From Obedience-Based Moral Education to Subjectivity-Oriented Moral Education

In moral education practice, a common judgment bias exists: the more obedient, "sensible," and considerate of the overall situation students are, the more likely they are to be regarded as morally good; yet when students express their true feelings, maintain their own boundaries, or question unreasonable arrangements, they are easily categorized as "immature" or "selfish." This paper argues that the deeper problem behind this phenomenon is not merely the disciplinary orientation of moral education methods, nor merely the lack of experience in value indoctrination, but an imbalance among other-regarding goodness, self-regarding goodness, and rationality in the structure of students' moral personality. Obedience-based moral education often asks students, in the name of goodness, to be considerate of others, respect authority, and obey the collective; in practice, however, it may unilaterally amplify students' other-regarding personality attributes—caring for others, respecting others, trusting others, and yielding to others—while continuously suppressing their self-regarding personality attributes—self-protection, self-care, self-reflection, self-esteem, and freedom—and replacing students' own rational judgment with external authority. This produces an obedient personality characterized by "high other-regarding goodness—low self-regarding goodness—weak rationality." Based on an analysis of human nature structure and personality attributes, this paper distinguishes two types of personality attributes: self-regarding goodness and other-regarding goodness. Self-regarding goodness refers to an individual's legitimate maintenance of their own life, dignity, development, and freedom; other-regarding goodness refers to an individual's capacity to care for others and participate in public life. The two are not a moral opposition between good and evil, but a dialectically unified relationship of mutual constraint and mutual transformation in real personality. True fostering of virtue through education is not to cultivate "good children" who merely obey, but to cultivate subjectivity-oriented personalities capable of making rational judgments between self-protection and protecting others, self-care and caring for others, self-esteem and respecting others, and freedom and respecting others' freedom. The focus of moral education therefore needs to shift from "obedience" to "judgment," and from one-way compliance to a balance between self-regarding and other-regarding goodness.