Six forms of variety in students' moral reasoning: an age-old distinction enabling new methods and findings

Abstract

In this study, the age-old distinction between decision method and criterion of rightness, commonly employed in normative ethics, was used to attain a detailed understanding of inter- and intrapersonal variety in students' moral reasoning. A total of 24 Swedish students, 12–15 years of age, were interviewed. Inter- and intrapersonal varieties in and between the two dimensions of moral reasoning were found, constituting six novel forms of varieties. We describe several explanations proposed within the field of social-cognitive domain theory, and argue that these do not suffice to explain all the found forms of varieties in students' moral reasoning. Some limitations of the present study are discussed, and some suggestions for future research are given.

Keywords::

• education
• ethics
• moral reasoning
• social-cognitive domain theory
• well-being

Acknowledgements

First of all, we would like to thank the students who participated in the study. We also thank the parents, principals, and teachers for making this study possible. Furthermore, we are grateful to anonymous reviewers for constructive and helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected].

^2. Kohlberg has indeed given arguments against this claim, for example clarifying that within the principle of justice, a kind of care perspective was included through a principle of benevolence to all people, which can be seen as a kind of care (cf. Kohlberg, Boyd, and Levine 1990).

^3. It might be thought that the interpersonal variations to be presented below can be explained by the differences in ages, but interpersonal variations were found within the same age groups.

^4. As we have said, one might have a decision method that is very closely related to ones criterion of rightness. Hence, for each case, we have, in our analysis, tried to interpret whether the student meant a certain statement as a decision method, a criterion of rightness, or both. The reader could also find Kohlberg's discussion of deontic judgments versus judgments of what is right to be of interest (Kohlberg 1984).

^5. The student used the Swedish word ‘schyst’ (‘sjyst’/‘juste’), which is historically related to the English word ‘justice,’ and could translate to, for instance, ‘fair,’ ‘kind,’ ‘just,’ ‘honorable,’ ‘decent,’ ‘correct,’ and ‘irreproachable.’ It is used in such expressions as ‘fair play.’ Hence, we translated it into ‘fair’ in the rest of the text, in accordance with advice from a professional translator.

^6. It could be argued that the interview itself is a context, and as the interview progresses, the context changes. We will make two short comments here. First, if such a view is adopted, could there be any two statements given in the same context, such that the contextual explanation could be rejected, or is it impossible to find evidence against it? Second, we have here presented and discussed statements that are seen as varying that were given very close in time to each other, in situations where it does not seem intuitive to believe that any (significant) change in context had taken place.

Additional information

Funding

The present study has been carried out thanks to support from two grants from the Swedish Research Council [grant number Dnr 2008-5334 and 721-2013-2161]. Both authors are employed at Luleå University of Technology, a public university (independent, national university) in Sweden. The research study was approved by the Regional Ethics Review Board (Dnr 45-2009 and 760-2010) in Sweden.