What we called "educatedness" in the preceding sections can be taken to be the core of education, but it does not cover the scope of what education should be aiming at. For instance, there is no doubt that education should enhance the faculties of imagination and creativity in the learner, but we do not consider imagination and creativity when making judgments on educatedness. Similarly, we expect education to nurture the physical, emotional, interpersonal, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual dimensions of human development, but when it comes to the concept of educatedness, only the intellectual dimension appears to be relevant.

Take the moral dimension as an example. Let us imagine that Einstein was an extremely immoral person who was ready to cheat, lie, and kill in order to achieve his own selfish goals. Would we consider him uneducated? Chances are that we would say no. In contrast, imagine that Mahatma Gandhi had not heard about Isaac Newton and could not calculate the sum of 438 and 27. Chances are that we would say that he was an uneducated person, even though he must have been the 100th percentile with respect to his moral faculty. Similar reflections on the physical, interpersonal, aesthetic, and spiritual dimensions indicate that the word "educated" is biased towards the intellectual dimension of education, probably due to the historical accident of educational institutions focusing on the intellectual aspect of education. In focusing exclusively on the intellectual dimension, I have been implicitly equating the concept of liberal education with the concept referred to by the word "educated", without necessarily claiming that education of the intellect is the only goal of educational institutions.

That the concept of educatedness does not include the moral dimension does not imply that it does not include the capability for moral reasoning, which involves the calculation of inferences from moral axioms. Thus, given the moral axioms:

Actions that are detrimental to happiness, well-being and life are morally bad; and Actions that enhance happiness, well-being and life are morally good;

do we infer that killing monkeys is morally bad? What about killing chickens or rats? Is conducting experiments on monkeys or rats that involve removing pieces of their brain under anesthesia morally bad? If a person is physically incapacitated for life and will suffer intense pain, is it morally good or bad to help him/her commit suicide? Arriving at rational inferences in such situations is an intellectual matter. The moral reasoning involved in these processes is not different in form from the reasoning involved in arriving at conclusions in various academic disciplines.⁶ I assume that the inability to engage in moral reasoning is a gap in educatedness.

Having made the rational inference, choosing an action that is morally good or morally bad is not a matter of the intellect, but of moral values. A person may have impeccable capacity to engage in moral reasoning, and yet decide to tell lies or torture people knowing fully well that these actions are morally bad. Within the view that I have sketched above, the concept of educatedness includes the capability to engage in moral reasoning, but not necessarily the moral values that we consider to be the right ones.

If we have a specialized program of moral education, its ultimate goal would presumably be to lead people to morally desirable actions. However, a less ambitious goal would be to help them acquire the ability to engage in an auto-critical exploration of their own moral values at a rational level, hoping that somehow it would facilitate morally good actions as well. Hence, independently of the concept of education covered by the word "educated", it may be more practical to focus on moral reasoning in liberal education, and leave moral values to moral education.