Choosing Biases, Using Power and Practicing Resistance: Moral Development in a World without Certainty.

In contrast to the modernist models which have dominated the psychological study of moral development in recent decades, the model of moral development presented here rests on the premise that situations in the real world are inherently ambiguous, and that their moral significance in particular is profoundly underdetermined by available 'facts'. Under these conditions, our interpretations of moral events are necessarily biased by the interpretive habits in our repertoire. These habits of cognition - which simultaneously perceive the moral world and constitute it - are founded in early socialization, and are then directed and shaped throughout life by reflection and by our experience. The description of the model is buttressed by research results, including a study of narratives collected from working class African-, European-, and Mexican-American men and women. Copyright 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel