Critical Thinking: Evidence that It’s Not All About Evidence

Moral reasoning, called ethical reasoning in the universities, is not a routine focus of direct, systematic instruction in k12 secular classrooms. I’ve looked for it in the anchor standards of the CCSS and found it mostly a tangential aim. CCSS does not find moral reasoning an element of either college or career readiness.

For example, Grade 3 ELA standards require students to determine the central message, lesson, or moral of stories, including fables and myths, and explain how this moral is conveyed through key details in the text. Such activities don’t call for teaching moral reasoning.

The core of the Core is teaching literary analysis through so-called “close reading.” The standard focuses on students' ability to identify and extract an already-established “moral” from a text, then explain how literary devices and details support that predetermined message. This is fundamentally a reading comprehension skill like most of the English-Language Art standards aim to foster,

How is the sense of “moral” in the context of a fairy tale just the opposite of the sense of “moral” in the context of human behavior?

Notice: Here we have a question masquerading as a premise. If you are comprehending the message of this text, you already know what I think. This rhetorical move is called “leading the witness” in a court of law and would be disallowed. Is “finding the moral of a story” the opposite of “moral reasoning?”

In fairy tales, "moral" refers to a simple, predetermined lesson, often binary and absolute, meant to guide behavior through clear rules. Consider "honesty is always rewarded" or "greed leads to downfall.”

A poor orphan girl has only her clothes and a piece of bread. She gives away everything she owns to those more needy—her cap, coat, dress, and even her shift—until she stands naked in the woods. Suddenly, stars fall from heaven as shining talers (coins), and she finds herself dressed in the finest linen. She is rich for the rest of her life.

A farmer owns a wonderful goose that lays a golden egg each day. But growing impatient with getting just one egg per day, he kills the goose to get all the eggs at once. Finding no eggs inside, he loses everything, destroying his own source of wealth through his greed.

What lifetime lessons are teachers teaching? Morals are rules you follow. If you do good things, stars will fall from the sky. What constitutes a good thing? Giving away the shirt on your back.

This is critical analysis cuts to the heart of why fairy tale "morals" are actually anti-moral reasoning. Let me explain how. Anti-moral thinking is fixed, algorithmic. If you do X (give away everything), then Y will happen (stars fall/riches appear). The rules are absolute and unquestionable—no thinking required. Memorize and obey.

Good deeds are often extreme (giving until naked) rather than reasoned (under what conditions would it be wise and just to kill the goose that lays golden eggs?). In some ways, Donald Trump is killing the goose, thinking that he will get all the golden eggs. Don’t expect him to give you the shirt off of his back.

Magic ensures justice, removing real-world complexity. This is indoctrination, not reasoning. It teaches children that morality is following predetermined rules, memorizing what counts as "good,” expecting supernatural rewards. questioning or analyzing the rules, never weighing competing needs or contexts.

So when teachers have students identify these "morals," they're actually teaching the opposite of moral reasoning. They're teaching moral obedience. Ethics is about remembering and following rules rather than thinking through complex situations. This strips away the very essence of moral reasoning: the active process of working through ethical challenges using critical thinking. Extreme, unreasoned behavior is virtuous or not according to the rules of the game, rather than teaching thoughtful ethical decision-making.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ethical thinking is critical reasoning that precedes decisions to act in the real world, totally unnecessary if the decision is already rule-bound in someone else’s fantasy world. Unfortunately, critical analysis of empirical arguments dominates course syllabi as a learning outcome—everyone in the field of English teaches critical thinking and close reading for empirical evidence in text, for example—but moral reasoning? Not in the standards. The issues worth considering are interpretive or factual, not behavioral.

The difference between empirical critical thinking and ethical critical thinking begins with the kind of questions addressed. Why do humans traveling into space lose bone density? The simplicity of this question calls for a scientific stance. A leading question, this “why” question does not require critical thinking. It requires reading comprehension.

But teachers could massage the question to simulate critical thinking. Agree or disagree and provide evidence for your judgement: “Humans traveling into space experience unhealthy changes to their bodies.” The chapter provides evidence about bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and other physiological changes. Students can easily cite these facts to support their agreement.

But this is still primarily reading comprehension and fact-finding, not critical thinking where nobody knows the answer up front. They're just locating and restating evidence that's already provided to support a prefabricated conclusion. Treating students like hamsters going through the motions scaffolds their capacity to live in hamster cages with spinning treadmills. But does it make them college and career ready?

In contrast, ethical questions lack this empirical simplicity and occasionally scientific certitude. "Should humans continue space exploration given the health risks to astronauts?" Now we're in ethical territory requiring actual critical thinking.

How do we weigh individual health risks against potential benefits to humanity? Is it ethical to ask people to risk their health for scientific advancement? What level of risk is acceptable for voluntary participants? How do we balance astronaut safety with scientific progress?Who should make these decisions?

What about the Oppenheimer question?

These questions can't be answered by finding literal facts in a text, though facts are always good to have no doubt. They require wrestling with values, priorities, and competing goods.

