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

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.