Judging Moral Issues in a Multicultural Society: The Role of Moral Inclusion and Moral Exclusion

The issue of how people develop moral knowledge and moral judgment is of theoretical and empirical importance in psychological literature. The cognitive-developmental approach is still the predominant today. However, a full account of morality may start from Kohlberg’s individual moral development, but it must recognize that intra-individual variations may reflect different individual ways of thinking about the social world. In this research, the individual conception of community and the boundaries within which people apply their sense of justice is considered as an evidence of the intra-individual variations on moral reasoning. The short-form of the Defining Issue Test was administered to 360 Italian participants. The classical dilemmas were changed by varying the identity of the protagonist of each dilemma. So each participant responded to three dilemmas, one about an Italian (ingroup), one about an American (considered as belonging to a morally-included community), and lastly one about a Rumanian person (considered as belonging to a morally-excluded community). The results effectively show that people’s moral reasoning is different according to the people being judged. If the person submitted to judgment belonged to a morally-excluded community, participants used an harsher morality, whereas if the person belonged to a morally-included community, participants tended to be more lenient and indulgent.