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Cultural Differences
Moral Reasoning
Moral reasoning: An intercultural comparison
Until recently, many Western developmental theorists tended to see morality as a transcultural phenomenon, reflecting their belief that all cultures shared certain common moral assumptions. Both Piaget and Kohlberg stressed that moral development passes through a series of stages, just like the child's ability to understand other complex subjects like mass and volume (Jensen 2008; Sunac n.d). However, this tends to assume that the individual is the primary moral decision-making unit and reflects an individualistic bias. American culture is defined by certain assumptions, such as the importance of individualism and material advancement, which are not necessarily shared by all cultures (or indeed all subcultures within America) (Humphries & Jagers 2009: 206). In America, an individual who 'stands up' to a crowd, or who goes against established ideas and makes a profit in the case of an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is upheld as a role model. Acting in an asocial fashion is validated; provided the individual translates his success...
In other societies, too much individualism is seen as dangerous and not necessarily useful or good, regardless of whether it profits the individual or results in material gain. When instilling moral ideas in children, American parents often stress the need to be moral for the sake of one's self. 'Even if no one else knows, you will know,' a parent might counsel his or her child. The Judeo-Christian ethic stresses that the individual's soul or self is a gift from God and all souls are equal. American law is a rights-based culture, and these rights are derived from a sense of 'inalienable' rights connected to the individual (Bedford and Hwang 2002: 129)
But within the Confucian ethos dominant in Asian cultures, " one's life is an inheritance from one's ancestors, just as one's children's lives flow from one's own" (Bedford and Hwang 2002: 129). A personal sense of self derives from one's position in the family, and thus something which might seem admirable to a Westerner, such as defying the values one was brought up with and choosing a…
References
Bedford, Olwen & Kwang-Kuo Hwang. (2003). Guilt and shame in Chinese culture:
A cross-cultural framework from the perspective of morality and identity.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33:2.
Humphries, Marisha L. & Robert J. Jagers (2009). Culture: A possible predictor of morality for African-American adolescents. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 19(2), 205 -- 215
Moral Reasoning Taps is a movie about a private military high school, where the school is facing closure. To prevent this the adolescents attending the campus take over the school; in terms of adolescent moral reasoning, the boys involved impulsively react instead of thinking things through. They arm themselves, feeling like they are taking initiative and working together as a team to accomplish a common goal. They react just as they
reasoning that moral reasoning is determining what is right or wrong in a situation is acceptable but confusion arise from understanding what is wrong and what is right. Though universal with intercultural variations, it cannot be argued that it is only based on the perception of right or wrong. As a support to this, it is correct that cultures have varying beliefs and opinions and view moral reasoning differently.
Kohlberg's Moral Stages What would you do if confronted with this same dilemma? If I was confronted with this dilemma, I would tell the truth about my son and not let my wife take the blame. However, I would not do so out of higher moral principles but because I would tend to assume that law enforcement would likely figure out eventually what was the truth and then both my son and
Brannigan's Moral Reasoning Applied to a Specific Case Study Using Brannigan's six steps to moral reasoning, the situation involving the business man, his wife, and her lover can be broken down and analyzed from a moral perspective in order to arrive at an agreed upon moral option. The first step in using Brannigan's Moral Reasoning logic is to identify the fact. Since the case went to court, the article used to
I would have been thinking about social norms and categorical imperatives in Kohlberg's system -- or about the social value of self-sacrifice in Gilligan's. Instead I made a moral choice that reflects moral maturity: a level of caring that Gilligan would define as postconventional. Whether consciously or not, I was determined to preserve the dignity and promote the well-being of both my friends. I took myself out of the picture.
As Kohlberg proposed, children undergo "a sequence of qualitative changes in the way an individual thinks," (Nucci 2002). As children encounter new environmental stimuli including new peers, new social group situations, and new challenges to the developing ego, moral character begins to emerge. While it would be impossible to assess the Rising Star Montessori academy based on the Web copy on their site, it is safe to say that