Abstract:

The current excessive utilitarian educational momentum has overly elevated the instrumental value of education, which adversely affects the healthy ecology of education. This utilitarian tendency is also reflected in moral education, which mainly adheres to anthroposocial centrism but without a “human being” in sight. The majority of the judgments of the moral cognition and behavioral results remain in the paper-and-pencil test, and the content of moral education lacks relevance and modernity. The tendency towards utilitarian education is often equated with the idea that education is too “Utilitarian” by all sectors of society, but there are differences and similarities with the theoretical roots of utilitarian education. Under the pressure of reality and the challenges of the times, in order to overcome the shortcomings of utilitarian education, which emphasizes too much on consequences, we need to clarify the theoretical roots of utilitarian education and find a new type of ethical principle to solve the problem of moral education, which makes it difficult to balance the goodness of beliefs and the goodness of results of behaviors. The study concludes that the ethic of responsibility, which takes into account the goodness of motivation and the goodness of results, is the ethical approach that we must follow at present, which can not only overcome the theoretical drawback of utilitarian education that emphasizes too much on consequences, but also extend the human society-centered ethical order to the natural world and future society, and guide the real life world and social practice. In order to solve the problem of utilitarian moral education and to move from utilitarian education, which overly pursues visible educational achievements, to responsibility ethics education, which takes into account both the goodness of beliefs and the goodness of results, it is necessary for all walks of life to make joint efforts to break the ethical constraints of anthropocentrism for sustainable education development, deepen the reform of evaluation, establish a human-centered educational philosophy, and to rectify the phenomenon of over-pursuing visible educational achievements. Meanwhile, it's important to pay attention to learners' existing experience and intrinsic motivation, and face up to the real needs of real life and educational practice.

Key words: utilitarian education, utilitarianism, ethic of responsibility, responsibility ethics education