Refining a Non-Kohlbergian Decision-Making Approach to the Production of Justifications for Moral Judgements

This paper reports two studies primarily designed to refine understanding of the influence of interview topic on the proportions of major types of justifications for moral judgements encountered during moral judgement interviews. It was assumed that subjects will tend to report the use of information that supports their decisions when a definite decision is made and will report all kinds of relevant information when they are uncertain what to decide. It was suggested that for situations to which a well-known moral rule applies, when the rule is upheld, the rule will influence such proportions as different rules are valued for different reasons. When such a rule is rejected, the nature of the reason suggested for rejecting the rule will influence such proportions. When subjects are uncertain whether to support or reject a rule, such proportions will be influenced by both the rule and the reason suggesting rejection. These predictions were broadly verified, which was interpreted as supporting the suggested analysis of the influence of these aspects of the interview topic on proportions of major types of justification.