Moral Foundations research offers rich promise, opening up key questions about how affect and cognition are integrated in moral response, and exploring how different moral discourses may supply meaning and valence to moral experience. Haidt and his colleagues also associate different discourses with different political positions. However I address…

This paper presents an autobiographical narrative of two aspects of my history; two events that permeated my moral consciousness and influenced my political development and a sequence of changes in my dominant theoretical and epistemological perspectives. The two events were, as a teenager, the intense experience of briefly witnessing Apartheid…

This paper explores moral reasoning within the framework of contemporary cultural theory, in which moral functioning is action mediated by tools (such as socially available discourses) within a social and cultural context. This cultural model of a "dialogic moral self" challenges many of the assumptions inherent in the individualistic Kantian…

In Western thought, the relationship between the moral and political domains has been dominated by a version of political philosophy which, based on the distinction between "public" and "private," argues that the moral is different from the political. In parallel, and related to this, has been a delineation of the "political" as concerned with…

Compares and contrasts the world views and psychological assumptions of communitarianism and liberal rationalism. Liberal rationalists come out of a strongly cognitive, individualistic psychological tradition while communitarians espouse social constructivism. Discusses the implications of this for moral education. (MJP)

Reports a study of a connectedness' versus separateness' orientation in adolescents' reasoning about friendship, loyalty, and understanding of political and social order. Conflict resolution for students having a connectedness orientation focused on negotiation; in separateness orientation, the focus was on codes of conduct. Adolescent males…