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29Autonomy, rationality, and religious initiation: replies to Hand, Wareham, Gheaus, Lewin, and ClaytonJournal of Philosophy of Education 58 (1): 143-151. 2024.John Tillson concludes the symposium on his Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence by replying to his five respondents. The reply focusses on Michael Hand’s defence of parental rights to raise their children in their faith; Ruth Wareham’s suggestion that the value of autonomy rules out a wider range of impermissible religious influences than Tillson’s account is able to; David Lewin’s alternative criteria for ethical influence and scepticism about rationality’s objectivity; Anca Gheaus’ …Read more
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26Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence: introduction to the symposiumJournal of Philosophy of Education 58 (1): 99-103. 2024.It is morally impermissible for parents, educators, and others to initiate children into religious belief systems. That is the provocative conclusion of John Tillson’s Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence—the book which is the focus of the present symposium. This introduction briefly summarizes the book’s arguments together with the criticisms levelled against them. The symposium includes critiques by Matthew Clayton, Anca Gheaus, Michael Hand, David Lewin, and Ruth Wareham. Clayton an…Read more
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12The Aims of Upbringing, Reasonable Affect, and Parental Rights: A Response to Paul Hirst's Autobiographical Reflections'Journal of Philosophy of Education. forthcoming.In a candid autobiographical chapter (Hirst 2010), which numbers among his last writings, Paul Hirst subjects his upbringing within a fundamentalist Christian sect to searching moral appraisal. He concludes that his parents wronged him by religiously indoctrinating him, stifling his emotional development, and arbitrarily restricting his range of valuable morally permissible experiences. This upbringing undermined his autonomy and—more fundamentally, on his account—kept him from living the life h…Read more
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21Pedagogies of Punishment: The Ethics of Discipline in Education (edited book)Bloomsbury. 2023.Written by interdisciplinary authors from the fields of educational policy, early childhood education, history, political philosophy, law, and moral philosophy, this volume addresses the use of disciplinary action across varied educational contexts. Much of the punishment of children occurs in non-criminal contexts, in educational and social settings, and schools are institutions where young people are subject to disciplinary practices and justifications that are quite unlike those found elsewhe…Read more
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20On Deciding The Aims and Content of Public SchoolingEducational Theory 73 (1): 90-115. 2023.In this paper, John Tillson defends an approach to deciding the aims and content of public schooling from the critique of Public Reason Liberalism. The approach that he defends is an unrestricted pairing of the Epistemic Criterion and of the Momentousness Criterion. On the Epistemic Criterion, public schooling should align students' credence with credibility. On the Momentousness Criterion, public schooling ought to include content that it is costly for children to lack the correct view about, w…Read more
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10Knowledge, Moment, and Acceptability: How to Decide Public Educational Aims and CurriculaPhilosophy of Education 76 (3): 42-55. 2020.
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19Respect, Concern, and the Wrongness of Manipulation in EducationPhilosophy of Education 77 (2): 81-85. 2021.
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27Rationality, Religious Belief, and Shaping Dispositions: Replies to Carruth, Gatley, Levy, Kotzee and RochaStudies in Philosophy and Education 41 (1): 135-149. 2021.
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24Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence: An OverviewStudies in Philosophy and Education 41 (1): 111-112. 2021.
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111Wrongful Influence in Educational ContextsIn Kathryn Ann Hytten (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education, Oxford University Press. 2022.When and why are coercion, indoctrination, manipulation, deception, and bullshit morally wrongful modes of influence in the context of educating children? Answering this question requires identifying what valid claims different parties have against one another regarding how children are influenced. Most prominently among these, it requires discerning what claims children have regarding whether and how they and their peers are influenced, and against whom they have these claims. The claims they h…Read more
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35Knowledge, Moment, and Acceptability: How to Decide Public Educational Aims and CurriculaPhilosophy of Education 3 (76). 2020.In this paper I defend a pairing of the “Epistemic Criterion” and of the “Momentousness Criterion” from a critique in Clayton and Stevens’s advocacy of the “Acceptability Requirement.” I argue that where it is valuable for people to set their own ends, they can only fully meaningfully do this in light of facts and free of misinformation. It is the duty of educators to put them in this position; it is then students' prerogative to fail to live meaningfully. While children have no duty to perfect …Read more
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27Is Knowledge Insertion Desirable?Educational Theory 70 (4): 483-505. 2020.In this article, John Tillson discusses the conditions under which what he calls “knowledge insertion” would be desirable for the one who has knowledge inserted. He argues that making use of knowledge insertion would not be cost free; in particular, it would come at the price of relationship goods realized through teacher–learner relationships, and of the achievement of learning, at least for the knowledge inserted. Despite these costs, though, Tillson concludes that knowledge insertion would mo…Read more
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28Deciding for OthersJournal of Philosophy of Education 54 (5): 1349-1355. 2020.Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.
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6Children’s moral rights and UK school exclusionsTheory and Research in Education 18 (4). 2020.This article argues that uses of exclusion by schools in the United Kingdom (UK) often violate children’s moral rights. It contends that while exclusion is not inherently incompatible with children’s moral rights, current practice must be reformed to align with them. It concludes that as a non-punitive preventive measure, there may be certain circumstances in schools where it is necessary to exclude a child in order to safeguard the weighty interests of others in the school community. However, r…Read more
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15Sympathy, Social Stability and Those Left Out: Querying A Theory of Moral EducationJournal of Philosophy of Education 53 (4): 649-655. 2019.
