PART 4: APPLYING MORAL DEVELOPMENT
In this part, we expose students to frameworks of moral thinking and ask them to apply these frameworks to their values and decision they've made in the face of ethical dilemmas. This theory application was the second part of the values dilemma assignment and to be done after the initial part was finished and returned. The idea was for students to perform the first part of the exercise without theory, obtain feedback that. They did it correctly, and then apply the theory. Applying theory to academic exercises is hardly unusual. Perhaps the most obvious example of an academic discipline that requires student to perform practical exercises representing theory is Chemistry. While many ethical scholars, including Matherne et.al(2006) and Taft and White (2007) advocate combining theory and values articulation, we are not aware of anything in the literature indicating a graded assignment for students to apply theory to ethical dilemmas they ‘ve experienced.
There are at least four purposes to this part of the unit. The most important is to help students organize there thinking about values and ethics. The second is to expose them to the prominent ways to think about ethical issues. The third is to expose them to the idea of moral development, that there is a progression of responses to ethical issue, that some ethical responses are more mature and ‘better’ for the people affected than others. The final purpose is academic.
We want students to be exposed to scholarly ways of thinking and know about and be able to apply ethical and moral development theory, and having students apply academic material makes grading more credible. We have exposed students to two major theoretical approaches to moral development theory, Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development (Kohlberg, 1984) and The University of Minnesota group’s approach to post conventional moral thinking (Narvaez and Bock, 2002; Rest et al,. 1999) often referred to as the Defining Issues Test or DIT. One of us has done this once, frankly with poor. About half of the students in the dress did not apply the theoretical approaches (and received a lower grade as a result) and close to a quarter of the fourteen students who tried to apply the theory did a fair to poor job.