Moral development and political corruption: an evaluation instrument proposal

Abstract

Corruption is one of the biggest problems that the Spanish society faces nowadays, hence the need to create tests and questionnaires that assess the degree of moral development among the population. Moral dilemmas are widely used in the context of many investigations and among different disciplines, but concretely they are popular among the social sciences. Most of them have the aim to achieve measurements related to moral development or moral judgment and therefore they are very useful in order to predict future actions of the test-takers. Many of the negative phenomena that affect our social model are in connection with the moral decisions and dilemmas that individuals face. One of the biggest problems that we face today in our country has to do with political corruption, since in the political framework moral decisions and dilemmas take on a transcendental importance, impacting on the welfare of all citizens. The studies of Lawrence Kohlberg related to moral development, are the theoretical framework used to build those tests, being the Defining Issues Test of James Rest the most renowned, validated and adapted to different circumstances. The present paper will try to describe the background and content of a questionnaire, developed from the DIT, whose main goal is to study the moral development of law students in Spain and, in particular, the moral development related to political corruption.

Keywords

• Moral values
• moral development
• evaluation
• ethic education
• political corruption