and shaky guides. When a medical researcher who has noted an individual’s illness also notes the fact that diverting resources to caring, clinically, for this individual would inhibit the progress of my research, thus harming the long-term health chances of future sufferers of this illness , he or she comes face to face with conflicting moral considerations. At this juncture, it is far less plausible or satisfying simply to say that, employing one’s ordinary sensory and recognitional capacities, one sees what is to be done, both things considered. To posit a special faculty of moral intuition that generates such overall judgments in the face of conflicting considerations is to wheel in a deus ex machina . It cuts inquiry short in a way that serves the purposes of fiction better than it serves the purposes of understanding. It is plausible instead to suppose that moral reasoning comes in at this point (Campbell & Kumar 2012).

For present purposes, it is worth noting, David Hume and the moral sense theorists do not count as short-circuiting our understanding of moral reasoning in this way. It is true that Hume presents himself, especially in the Treatise of Human Nature , as a disbeliever in any specifically practical or moral reasoning. In doing so, however, he employs an exceedingly narrow definition of “reasoning” (Hume 2000, Book I, Part iii, sect. ii). For present purposes, by contrast, we are using a broader working gloss of “reasoning,” one not controlled by an ambition to parse out the relative contributions of (the faculty of) reason and of the passions. And about moral reasoning in this broader sense, as responsible thinking about what one ought to do, Hume has many interesting things to say, starting with the thought that moral reasoning must involve a double correction of perspective (see section 2.4 ) adequately to account for the claims of other people and of the farther future, a double correction that is accomplished with the aid of the so-called “calm passions.”

If we turn from the possibility that perceiving the facts aright will displace moral reasoning to the possibility that applying the correct moral theory will displace – or exhaust – moral reasoning, there are again reasons to be skeptical. One reason is that moral theories do not arise in a vacuum; instead, they develop against a broad backdrop of moral convictions. Insofar as the first potentially reductive strand, emphasizing the importance of perceiving moral facts, has force – and it does have some – it also tends to show that moral theories need to gain support by systematizing or accounting for a wide range of moral facts (Sidgwick 1981). As in most other arenas in which theoretical explanation is called for, the degree of explanatory success will remain partial and open to improvement via revisions in the theory (see section 2.6 ). Unlike the natural sciences, however, moral theory is an endeavor that, as John Rawls once put it, is “Socratic” in that it is a subject pertaining to actions “shaped by self-examination” (Rawls 1971, 48f.). If this observation is correct, it suggests that the moral questions we set out to answer arise from our reflections about what matters. By the same token – and this is the present point – a moral theory is subject to being overturned because it generates concrete implications that do not sit well with us on due reflection. This being so, and granting the great complexity of the moral terrain, it seems highly unlikely that we will ever generate a moral theory on the basis of which we can serenely and confidently proceed in a deductive way to generate answers to what we ought to do in all concrete cases. This conclusion is reinforced by a second consideration, namely that insofar as a moral theory is faithful to the complexity of the moral phenomena, it will contain within it many possibilities for conflicts among its own elements. Even if it does deploy some priority rules, these are unlikely to be able to cover all contingencies. Hence, some moral reasoning that goes beyond the deductive application of the correct theory is bound to be needed.

In short, a sound understanding of moral reasoning will not take the form of reducing it to one of the other two levels of moral philosophy identified above. Neither the demand to attend to the moral facts nor the directive to apply the correct moral theory exhausts or sufficiently describes moral reasoning.

In addition to posing philosophical problems in its own right, moral reasoning is of interest on account of its implications for moral facts and moral theories. Accordingly, attending to moral reasoning will often be useful to those whose real interest is in determining the right answer to some concrete moral problem or in arguing for or against some moral theory. The characteristic ways we attempt to work through a given sort of moral quandary can be just as revealing about our considered approaches to these matters as are any bottom-line judgments we may characteristically come to. Further, we may have firm, reflective convictions about how a given class of problems is best tackled, deliberatively, even when we remain in doubt about what should be done. In such cases, attending to the modes of moral reasoning that we characteristically accept can usefully expand the set of moral information from which we start, suggesting ways to structure the competing considerations.

Facts about the nature of moral inference and moral reasoning may have important direct implications for moral theory. For instance, it might be taken to be a condition of adequacy of any moral theory that it play a practically useful role in our efforts at self-understanding and deliberation. It should be deliberation-guiding (Richardson 2018, §1.2). If this condition is accepted, then any moral theory that would require agents to engage in abstruse or difficult reasoning may be inadequate for that reason, as would be any theory that assumes that ordinary individuals are generally unable to reason in the ways that the theory calls for. J.S. Mill (1979) conceded that we are generally unable to do the calculations called for by utilitarianism, as he understood it, and argued that we should be consoled by the fact that, over the course of history, experience has generated secondary principles that guide us well enough. Rather more dramatically, R. M. Hare defended utilitarianism as well capturing the reasoning of ideally informed and rational “archangels” (1981). Taking seriously a deliberation-guidance desideratum for moral theory would favor, instead, theories that more directly inform efforts at moral reasoning by we “proletarians,” to use Hare’s contrasting term.

Accordingly, the close relations between moral reasoning, the moral facts, and moral theory do not eliminate moral reasoning as a topic of interest. To the contrary, because moral reasoning has important implications about moral facts and moral theories, these close relations lend additional interest to the topic of moral reasoning.

The final threshold question is whether moral reasoning is truly distinct from practical reasoning more generally understood. (The question of whether moral reasoning, even if practical, is structurally distinct from theoretical reasoning that simply proceeds from a proper recognition of the moral facts has already been implicitly addressed and answered, for the purposes of the present discussion, in the affirmative.) In addressing this final question, it is difficult to overlook the way different moral theories project quite different models of moral reasoning – again a link that might be pursued by the moral philosopher seeking leverage in either direction. For instance, Aristotle’s views might be as follows: a quite general account can be given of practical reasoning, which includes selecting means to ends and determining the constituents of a desired activity. The difference between the reasoning of a vicious person and that of a virtuous person differs not at all in its structure, but only in its content, for the virtuous person pursues true goods, whereas the vicious person simply gets side-tracked by apparent ones. To be sure, the virtuous person may be able to achieve a greater integration of his or her ends via practical reasoning (because of the way the various virtues cohere), but this is a difference in the result of practical reasoning and not in its structure. At an opposite extreme, Kant’s categorical imperative has been taken to generate an approach to practical reasoning (via a “typic of practical judgment”) that is distinctive from other practical reasoning both in the range of considerations it addresses and its structure (Nell 1975). Whereas prudential practical reasoning, on Kant’s view, aims to maximize one’s happiness, moral reasoning addresses the potential universalizability of the maxims – roughly, the intentions – on which one acts. Views intermediate between Aristotle’s and Kant’s in this respect include Hare’s utilitarian view and Aquinas’ natural-law view. On Hare’s view, just as an ideal prudential agent applies maximizing rationality to his or her own preferences, an ideal moral agent’s reasoning applies maximizing rationality to the set of everyone’s preferences that its archangelic capacity for sympathy has enabled it to internalize (Hare 1981). Thomistic, natural-law views share the Aristotelian view about the general unity of practical reasoning in pursuit of the good, rightly or wrongly conceived, but add that practical reason, in addition to demanding that we pursue the fundamental human goods, also, and distinctly, demands that we not attack these goods. In this way, natural-law views incorporate some distinctively moral structuring – such as the distinctions between doing and allowing and the so-called doctrine of double effect’s distinction between intending as a means and accepting as a by-product – within a unified account of practical reasoning (see entry on the natural law tradition in ethics ). In light of this diversity of views about the relation between moral reasoning and practical or prudential reasoning, a general account of moral reasoning that does not want to presume the correctness of a definite moral theory will do well to remain agnostic on the question of how moral reasoning relates to non-moral practical reasoning.

2. General Philosophical Questions about Moral Reasoning

To be sure, most great philosophers who have addressed the nature of moral reasoning were far from agnostic about the content of the correct moral theory, and developed their reflections about moral reasoning in support of or in derivation from their moral theory. Nonetheless, contemporary discussions that are somewhat agnostic about the content of moral theory have arisen around important and controversial aspects of moral reasoning. We may group these around the following seven questions:

• How do relevant considerations get taken up in moral reasoning?
• Is it essential to moral reasoning for the considerations it takes up to be crystallized into, or ranged under, principles?
• How do we sort out which moral considerations are most relevant?
• In what ways do motivational elements shape moral reasoning?
• What is the best way to model the kinds of conflicts among considerations that arise in moral reasoning?
• Does moral reasoning include learning from experience and changing one’s mind?
• How can we reason, morally, with one another?

The remainder of this article takes up these seven questions in turn.

One advantage to defining “reasoning” capaciously, as here, is that it helps one recognize that the processes whereby we come to be concretely aware of moral issues are integral to moral reasoning as it might more narrowly be understood. Recognizing moral issues when they arise requires a highly trained set of capacities and a broad range of emotional attunements. Philosophers of the moral sense school of the 17th and 18th centuries stressed innate emotional propensities, such as sympathy with other humans. Classically influenced virtue theorists, by contrast, give more importance to the training of perception and the emotional growth that must accompany it. Among contemporary philosophers working in empirical ethics there is a similar divide, with some arguing that we process situations using an innate moral grammar (Mikhail 2011) and some emphasizing the role of emotions in that processing (Haidt 2001, Prinz 2007, Greene 2014). For the moral reasoner, a crucial task for our capacities of moral recognition is to mark out certain features of a situation as being morally salient. Sartre’s student, for instance, focused on the competing claims of his mother and the Free French, giving them each an importance to his situation that he did not give to eating French cheese or wearing a uniform. To say that certain features are marked out as morally salient is not to imply that the features thus singled out answer to the terms of some general principle or other: we will come to the question of particularism, below. Rather, it is simply to say that recognitional attention must have a selective focus.

What will be counted as a moral issue or difficulty, in the sense requiring moral agents’ recognition, will again vary by moral theory. Not all moral theories would count filial loyalty and patriotism as moral duties. It is only at great cost, however, that any moral theory could claim to do without a layer of moral thinking involving situation-recognition. A calculative sort of utilitarianism, perhaps, might be imagined according to which there is no need to spot a moral issue or difficulty, as every choice node in life presents the agent with the same, utility-maximizing task. Perhaps Jeremy Bentham held a utilitarianism of this sort. For the more plausible utilitarianisms mentioned above, however, such as Mill’s and Hare’s, agents need not always calculate afresh, but must instead be alive to the possibility that because the ordinary “landmarks and direction posts” lead one astray in the situation at hand, they must make recourse to a more direct and critical mode of moral reasoning. Recognizing whether one is in one of those situations thus becomes the principal recognitional task for the utilitarian agent. (Whether this task can be suitably confined, of course, has long been one of the crucial questions about whether such indirect forms of utilitarianism, attractive on other grounds, can prevent themselves from collapsing into a more Benthamite, direct form: cf. Brandt 1979.)

