New perspectives on moral reasoning

Abstract

The works of Carol Gilligan introduce the ethics of care and responsibility that takes into account the differing aspects and particular needs of people. Such ethics is opposed to those of the justice described by Kholberg whose characteristics are the principle of equality and the disregard for each human beings specific features. Both ethics are, however, complementary. The work that is presented here includes both ethical approaches, in an experimental situation in which it was requested that subjects of different ages (from 6 up to 21 years old) took decisions that implied to choose for one or another of these two approaches or to integrate both. The treatment of the data was carried out analyzing the organizing models that appear, which allowed identifying the elements of the situation that were more prominent for the subjects of each age, the meaning that they attributed to each one of those elements, the manner according to they organized them in order to confer a meaning to the set of elements, and the implications that were derived of the whole experiment. The study of the evolution of organizing models at different ages shows that the evolution of the ethical conceptions is far from linear. It leads to thinking about the analysis of the processes of ethics construction by means of theoretical models that contemplate the complexity and the abandonment of linear models that are unable to describe the observed phenomena.