While at one level, the literature in ethics for some issues is broad, deep, and complex, for others it appears limited and lacking in sophistication. This cross — cultural study deals not only with the moral reasoning behind moral dilemmas in business but also with the magnitudes these dilemmas in concert with their possible outcomes and consequences. While many studies discuss the effect of these outcomes, we have found none that have explicitly examined them.The methodology and analysis use a novel (...) approach for this topic, and is a major contribution of the paper: that of tradeoff analysis. Tradeoff analysis is capable of revealing both the nature of an individual's moral reasoning as well as interactions between this and the rewards or consequences for the moral action. These interactions are illustrated with a cross — cultural pilot study conducted in Singapore and the United States, which reveal noteworthy differences in moral decision making. (shrink)

Children tend to view equal resource distributions as more fair than unequal ones, but will sometimes view even unequal distributions as fair. However, less is known about how children form judgments about inequality when different procedures are used. In the present study, we investigated children’s consideration of procedures, outcomes, and emotions when judging the fairness of unequal resource distributions. Participants were introduced to a Fair Coin and an Unfair Coin. In two between-subjects conditions, they watched a researcher flip either the (...) Fair or Unfair Coin in order to distribute resources unequally between two child recipients. Participants then rated the fairness of this event, provided verbal justifications for their ratings, and rated the emotional state of each recipient. Results revealed that participants rated the event as more fair in the Fair Coin than the Unfair Coin condition. References to the outcome in children’s justifications predicted lower fairness ratings, while references to the procedure only predicted lower ratings in the Unfair Coin condition. Greater Emotion Difference Scores predicted lower fairness ratings, and this effect increased with age. Together, these results show that children consider procedures, outcomes, and emotions when judging the fairness of inequality. Moreover, results suggest age-related increases in consideration of recipients’ emotions makes inequality seem less fair, even when fair procedures are used. Implications for the development of fairness are discussed. (shrink)

Professionals in business and law, healthcare providers, educators, policymakers, consumers, and higher education practitioners value ethical reasoning skills. Because of this, we concentrated campus-wide reaccreditation efforts to help students actively engage in ER. In doing so, we re-conceptualized the ER process, implemented campus-wide ER interventions designed to be experienced by all undergraduate students, and created the ethical reasoning identification test to measure students’ ability to engage in a foundational step in the ER process. Using factor analysis, we demonstrated internal validity (...) evidence for ERIT scores. More specifically, confirmatory factor analysis provided support for a unidimensional factor structure, meaning stakeholders can report and analyze ERIT total scores. The unidimensional factor structure was replicated using two independent samples. Across all samples, ERIT scores demonstrated reliability consistent with professional standards. In addition, we collected external validity evidence for ERIT scores. The ERIT was sensitive to slight differences in ER training. That is, students experiencing a 75-min intervention performed better on the test compared to students without this experience. Overall, results suggested that our ER intervention may effectively increase students ER abilities and the ERIT demonstrated great potential for assessing foundational ethical reasoning skills. To further examine validity, researchers should consider known groups analyses with varying “doses” of the ER intervention, as well as measurement invariance studies. (shrink)

An enduring question in the cultural study of psychological experience concerns how emotion may play a role in shaping moral aspects of children’s lives as they are mentored into socially preferred ways of understanding and responding to the world at hand. This article brings together approaches from psychological and linguistic anthropology to explore how cultural schemas of normativity are communicated, embodied, and enacted as children participate in day-to-day family activities and routines. Illustrative examples emanate from a videotaped corpus of naturalistic (...) interactional data that document the daily lives of 32 ethnically diverse U.S. middle-class families who reside in the Los Angeles, California metropolitan region. The article employs discourse and narrative analysis to examine how children are apprenticed into perceiving, appraising, and reacting to the emotions of self and others as culturally shaped indicators for proper comportment. Data analysis emphasizes how implicit components of caregivers’ interactions with children (i.e., gesture, gaze, facial expression) intertwine with explicit, verbal communication to constitute intricately layered affective messages that shape the evaluative frames through which children interpret, display, and respond to emotions. The article identifies two culturally salient childrearing practices, “pep talks” and “time outs,” that apprentice children into moral accountable relationships with others by encouraging them to manage their emotions in culturally preferred ways. Study findings suggest that parental communications conveying praise and approval—or conversely indexing disapproval—towards children are emotionally resonant motivational practices in this cultural milieu as children are mentored into culturally meaningful emotional management techniques. The article highlights how children actively employ semiotic socio-communicative resources and it closely traces their sense-making processes in tandem with their discursive contributions to the moment-by-moment interaction. It argues that emotion, morality, and interpersonal relations are critical in shaping children’s acquisition of consensually validated ways of perceiving, feeling, and responding to the phenomena they encounter in their day-to-day lives. This perspective aims towards contextualized understandings that render plausible connections between local contexts of everyday action and broader macro-level discourses and master narratives, such as those associated with a neo-liberal emphasis on cultivating citizens who learn to regulate their emotions on behalf of self and others. (shrink)

