Moral Judgment In College Students

Moral development is a powerful task of young adulthood, and attending to that development is a mandate expected of institutions of higher education. Liddell and Cooper offer a practical approach to understanding how moral learning occurs as well as the role of mentors and educators in facilitating that learning. Using Rest's Four Component Model--moral sensitivity, judgement, motivation, and action--they describe powerful campus initiatives for moral growth, including service learning, civic engagement, campus judicial systems, diversity and social justice initiatives, and sustainability efforts. Guidelines for effective moral mentorship are examined, and assessment approaches are described in detail. This is the 139thvolume of this Jossey-Bass higher education quarterly series. An indispensable resource for vice presidents of student affairs, deans of students, student counselors, and other student services professionals, New Directions for Student Services offers guidelines and programs for aiding students in their total development: emotional, social, physical, and intellectual.

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, "good," "wrong," "selfish," "courageous") and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person's modes of speech. She challenges us to overcome our fixation on moral judgments and direct attention to responses that animate all our individual linguistic habits. Her argument incorporates insights from McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates a rich set of examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Theodor Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.

Every year in this country, some 10,000 college and university courses are taught in applied ethics. And many professional organizations now have their own codes of ethics. Yet social science has had little impact upon applied ethics. This book promises to change that trend by illustrating how social science can make a contribution to applied ethics. The text reports psychological studies relevant to applied ethics for many professionals, including accountants, college students and teachers, counselors, dentists, doctors, journalists, nurses, school teachers, athletes, and veterinarians. Each chapter begins with the research base of the cognitive-developmental approach--especially linked to Kohlberg and Rest's Defining Issues Test. Finally, the book summarizes recent research on the following issues: * moral judgment scores within and between professions, * pre- and post-test evaluations of ethics education programs, * moral judgment and moral behavior, * models of professional ethics education, and * models for developing new assessment tools. Researchers in different professional fields investigate different questions, develop different research strategies, and report different findings. Typically researchers of one professional field are not aware of research in other fields. An important aim of the present book is to bring this diverse research together so that cross-fertilization can occur and ideas from one field can transfer to another.

The conscience of today's college students is guided by the personal moral values that underlie its concept of justice. College professors frequently avoid discussions of moral values, fearful of either the deconstructionist's criticism or the alleged wall of separation between church and state. Regardless of their reasons, they tend to argue that today's students have no interest in discussing abstract concepts of morality. The Daveys argue that given the right case studies of moral dilemmas, today's college students will enthusiastically share and discuss their own moral values, learn to critically examine pressing social issues, and grow to new levels of understanding. More than two dozen scenarios involving moral questions concerning race, poverty, crime, drugs, sex, religion, educational funding, and constitutional rights are presented. These issues are faced by a generation raised during the information revolution. College students live in a world of such rapid change that nothing is certain about their future. It may well be that there has never been a time when college students were more eager to discuss fundamental questions about right and wrong, to examine their own moral values. This timely work is of value in any course touching upon moral values, including courses in sociology, education, political science and law, child development, criminal justice, and philosophy.