Even with all the empirical data about health risks to astronauts, the ethical decision isn't clear-cut. It requires reasoning through complex tradeoffs and defending philosophical positions about human rights, scientific progress, acceptable risk, and informed consent.

So while empirical critical thinking often involves evaluating evidence for factual claims, ethical critical thinking involves the harder task of reasoning about what we ought to do in situations where facts alone can't help.

Using this example, we can build a series of empirical critical thinking activities prerequisite to answering the deeper moral questions. What evidence exists to support the premise that space travel results in bone density loss? What do scientists know with confidence? The first phase of critical thinking is exploring and analyzing the quality of the evidence.

Astronauts can lose 1% of bone mass per month in space. The rate of loss is approximately 10 times faster than in people with osteoporosis on Earth. Some bone loss can be mitigated through intensive exercise protocols in space, but recovery after return to Earth varies significantly between individuals. Many astronauts never regain their pre-astronaut bone density.¹

Silence about ethical reasoning in the CCSS likely means that the framers made a conscious decision to avoid stepping into the quagmire of Constitutional separation of church and state. Civil libertarians and others have voiced concern that conservative Christians and others are trying to impose their values on students².

Federal courts, they point out, consistently have interpreted the First Amendment’s prohibition on the establishment of religion to forbid state sponsorship of prayer and most other religious activities in public schools.

The fallacy lies in conflating universal ethical principles with their religious expressions. The Golden Rule ("treat others as you wish to be treated") appears across cultures and philosophical traditions. Confucianism speaks of reciprocity. Buddhism emphasizes compassion and non-harm. Greek philosophers explored justice and virtue. Secular humanism bases ethics on human dignity and reason. Indigenous traditions often emphasize harmony and mutual respect.

The ability to reason ethically is human, not necessarily religious. We see young children naturally wrestling with fairness and harm before any formal moral education. The tools of ethical reasoning—starting with factual understanding and moral premises, analyzing consequences, considering multiple perspectives, weighing competing values—are cognitive skills independent of religious belief.

Yet the CCSS likely avoids explicit ethical reasoning instruction precisely because it could be misinterpreted as religious instruction. Here’s the argument, I proffer, that drove a more or less conscious decision to avoid analysis based on values and enshrine analysis based on demonstrable facts, even if these facts are fiction in literature.

Assertion: CCSS must avoid touching the third rail, moral reasoning, if every state in the country can be expected to adopt them. National standards are not national unless they are.

Premise 1: Most people perceive moral reasoning as the province of the Christian church. Oh? Yes, but this perception is wrong. I’ve already addressed the weakness of this premise in substance by showing how moral premises overlap secularism and religion. Is this premise support for the decision?

Premise 2: The Constitution calls for separation of church and state. Yes. This premise fails to support the assertion because, while the predicate is true, the conflation of moral reasoning and church is false. See premise 1.

Premise 3: CCSS must avoid the perception of favoring the teaching of values in school if the project is to succeed. Weaknesses: Reframing the purpose, redefining success (equivocation)—CCSS was actually intended to improve schools by raising and clarifying standards. That defines success. The writers were tasked with creating a new vision, not recreating a vision consonant with people’s perception. One might argue that this dilemma forced accommodation, but the action taken tilted too far toward the political and therefore damaged the original purpose beyond repair.

The end result created an unfortunate vacuum where students miss learning ethical reasoning as the highest form of critical thinking skills that transcends any particular faith tradition.

The irony is that by avoiding ethical reasoning instruction for fear of religious entanglement, we may leave students less equipped to thoughtfully engage with moral questions using reason rather than just accepting rules from any source religious or secular.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Readers might push back on whether the CCSS writers' avoidance of moral reasoning was purely about church/state separation concerns. They might suggest additional factors like the challenge of assessing moral reasoning in standardized ways, political pressure to focus on measurable skills, the influence of corporate interests in emphasizing career-ready skills over ethical reasoning. They’re right. All is true. But do these facts argue that they made the best decision (another moral question)?

A thoughtful reader might also want to explore solutions: How could schools teach ethical reasoning in ways that are both rigorous and constitutionally appropriate? What would this look like in practice? Well, that’s not going to show up in a blog on Substack. That, dear reader, is a societal challenge.

In the meantime, here we are. Would America be better off today if the country had placed ethical reasoning as the pinnacle of college and career readiness rather than logical argument? If we forget about NAEP scores and think about the outcome of the 2024 elections, one might make a compelling argument for this position: Yes, we would be better off if we had taught the young people who voted in 2024!to think critically and ethically. I’ll end with this evidence exposing an utter failure of ethical reasoning in the brain of the leader of the free world for whom the majority voted:

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” Trump said in a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’ll own it ... We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal ... the Riviera of the Middle East.”³

1. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/counteracting-bone-and-muscle-loss-in-microgravity

2. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/03/religion-in-the-public-schools-2019-update/

3. https://whyy.org/articles/trump-gaza-takeover/