Foster transcendent moral imagination (Layer 5), especially through the arts, literature, and spiritual inquiry.
The Setiawan Moral Hierarchy is not merely a descriptive model but a diagnostic and generative tool. By situating moral conflicts within layered hierarchies, it allows for more nuanced, dialogical, and reflexive ethical responses to contemporary dilemmas. It thus offers both clarity and complexity, enabling individuals and institutions to act ethically not by flattening difference, but by orchestrating moral dissonance into moral discernment.
8. Implications for Moral Philosophy and Ethics Education
The Setiawan Moral Hierarchy (SMH) offers a multidimensional framework that challenges conventional moral approaches which tend to be linear, normative and homogeneous. In the context of ethics education, moral philosophy, and public policy, this framework provides a new direction for approaching moral complexity in an era of global disruption and value fragmentation.
8.1 Reorientation of Ethics Education: From Normative to Reflective-Structural
Traditional ethical education models, both religious and secular based, are often dominated by normative-prescriptive approach: teaching what is right or wrong based on a particular value system (e.g., religious doctrine, the principles of utilitarianism, or Kantian deontology). SMH proposed epistemological shift towards reflective-structural ethics education, which include:
Multi-level understanding on morality as a complex and dynamic phenomenon.
Introduction to value conflict and moral dissonance as part of ethical learning, not as a deviation.
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Use of interactive case studies which places students in a real dilemma across moral layers (for example: between individual empathy and systemic structures, between spiritual values and positive law).
Critical of hegemonic morals which is often reproduced in educational institutions without space for deliberation across beliefs and cultural backgrounds.
Thus, ethical education is no longer a means of single moral formalization, but arena of dialogue, reconceptualization and reflection on value systems in a plural and conflict-ridden world.