Computer users copy computer software - this is well-known. However, less well-known are the reasons why some computer users choose to make unauthorized copies of computer software. Furthermore, the relationship linking the theory and the practice is unknown, i.e., how the attitudes of ordinary end-users correspond with the theoretical views of computer ethics scholars. In order to fill this gap in the literature, we investigated the moral attitudes of 249 Finnish computing students towards the unauthorized copying of computer software, and (...) we then asked how these results compared with the theoretical reasons offered by computer ethics scholars. The results shed a new light on students' moral attitudes with respect to the unauthorized copying of software. In particular, this new knowledge is useful for computer ethics teachers, and for organizations seeking to combat this practice. (shrink)

A person's values are what that person regards as or thinks important; a society's values are what that society regards as important. A society's values are expressed in laws and legislatively enacted policies, in its mores, social habits, and positive morality. Any body's values—an individual person's or a society's—are subject to change, and in our time especially. An individual manifests his or her values in expressions of approval or disapproval, of admiration or disdain, by seeking or avoidance behaviour, and by (...) his or her characteristic activities. What one values one seeks for or tries to maintain. Sometimes attaining it leads to unexpected enlightenment—that isn't what one wanted after all. But a person's values are discovered most significantly in a reflective way by becoming aware of what one is willing to give up to attain or maintain one's values. This is the price one is willing to pay for it, and values are occasionally, and in the money and stock markets always, expressed in terms of price. This can be significant or it can be misleading; it depends on how it is interpreted. Not everything has a monetary equivalent, despite the attempts of the law to provide recovery for damages in monetary terms, and despite the cynical maxim, ‘Everyone has his price’. (shrink)

A person's values are what that person regards as or thinks important; a society's values are what that society regards as important. A society's values are expressed in laws and legislatively enacted policies, in its mores, social habits, and positive morality. Any body's values—an individual person's or a society's—are subject to change, and in our time especially. An individual manifests his or her values in expressions of approval or disapproval, of admiration or disdain, by seeking or avoidance behaviour, and by (...) his or her characteristic activities. What one values one seeks for or tries to maintain. Sometimes attaining it leads to unexpected enlightenment—that isn't what one wanted after all. But a person's values are discovered most significantly in a reflective way by becoming aware of what one is willing to give up to attain or maintain one's values. This is the price one is willing to pay for it, and values are occasionally, and in the money and stock markets always, expressed in terms of price. This can be significant or it can be misleading; it depends on how it is interpreted. Not everything has a monetary equivalent, despite the attempts of the law to provide recovery for damages in monetary terms, and despite the cynical maxim, ‘Everyone has his price’. (shrink)

The role of ethics in organizational crisis management has received limited but growing attention. However, the majority of research has focused on applications of ethical theories to managing crisis events after they have occurred, as opposed to the implications of ethical theories for the primary prevention of these situations. The relationship between concepts derived from a contemporary ethic of care, pp. 141–158, Gilligan, C.: 1990, ‘Preface’, in C. Gilligan, N. P. Lyons and T. J. Hanmer, pp. 6–29, Gilligan, C.: 1991, (...) ‘Women’s Psychological Development: Implications for Psychotherapy’, in C. Gilligan, A. G. Rogers and D. L. Tolman, pp. 5–32), and, concepts derived from a classic theory of organizational decline and recovery ) is described. The relevance of these notions for signal detection and uptake in organizational crisis prevention is discussed. Implications for prevention are highlighted through consideration of a case involving organizational crisis, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Directions for both business practice and future research are identified. (shrink)