Note that, as we have been describing moral uptake, we have not implied that what is perceived is ever a moral fact. Rather, it might be that what is perceived is some ordinary, descriptive feature of a situation that is, for whatever reason, morally relevant. An account of moral uptake will interestingly impinge upon the metaphysics of moral facts, however, if it holds that moral facts can be perceived. Importantly intermediate, in this respect, is the set of judgments involving so-called “thick” evaluative concepts – for example, that someone is callous, boorish, just, or brave (see the entry on thick ethical concepts ). These do not invoke the supposedly “thinner” terms of overall moral assessment, “good,” or “right.” Yet they are not innocent of normative content, either. Plainly, we do recognize callousness when we see clear cases of it. Plainly, too – whatever the metaphysical implications of the last fact – our ability to describe our situations in these thick normative terms is crucial to our ability to reason morally.

It is debated how closely our abilities of moral discernment are tied to our moral motivations. For Aristotle and many of his ancient successors, the two are closely linked, in that someone not brought up into virtuous motivations will not see things correctly. For instance, cowards will overestimate dangers, the rash will underestimate them, and the virtuous will perceive them correctly ( Eudemian Ethics 1229b23–27). By the Stoics, too, having the right motivations was regarded as intimately tied to perceiving the world correctly; but whereas Aristotle saw the emotions as allies to enlist in support of sound moral discernment, the Stoics saw them as inimical to clear perception of the truth (cf. Nussbaum 2001).

That one discerns features and qualities of some situation that are relevant to sizing it up morally does not yet imply that one explicitly or even implicitly employs any general claims in describing it. Perhaps all that one perceives are particularly embedded features and qualities, without saliently perceiving them as instantiations of any types. Sartre’s student may be focused on his mother and on the particular plights of several of his fellow Frenchmen under Nazi occupation, rather than on any purported requirements of filial duty or patriotism. Having become aware of some moral issue in such relatively particular terms, he might proceed directly to sorting out the conflict between them. Another possibility, however, and one that we frequently seem to exploit, is to formulate the issue in general terms: “An only child should stick by an otherwise isolated parent,” for instance, or “one should help those in dire need if one can do so without significant personal sacrifice.” Such general statements would be examples of “moral principles,” in a broad sense. (We do not here distinguish between principles and rules. Those who do include Dworkin 1978 and Gert 1998.)

We must be careful, here, to distinguish the issue of whether principles commonly play an implicit or explicit role in moral reasoning, including well-conducted moral reasoning, from the issue of whether principles necessarily figure as part of the basis of moral truth. The latter issue is best understood as a metaphysical question about the nature and basis of moral facts. What is currently known as moral particularism is the view that there are no defensible moral principles and that moral reasons, or well-grounded moral facts, can exist independently of any basis in a general principle. A contrary view holds that moral reasons are necessarily general, whether because the sources of their justification are all general or because a moral claim is ill-formed if it contains particularities. But whether principles play a useful role in moral reasoning is certainly a different question from whether principles play a necessary role in accounting for the ultimate truth-conditions of moral statements. Moral particularism, as just defined, denies their latter role. Some moral particularists seem also to believe that moral particularism implies that moral principles cannot soundly play a useful role in reasoning. This claim is disputable, as it seems a contingent matter whether the relevant particular facts arrange themselves in ways susceptible to general summary and whether our cognitive apparatus can cope with them at all without employing general principles. Although the metaphysical controversy about moral particularism lies largely outside our topic, we will revisit it in section 2.5 , in connection with the weighing of conflicting reasons.

With regard to moral reasoning, while there are some self-styled “anti-theorists” who deny that abstract structures of linked generalities are important to moral reasoning (Clarke, et al. 1989), it is more common to find philosophers who recognize both some role for particular judgment and some role for moral principles. Thus, neo-Aristotelians like Nussbaum who emphasize the importance of “finely tuned and richly aware” particular discernment also regard that discernment as being guided by a set of generally describable virtues whose general descriptions will come into play in at least some kinds of cases (Nussbaum 1990). “Situation ethicists” of an earlier generation (e.g. Fletcher 1997) emphasized the importance of taking into account a wide range of circumstantial differentiae, but against the background of some general principles whose application the differentiae help sort out. Feminist ethicists influenced by Carol Gilligan’s path breaking work on moral development have stressed the moral centrality of the kind of care and discernment that are salient and well-developed by people immersed in particular relationships (Held 1995); but this emphasis is consistent with such general principles as “one ought to be sensitive to the wishes of one’s friends”(see the entry on feminist moral psychology ). Again, if we distinguish the question of whether principles are useful in responsibly-conducted moral thinking from the question of whether moral reasons ultimately all derive from general principles, and concentrate our attention solely on the former, we will see that some of the opposition to general moral principles melts away.

It should be noted that we have been using a weak notion of generality, here. It is contrasted only with the kind of strict particularity that comes with indexicals and proper names. General statements or claims – ones that contain no such particular references – are not necessarily universal generalizations, making an assertion about all cases of the mentioned type. Thus, “one should normally help those in dire need” is a general principle, in this weak sense. Possibly, such logically loose principles would be obfuscatory in the context of an attempt to reconstruct the ultimate truth-conditions of moral statements. Such logically loose principles would clearly be useless in any attempt to generate a deductively tight “practical syllogism.” In our day-to-day, non-deductive reasoning, however, such logically loose principles appear to be quite useful. (Recall that we are understanding “reasoning” quite broadly, as responsibly conducted thinking: nothing in this understanding of reasoning suggests any uniquely privileged place for deductive inference: cf. Harman 1986. For more on defeasible or “default” principles, see section 2.5 .)

In this terminology, establishing that general principles are essential to moral reasoning leaves open the further question whether logically tight, or exceptionless, principles are also essential to moral reasoning. Certainly, much of our actual moral reasoning seems to be driven by attempts to recast or reinterpret principles so that they can be taken to be exceptionless. Adherents and inheritors of the natural-law tradition in ethics (e.g. Donagan 1977) are particularly supple defenders of exceptionless moral principles, as they are able to avail themselves not only of a refined tradition of casuistry but also of a wide array of subtle – some would say overly subtle – distinctions, such as those mentioned above between doing and allowing and between intending as a means and accepting as a byproduct.

A related role for a strong form of generality in moral reasoning comes from the Kantian thought that one’s moral reasoning must counter one’s tendency to make exceptions for oneself. Accordingly, Kant holds, as we have noted, that we must ask whether the maxims of our actions can serve as universal laws. As most contemporary readers understand this demand, it requires that we engage in a kind of hypothetical generalization across agents, and ask about the implications of everybody acting that way in those circumstances. The grounds for developing Kant’s thought in this direction have been well explored (e.g., Nell 1975, Korsgaard 1996, Engstrom 2009). The importance and the difficulties of such a hypothetical generalization test in ethics were discussed the influential works Gibbard 1965 and Goldman 1974.

Whether or not moral considerations need the backing of general principles, we must expect situations of action to present us with multiple moral considerations. In addition, of course, these situations will also present us with a lot of information that is not morally relevant. On any realistic account, a central task of moral reasoning is to sort out relevant considerations from irrelevant ones, as well as to determine which are especially relevant and which only slightly so. That a certain woman is Sartre’s student’s mother seems arguably to be a morally relevant fact; what about the fact (supposing it is one) that she has no other children to take care of her? Addressing the task of sorting what is morally relevant from what is not, some philosophers have offered general accounts of moral relevant features. Others have given accounts of how we sort out which of the relevant features are most relevant, a process of thinking that sometimes goes by the name of “casuistry.”

Before we look at ways of sorting out which features are morally relevant or most morally relevant, it may be useful to note a prior step taken by some casuists, which was to attempt to set out a schema that would capture all of the features of an action or proposed action. The Roman Catholic casuists of the middle ages did so by drawing on Aristotle’s categories. Accordingly, they asked, where, when, why, how, by what means, to whom, or by whom the action in question is to be done or avoided (see Jonsen and Toulmin 1988). The idea was that complete answers to these questions would contain all of the features of the action, of which the morally relevant ones would be a subset. Although metaphysically uninteresting, the idea of attempting to list all of an action’s features in this way represents a distinctive – and extreme – heuristic for moral reasoning.

Turning to the morally relevant features, one of the most developed accounts is Bernard Gert’s. He develops a list of features relevant to whether the violation of a moral rule should be generally allowed. Given the designed function of Gert’s list, it is natural that most of his morally relevant features make reference to the set of moral rules he defended. Accordingly, some of Gert’s distinctions between dimensions of relevant features reflect controversial stances in moral theory. For example, one of the dimensions is whether “the violation [is] done intentionally or only knowingly” (Gert 1998, 234) – a distinction that those who reject the doctrine of double effect would not find relevant.

In deliberating about what we ought, morally, to do, we also often attempt to figure out which considerations are most relevant. To take an issue mentioned above: Are surrogate motherhood contracts more akin to agreements with babysitters (clearly acceptable) or to agreements with prostitutes (not clearly so)? That is, which feature of surrogate motherhood is more relevant: that it involves a contract for child-care services or that it involves payment for the intimate use of the body? Both in such relatively novel cases and in more familiar ones, reasoning by analogy plays a large role in ordinary moral thinking. When this reasoning by analogy starts to become systematic – a social achievement that requires some historical stability and reflectiveness about what are taken to be moral norms – it begins to exploit comparison to cases that are “paradigmatic,” in the sense of being taken as settled. Within such a stable background, a system of casuistry can develop that lends some order to the appeal to analogous cases. To use an analogy: the availability of a widely accepted and systematic set of analogies and the availability of what are taken to be moral norms may stand to one another as chicken does to egg: each may be an indispensable moment in the genesis of the other.

Casuistry, thus understood, is an indispensable aid to moral reasoning. At least, that it is would follow from conjoining two features of the human moral situation mentioned above: the multifariousness of moral considerations that arise in particular cases and the need and possibility for employing moral principles in sound moral reasoning. We require moral judgment, not simply a deductive application of principles or a particularist bottom-line intuition about what we should do. This judgment must be responsible to moral principles yet cannot be straightforwardly derived from them. Accordingly, our moral judgment is greatly aided if it is able to rest on the sort of heuristic support that casuistry offers. Thinking through which of two analogous cases provides a better key to understanding the case at hand is a useful way of organizing our moral reasoning, and one on which we must continue to depend. If we lack the kind of broad consensus on a set of paradigm cases on which the Renaissance Catholic or Talmudic casuists could draw, our casuistic efforts will necessarily be more controversial and tentative than theirs; but we are not wholly without settled cases from which to work. Indeed, as Jonsen and Toulmin suggest at the outset of their thorough explanation and defense of casuistry, the depth of disagreement about moral theories that characterizes a pluralist society may leave us having to rest comparatively more weight on the cases about which we can find agreement than did the classic casuists (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988).

Despite the long history of casuistry, there is little that can usefully be said about how one ought to reason about competing analogies. In the law, where previous cases have precedential importance, more can be said. As Sunstein notes (Sunstein 1996, chap. 3), the law deals with particular cases, which are always “potentially distinguishable” (72); yet the law also imposes “a requirement of practical consistency” (67). This combination of features makes reasoning by analogy particularly influential in the law, for one must decide whether a given case is more like one set of precedents or more like another. Since the law must proceed even within a pluralist society such as ours, Sunstein argues, we see that analogical reasoning can go forward on the basis of “incompletely theorized judgments” or of what Rawls calls an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls 1996). That is, although a robust use of analogous cases depends, as we have noted, on some shared background agreement, this agreement need not extend to all matters or all levels of individuals’ moral thinking. Accordingly, although in a pluralist society we may lack the kind of comprehensive normative agreement that made the high casuistry of Renaissance Christianity possible, the path of the law suggests that normatively forceful, case-based, analogical reasoning can still go on. A modern, competing approach to case-based or precedent-respecting reasoning has been developed by John F. Horty (2016). On Horty’s approach, which builds on the default logic developed in (Horty 2012), the body of precedent systematically shifts the weights of the reasons arising in a new case.

