An Empirical Analysis of Ethical Values and Norms-Variances based on Education and Gender on Justification of Violence

Abstract

Ethics reflect beliefs about what is right, what is wrong, what is just, what is unjust, what is good, and what is bad in terms of a person’s behavior. Do ethical values differ based on gender? Do the ethical values differ based on education and age? The objective of this paper is to explore variances based on the factors of gender and education on the three ethical variables namely, ‘Justifiable a man beating his wife’, ‘Justifiable Parents beating their children’, and Justifiable violence against others’. The paper uses the primary data collected from the seventh wave of the world values survey especially taking the data (N=1200) of Iraq. Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis test are run to explore the variances based on gender and education respectively. The finding includes that there is significant variation exists between males and females and based on education. Another finding is for all categories of education (lower, middle, and higher), the mean values of the female are higher than the male which means that for females regardless of their education level ‘parents beating children’ is more justifiable than for males. The paper suggests some recommendations based on the findings.

Keywords

• ethical values and norms
• gender
• education
• variance
• violence