ABSTRACT

Adolescents’ and young adults’ practical moral judgments about two interpersonal moral dilemmas, which differed in their moral complexity, were examined using two philosophical frameworks (deontological and consequentialist principles) as tools for psychological analysis. A sample of 234 participants (ages 14–16, 18–19, and 20–21) reasoned about two moral dilemmas, which had been experienced by a subset of adolescents in a pilot study, in two forms: Participants 1) provided open-ended decisions and justification from the perspective of an imagined moral agent and 2) selected a choice from nine fixed reasoning alternatives (half advocating one course and other half advocating the other course of action, plus a relativistic reasoning). The participants’ open-ended responses served as a foundation of coding systems and were analyzed using log-linear analyses, chi-square tests, and a binominal logistic regression. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods uncovered unexpected but nuanced young people’s moral thinking. Results indicated that female participants were more likely than males to show a unique decision style: “restructuring” of the moral dilemmas/situations , and moral relativism emerged only when asked to select a choice from nine reasoning alternatives and was primarily evidenced among the younger (aged 18–19) female college students.

摘要

使用两种哲学框架（义务论和后果主义原则）作为心理分析工具，研究了青少年和年轻人对两种人际道德困境的实际道德判断，这两种道德困境的道德复杂性不同。234 名参与者（14-16 岁、18-19 岁和 20-21 岁）的样本以两种形式对一部分青少年在试点研究中经历过的两个道德困境进行了推理：参与者 1) 提供开放-从想象的道德代理人的角度结束决策和辩护，以及 2) 从九个固定推理选项中选择一个选项（一半主张一种做法，另一半主张另一种做法，加上相对论推理）。参与者的开放式回答作为编码系统的基础，并使用对数线性分析、卡方检验和二项式逻辑回归进行分析。定性和定量相结合的方法揭示了出乎意料但又微妙的年轻人的道德思维。结果表明，女性参与者比男性更有可能表现出独特的决策风格：道德困境/情境的“重组”，道德相对主义仅在被要求从九种推理选择中做出选择时出现，并且主要在年轻人中得到证明（ 18-19 岁）女大学生。