Reasoning by appeal to cases is also a favorite mode of some recent moral philosophers. Since our focus here is not on the methods of moral theory, we do not need to go into any detail in comparing different ways in which philosophers wield cases for and against alternative moral theories. There is, however, an important and broadly applicable point worth making about ordinary reasoning by reference to cases that emerges most clearly from the philosophical use of such reasoning. Philosophers often feel free to imagine cases, often quite unlikely ones, in order to attempt to isolate relevant differences. An infamous example is a pair of cases offered by James Rachels to cast doubt on the moral significance of the distinction between killing and letting die, here slightly redescribed. In both cases, there is at the outset a boy in a bathtub and a greedy older cousin downstairs who will inherit the family manse if and only if the boy predeceases him (Rachels 1975). In Case A, the cousin hears a thump, runs up to find the boy unconscious in the bath, and reaches out to turn on the tap so that the water will rise up to drown the boy. In Case B, the cousin hears a thump, runs up to find the boy unconscious in the bath with the water running, and decides to sit back and do nothing until the boy drowns. Since there is surely no moral difference between these cases, Rachels argued, the general distinction between killing and letting die is undercut. “Not so fast!” is the well-justified reaction (cf. Beauchamp 1979). Just because a factor is morally relevant in a certain way in comparing one pair of cases does not mean that it either is or must be relevant in the same way or to the same degree when comparing other cases. Shelly Kagan has dubbed the failure to take account of this fact of contextual interaction when wielding comparison cases the “additive fallacy” (1988). Kagan concludes from this that the reasoning of moral theorists must depend upon some theory that helps us anticipate and account for ways in which factors will interact in various contexts. A parallel lesson, reinforcing what we have already observed in connection with casuistry proper, would apply for moral reasoning in general: reasoning from cases must at least implicitly rely upon a set of organizing judgments or beliefs, of a kind that would, on some understandings, count as a moral “theory.” If this is correct, it provides another kind of reason to think that moral considerations could be crystallized into principles that make manifest the organizing structure involved.

We are concerned here with moral reasoning as a species of practical reasoning – reasoning directed to deciding what to do and, if successful, issuing in an intention. But how can such practical reasoning succeed? How can moral reasoning hook up with motivationally effective psychological states so as to have this kind of causal effect? “Moral psychology” – the traditional name for the philosophical study of intention and action – has a lot to say to such questions, both in its traditional, a priori form and its newly popular empirical form. In addition, the conclusions of moral psychology can have substantive moral implications, for it may be reasonable to assume that if there are deep reasons that a given type of moral reasoning cannot be practical, then any principles that demand such reasoning are unsound. In this spirit, Samuel Scheffler has explored “the importance for moral philosophy of some tolerably realistic understanding of human motivational psychology” (Scheffler 1992, 8) and Peter Railton has developed the idea that certain moral principles might generate a kind of “alienation” (Railton 1984). In short, we may be interested in what makes practical reasoning of a certain sort psychologically possible both for its own sake and as a way of working out some of the content of moral theory.

The issue of psychological possibility is an important one for all kinds of practical reasoning (cf. Audi 1989). In morality, it is especially pressing, as morality often asks individuals to depart from satisfying their own interests. As a result, it may appear that moral reasoning’s practical effect could not be explained by a simple appeal to the initial motivations that shape or constitute someone’s interests, in combination with a requirement, like that mentioned above, to will the necessary means to one’s ends. Morality, it may seem, instead requires individuals to act on ends that may not be part of their “motivational set,” in the terminology of Williams 1981. How can moral reasoning lead people to do that? The question is a traditional one. Plato’s Republic answered that the appearances are deceiving, and that acting morally is, in fact, in the enlightened self-interest of the agent. Kant, in stark contrast, held that our transcendent capacity to act on our conception of a practical law enables us to set ends and to follow morality even when doing so sharply conflicts with our interests. Many other answers have been given. In recent times, philosophers have defended what has been called “internalism” about morality, which claims that there is a necessary conceptual link between agents’ moral judgment and their motivation. Michael Smith, for instance, puts the claim as follows (Smith 1994, 61):

If an agent judges that it is right for her to Φ in circumstances C , then either she is motivated to Φ in C or she is practically irrational.

Even this defeasible version of moral judgment internalism may be too strong; but instead of pursuing this issue further, let us turn to a question more internal to moral reasoning. (For more on the issue of moral judgment internalism, see moral motivation .)

The traditional question we were just glancing at picks up when moral reasoning is done. Supposing that we have some moral conclusion, it asks how agents can be motivated to go along with it. A different question about the intersection of moral reasoning and moral psychology, one more immanent to the former, concerns how motivational elements shape the reasoning process itself.

A powerful philosophical picture of human psychology, stemming from Hume, insists that beliefs and desires are distinct existences (Hume 2000, Book II, part iii, sect. iii; cf. Smith 1994, 7). This means that there is always a potential problem about how reasoning, which seems to work by concatenating beliefs, links up to the motivations that desire provides. The paradigmatic link is that of instrumental action: the desire to Ψ links with the belief that by Φing in circumstances C one will Ψ. Accordingly, philosophers who have examined moral reasoning within an essentially Humean, belief-desire psychology have sometimes accepted a constrained account of moral reasoning. Hume’s own account exemplifies the sort of constraint that is involved. As Hume has it, the calm passions support the dual correction of perspective constitutive of morality, alluded to above. Since these calm passions are seen as competing with our other passions in essentially the same motivational coinage, as it were, our passions limit the reach of moral reasoning.

An important step away from a narrow understanding of Humean moral psychology is taken if one recognizes the existence of what Rawls has called “principle-dependent desires” (Rawls 1996, 82–83; Rawls 2000, 46–47). These are desires whose objects cannot be characterized without reference to some rational or moral principle. An important special case of these is that of “conception-dependent desires,” in which the principle-dependent desire in question is seen by the agent as belonging to a broader conception, and as important on that account (Rawls 1996, 83–84; Rawls 2000, 148–152). For instance, conceiving of oneself as a citizen, one may desire to bear one’s fair share of society’s burdens. Although it may look like any content, including this, may substitute for Ψ in the Humean conception of desire, and although Hume set out to show how moral sentiments such as pride could be explained in terms of simple psychological mechanisms, his influential empiricism actually tends to restrict the possible content of desires. Introducing principle-dependent desires thus seems to mark a departure from a Humean psychology. As Rawls remarks, if “we may find ourselves drawn to the conceptions and ideals that both the right and the good express … , [h]ow is one to fix limits on what people might be moved by in thought and deliberation and hence may act from?” (1996, 85). While Rawls developed this point by contrasting Hume’s moral psychology with Kant’s, the same basic point is also made by neo-Aristotelians (e.g., McDowell 1998).

The introduction of principle-dependent desires bursts any would-be naturalist limit on their content; nonetheless, some philosophers hold that this notion remains too beholden to an essentially Humean picture to be able to capture the idea of a moral commitment. Desires, it may seem, remain motivational items that compete on the basis of strength. Saying that one’s desire to be just may be outweighed by one’s desire for advancement may seem to fail to capture the thought that one has a commitment – even a non-absolute one – to justice. Sartre designed his example of the student torn between staying with his mother and going to fight with the Free French so as to make it seem implausible that he ought to decide simply by determining which he more strongly wanted to do.

One way to get at the idea of commitment is to emphasize our capacity to reflect about what we want. By this route, one might distinguish, in the fashion of Harry Frankfurt, between the strength of our desires and “the importance of what we care about” (Frankfurt 1988). Although this idea is evocative, it provides relatively little insight into how it is that we thus reflect. Another way to model commitment is to take it that our intentions operate at a level distinct from our desires, structuring what we are willing to reconsider at any point in our deliberations (e.g. Bratman 1999). While this two-level approach offers some advantages, it is limited by its concession of a kind of normative primacy to the unreconstructed desires at the unreflective level. A more integrated approach might model the psychology of commitment in a way that reconceives the nature of desire from the ground up. One attractive possibility is to return to the Aristotelian conception of desire as being for the sake of some good or apparent good (cf. Richardson 2004). On this conception, the end for the sake of which an action is done plays an important regulating role, indicating, in part, what one will not do (Richardson 2018, §§8.3–8.4). Reasoning about final ends accordingly has a distinctive character (see Richardson 1994, Schmidtz 1995). Whatever the best philosophical account of the notion of a commitment – for another alternative, see (Tiberius 2000) – much of our moral reasoning does seem to involve expressions of and challenges to our commitments (Anderson and Pildes 2000).

Recent experimental work, employing both survey instruments and brain imaging technologies, has allowed philosophers to approach questions about the psychological basis of moral reasoning from novel angles. The initial brain data seems to show that individuals with damage to the pre-frontal lobes tend to reason in more straightforwardly consequentialist fashion than those without such damage (Koenigs et al. 2007). Some theorists take this finding as tending to confirm that fully competent human moral reasoning goes beyond a simple weighing of pros and cons to include assessment of moral constraints (e.g., Wellman & Miller 2008, Young & Saxe 2008). Others, however, have argued that the emotional responses of the prefrontal lobes interfere with the more sober and sound, consequentialist-style reasoning of the other parts of the brain (e.g. Greene 2014). The survey data reveals or confirms, among other things, interesting, normatively loaded asymmetries in our attribution of such concepts as responsibility and causality (Knobe 2006). It also reveals that many of moral theory’s most subtle distinctions, such as the distinction between an intended means and a foreseen side-effect, are deeply built into our psychologies, being present cross-culturally and in young children, in a way that suggests to some the possibility of an innate “moral grammar” (Mikhail 2011).

A final question about the connection between moral motivation and moral reasoning is whether someone without the right motivational commitments can reason well, morally. On Hume’s official, narrow conception of reasoning, which essentially limits it to tracing empirical and logical connections, the answer would be yes. The vicious person could trace the causal and logical implications of acting in a certain way just as a virtuous person could. The only difference would be practical, not rational: the two would not act in the same way. Note, however, that the Humean’s affirmative answer depends on departing from the working definition of “moral reasoning” used in this article, which casts it as a species of practical reasoning. Interestingly, Kant can answer “yes” while still casting moral reasoning as practical. On his view in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason , reasoning well, morally, does not depend on any prior motivational commitment, yet remains practical reasoning. That is because he thinks the moral law can itself generate motivation. (Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and Religion offer a more complex psychology.) For Aristotle, by contrast, an agent whose motivations are not virtuously constituted will systematically misperceive what is good and what is bad, and hence will be unable to reason excellently. The best reasoning that a vicious person is capable of, according to Aristotle, is a defective simulacrum of practical wisdom that he calls “cleverness” ( Nicomachean Ethics 1144a25).