This paper is a response to van Haaften’s attempt to build ‘a natural bridge from “is” to “ought”’ and in doing so to provide a general account of how, in developmental theory, a claim that ‘a later stage in conceptual development is somehow better or more adequate than preceding ones’ can itself be justified. The account by van Haaften violates the ‘seems justified/is justified’ distinction and embroils him in a problematic form of relativism. This paper offers an alternative account of (...) such claims in terms of stage-independent criteria of adequacy. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to empirically examine moral ideology, ethical beliefs, and moral intensity in the context of Pakistan. Jones, 366–395, 1991) model and Muncy and Vitell have extensively been investigated and validated in west for examining ethical decision-making process. This study examines and validates these models in a collectivist cultural settings, i.e., Pakistan. A self-administered online survey technique using convenience sampling technique was used to gather data from a sample of 1000 consumers in Pakistan. Final analysis was (...) carried out on 338 valid responses. Data was analyzed using from descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and model estimation carried out AMOS. Cronbach’s α was used to test the reliability of the instrument. A majority of the consumers were high on idealism and low on relativism. Consumers dejected questionable activities that have harmful outcomes more than ones that have harmless outcomes. Both idealism and relativism are found to significant predict moral intensity. However, no relationship has been found between moral ideology and ethical beliefs. Consumer’s ethical beliefs are found to significantly affect moral intensity and behavioral intention. Social moral intensity is found to mediate the relationship of relativism and harmful ethical beliefs. The study is among the pioneer studies in Pakistan that examines the link of moral ideology, moral intensity, and ethical beliefs. The study provides an Urdu version of scales that can be utilized for further exploration and validation. (shrink)

This examination of the often-inaccessible work and semiotics of George Herbert Mead focuses first on his pivotal ideas of Sociality, Consciousness, and Communication. Mead’s insight of sociality as forced relatedness, or forced semiosis, appearing early in evolution, or appearing in simple systems, guarantees him a foundational place among biosemioticians. These ideas are Mead’s exemplar description of multiple referentiality afforded to social organisms (connected to his idea of the generalized other), thus enabling passing from one umwelt to another, with relative ease. (...) Although Mead’s comprehensive semiosis is basically sound, and in concordance with modern and contemporary semiotics (and biosemiotics), it nevertheless lacks a satisfactory explanation of how conscious organisms achieve passing into new frames of reference. Semiotic Matrix Theory (SMT), its pansemiosis, describes falsifiable existential and cognitive heuristics of recognizing Energy requirements, Safety concerns and Possibility or Opportunity as “passing” functions. Finally, another type of emergence, ecoethics, isan embedded constant in biosemiosis. Not all semiosis is good semiosis, not all text is good text. Because our species is moving away from ancient biosemiosisand interrelatedness, this historicity, even ductile enough to invent synthetic semiosis or capricious umwelten, is facing the ecological reality and consequences of an overly anthropocentric text. (shrink)

Recent research on young children's morality has stressed the autonomous and internal nature of children's moral motivation. However, this research has mostly focused on implicit moral motives, whereas children's explicit motives have not been investigated directly. This study examined children’s explicit motives for why they want to engage in prosocial actions and avoid antisocial behavior. A total of 195 children aged 4 to 12 years were interviewed about their motives for everyday prosocial-moral actions, as well as reported on their relationship (...) with their parents. Children's explicit motives to abstain from antisocial behavior were found to be more external and less other-oriented than their motives for prosocial action. Motives that reflected higher levels of internal motivation became more frequent with age. Moreover, positive parent-child relationships predicted more other-oriented motives and greater explication of moral motives. Overall, the study provides evidence that children’s explicit moral motivation is far more heterogeneous than prominent theories of moral development (past and present) suggest. (shrink)

The so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ is often presented as a counterproductive element in education, and many scholars argue that it should be eliminated, by being made explicit, in education in general and specifically in higher education. The problem of the HC has not been solved by the transition from a teacher-centered education to a student-centered educational model that takes the student’s experience as the starting point of learning. In this article we turn to several philosophers of education to propose that HC (...) can be made explicit in HE when the teacher recognizes and lives his/her teaching as a personal issue, not merely a technical one; and that the students’ experience of the learning process is not merely individual but emerges through their interpersonal relationship with the teacher. We suggest ways in which this interpersonal relationship can be strengthened despite current challenges in HE. (shrink)

A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist (...) proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research. (shrink)

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Guided by theories of moral psychology and social identity, one hundred and fifty-three public relations practitioners working in the United States participated in an online experiment that tested...

