II.—THE FINAL AIM OF MORAL ACTION

Iithe Interpretation of Political Discourses

The Hermeneutic Study of Moral Action and Moral Development

In the past decade radical changes have occurred in our understanding of the character of moral beliefs, precepts, and prescriptions, and how these are or can be justified. Profound changes have also taken place in our view of the nature of scientific inquiry, particularly in the human sciences, and how scientific knowledge claims can be justified. These changes reflect a larger transition betw...

Moral functioning as mediated action

In this paper, I argue that it is quite useful, both theoretically and empirically, to adopt a sociocultural approach to the study of moral development. This entails viewing ‘moral functioning’ as a form of mediated action, and moral development as the process by which persons gradually appropriate a variety of ‘moral mediational means’. Mediated action entails two central elements: an ‘agent’,...

Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action

ive achievement has a double effect: under a strict deontological point of view, moral questions are taken out of their contexts in such a way that mora] solutions retain only the rationally motivating force of insights. 179 Moral Consciousness Communicative Action Moral issues are never raised for their own sake; people raise them seeking a guide for action. For this reason the demotivated sol...

Action Trees and Moral Judgment

It has sometimes been suggested that people represent the structure of action in terms of an action tree. A question now arises about the relationship between this action tree representation and people's moral judgments. A natural hypothesis would be that people first construct a representation of the action tree and then go on to use this representation in making moral judgments. The present p...