Digital moral agency in school ethics curricula : from responsible use to epistemic and socio-technical judgement

Abstract

Digital technologies increasingly shape the relationships, information environments and institutional systems within which young people exercise moral judgement, yet curriculum responses often separate digital competence from moral education. This study develops the concept of digital moral agency and examines how it is represented across 13 official Maltese Ethics curriculum, syllabus and policy documents published between 2012 and 2026. Using longitudinal qualitative document analysis, we compared successive formulations of the intended curriculum and coded established dimensions of moral agency and practical wisdom alongside inductively identified digital concerns. The analysis shows continuity in reflection, dialogue, responsibility, care, justice and reason-giving, alongside a widening of the contexts in which these capacities are expected to operate. Digital moral agency emerges across three interrelated dimensions: personal and relational judgement concerning conduct, wellbeing, privacy and relationships; epistemic judgement concerning credibility, influence and synthetic information; and structural judgement concerning algorithms, surveillance, bias, data exploitation and distributed responsibility. These dimensions do not form a simple age-graded sequence: newer Years 7-8 syllabi make algorithms, surveillance and AI-supported decision-making explicit, while the current SEC programme for older students remains more strongly focused on conduct and social influence, reflecting overlapping reform cycles. The findings suggest that digital ethics education should move beyond an ethics of responsible use towards an ethics of participation in socio-technical systems. The framework offers a curriculum-mapping tool for integrating ethical judgement with digital and artificial-intelligence literacy across school years.