Patterns In Moral Formation

By Author: Jackey
Total Articles: 54
Comment this article

As Primer and Walker (2008) pointed out, "moral psychology is controversial stuff" and offer several reasons that even a scholar's friend might react to it with resistance: The friend is not ready to concede the existence of morality in the first place, what morality means in the second and what gives the scholar any authority to determine right or wrong in the third. Controversial issues pervade the Replica Cartier Santos academic study of moral topics just the same and have since the field's inception, Nevertheless, scholars of morality bravely venture forth, viewing the need as high, the challenges as not insurmountable, the consequences significant, and the educational context so full of opportunity as to be worth the risk.

Although a great deal of scholarship has contributed to our understanding of moral formation, there are many disparate perspectives and little consensus; as Reed and Stoermer (2008) noted, "The field lacks a single comprehensive model of moral functioning". This statement reflects the fact that morality is ...
... a multifaceted domain, with many constructs, philosophical perspectives, and disciplinary and research traditions, yielding many subfields. Many examples of these domains may be found in two recent compilations of articles: the 30 chapters of Nucci and Narvaez's (2008) Handbook of Moral and Character Education and the special issue of the Journal of Moral Education on an integrated model of moral functioning edited by Reed (2008). At the heart of these perspectives are attempts to adequately articulate the roles of individuals, families, schools, religious organizations, community institutions, legal systems, and other societal influences on attributes in the moral domain such as personal responsibility and integrity; from this perspective, morality can be defined as learning the values, norms, and standards of one's culture. At Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches the same time, the ability to understand moral concepts such as integrity and how it can be used as a moral compass in one's life emerges over time, taking different shapes along the way. Both perspectives require consideration of what people can expect of each other within cultures and social institutions, so is inherently a relational construct.

Many moral development scholars have argued that the complexity of the domain calls for attention to many facets of development, including cognitive and identity development; this argument is reflected in the breadth of articles noted in the two volumes cited above. The Four Component Model of Morality (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, & Thoma, 1999) was also developed to differentiate among elements of morality and to offer an explanation of how moral action is grounded not only in cognition, but also affect and social dynamics. Bebeau and Monson (2008) have recently offered an updated version of the components in the context of professional education; these components are: moral sensitivity (interpreting situations to discern who is affected and how; seeing things from others' perspectives, recognizing moral dimensions of interactions and when to apply legal and professional codes of conduct, identifying possible courses of action); moral judgment (weighing the moral implications of each action option; examining criteria underlying moral thinking); moral motivation and commitment (prioritizing moral values over other values; exploration and development of a professional identity); and moral character and competence (having the ego strength and skills to implement moral actions). Many of their insights for promoting professional responsibility are also applicable to undergraduates, especially for (but not limited to) those interested in professional careers.