Moral development in business education – social conditions influencing moral judgement competence

Abstract

Workplace relations like any social relation first and foremost have a moral dimension. Thus, if vocational education sees one of its major goals in helping apprentices to deal with moral issues, one of the core objectives in vocational education is the support of the apprentice's development of moral judgement competence. Since Lawrence Kohlberg has provided his cognitive-developmental approach we know a lot about moral development. But we know little about the influence of social environment on moral cognitive structures. With this paper the author intends to explore questions concerned with the developmental conditions of moral judgement within apprenticeship. To do so, the paper firstly provides a theoretical approach on certain social conditions for moral development; secondly gives some empirical evidence for this approach concerning data raised in context of a longitudinal study in Germany; and thirdly suggests some ideas for using this approach within the vocational education system.

Framing Effect in the Trolley Problem and Footbridge Dilemma

“…In early studies of moral decision making, moral judgment was regarded as a pure logical reasoning process (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Galotti, 1989). Psychological elements, such as those pertaining to intuition and emotion, were thought to be uninvolved in the process of moral judgment (Bienengräber, 2014). However, this idea has recently been challenged, particularly by cognitive neuroscientists (Crockett et al., 2015).…”

McMindfulness in the workplace: vocational learning and the commodification of the present moment

“…More recently, James (2010) has outlined proposals for fostering moral values in workplace learning in an Australian context, and similar work is described by Bienengräber (2014) in the context of German business education. Many of these developments have been connected with research and development in mindfulness practice which indicates the efficacy of such work in enhancing learning in general (Langer 2003;Siegel 2007) and vocational learning in particular (Hyland 2011b(Hyland , 2014.…”