Huck Finn, Moral Language and Moral Education ANDERS SCHINKEL The aim of this article is twofold. Against the traditional interpretation of ‘the conscience of Huckleberry Finn’ (for which Jonathan Bennett’s article with this title is the locus classicus) as a conflict between conscience and sympathy, I propose a new interpretation of Huck’s inner conflict, in terms of Huck’s mastery of (the) moral language and its integration with his moral feelings. The second aim is to show how this interpretation can provide insight into a particular aspect of moral education: learning a moral language. A moral education that has a proper regard for the flexibility of moral language and the importance of the integration of moral language and (pre-)moral feelings should prevent such conflicts as Huck experienced from arising. I INTRODUCTION A traditional interpretation of the moral conflicts experienced by Huckleberry Finn is that they arise from a clash between conscience and sympathetic feeling. 1 Jonathan Bennett’s ‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’ has become the locus classicus for this kind of interpretation. 2 A much more interesting—and, I believe, more truthful— perspective is possible, however. This arises when we focus on Huck’s mastery of (the) moral language. 3 Huck’s inner conflict is not the conflict of a conscience, representative of conventional morality, with sympathy (or the ‘heart’), as a force of nature. Rather, it is the result of a split conscience, where only one half has the whole of Huck’s moral vocabulary at its disposal. This in turn points to a serious flaw in Huck’s moral education: Huck has been taught the moral language of the time, but not with the necessary flexibility. Huck cannot distinguish between moral concepts and their historically and geographically contingent application in the conventional morality he was raised in—roughly put, he cannot distinguish their form from their contents. This article, then, has a double purpose. The first is to propose a new interpretation of Huck’s inner conflict, traditionally represented as a conflict between conscience and sympathy, in terms of Huck’s mastery of (the) moral language and its Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2011 r 2011 The Author Journal compilation r 2011 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.