The relation between the ethics of personal conscience—social responsibility and principled moral reasoning

Abstract

Three samples of college students were tested on Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA) and Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT), a test of moral reasoning ability in the Kohlbergian tradition. In addition, one of the samples took Collins's revision of Rotter's Internal-External Scale (I-E) while another sample took Snyder's Self-Monitoring Scale. There was a small but reliable tendency for subjects who endorsed the "ethics of personal conscience," as measured by the SEA, to show greater maturity in moral reasoning, as assessed by the DIT. This result was seen as raising some interesting questions about the relation between liberalism-conservatism and moral maturity. The subjects who advocated the ethics of social responsibility tended to show more internal locus of control as measured by the I-E scale. There also was a tendency for subjects who preferred the morality of conventional role-conformity, as measured by the DIT, to have high scores on the Self-Monitoring Scale. The correlations between personal conscience and mature moral reasoning, while significant, were small enough to make it seem that people of various social and political attitudes are likely to achieve maturity in moral reasoning.