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Vol. 3 No. 4 (2026): October

Copyright (c) 2026 Langelihle Benard Jele, Sibonise Mabengwana, Prof Beatrice Okyere-Manu

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The Consequentialist Role of Ethics Education in Developing Students’ Moral Values: An Ethical Analysis

https://doi.org/10.62810/jssh.v3i4.357
Langelihle Benard Jele
University of KwaZulu-Natal, College of Humanities, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7080-0799
Sibonise Mabengwana
Walter Sisulu University, Faculty of Education, Mthatha, South Africa
Prof Beatrice Okyere-Manu
University of KwaZulu-Natal, College of Humanities, Howard, South Africa

Corresponding Author(s) : Langelihle Benard Jele

220070172@stu.ukzn.ac.za

Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 3 No. 4 (2026): October

Abstract

Contemporary high school curricula, including South Africa’s Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), remain heavily content- and assessment-driven, leaving limited space for the deliberate cultivation of moral character (Department of Basic Education, 2012; Bourke et al., 2020). While the literature widely asserts the value of ethics education, comparatively few studies evaluate this value through the systematic lens of a single, explicit ethical theory or specify which values are being developed. This study conducts a consequentialist ethical examination of the importance of teaching ethics in schools for developing students’ moral values. Adopting a qualitative desktop/secondary-literature design, a systematic search of JSTOR, Google Scholar, and PubMed (2019–2024) using defined search terms and inclusion/exclusion criteria yielded a purposively selected corpus, which was analyzed thematically with consequentialism as the interpretive lens. Ethics education is found to promote critical thinking, moral reasoning, decision-making, and social-emotional competence, while also introducing risks of value conflict, curricular overload, and assessment difficulty; when weighed against one another, the net utility is judged favorable. The study offers a theoretically grounded, consequentialist justification for integrating ethics education into secondary curricula and provides targeted recommendations for educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers.

Keywords

Ethics Education Curriculum Integration Consequentialism Values Formation Secondary School Moral Development
Jele, L. B., Mabengwana, S., & Okyere-Manu, P. B. (2026). The Consequentialist Role of Ethics Education in Developing Students’ Moral Values: An Ethical Analysis. Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 3(4), 928–940. https://doi.org/10.62810/jssh.v3i4.357
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