Moral Judgment Issue
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The issue of moral judgment has been examined in normative terms, assessing what is and what is not a moral judgment and how to behave in a moral fashion. It has been considered in developmental terms, addressing the question of how moral judgment is developed in the child and how it is transformed into action in adulthood. One of the approaches taken to this question in recent years has considered the role of gender differences in the development of moral judgment. This has created some controversy as different theorists have analyzed not only how moral judgment develops but how it might develop differently in girls as opposed to boys. The issue can be seen sharply in the Gilligan-Kohlberg controversy. Kohlberg had set forth a model of the development of moral judgment that was later challenged by Gilligan and others, who determined that Kohlberg was actually focusing only on the development of one aspect of moral orientation having to do with the ethics of justice and rights. This led Gilligan to consider further gender differences as they could be seen in the development of moral judgment, and she determined that women's moral judgment is more rooted in context, more immersed in the details of relationships and narratives (Benhabib 155). This was in keeping with certain conclusions offered by Piaget, who observed that girls have a more "pragmatic" attitude toward rules and see them more in terms of relationships. Of course, this led Piaget to deny the validit
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al, and in stage three the child seeks the approval of others, while in stage four the child conforms to norms. Level III is Postconventional, and stage five involves obedience to democratic laws and contracts, and stage six involves individual principles of conscience.
THE JUSTICE TRADITION
The research and theoretical constructs of Kohlberg are a continuation of what is known as the justice tradition started by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. Their theories share two core views:
Substantively, each of these theories is committed to personal liberty, and, methodologically, each of them relies on a social contract model. Together, these elements form the basis for the ideal of individual autonomy that distinguishes the justice tradition (Kittay and Meyers 4).
In this tradition, individual autonomy has two main dimensions--moral autonomy and personal autonomy:
People gain moral autonomy when they use reason to discern which principles ought to be followed; personal autonomy in their entitlement to pursue their own visions of the good in their own way. These aspects of autonomy stem from the themes of social contractarianism and personal liberty, respectively (Kittay and Meyers 4).
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Approximate Word count = 3429
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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