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). (...) By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash. (shrink)

If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists' behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% (...) more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing. (shrink)

Moral reasoning among media professionals varies. Historically, advertising professionals score lower on the Defining Issues Test than their media colleagues in journalism and public relations. However, the extent to which professional identity impacts media professionals’ moral reasoning has yet to be examined. To understand how professional identity influences moral reasoning, if at all, and guided by theories of moral psychology and social identity, 134 advertising practitioners working in the USA participated in an online experiment. While professional identity was not a (...) significant predictor of moral reasoning, an interaction effect between gender and identity priming occurred. This finding suggests that we reconsider moral psychology theory’s explanatory power for media practitioners and consider how the complexity of professional identities in concert with gender and professional training, among other variables, interact to affect moral reasoning. In addition, advertising practitioners participating in this experiment scored higher on the DIT than those tested previously. (shrink)

One of the central questions in both metaethics and empirical moral psychology is whether moral judgments are the products of reason or emotions. This way of putting the question relies on an overly simplified view of reason and emotion as two fully independent cognitive faculties whose causal contributions to moral judgment can be cleanly separated. However, there is a significant body of evidence in the cognitive sciences that seriously undercuts this conception of reason and emotion, and supports the view that (...) moral judgments are caused by a complex interplay of psychological mechanisms that are both cognitive and affective, but in a way that is not simply a function of the independent causal contributions of reason and emotion. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this view for metaethics. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between an employee's level of moral reasoning and a form of work performance known as organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). Prior research in the public accounting profession has found higher levels of moral reasoning to be positively related to various types of ethical behavior. This study extends the ethical domain of accounting behaviors to include OCB. Analysis of respondents from a public accounting firm in the northeast region of the United States (n = 107) support a (...) positive and significant relationship between moral reasoning and two dimensions of OCB: interpersonal helping behaviors and sportsmanship behaviors. This study controls for previously identified determinants of OCB (e.g., procedural justice) and demographic variables (age, sex, tenure and social desirability). Results suggest that moral reasoning accounts for professional behaviors that are perceived as intrinsically good by the employee and economically beneficial by the employer. (shrink)

May interprets the prevalence of non-emotional moral intuitions as indicating support for rationalism. However, research in developmental psychology indicates that the mechanisms underlying these intuitions are not always rational in nature. Specifically, automatic intuitions can emerge passively, through processes such as evolutionary preparedness and enculturation. Although these intuitions are not always emotional, they are not clearly indicative of reason.

Although neglected by psychology, self-respect has been an integral part of philosophical discussion since Aristotle and continues to be a central issue in contemporary moral philosophy. Within this tradition, self-respect is considered to be based on one's capacity for rationality and leads to behaviors that promote autonomy, such as independence, self-control and tenacity. Self-respect elicits behaviors that one should be treated with respect and requires the development and pursuit of personal standards and life plans that are guided by respect for (...) self and others. In contrast, the psychological concept of self-esteem is grounded in the theories of self-concept. As such, self-esteem is a self-evaluation of competency ratios and opinions of significant others that results in either a positive or negative evaluation of one's worthiness and inclusionary status. The major distinction between the two is that while competency ratios and others' opinions are central to self-esteem, autonomy is central to self-respect. We submit that not only is self-respect important in understanding self-esteem, but that it also uniquely contributes to individual functioning. Research is needed to establish the central properties of self-respect and their effects on individual functioning, developmental factors, and therapeutic approaches. (shrink)

This study investigated teachers' views of forgiveness and institutional pardon for conflict resolution at schools. We asked, "Should teachers endorse student resolution of interpersonal conflicts at school by asking for forgiveness and forgiving?" "Considering that students' conflict led to behaviours that violated norms in the school, should schools pardon students' misconduct if students effectively used forgiveness for interpersonal conflict resolution?" Finally, "Is an internal and autonomous orientation for forgiveness related to social harmony or interpersonal ethics of care?" Fifty-three participants answered (...) a background information questionnaire and two dilemmas. Findings showed that teachers endorse forgiveness as social expectation, a humanitarian, moral response to conflicts at conventional levels. Teachers do not endorse institutional pardon because they do not perceive forgiveness as being related to resolving social issues. Opposition to forgiveness and pardon was supported by authoritarian, discipli narian views of education. (shrink)

