Narrative Engagement: An Alternative Approach to Moral Development and Transformation

The author discusses recent trends for professional organizations to develop regulations that codify the "moral consensus" of a group of professionals, and for these codes to be used as the basis for the ethics education of their students. The author argues that a much more nuanced approach to ethics education should be taken. She identifies the limitations associated with deontology and utilitarianism in moral education and proposes an alternative strategy of moral development and transformation that relies on a poststructralist, narrative approach to help students of different moral loyalties and orientations develop their own sense of moral identity and imagination.