Exploring the Foundation of Agreeable Contents in National-Level Character Education

This study addresses the issue of overly diverse national-level character education programs lacking a unified starting point, and proposes a foundation of agreeable content to resolve this challenge. First, the concept of ‘agreeable’ is analyzed within the framework of contractualism, highlighting its structure, meaning, and necessity. Second, to establish a foundation for agreeable content in national-level character education—essentially, to define a starting point—the end point is identified as ‘establishing a sustainable cooperative system’. Finally, the study examines two key issues within such a system: the meaning of self-interest and the status of self-interest among different individuals. It argues that these issues should be connected to the minimum concept of morality, leading to the deduction of ‘morality as fairness’ as an agreeable starting point. Moreover, the study emphasizes that while ‘morality as fairness’ is not the only possible starting point, it is the foundational one, serving as the starting point that all others must pass through.