Moral considerations often conflict with one another. So do moral principles and moral commitments. Assuming that filial loyalty and patriotism are moral considerations, then Sartre’s student faces a moral conflict. Recall that it is one thing to model the metaphysics of morality or the truth conditions of moral statements and another to give an account of moral reasoning. In now looking at conflicting considerations, our interest here remains with the latter and not the former. Our principal interest is in ways that we need to structure or think about conflicting considerations in order to negotiate well our reasoning involving them.

One influential building-block for thinking about moral conflicts is W. D. Ross’s notion of a “ prima facie duty”. Although this term misleadingly suggests mere appearance – the way things seem at first glance – it has stuck. Some moral philosophers prefer the term “ pro tanto duty” (e.g., Hurley 1989). Ross explained that his term provides “a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind (e.g., the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant.” Illustrating the point, he noted that a prima facie duty to keep a promise can be overridden by a prima facie duty to avert a serious accident, resulting in a proper, or unqualified, duty to do the latter (Ross 1988, 18–19). Ross described each prima facie duty as a “parti-resultant” attribute, grounded or explained by one aspect of an act, whereas “being one’s [actual] duty” is a “toti-resultant” attribute resulting from all such aspects of an act, taken together (28; see Pietroski 1993). This suggests that in each case there is, in principle, some function that generally maps from the partial contributions of each prima facie duty to some actual duty. What might that function be? To Ross’s credit, he writes that “for the estimation of the comparative stringency of these prima facie obligations no general rules can, so far as I can see, be laid down” (41). Accordingly, a second strand in Ross simply emphasizes, following Aristotle, the need for practical judgment by those who have been brought up into virtue (42).

How might considerations of the sort constituted by prima facie duties enter our moral reasoning? They might do so explicitly, or only implicitly. There is also a third, still weaker possibility (Scheffler 1992, 32): it might simply be the case that if the agent had recognized a prima facie duty, he would have acted on it unless he considered it to be overridden. This is a fact about how he would have reasoned.

Despite Ross’s denial that there is any general method for estimating the comparative stringency of prima facie duties, there is a further strand in his exposition that many find irresistible and that tends to undercut this denial. In the very same paragraph in which he states that he sees no general rules for dealing with conflicts, he speaks in terms of “the greatest balance of prima facie rightness.” This language, together with the idea of “comparative stringency,” ineluctably suggests the idea that the mapping function might be the same in each case of conflict and that it might be a quantitative one. On this conception, if there is a conflict between two prima facie duties, the one that is strongest in the circumstances should be taken to win. Duly cautioned about the additive fallacy (see section 2.3 ), we might recognize that the strength of a moral consideration in one set of circumstances cannot be inferred from its strength in other circumstances. Hence, this approach will need still to rely on intuitive judgments in many cases. But this intuitive judgment will be about which prima facie consideration is stronger in the circumstances, not simply about what ought to be done.

The thought that our moral reasoning either requires or is benefited by a virtual quantitative crutch of this kind has a long pedigree. Can we really reason well morally in a way that boils down to assessing the weights of the competing considerations? Addressing this question will require an excursus on the nature of moral reasons. Philosophical support for this possibility involves an idea of practical commensurability. We need to distinguish, here, two kinds of practical commensurability or incommensurability, one defined in metaphysical terms and one in deliberative terms. Each of these forms might be stated evaluatively or deontically. The first, metaphysical sort of value incommensurability is defined directly in terms of what is the case. Thus, to state an evaluative version: two values are metaphysically incommensurable just in case neither is better than the other nor are they equally good (see Chang 1998). Now, the metaphysical incommensurability of values, or its absence, is only loosely linked to how it would be reasonable to deliberate. If all values or moral considerations are metaphysically (that is, in fact) commensurable, still it might well be the case that our access to the ultimate commensurating function is so limited that we would fare ill by proceeding in our deliberations to try to think about which outcomes are “better” or which considerations are “stronger.” We might have no clue about how to measure the relevant “strength.” Conversely, even if metaphysical value incommensurability is common, we might do well, deliberatively, to proceed as if this were not the case, just as we proceed in thermodynamics as if the gas laws obtained in their idealized form. Hence, in thinking about the deliberative implications of incommensurable values , we would do well to think in terms of a definition tailored to the deliberative context. Start with a local, pairwise form. We may say that two options, A and B, are deliberatively commensurable just in case there is some one dimension of value in terms of which, prior to – or logically independently of – choosing between them, it is possible adequately to represent the force of the considerations bearing on the choice.

Philosophers as diverse as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill have argued that unless two options are deliberatively commensurable, in this sense, it is impossible to choose rationally between them. Interestingly, Kant limited this claim to the domain of prudential considerations, recognizing moral reasoning as invoking considerations incommensurable with those of prudence. For Mill, this claim formed an important part of his argument that there must be some one, ultimate “umpire” principle – namely, on his view, the principle of utility. Henry Sidgwick elaborated Mill’s argument and helpfully made explicit its crucial assumption, which he called the “principle of superior validity” (Sidgwick 1981; cf. Schneewind 1977). This is the principle that conflict between distinct moral or practical considerations can be rationally resolved only on the basis of some third principle or consideration that is both more general and more firmly warranted than the two initial competitors. From this assumption, one can readily build an argument for the rational necessity not merely of local deliberative commensurability, but of a global deliberative commensurability that, like Mill and Sidgwick, accepts just one ultimate umpire principle (cf. Richardson 1994, chap. 6).

Sidgwick’s explicitness, here, is valuable also in helping one see how to resist the demand for deliberative commensurability. Deliberative commensurability is not necessary for proceeding rationally if conflicting considerations can be rationally dealt with in a holistic way that does not involve the appeal to a principle of “superior validity.” That our moral reasoning can proceed holistically is strongly affirmed by Rawls. Rawls’s characterizations of the influential ideal of reflective equilibrium and his related ideas about the nature of justification imply that we can deal with conflicting considerations in less hierarchical ways than imagined by Mill or Sidgwick. Instead of proceeding up a ladder of appeal to some highest court or supreme umpire, Rawls suggests, when we face conflicting considerations “we work from both ends” (Rawls 1999, 18). Sometimes indeed we revise our more particular judgments in light of some general principle to which we adhere; but we are also free to revise more general principles in light of some relatively concrete considered judgment. On this picture, there is no necessary correlation between degree of generality and strength of authority or warrant. That this holistic way of proceeding (whether in building moral theory or in deliberating: cf. Hurley 1989) can be rational is confirmed by the possibility of a form of justification that is similarly holistic: “justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view” (Rawls 1999, 19, 507). (Note that this statement, which expresses a necessary aspect of moral or practical justification, should not be taken as a definition or analysis thereof.) So there is an alternative to depending, deliberatively, on finding a dimension in terms of which considerations can be ranked as “stronger” or “better” or “more stringent”: one can instead “prune and adjust” with an eye to building more mutual support among the considerations that one endorses on due reflection. If even the desideratum of practical coherence is subject to such re-specification, then this holistic possibility really does represent an alternative to commensuration, as the deliberator, and not some coherence standard, retains reflective sovereignty (Richardson 1994, sec. 26). The result can be one in which the originally competing considerations are not so much compared as transformed (Richardson 2018, chap. 1)

Suppose that we start with a set of first-order moral considerations that are all commensurable as a matter of ultimate, metaphysical fact, but that our grasp of the actual strength of these considerations is quite poor and subject to systematic distortions. Perhaps some people are much better placed than others to appreciate certain considerations, and perhaps our strategic interactions would cause us to reach suboptimal outcomes if we each pursued our own unfettered judgment of how the overall set of considerations plays out. In such circumstances, there is a strong case for departing from maximizing reasoning without swinging all the way to the holist alternative. This case has been influentially articulated by Joseph Raz, who develops the notion of an “exclusionary reason” to occupy this middle position (Raz 1990).

“An exclusionary reason,” in Raz’s terminology, “is a second order reason to refrain from acting for some reason” (39). A simple example is that of Ann, who is tired after a long and stressful day, and hence has reason not to act on her best assessment of the reasons bearing on a particularly important investment decision that she immediately faces (37). This notion of an exclusionary reason allowed Raz to capture many of the complexities of our moral reasoning, especially as it involves principled commitments, while conceding that, at the first order, all practical reasons might be commensurable. Raz’s early strategy for reconciling commensurability with complexity of structure was to limit the claim that reasons are comparable with regard to strength to reasons of a given order. First-order reasons compete on the basis of strength; but conflicts between first- and second-order reasons “are resolved not by the strength of the competing reasons but by a general principle of practical reasoning which determines that exclusionary reasons always prevail” (40).

If we take for granted this “general principle of practical reasoning,” why should we recognize the existence of any exclusionary reasons, which by definition prevail independently of any contest of strength? Raz’s principal answer to this question shifts from the metaphysical domain of the strengths that various reasons “have” to the epistemically limited viewpoint of the deliberator. As in Ann’s case, we can see in certain contexts that a deliberator is likely to get things wrong if he or she acts on his or her perception of the first-order reasons. Second-order reasons indicate, with respect to a certain range of first-order reasons, that the agent “must not act for those reasons” (185). The broader justification of an exclusionary reason, then, can consistently be put in terms of the commensurable first-order reasons. Such a justification can have the following form: “Given this agent’s deliberative limitations, the balance of first-order reasons will likely be better conformed with if he or she refrains from acting for certain of those reasons.”

Raz’s account of exclusionary reasons might be used to reconcile ultimate commensurability with the structured complexity of our moral reasoning. Whether such an attempt could succeed would depend, in part, on the extent to which we have an actual grasp of first-order reasons, conflict among which can be settled solely on the basis of their comparative strength. Our consideration, above, of casuistry, the additive fallacy, and deliberative incommensurability may combine to make it seem that only in rare pockets of our practice do we have a good grasp of first-order reasons, if these are defined, à la Raz, as competing only in terms of strength. If that is right, then we will almost always have good exclusionary reasons to reason on some other basis than in terms of the relative strength of first-order reasons. Under those assumptions, the middle way that Raz’s idea of exclusionary reasons seems to open up would more closely approach the holist’s.

The notion of a moral consideration’s “strength,” whether put forward as part of a metaphysical picture of how first-order considerations interact in fact or as a suggestion about how to go about resolving a moral conflict, should not be confused with the bottom-line determination of whether one consideration, and specifically one duty, overrides another. In Ross’s example of conflicting prima facie duties, someone must choose between averting a serious accident and keeping a promise to meet someone. (Ross chose the case to illustrate that an “imperfect” duty, or a duty of commission, can override a strict, prohibitive duty.) Ross’s assumption is that all well brought-up people would agree, in this case, that the duty to avert serious harm to someone overrides the duty to keep such a promise. We may take it, if we like, that this judgment implies that we consider the duty to save a life, here, to be stronger than the duty to keep the promise; but in fact this claim about relative strength adds nothing to our understanding of the situation. Yet we do not reach our practical conclusion in this case by determining that the duty to save the boy’s life is stronger. The statement that this duty is here stronger is simply a way to embellish the conclusion that of the two prima facie duties that here conflict, it is the one that states the all-things-considered duty. To be “overridden” is just to be a prima facie duty that fails to generate an actual duty because another prima facie duty that conflicts with it – or several of them that do – does generate an actual duty. Hence, the judgment that some duties override others can be understood just in terms of their deontic upshots and without reference to considerations of strength. To confirm this, note that we can say, “As a matter of fidelity, we ought to keep the promise; as a matter of beneficence, we ought to save the life; we cannot do both; and both categories considered we ought to save the life.”

Understanding the notion of one duty overriding another in this way puts us in a position to take up the topic of moral dilemmas . Since this topic is covered in a separate article, here we may simply take up one attractive definition of a moral dilemma. Sinnott-Armstrong (1988) suggested that a moral dilemma is a situation in which the following are true of a single agent:

• He ought to do A .
• He ought to do B .
• He cannot do both A and B .
• (1) does not override (2) and (2) does not override (1).

This way of defining moral dilemmas distinguishes them from the kind of moral conflict, such as Ross’s promise-keeping/accident-prevention case, in which one of the duties is overridden by the other. Arguably, Sartre’s student faces a moral dilemma. Making sense of a situation in which neither of two duties overrides the other is easier if deliberative commensurability is denied. Whether moral dilemmas are possible will depend crucially on whether “ought” implies “can” and whether any pair of duties such as those comprised by (1) and (2) implies a single, “agglomerated” duty that the agent do both A and B . If either of these purported principles of the logic of duties is false, then moral dilemmas are possible.

Jonathan Dancy has well highlighted a kind of contextual variability in moral reasons that has come to be known as “reasons holism”: “a feature that is a reason in one case may be no reason at all, or an opposite reason, in another” (Dancy 2004). To adapt one of his examples: while there is often moral reason not to lie, when playing liar’s poker one generally ought to lie; otherwise, one will spoil the game (cf. Dancy 1993, 61). Dancy argues that reasons holism supports moral particularism of the kind discussed in section 2.2 , according to which there are no defensible moral principles. Taking this conclusion seriously would radically affect how we conducted our moral reasoning. The argument’s premise of holism has been challenged (e.g., Audi 2004, McKeever & Ridge 2006). Philosophers have also challenged the inference from reasons holism to particularism in various ways. Mark Lance and Margaret Olivia Little (2007) have done so by exhibiting how defeasible generalizations, in ethics and elsewhere, depend systematically on context. We can work with them, they suggest, by utilizing a skill that is similar to the skill of discerning morally salient considerations, namely the skill of discerning relevant similarities among possible worlds. More generally, John F. Horty has developed a logical and semantic account according to which reasons are defaults and so behave holistically, but there are nonetheless general principles that explain how they behave (Horty 2012). And Mark Schroeder has argued that our holistic views about reasons are actually better explained by supposing that there are general principles (Schroeder 2011).

This excursus on moral reasons suggests that there are a number of good reasons why reasoning about moral matters might not simply reduce to assessing the weights of competing considerations.

If we have any moral knowledge, whether concerning general moral principles or concrete moral conclusions, it is surely very imperfect. What moral knowledge we are capable of will depend, in part, on what sorts of moral reasoning we are capable of. Although some moral learning may result from the theoretical work of moral philosophers and theorists, much of what we learn with regard to morality surely arises in the practical context of deliberation about new and difficult cases. This deliberation might be merely instrumental, concerned only with settling on means to moral ends, or it might be concerned with settling those ends. There is no special problem about learning what conduces to morally obligatory ends: that is an ordinary matter of empirical learning. But by what sorts of process can we learn which ends are morally obligatory, or which norms morally required? And, more specifically, is strictly moral learning possible via moral reasoning?

Much of what was said above with regard to moral uptake applies again in this context, with approximately the same degree of dubiousness or persuasiveness. If there is a role for moral perception or for emotions in agents’ becoming aware of moral considerations, these may function also to guide agents to new conclusions. For instance, it is conceivable that our capacity for outrage is a relatively reliable detector of wrong actions, even novel ones, or that our capacity for pleasure is a reliable detector of actions worth doing, even novel ones. (For a thorough defense of the latter possibility, which intriguingly interprets pleasure as a judgment of value, see Millgram 1997.) Perhaps these capacities for emotional judgment enable strictly moral learning in roughly the same way that chess-players’ trained sensibilities enable them to recognize the threat in a previously unencountered situation on the chessboard (Lance and Tanesini 2004). That is to say, perhaps our moral emotions play a crucial role in the exercise of a skill whereby we come to be able to articulate moral insights that we have never before attained. Perhaps competing moral considerations interact in contextually specific and complex ways much as competing chess considerations do. If so, it would make sense to rely on our emotionally-guided capacities of judgment to cope with complexities that we cannot model explicitly, but also to hope that, once having been so guided, we might in retrospect be able to articulate something about the lesson of a well-navigated situation.

A different model of strictly moral learning puts the emphasis on our after-the-fact reactions rather than on any prior, tacit emotional or judgmental guidance: the model of “experiments in living,” to use John Stuart Mill’s phrase (see Anderson 1991). Here, the basic thought is that we can try something and see if “it works.” For this to be an alternative to empirical learning about what causally conduces to what, it must be the case that we remain open as to what we mean by things “working.” In Mill’s terminology, for instance, we need to remain open as to what are the important “parts” of happiness. If we are, then perhaps we can learn by experience what some of them are – that is, what are some of the constitutive means of happiness. These paired thoughts, that our practical life is experimental and that we have no firmly fixed conception of what it is for something to “work,” come to the fore in Dewey’s pragmatist ethics (see esp. Dewey 1967 [1922]). This experimentalist conception of strictly moral learning is brought to bear on moral reasoning in Dewey’s eloquent characterizations of “practical intelligence” as involving a creative and flexible approach to figuring out “what works” in a way that is thoroughly open to rethinking our ultimate aims.

Once we recognize that moral learning is a possibility for us, we can recognize a broader range of ways of coping with moral conflicts than was canvassed in the last section. There, moral conflicts were described in a way that assumed that the set of moral considerations, among which conflicts were arising, was to be taken as fixed. If we can learn, morally, however, then we probably can and should revise the set of moral considerations that we recognize. Often, we do this by re-interpreting some moral principle that we had started with, whether by making it more specific, making it more abstract, or in some other way (cf. Richardson 2000 and 2018).

So far, we have mainly been discussing moral reasoning as if it were a solitary endeavor. This is, at best, a convenient simplification. At worst, it is, as Jürgen Habermas has long argued, deeply distorting of reasoning’s essentially dialogical or conversational character (e.g., Habermas 1984; cf. Laden 2012). In any case, it is clear that we often do need to reason morally with one another.

Here, we are interested in how people may actually reason with one another – not in how imagined participants in an original position or ideal speech situation may be said to reason with one another, which is a concern for moral theory, proper. There are two salient and distinct ways of thinking about people morally reasoning with one another: as members of an organized or corporate body that is capable of reaching practical decisions of its own; and as autonomous individuals working outside any such structure to figure out with each other what they ought, morally, to do.

The nature and possibility of collective reasoning within an organized collective body has recently been the subject of some discussion. Collectives can reason if they are structured as an agent. This structure might or might not be institutionalized. In line with the gloss of reasoning offered above, which presupposes being guided by an assessment of one’s reasons, it is plausible to hold that a group agent “counts as reasoning, not just rational, only if it is able to form not only beliefs in propositions – that is, object-language beliefs – but also belief about propositions” (List and Pettit 2011, 63). As List and Pettit have shown (2011, 109–113), participants in a collective agent will unavoidably have incentives to misrepresent their own preferences in conditions involving ideologically structured disagreements where the contending parties are oriented to achieving or avoiding certain outcomes – as is sometimes the case where serious moral disagreements arise. In contexts where what ultimately matters is how well the relevant group or collective ends up faring, “team reasoning” that takes advantage of orientation towards the collective flourishing of the group can help it reach a collectively optimal outcome (Sugden 1993, Bacharach 2006; see entry on collective intentionality ). Where the group in question is smaller than the set of persons, however, such a collectively prudential focus is distinct from a moral focus and seems at odds with the kind of impartiality typically thought distinctive of the moral point of view. Thinking about what a “team-orientation” to the set all persons might look like might bring us back to thoughts of Kantian universalizability; but recall that here we are focused on actual reasoning, not hypothetical reasoning. With regard to actual reasoning, even if individuals can take up such an orientation towards the “team” of all persons, there is serious reason, highlighted by another strand of the Kantian tradition, for doubting that any individual can aptly surrender their moral judgment to any group’s verdict (Wolff 1998).

This does not mean that people cannot reason together, morally. It suggests, however, that such joint reasoning is best pursued as a matter of working out together, as independent moral agents, what they ought to do with regard to an issue on which they have some need to cooperate. Even if deferring to another agent’s verdict as to how one morally ought to act is off the cards, it is still possible that one may licitly take account of the moral testimony of others (for differing views, see McGrath 2009, Enoch 2014).

In the case of independent individuals reasoning morally with one another, we may expect that moral disagreement provides the occasion rather than an obstacle. To be sure, if individuals’ moral disagreement is very deep, they may not be able to get this reasoning off the ground; but as Kant’s example of Charles V and his brother each wanting Milan reminds us, intractable disagreement can arise also from disagreements that, while conceptually shallow, are circumstantially sharp. If it were true that clear-headed justification of one’s moral beliefs required seeing them as being ultimately grounded in a priori principles, as G.A. Cohen argued (Cohen 2008, chap. 6), then room for individuals to work out their moral disagreements by reasoning with one another would seem to be relatively restricted; but whether the nature of (clearheaded) moral grounding is really so restricted is seriously doubtful (Richardson 2018, §9.2). In contrast to what such a picture suggests, individuals’ moral commitments seem sufficiently open to being re-thought that people seem able to engage in principled – that is, not simply loss-minimizing – compromise (Richardson 2018, §8.5).

What about the possibility that the moral community as a whole – roughly, the community of all persons – can reason? This possibility does not raise the kind of threat to impartiality that is raised by the team reasoning of a smaller group of people; but it is hard to see it working in a way that does not run afoul of the concern about whether any person can aptly defer, in a strong sense, to the moral judgments of another agent. Even so, a residual possibility remains, which is that the moral community can reason in just one way, namely by accepting or ratifying a moral conclusion that has already become shared in a sufficiently inclusive and broad way (Richardson 2018, chap. 7).

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agency: shared | intentionality: collective | moral dilemmas | moral particularism | moral particularism: and moral generalism | moral relativism | moral skepticism | practical reason | prisoner’s dilemma | reflective equilibrium | value: incommensurable

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for help received from Gopal Sreenivasan and the students in a seminar on moral reasoning taught jointly with him, to the students in a more recent seminar in moral reasoning, and, for criticisms received, to David Brink, Margaret Olivia Little and Mark Murphy. He welcomes further criticisms and suggestions for improvement.

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Moral Education Through the Fostering of Reasoning Skills

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The development of reasoning skills is often regarded as a central goal of ethics and philosophy classes in school education. In light of recent studies from the field of moral psychology, however, it could be objected that the promotion of such skills might fail to meet another important objective, namely the moral education of students. In this paper, I will argue against such pessimism by suggesting that the fostering of reasoning skills can still contribute to the aims of moral education. To do so, I will engage with the concept of moral education, point out different ways in which reasoning skills play an essential role in it, and support these considerations by appealing to further empirical studies. My conclusion will be that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills fulfils two important aims of moral education: First, it enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. Lastly, I will refer to education in the field of sustainable development in order to exemplify the importance of these abilities.

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The development of reasoning skills is a central goal of ethics and philosophy classes in school education. The focus on the promotion of cognitive abilities, however, has been criticized for being ineffective in motivating actual moral behavior. Critics object that the promotion of reasoning skills misses the actual aim of ethics classes, namely the moral education of students.

As I will show in the following, their pessimism could even be backed up by recent studies in moral psychology. Nevertheless, I will argue that this pessimism is not justified. To do so, I will engage with the concept of moral education, point out different ways in which reasoning skills play an essential role in it, and support these considerations by appealing to further empirical studies. My conclusion will be that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills fulfils two important aims of education: First, it enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others and fosters those skills that are necessary for any successful societal discourse on moral issues.

To mention one example of the sort of criticism I refer to, consider the debate on the aim of ethics classes in Germany (grades 7 to 10). Ethics is a subject in German high schools that aims at fostering the moral education of students. The curricula of this subject focus on the development of ethical reasoning skills. However, critics object to this that the mere development of ethical reasoning skills does not contribute to the moral education of students. These critics understand moral education as a type of education that improves the moral quality of students’ actions. This is a view that can also be found in the school laws of the federal states. According to such school laws, the statutory aim of ethics classes is, for example, “to educate students to behave in a responsible and value-conscious manner” (Baden-Wurttemberg) or “to educate the students to value-aware judgment and action” (Bavaria). Footnote 1

Nevertheless, the practice of ethics teaching in European schools mostly aims at the development of reasoning skills. Footnote 2 Ethics classes focus on a special type of reasoning skills: the competence to reflect upon ethical questions. Developing this competence is a common goal of teaching ethics. The aim of this subject is to promote the ability to identify ethical issues in the world we live in, to deal with them in an argumentative way and to take a well-founded position on them. General argumentative competences are also fostered in ethics classes but only in the context of critical reflections of this particular kind. I will call ethics classes with such course objectives “competence-oriented”.

Sometimes, competence-oriented approaches to teaching have been sharply distinguished from approaches that focus more strongly on a transfer of knowledge. This sharp distinction is misleading, however. For example, knowledge about the difference between a normative and a descriptive proposition can also be of help in developing the competence to reflect upon ethical questions. What is characteristic for competence-oriented approaches, however, is that the transfer of propositional knowledge (about philosophical positions, for instance) is never regarded as an end in itself. Although students also become familiarized with the philosophical tradition, the ultimate goal of ethics classes is to foster their ability to philosophize autonomously. Footnote 3 But what can be expected from such an approach with regard to moral education?

At first, one might think that such skills can improve the quality of the students’ moral judgments and actions. In the next section, however, this claim is called into question on the basis of particular studies from the field of moral psychology. These studies examine the moral judgments and moral actions of ethics professors and compare them to those of professors from other areas of philosophy and of other fields overall. It can be assumed that ethics professors possess in a particularly pronounced way those abilities whose promotion should take place in the ethics classroom. Despite this, the studies discussed in the next section could not find the judgments and actions of ethics professors to be of noticeably higher moral quality. This raises doubt about the ability of such competences to improve moral judgment and action overall (Sect.  1 ).

What other contribution can we then expect from competence-oriented approaches to moral education? Authors who point to the motivational limits of rational engagement sometimes advocate to evoke certain emotionally toned states, such as empathy, as an alternative approach. I will argue that while there are indeed some considerations speaking in favor of such approaches, it is necessary to embed emotional reactions of this kind in a process of critical reflection. More generally, a competence-oriented approach to moral education enables various forms of critical reflection and thereby contributes to the development of individual autonomy (Sect.  2 ).

A further important goal of competence-oriented approaches is to enable students to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. For example, identifying shared beliefs is an important step in resolving disputes about moral issues. As indicated by various studies, a competence-oriented philosophy and ethics education can increase the quality of the discourse on moral issues (Sect.  3 ).

In the last section, I will use an applied example to show why the aim of improving societal discourse is a particularly important goal. Using education in the field of sustainable development as an example, it becomes obvious that educators should not aim so much at trying to lead individual students on the right moral path. Instead, they should foster those skills that are necessary for any successful societal discourse on moral issues (Sect.  4 ).

1 Doing the Right Thing

To which aspect of moral education can the promotion of reasoning skills contribute? Similar to the development of other competences (for instance, scientific competences), one could think that, with an increase in cognitive abilities, moral judgments (in analogy to scientific judgments) become less prone to error. As a first step, the following section therefore examines this assumption by looking at relevant studies from the field of moral psychology.

In contrast to scientific judgments, moral judgments in particular instances are often a contentious issue even among experts. For example, has someone judged wrongly when they consider it morally acceptable to kill animals in order to eat them? This is controversial. In moral psychology, many studies dealing with the inaccuracy of moral judgments therefore avoid taking a stand on particular questions of right or wrong. To maintain moral neutrality, they only look at phenomena that can raise doubts about the reliability of moral judgments independently of what we think about the moral issues in question.

One example of a well-researched phenomenon of this kind are so-called framing effects , which result from the way in which moral problems are presented. Particular forms of such presentations can influence our moral judgments in the corresponding cases. These influences could be achieved, for example, by using a specific formulation of the moral question at issue ( wording effects ). A difference in moral judgment could also result from the order in which moral cases are presented ( order effects ). Here, judgments differ based on whether two corresponding cases A and B are presented in the order AB or in the order BA. Furthermore, moral judgments on a particular option can differ depending on whether this option is presented as part of a pair (AB) or of a sequence (ABC), which contains an additional option.

In philosophical debate, studies that deal with these effects have sometimes been interpreted as raising doubt about the reliability of our moral intuitions. Footnote 4 According to this line of argument, such unreliability results from the fact that the moral intuitions on which we base our judgments are often influenced by factors that are quite obviously not of moral relevance for the issue in question. For example, as the order of cases and the options in-between are clearly morally irrelevant, the corresponding studies could be said to show that our intuitions are not reliable (Sinnott-Armstrong 2006 , 353). Skepticism of this kind can even go so far as to question our general ability to form sound moral judgments. Footnote 5

Now, one might be tempted to make the optimistic suggestion that the reliability of moral judgments could be increased by an enhancement of the relevant reasoning skills. Schwitzgebel and Cushman ( 2012 ), however, cloud this optimism. In their study, they show that university-employed philosophers are no less affected by order effects on their judgments about moral dilemmas than non-philosophers. Schwitzgebel and Cushman tested this (among other things) on the basis of judgments about different variants of trolley cases. Such cases deal with situations in which a train would run over a group of people if an observer did not intervene. This intervention, however, would result in the death of an uninvolved person. Variants of trolley cases typically differ in the options the observer has available for intervention. The best-known options in the debate are flipping a switch (A) and pushing a person on the tracks whose body weight can stop the train (B). According to the study, the order in which A and B are presented to the participants influences how these two options happen to be morally evaluated.

Schwitzgebel and Cushman ( 2012 ), however, did not find any indications that these order effects are weaker for philosophers than for other participants. These findings also remain consistent when one compares regular participants to moral philosophers. Schwitzgebel and Cushman ( 2015 ) looked at this subgroup specifically but could not identify any degree of philosophical expertise that reduced the influence of such effects. Across the board, professional philosophers showed about the same order effects as comparably educated non-philosophers. Even among philosophers who had specific expertise on the moral issues in question, these effects were not smaller. Footnote 6 Explicit requests to think about the answers beforehand and to consider different arguments for or against the respective positions were also unable to change this result.

If philosophers’ moral judgments are also influenced by irrelevant factors such as the order in which cases are presented, this calls into question optimistic views about the relevance of philosophical skills for moral judgment. This concerns both the promotion of reasoning skills in general and the concrete discussion of moral dilemmas in particular. These studies, then, raise doubts about whether the promotion of reasoning skills can contribute in any significant way to increasing the reliability of moral judgments.

To mitigate this worry, however, one might point to the limited scope of Schwitzgebel and Cushman’s studies. One major reason why trolley cases have been the subject of so much philosophical debate is that they are so difficult to decide. Different moral theories each highlight different aspects most of us would take to be morally relevant: While consequentialists, for instance, typically care most about the number of people saved, some deontologists would argue that killing another person is unjustifiable no matter what. In trolley cases, it seems that there is something to be said in favor of each of the competing views.

This feature could also explain the emergence of order effects in the study just mentioned. The different order in which the cases are presented might emphasize different perspectives in such a way that the case discussed first (B, for example) could draw attention to certain aspects that might also be of moral relevance for the following case (A, for example). Pushing a person on the tracks whose body weight can stop the train (B) draws attention to the fact that, in flipping a switch (A), a human being would also be sacrificed for the lives of others. This perceived similarity could be reflected in the answers of the test participants and thereby explain why the conviction that the switch should be flipped in A decreases after the presentation of B. Footnote 7

Trolley cases require rather artificial and difficult moral judgments on which there is not even a consensus among those who have spent years dealing with them. Despite Schwitzgebel and Cushman’s studies, one might therefore still optimistically suppose that rational engagement may well have an impact on moral judgment as long as that engagement is concrete and relevant enough. In educational contexts, this would mean that we could still assume ethics teaching to have a positive influence on students’ attitudes at least towards those moral questions they actually come across in their everyday lives. Footnote 8

However, another study by Schwitzgebel and Rust ( 2014 ) indicates that we should not take this supposed influence on moral judgment to have an effect on moral action. Schwitzgebel and Rust examined the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of ethics professors, non-ethicist philosophers and professors in departments other than philosophy on eight different moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one’s mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. Schwitzgebel and Rust found that ethicists did not show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups with regard to any of these issues. Their conclusion reads as follows: “It remains to be shown that even a lifetime’s worth of philosophical moral reflection has any influence upon one’s real-world moral behavior” (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014 , 320).

First of all, it should be noted that this study at least contains good news for the relevance of the profession in relation to moral judgments: ethics professors do express different attitudes towards those ethical questions they come across in their own lives compared to other professors. It therefore seems that years of ethical reflection have apparently influenced their moral convictions to some extent at least. For example, 89% of ethics professors rated donating 10% of one’s income to charity as morally good, whereas only 73% of professors from subjects other than philosophy agreed with this belief. When asked how much professors should donate, only 9% of ethicists responded “nothing at all”, compared to 25% of professors from other disciplines (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014 , 312).

Despite these differences in moral judgments , however, the study also contains some bad news regarding moral action: the self-reported moral behavior of the different groups was nearly identical. 4% of the ethicists and 6% of the professors from other disciplines stated that they had not donated anything in 2008. Of those who had donated something, the geometric mean of the ethicists’ self-reported donation rate was 3.7% of income, compared to 3.6% in the case of professors from other subjects. Thus, non-philosophers even showed a stronger correlation between expressed normative attitudes and actual moral behavior. Footnote 9 The moral convictions of ethicists, on the other hand, were not found to be significantly reflected in their personal actions (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2014 , 313).

One should be careful not to generalize the results of these particular studies. The promotion of reasoning skills could still have a positive influence on moral judgment as well as on moral action in some regard at least. A different study that focusses on students rather than on ethics professors could be seen as an indication of this (Schwitzgebel et al. 2021 ): Students who discussed a required reading about how it is morally wrong to eat factory farmed meat reduced their rate of meat purchases at campus dining locations from 30% of purchases overall to 23%. In this particular case, philosophical instruction in the classroom seems to have been able to influence students’ real-world behavior. Footnote 10 Nevertheless, Schwitzgebel and Rust’s study still casts serious doubt on the claim that reasoning skills have a substantial positive influence on moral action.

2 Critical Reflection

In this section, I will discuss some recent proposals arguing that moral education should focus on the promotion of particular emotions rather than on cognitive skills. Then, I will emphasize the need for critical reflection on one’s emotions and the related beliefs to avoid the emergence of biased moral judgements. I will argue that the promotion of ethical reasoning skills enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs and thereby contributes to the development of their individual autonomy.

The studies discussed in the last section indicate that rational engagement with moral issues does not have a large impact on moral action. Similar kinds of skepticism have been expressed in the philosophy of education for some time now. It has even been argued that a purely cognitive engagement with moral issues has no effects at all on personal behavior. For example, Slote finds it questionable that “any amount of sophisticated or universal moral reasoning can actually motivate someone to do what she has concluded is morally obligatory or good” (Slote 2009 , 221).

Slote suggests that an evocation of empathy is more conducive to achieving the goals of moral education than an enhancement of rational competences. Intuitively, he argues, there is a close psychological connection between empathy and active care about moral issues, which is why schools should also be concerned with the promotion of empathy (Slote 2009 , 221). But is there any empirical evidence that empathic responses actually have such effects on personal behavior? And should teaching ethics therefore aim at the promotion of empathy?

Moral psychology has largely been concerned with the influence of emotional and intuitive responses on moral judgment. However, there is also some research on the relationship between various emotions and moral action. Here, one can indeed find some indications of the effects of empathy on acting in favor of others (Denham 2017 ). For example, it could be shown that empathy is positively correlated with helpfulness towards strangers. Furthermore, the presence of empathy increases interpersonal cooperation. It can also have a positive influence on the outcomes of negotiations between parties with competing goals. In a corresponding study, both sides achieved better outcomes compared to a control group when feeling empathic towards each other (Galinsky et al. 2008 ). In prisoner’s dilemma games, subjects cooperated on the basis of empathic responses even when they knew that their game partner had betrayed them (Batson and Ahmad 2001 ). These and other examples show that empathy can indeed have a positive impact on behavior in favor of others.

However, one should keep in mind that empathic responses are subject to a number of biases. This means that individuals who are in similar need of help are not always met with a similar degree of empathy. For instance, one empathizes more with people in spatial and temporal proximity. In addition, empathy is more pronounced towards those who are similar to oneself in some regard (Prinz 2011 ). This becomes also important when we think of promoting empathic responses by means of education. To mitigate this effect, a critical reflection on the partiality of empathic reactions should be a subject of ethics classes as well. The reading of literary narratives has been a recommended means of stimulating empathic responses in the context of moral education (Nussbaum 2003 , 99–100). However, the empathic responses that such texts evoke should pass a process of reflection in order to counteract the potential partiality typical for empathic reactions in this way. Footnote 11 When reading narrative texts in ethics classes, the aim should be to stimulate shared reflections on the respective empathic reactions evoked by these texts.

Moreover, questions about the consistency of moral judgments could be used to reflect on the emotions that underlie such judgments. Thereby, circumstances of the following kind could be addressed in ethics classes: Why do we think we are obligated to help someone in need when this person is nearby, whereas we do not consider ourselves to be obligated to help those who live far away? Why are the moral standards for keeping dogs as pets often higher than those for keeping pigs for meat production? Is this also due to differing empathic reactions to the suffering of dogs and pigs? Could our different empathic reactions explain these judgments – and do we thereby have contradicting beliefs? Such reflective processes can also be stimulated by using narrative texts to evoke empathic responses that are in tension with prior moral judgments. Literary texts that irritate the reader can be especially suitable for this particular reason (Nussbaum 2003 , 98).

Empirical studies also show that empathy is very easily exhausted. Overall, empathic responses are rather unstable. If we cannot help one person, we jump to the conclusion that we cannot help anyone else either. Negative emotions that result from not being able to help one person reduce positive feelings towards a person we could actually help (Västfjäll et al. 2015 ). Thus, while emotions such as empathy can motivate action in favor of others, we should keep in mind that empathic responses are highly susceptible to disruption. A critical reflection on these processes could counteract the fact that empathy is spatio-temporally biased and unstable, and it could contribute to developing a more reflective form of empathy.

Singer and Klimecki ( 2014 ) point out that an empathic response to suffering can result in two kinds of reactions: empathic distress and compassion. Empathic distress is accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect oneself from negative feelings. Compassion, on the other hand, is conceived of as a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering, which is accompanied by the motivation to help. Their own studies and studies by colleagues lead Singer and Klimecki to the optimistic assumption that compassion can be trained (Singer and Klimecki 2014 , 876). However, since compassion results from empathic responses, it also lacks a moral compass, which means that it could be in need of supervision by reason due to its potential biases (Persson and Savulescu 2018 ). Stimulating such processes and imparting the skills necessary for them is therefore an essential task of ethics education.

Beyond a reflection on empathic reactions, philosophy and ethics classes can stimulate further reflection processes on a range of other emotions. Students should learn to critically assess their emotions because these do not always point in the right direction. Moral misconduct can be especially the result of emotions such as anger, aggression and disgust. Footnote 12 It is important to be able to reflect on one’s emotional reactions in certain situations because unreflected emotions can change one’s own actions and judgments in problematic ways. Thus, one should be able to make oneself aware of such processes. Philosophy and ethics classes foster this kind of reflective ability.

Ethical reflections on the concept of “naturalness” are an example of this. There is nothing inherently positive about the fact that something is (allegedly) natural. Moreover, the evaluation of something that is dismissed as “unnatural” is often paired with a form of emotionally toned aversion. For instance, moral judgments in the field of sexual ethics often correlate with feelings of disgust. Footnote 13 A competence-oriented approach to ethics and philosophy teaching can foster reasoning skills that contribute to a critical examination of such emotions and the related beliefs. Footnote 14

Reflecting on one’s own beliefs, however, is not only important in cases in which they happen to be emotionally toned. In order to demonstrate intellectual independence one should reflect upon one’s own beliefs as well as on those of others. This process involves the examination and, if necessary, revision of personal beliefs, an avoidance of unreflected adoptions of the positions of others and a reasonable trust in the findings of experts. For this, certain skills are necessary. To mention a few examples, one must be able to identify false conclusions as such, to correctly classify alleged empirical evidence and to remain unimpressed by mere recourse to supposed authorities or reactions to one’s own opinions that have nothing to do with the issue itself. Competence-oriented approaches to philosophy and ethics teaching are designed precisely to promote abilities of these particular kinds. Footnote 15

The promotion of ethical reasoning skills also contributes to students’ individual autonomy. Various conceptions of individual autonomy include the independence of one’s deliberation from manipulation by others and the avoidance of an uncritical adoption of the positions of others, including their positions on morality. Such forms of intellectual independence can also be a goal of ethics classes. As Hand ( 2018 , 11) puts it: “[O]ur job as educators is to cultivate moral autonomy by enabling children to make their own independent judgements on the content and justification of morality.” Footnote 16

However, ethics classes do not only deal with moral issues in the narrower sense. They also include broader discussions on the content of a good life and allow ample scope for reflective processes. When we ask ourselves how we want to live, there is not just the one reasonable way to reply to this. Rather, there is a wide range of possibilities for each person to answer such questions autonomously. An autonomous person chooses on her own how to live, and this implies that she is not just drifting through life. Footnote 17 Instead, she reflects on what is important to her in life. Ethics classes improve student’s ability to reflect on the content of a good life and facilitate the capacity to choose on their own how to live. This contributes to their individual autonomy.

In summary, then, philosophy and ethics classes seem particularly well-suited to enable students to critically reflect on their own emotional reactions and ethical beliefs. For example, critical reflection on dubious standards of naturalness and associated feelings of disgust may change their individual moral judgments. Moreover, in enabling students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs, ethics teaching also contributes to the development of their individual autonomy.

3 Moral Discourse

Reflective skills, however, are central not only to thinking for oneself but also to discussing various issues with others. In modern societies, a number of moral questions arise that cannot simply be decided on an individual basis. Examples of this are how we evaluate the possibilities of human genetics or discussions about compulsory vaccination against certain diseases. In schools, students should acquire the skills necessary for participating in dialogues on moral issues of this kind. Footnote 18

Philosophy and ethics education could contribute this. Students should be enabled to engage with socio-politically relevant topics that have normative dimensions. For this purpose, it is important that they can identify the norms and values on which the different relevant arguments are based. To be aware of central positions in moral philosophy could help in such contexts to structure ethical discussions more clearly and to identify sources of dissent more easily. Footnote 19 For example, a controversy over how to allocate scarce medical resources may arise from the endorsement of consequentialist and non-consequentialist considerations by different parties. In order to identify such positions, even the prior examination of trolley cases could be a helpful methodological tool.

However, teaching ethics is not just a matter of uncovering dissent. Sometimes, it can seem that there is a lot that separates us due to the plurality of opinions in our societies or simply because of misunderstandings. Philosophy and ethics classes could help here to uncover some common ground. This includes developing the ability to recognize certain conflicts as moral conflicts in the first place. In addition, students should learn to distinguish between different presuppositions made in such conflicts (e.g., concerning the moral status of embryos) and the argumentative result about which there is disagreement (e.g., the moral permissibility of abortion). It is not unusual that even opposing parties happen to agree on some of the premises of their arguments. Those who have learned to distinguish between premises and conclusions need not restrict their focus on the result of an argumentation but can also reflect on the presuppositions made. In this way, students should learn that there can be beliefs we all agree on even in cases of dissent. Seeing which of these beliefs one actually shares is an important step in every reasonable conversation. Ethics education could promote such insights by fostering the ability to critically engage with moral argumentations.

Moreover, philosophy and ethics classes might help students to adopt a questioning view on the world that appreciates the limits of one’s own knowledge while still being aimed at understanding. This attitude is characterized by the readiness to revise previous convictions, an acknowledgment of new information and, ultimately, the willingness to be convinced by successful argumentation. What is at issue here, in other words, is the promotion of an attitude that not only aims at convincing others but also considers the possibility of being convinced oneself.

Sometimes, we fail to overcome disagreements despite having found some common ground. However, discussions of this kind could still prove to be very fruitful because they allow us to become aware of the basis of our disagreement. It may also become clear that the disagreement hinges on certain presuppositions that are controversial but not open to further discussion. One cannot expect to reach consensus on every morally relevant question. For example, controversial religious or ideological assumptions may be central to giving an answer to the question at issue. Nevertheless, developing an understanding of what divides us could also make our relations to one another better and more peaceful (for instance by reaching an agreement on how to deal with such conflicts).

Can philosophy and ethics classes really contribute to the achievement of such ambitious goals? In what follows, I will highlight some studies that actually point in this direction. They reveal that such classes can indeed fulfil high expectations and thereby indicate that fostering reasoning skills can achieve important goals of moral education.