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13John TILLSON, Law’s The war for children’s minds: a critical commentary of StephenBajo Palabra 5. 2016.Reseña.
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73Children, Religion and the Ethics of InfluenceBloomsbury. 2019.In Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence, John Tillson develops a theory concerning which kinds of formative influence are morally permissible, impermissible or obligatory. Applying this theory to the case of religion, he argues that religious initiation in childhood is morally impermissible whether conducted by parents, teachers or others. Tillson addresses questions such as: how we come to have the ethical responsibilities we do, how we understand religion, how ethical and religious c…Read more
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14Children, religion and the ethics of influenceDissertation, Dublin City University. 2015.This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which …Read more
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71Assessment, Truth and Religious StudiesStudies in Philosophy and Education (2): 195-210. 2019.This paper addresses the question of what should determine whether students’ answers to closed questions are marked as correct or incorrect in the context of formal religious education, and when their answers to open ended questions should be given more or less credit. Drawing on insights from Craig Bourne, Emily Caddick Bourne and Clare Jarmy, I argue that a combination of judged truth, and a range of well-argued cases about what ought to be believed given certain premises should constrain thes…Read more
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128Is it distinctively wrong to simulate doing wrong?Ethics and Information Technology 20 (3): 205-217. 2018.This paper is concerned with whether there is a moral difference between simulating wrongdoing and consuming non-simulatory representations of wrongdoing. I argue that simulating wrongdoing is (as such) a pro tanto wrong whose wrongness does not tarnish other cases of consuming representations of wrongdoing. While simulating wrongdoing (as such) constitutes a disrespectful act, consuming representations of wrongdoing (as such) does not. I aim to motivate this view in part by bringing a number of…Read more
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33Rival Conceptions of Religious EducationIn Paul Smeyers (ed.), International Handbook of Philosophy of Education, Springer. pp. 1059-1082. 2018.The sense of religious education under discussion in this chapter will be the formative influence of children, with respect to religions. Such influence could be anti-religious, pro-religious, or neutral about the value of religion. What I will call ‘the Basic Question’ asks ‘how ought children to be influenced with respect to religions?’ In this chapter we will assess a range of forms that question can take in different kinds of societies. We will distinguish and explore questions regarding the…Read more
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39Review of What Is A Public Education and Why We Need It: A Philosophical Inquiry into Self - Development, Cultural Commitment, and Public Engagement, Walter Feinberg (review)Studies in Philosophy and Education 37 (5): 529-536. 2018.
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53Is all formative influence immoral?Ethics and Education 13 (2): 208-220. 2018.Is it true that all formative influence is unethical, and that we ought to avoid influencing children (and indeed anyone at all)? There are more or less defensible versions of this doctrine, and we shall follow some of the strands of argument that lead to this conclusion. It seems that in maintaining that all influence is immoral, one commits oneself to the idea that children have innate teleologies, that these may be frustrated, and that to frustrate a child’s innate teleology would be to wrong…Read more
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5Elmer Thiessen and the Ethics of EvangelismJournal of Education and Christian Belief 17 (2): 243-258. 2013.IN THIS PAPER I provide a critical commentary of Elmer Thiessen's The Ethics of Evangelism. Following an overview of the book's project and strategies, I discuss two stages of the project in detail. The first is Thiessen's analysis of ‘religious proselytism’; the second is Thiessen's arguments that evangelizing can be a good thing to do in itself. Finally, I summarize what I think are the chief merits of the book and suggest for whom it will be of particular interest.
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5The Problem of Rational Moral EnlistmentTheory and Research in Education 15 (2): 165-181. 2017.How can one bring children to recognize the requirements of morality without resorting only to non-rational means of persuasion (i.e. what rational ground can be offered to children for their moral enlistment)? Michael Hand has recently defended a foundationalist approach to answering this question and John White has responded by a) criticizing Hand’s solution to the Problem of Rational Moral Enlistment, and b) attempting to circumvent the problem by suggesting a Humean route which understands m…Read more
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41Modify Your Body!Philosophy Now 91 53-54. 2012.Fiction. John Tillson watches a world going mad.
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33Towards a Theory of Propositional Curriculum ContentJournal of Philosophy of Education 48 (1): 137-148. 2014.This article addresses two questions. The first question is this: ‘when ought teachers to encourage or discourage students’ belief of a given proposition on the one hand (call this ‘directive teaching’), and when ought teachers to simply facilitate students’ understanding of that proposition, on the other (call this ‘non-directive teaching’) (cf. the work of Michael Hand)? The second question is this: ‘which propositional content should curricula address?’ An answer to these questions would amou…Read more
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61In Favour of Ethics Education, Against Religious EducationJournal of Philosophy of Education 45 (4): 675-688. 2011.The questions that I address are: ‘What ought to become of Religious Education (RE)?’ and ‘To what extent do non-religious beliefs belong in RE?’ I will argue that there are compelling reasons for studying religious and non-religious views alongside each other, but that there are serious objections to doing this in the context of any subject called ‘religious education’ and that a new compulsory, national curriculum subject called Ethics would be an appropriate context for such study
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Liverpool Hope UniversitySenior Lecturer In Philosophy of Education
Liverpool, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Education |
Social Epistemology |
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |