Ethical Capability

Watch now: To find out more about this curriculum area, watch ‘Understanding the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0, Capabilities’ on the Resources page.

Rationale and Aims

Rationale

The Ethical Capability curriculum explores what it means for both an individual and a society to live well, supporting the development of informed citizenship at local, regional and global levels.

Students explore concepts such as right, wrong, fairness, equality and respect. They discuss the meaning of these concepts and use their understanding to help them reach a position on ethical significance in a range of contexts, that is, what matters ethically, why it matters and how strongly it matters. They explore what underpins ethical perspectives, building their capacity to understand different vantage points on ethical issues, and how and why people might agree or disagree on the ethical significance of situations. They examine how ethical concepts, ethical perspectives and ethical frameworks work together to help people make and justify decisions in response to ethical issues that could involve an individual, a group, animals or the wider environment.

Students learn how to analyse their own and different ethical perspectives and how to refer to ethical concepts and ethical frameworks to help them deliberate with others and be accountable as members of a democratic community. They are enabled to build a strong, open-minded and coherent personal, social and environmentally orientated ethical outlook. They develop knowledge and skills that foster confidence in managing different ethical contexts, disagreements and uncertainty, and an awareness of the strengths and limitations of their responses to ethical issues.

Aims

The Ethical Capability curriculum aims to develop knowledge and skills that will enable students to:

• identify, analyse, evaluate and respond to ethical issues, recognising areas of contestability
• reflect on diverse ethical perspectives, including their own
• engage with the challenges of managing ethical decision-making and actions for individuals and groups
• cultivate open-mindedness and reasonableness.