Studies of the effects of competence-oriented philosophy instruction in middle schools showed that students felt to a greater extent than before that it was worthwhile to seriously discuss moral questions with their classmates. And their assessment was actually justified. After two years of philosophy education, the students had indeed learned to pay closer attention to the arguments of others and to reply to them with fitting objections. At the same time, they were increasingly able to evaluate their own claims more adequately. This gain in skills not only improved their own arguments but also their ability to reflect on the argumentative exchange from a meta-perspective. Such reflections were also increasingly articulated by the students in statements such as “You have a point.”, to which dialogue partners then often replied with their own meta-comments. Over time, meta-talk also became more reciprocal in nature. Whereas students initially ignored rare meta-level utterances, such meta statements were likely to initiate discussions later on (Kuhn et al. 2013b , 263 f.).

Due to this, the students’ development of new skills was identifiable in their argumentation itself but also in the meta-level communication they engaged in with one another. Students gradually began to communicate explicitly about epistemic norms that they expected one another to uphold by making remarks of the following kind: ‘‘What is your evidence for that?’’ or ‘‘Please respond to our argument. Do not make a completely new argument.’’ or “I know what side you’re on, but what I’m saying is that you aren’t seeing both sides of the argument.” (Kuhn et al. 2013a , 474). Overall, this led both to a further development of the quality of the discourse and, on a meta-level, to a better understanding of what characterizes a successful argumentative exchange.

As the philosophy course proceeded, the students developed greater specificity and skill to address direct counter-argumentation. When their opponents attempted to sidestep an argument, the students came back and reiterated the claim, asking again for their partner to respond to it. Moreover, they began to address the opponent’s broader position rather than to focus narrowly on the opponent’s immediately preceding utterance (Crowell and Kuhn 2014 , 376).

A successful argumentative exchange does not just profit from the development of rather formal reasoning skills but also from a closer look at the content, such as a clearer focus on the question at stake. In this respect, the role of more sophisticated philosophical skills also became obvious in an earlier study (Kuhn 1991 ). Here, it was striking that doctoral students of philosophy were particularly good at grasping the complexity of an ethical problem and at identifying possible reasons for dissent. They saw one such reason, for example, in the fact that the question at issue was formulated imprecisely and could thus be understood and answered differently (Kuhn 1991 , 262).

These studies therefore provide some reason for optimism. Judging by their findings, a competence-oriented philosophy and ethics education can at least increase the quality of the discourse on moral issues. Footnote 20

4 Education for Sustainable Development

Finally, an example will be used to show how important promoting the ability to engage in moral discourse can be. The upshot here is that even if it were true that a competence-oriented approach is unsuited to directly influence individuals to act morally better, it could still contribute to a no less important goal by improving societal discourse overall. This will be demonstrated by looking at a form of moral education that has been increasingly called for in recent years: environmental and climate education.

In the fall of 2015, the United Nations adopted a global sustainability agenda, the so-called Agenda 2030, which also explicitly mentions education in the field of sustainable development as one of its goals. At first, one could again assume that the primary aim of such education is to get people to act morally. Due to the dangers of climate change, they should save emissions and reduce their individual consumption. In this way, they could meet justified moral demands, such as demands for intergenerational justice. One could therefore think that the point of such forms of education is an insight into justified moral demands in order to make people act accordingly.

Since certain emotions have been shown to be relevant for individual moral action, one could also assume that appealing to such emotions would be a good strategy to motivate the desired environmental action among students. There are indeed a number of empirical studies indicating an influence of emotions on certain forms of environmental action. Footnote 21 However, it has also been shown that these effects are quick to fizzle out. For example, a video with sad background music showing how polar bears and penguins are affected by global warming led to a higher willingness to donate immediately after watching the film. Just one hour later, however, this effect was already diminished significantly. The viewers’ willingness to act was only being increased during the period in which the emotions were still present (Schwartz and Loewenstein 2017 ).

Instead, one could hope that an argumentative engagement with the ethical dimension of climate change would have a more stable and lasting influence on individual action. However, the question arises at this point whether there really is such a strong connection between argumentatively influenced moral judgments and individual action. Even if one were skeptical in that regard, however, this would not matter as much as one might be initially tempted to think. After all, education in the field of sustainable development should not only aim at influencing individual consumer choices. Rather, an important goal is to improve the societal discourse on sustainability issues on a more general basis. Philosophy and ethics classes can make an important contribution to this.

Of course, an examination of the reasons speaking in favor of sustainable action would give students the opportunity to adopt these reasons and to make their own actions more sustainable. However, they can also acquire a skill that goes beyond this. By engaging with these issues argumentatively, they gain the ability to take a well-founded position on environmental and climate protection issues in discussions with others. This allows them not only to decide for themselves how important climate protection is to them but also to participate in societal discourses dealing with moral issues of this kind.

Such joint reflection is a prerequisite for any democratic community’s ability to adequately respond to various challenges. As the implementation of the 2030 Agenda requires socio-political decision-making on a larger scale, it takes competent citizens who have the abilities needed to contribute to this. They must learn to formulate shared positions and also be able to discuss the viability of their normative foundations. Questions of sustainability are often linked, for example, to the importance one is willing to grant to the demands of future generations. Therefore, among other things, one must enter into a conversation about such questions of intergenerational justice. Once again, philosophy and ethics classes can provide the necessary skills for this.

Within a society, a prerequisite for agreements on certain positions is a conversation among reasonable participants. Such exchanges can lead to joint decisions that have the ability to endure in the long term and that are supported by as many people as possible. This is also particularly important for education in the field of sustainable development. Ultimately, the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development cannot be achieved by merely changing individual consumer behavior but only through a transformation supported by a major part of our society. As we have seen, competence-oriented philosophy and ethics teaching can indeed make a valuable contribution to this.

5 Conclusion

A societal expectation often placed on ethics education is that it should make the individual actions of students morally better. To this, I have replied by pointing out other important goals of philosophy and ethics education. The teaching of these subjects should enable students to reflect critically on their own ethical beliefs, to deal with moral questions in a well-founded way and to take a position on them. If ethics teaching succeeds in this, it also contributes to the development of individual autonomy.

In addition, ethics and philosophy classes can enable students to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others. One should have the skills necessary to identify such questions, refine questions that are too general, find shared presuppositions despite different answers to these questions and formulate solutions to remaining dissents. Such skills are important for the functioning of our democracy, and ethics and philosophy teaching can make an important contribution to their development among students. Thereby, school education can not only counteract hardened ideological fronts that stand in the way of reasonable discourse but also impart those skills necessary for the interlocutors to develop together with each other.

Thus, even if selected studies in moral psychology cast doubt on the idea that the promotion of argumentative competences makes individual action morally better, there still remain other goals of a competence-oriented approach of teaching ethics and philosophy that are not called into question by such studies. First, such an approach enables students to critically reflect on their ethical beliefs. Second, it allows them to explore ethical questions in a joint conversation with others and fosters those skills that are necessary for any successful societal discourse on moral issues. Both are particularly important goals of moral education anyway.

See Kriesel ( 2017 , 12).

For further emphasis on the promotion of ethical reasoning skills in several European countries, see e.g. Burkard ( 2020 ), Burkard et al. ( 2021 ), Kojcic ( 2018 ), Oosthoek ( 2018 ), Martin ( 2018 ).

See, for example, Hand ( 2018 ) for this aim. Fostering reasoning skills as a general educational goal has been defended by Siegel ( 1988 ) and ( 2017 ). In critical thinking courses, the principles of critical thinking are sometimes taught by application to concrete real-world examples as well. Abrami et al. ( 2008 ) find this approach to be particularly effective.

For a detailed discussion of these studies, especially with regard to the criticism of intuitionism that often comes along with them, see Burkard ( 2012 ).

Sauer ( 2021 , 151), for instance, draws the following skeptical conclusion from the current state of research: “Recent evidence from moral psychology and cognitive science shows that many of our moral judgments are in fact based on such unreliable processes. That is why we should often not engage in moral judgment, simply because we are no good at it.”

Schwitzgebel and Cushman ( 2015 , 136) are themselves puzzled about this and suspect that there is a level of philosophical expertise that reduces the influence of factors such as order and frame upon one’s moral judgments, even though they have yet to find empirical evidence of it.

Rini ( 2015 ) also suggests that it could be due to a lack of stability in philosophers’ views on trolley cases that they are so susceptible to biases and distortions in such contexts. Coming from a slightly different angle, Nado ( 2014 , 635) and Kauppinen ( 2018 , 19) suggest that it could be due to the decontextualized nature of the experimental setting that philosophers cannot properly make use of their ability to correct for their immediate biases in reacting to the cases. In a similar vein, Drożdżowicz ( 2018 ) and Egeler and Ross ( 2020 ) point to other capacities that could justify the notion of philosophical expertise in thinking about and discussing moral issues.

The use of trolley problems in the ethics classroom is not unpopular. Against this practice, Martena ( 2018 ) argues that one should rather ask the students to describe exemplars of moral situations they have faced in their own lives, or ones they have come across in movies or books.

The correlation was 0.62 for non-philosophers and 0.33 for ethicists.

With regard to the issue of vegetarianism, Schönegger and Wagner ( 2019 ) even found that German-speaking ethics professors do eat less meat than their colleagues.

The value of such a process of reflection is also mentioned by Nussbaum, and its importance is also emphasized by Merkel ( 2020 ).

See Teper et al. ( 2015 , 8). Negative emotions, however, can also serve a useful moral function. For example, Fehr/Gächter ( 2002 ) point out that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment.

Prinz ( 2009 , 233) explains the genesis of this connection as follows: “By labelling certain sexual acts as unnatural, Church leaders may have been able to tap into parishioners’ biological dispositions to disgust. Disgust obeys a logic of contamination. If sex is construed as dirty, then sex with multiple partners can be seen as a way to spread impurity.”

An approach of this kind can also foster the students’ abilities to make fine distinctions among their emotional experiences. As Cameron et al. ( 2013 ) have shown, individuals who are more skilled in making these distinctions are less susceptible to arbitrary emotional influences on their moral judgments, such as the influence of disgust.

A study by Iordanou ( 2010 ) reveals the transfer, and hence generality, of developing argument skills but also suggests the importance as well as the feasibility of fostering argument skills within science and social domains.

Hand ( 2018 , 91) only subscribes to this goal with regard to moral standards of an uncertain justificatory status , because he thinks that moral education “requires that moral standards are taught in different ways depending on whether they are justified, unjustified or of uncertain justificatory status”.

See Raz ( 1986 , 371).

This is also emphasized by Haydon ( 2003 ).

See also Burkard ( 2020 , 64–66).

Despite this general optimism, one could also draw methodological conclusions from these studies, e.g., that a written argumentative exchange can be particularly successful, see Kuhn ( 2018 , 123).

For an overview, see Brosch ( 2021 ).

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Valentin Salein, Anne Burkard and Alex Madva for written comments on earlier drafts of this paper. During workshops and colloquia, I particularly benefited from comments on this text by Anna Goppel, Valeska Martin, Linda Merkel, Corinna Mieth, Johanna Privitera, Peter Schaber and Lukas Tank. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to Gregor Hochstetter, Peter Königs and two anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions helped to improve the manuscript in important ways.

I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) within the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Human Abilities”, grant number 409272951.

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Meyer, K. Moral Education Through the Fostering of Reasoning Skills. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 27 , 41–55 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10367-3

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