Moral sensitivity
Ηθική ευαισθησία
The step in which a situation registers as having an ethical side, before anything is judged. When it does not run, nothing arrives to be judged and the decision gets made on other grounds without anybody noticing. It describes a mechanism and returns no verdict about the person.
How to spot it
Ask whether you would write it down somewhere the person who pays for it could read it. If the question feels strange rather than easy, that is the step that did not run.
The research behind the term
The term is not our invention. It comes from published research, and what follows is what that research found — our own synthesis of the published abstract, not a translation of the original.
Rest, J. R. (1986). Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory — πηγή
What it found
- The Four Component Model describes moral behaviour as a sequence of distinct processes rather than as a single unified ability.
- Formal education is associated with the level of moral judgement.
- Moral education programmes produce improvements of moderate size.
- No differences are found between the two sexes.
How it found it
A book that presents the theoretical framework and assesses the data from the Defining Issues Test, drawn both from the research group's own studies and from hundreds of other researchers.
What it means for ethical decision making
A moral decision can fail at four different points — recognition, judgement, intention, execution — and practice needs to identify which of them a person falls short on.
Practised in
The term does not stay a definition. It appears inside missions where the pattern happens in real time and you have to recognise it as it happens to you.
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Sources
Every claim on this page maps to published research. The citations link to the original source.
- Rest, J. R. (1986). Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory — Source on search.worldcat.org