The purpose of our article is to describe the initial development process of the subordinate influence ethics (SIE) measure, an instrument that was crossculturally conceived, designed, and validity tested to measure upward influence ethics strategies of professional subordinates across different societies, as well as within a single society. Development of the SIE began by defining the SIE constructs through theoretical review and empirical (nominal group technique) assessments in Germany, France, Hong Kong, and the U. S. In the present measurement development (...) phase, the SIE has been found to consist of three distinct dimensions: pro-organizational behaviors, self-serving behaviors, and maliciously intended behaviors. The construct validity of the SIE was examined across 4113 subjects from 30 countries. A reduced model of the SIE was developed empirically to represent the "best model" for the three-factor scale. (shrink)

The purpose of the present study was to provide new knowledge on the relation between emotions and morality by investigating the relation between discrete emotions and moral content judgment in sports. The participants were 363 athletes (179 male, 184 female) who were involved in competitive sport at the time of data collection. Their age ranged from 18 to 23 years (M = 20.01, SD = 1.38). All participants were undergraduate sport-science students at a Greek university and were involved in several (...) sports. The subjects filled in two questionnaires: Moral Content Judgment in Sport Questionnaire and Sport Emotion Questionnaire. The results supported a rather vague relationship between discrete emotions and moral content judgment. (shrink)

The approach to issues such as good and evil from philosophy leads us to specify what is understood by ethics and morals. Canonically, ethics is a branch of philosophy that studies and systematizes these concepts and aims to rationally define what constitutes a good or virtuous act, regardless of the culture in which it is framed. Morality is defined as the set of norms that govern the behavior of people who are part of a given society, thus contributing to the (...) maintenance of stability and social structure. Based on these definitions, naturalization consists of seeking foundations in the empirical sciences to justify moral principles. The objective of this work is to see to what extent science can contribute knowledge that supports ethics and moral principles, a project based on the naturalization of philosophy, questioning any apriorism that ignores science. First, the naturalizing program and its main variants in philosophy will be examined. Second, two proposals from the philosophy of science that can be framed in naturalism will be analyzed, namely: Philip Kitcher and Patricia S. Churchland. Next, some of the main theses that provide scientific explanation of human behavior from the point of view of moral virtues will be addressed. (shrink)

’Although the empirical and conceptual underpinnings of New Finance have been rigorously tested, its ethical underpinnings have not been explored.’These are seen to derive from the social remoteness of late twentieth century individualism, which needs to be countered by sensitivity to the social context of finance and to the developmental nature of ethical behaviour. The author is Fellow in Finance at Templeton College, Oxford.

Moral development, achievement goal, and athletic identity are considered psychological constructs sharing specific cognitive, social, motivational, and behavioral traits. The purpose of the present article is to investigate the relation among moral orientations, athletic identity, and social goal orientations. In addition, the impact of age, gender, type of sport, sport division, and school performance on moral orientation has also been investigated. One hundred forty athletes of artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, and acrobatic gymnastics (n?=?29 boys, n?=?111 girls), aged 8 to 17, (...) participated in the research. They belonged to IV, III, II, and I sport divisions. The participants filled in three questionnaires: Moral Orientation Students in Physical Education Questionnaire, Athletic Identity Measurement Scale, and Social Goal Orientation Questionnaire. The results established that moral orientation is related to the athletic identity and achievement social goal constructs, as well as the fact that they affect school performance. (shrink)

This article explains how people synchronize their thoughts through empathetic relationships and points out the elementary neuronal mechanisms orchestrating this process. The many dimensions of empathy are discussed, as is the manner by which empathy affects health and disorders. A case study of teaching children empathy, with positive results, is presented. Mirror neurons, the recently discovered mechanism underlying empathy, are characterized, followed by a theory of brain-to-brain coupling. This neuro-tuning, seen as a kind of synchronization between brains and between individuals, (...) takes various forms, including frequency aspects of language use and the understanding that develops regardless of the difference in spoken tongues. Going beyond individual-to-individual empathy and SYNC, the article explores the phenomenon of synchronization in groups and points out how synchronization increases group cooperation and performance. (shrink)

