This chapter offers an overview of some of the more important approaches to these questions in contemporary, mostly anglophone, conceptions of educational justice in primary and secondary education. Section 16.2 starts with some provisions of some important goals of education. Section 16.3 turns to educational justice in general. Section 16.4 asks about the spheres of educational justice: is it education and socialization in general, or the school system in particular? Section 16.5 distinguishes three different levels of education: basic education for all; the cultivation of individual talents and capacities; and selection for higher education and the job market. Section 16.6 outlines the differences between five principles of justice and equality in the field of education: strict equality; a conception of fair equality of opportunity, iii) a conception of luck-egalitarian equality of opportunity; iv) a prioritarian conception of educational justice; and democratic adequacy as a conception of educational justice.

While moral philosophers have traditionally distinguished between moral virtues like benevolence and talents like wit and eloquence, Hume blurred the line between the two, arguing that such talents indeed count as genuine moral virtues. His position was inspired by Cicero, and he defended it by arguing that there is no adequate criterion to distinguish talents from virtues. I argue that Hume’s view of talents is misguided, and the source of the problem is his conception of publicly agreeable qualities. Hume devised a four-pronged test designating that a moral actor’s mental quality is a genuine virtue if it proves either (1) useful to others, (2) useful to oneself, (3) agreeable to oneself, or (4) agreeable to others. Talents like wit and eloquence fall into the fourth category. The problem is that all of the agreeable mental qualities that Hume lists are also useful ones, and it is more reasonable to see utility as the sole source of a quality’s morality, and agreeableness as only an extra feeling of nonmoral admiration experienced by the spectator. I suggest that Hume could have avoided the problem of grouping talents with virtues if he dropped down to a two-pronged test.