The societal dynamism of modernity results in the theoretical upgrading and the actual development of personal reflective capacities, for example abstract reasoning, Kantian morality, and the development of the idiocentered perspective. These capacities are created in the disembedding of prereflective capacities, for example context-sensitive intelligence, care-morality, and mundocenteredness. The reflective capacities become the prerequisite of further modernization. The development-potential offered by the demands of modernity is accompanied by a risk of assimilative stress, for example pseudological reasoning, varieties of postmodernism, making (...) a fetish of the medium, and the forfeit of the morality of care. (shrink)

It has long been claimed that moral judgements are dominated by reason. In recent years, however, the tide has turned. Many psychologists and philosophers now hold the view that there is a close empirical association between moral judgements and emotions. In particular, they claim that emotions (1) co-occur with moral judgements, (2) causally influence moral judgements, (3) are causally sufficient for moral judgements, and (4) are causally necessary for moral judgements. At first sight these hypotheses seem well-supported. In this paper (...) I show, however, that appearances are deceiving. If one considers the relevant scientific studies in detail, one finds that in many interpretations the above hypotheses are either not supported or even contradicted by the available evidence. This conclusion is significant both for our understanding of moral judgements qua empirical phenomena and for normative ethics and metaethics. (shrink)

The public relations industry is increasingly focusing on evaluation and transparency of its activities. Despite this focus, an “evaluation” component is missing from many ethical decision-making models. Thus, this qualitative study of 22 public relations professionals asked How do public relations professionals evaluate or reflect upon ethical decisions? Five themes signaled that practitioners evaluate ethical decisions by conducting “gut checks,” asking questions, considering society, reflecting on core values, and considering the public's feedback. Findings suggest that professionals evaluate decisions on personal, (...) organizational, and societal levels. Experience in the field, age, and personal intuitions are also factors. (shrink)

We conducted an on-line survey to investigate the professor’s idea of “morality” and then to compare their moral thinking at the abstract level with their moral thinking in the real life situations by sampling 257 professors from the University of Novi Sad. We constructed questionnaire based on related theoretical ethical concepts. Our results show (after we performed exploratory factor analysis) that the professor’s idea of “morality” consists of the three moral thinking patterns which are simultaneously activated during the process of (...) their abstract moral thinking. We have identified these patterns in the following manner: deontological, formal and subjective pattern. In addition, our results show that of the three, the subjective pattern is more activated than the other two during their process of the moral thinking at the abstract level. We also discovered that there is a statistically significant difference between professor’s moral thinking patterns activation level at the abstract level and their moral thinking patterns activation level in the real life situation. (shrink)

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability (...) and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values. (shrink)

The relationship between tenure and principled reasoning is of vital importance to the fields of management and business ethics, as more tenured managers often hold influential posts and have the ability to affect the overall ethical tones of their organizations. Few researchers have studied this relationship, however, and those studies that have been conducted have produced mixed results. While some researchers have found that greater tenure is associated with higher levels of ethical reasoning, others have found the reverse to be (...) true. The findings of this particular study of 270 current U.S. corporate managers, who responded to a nationwide survey, indicated that there is indeed a link between tenure and principled reasoning. More tenured managers demonstrated lower principled reasoning than their less tenured counterparts. As the number of years of tenure increased, principled reasoning scores declined. The results of this study, as well as a comparison to the results of previous studies that have been conducted, are discussed within this paper. (shrink)

This paper explores moral sensitivity in a learning perspective, and a framework is developed for the understanding of how moral sensitivity can be developed through reiterative problem solving in the face of diverse ethical problems. Factors that may inhibit the individual's ability to conceive of moral issues are discussed, and perspectives from moral psychology are integrated with theory on problem formulation. It is argued that (1) the individual's moral sensitivity is pivotal for ethical problem solving, because problem formulation is paramount (...) for further reflection and behaviour; (2) ethical behaviour must be understood both (a) in terms of the individual's psychological make‐up that determines psychological response to moral features and (b) in terms of external constraints on the individual's moral sensitivity; and (3) the development of moral sensitivity can be promoted by actively and consciously pursuing disciplined imagination in multi‐perspective formulations of problems. (shrink)