THE IDENTIFICATION OF CONCRETE SITUATIONS AND PROBLEMS RELATING TO THE COMMON GOOD.

The original idea was to present the participants with dilemmas regarding the common good structured in order to elicit reasoning response in public situations.

The followed strategy is to refer to many instances, events, or situations, which seem to have the potential to raise moral interrogations for morally attentive adults. The intent is to produce issues that replicate a sense of the moral ordinariness, complexity and urgency that occurs in our world. The moral dilemmas in fact play an essential role in the collection of valid moral judgment data (Gibbs, 1992). They make at least two contributions to moral judgement assessment: 1) they provide concrete situational details that can lead into and facilitate the process of abstract common good reflections (subjects seem to “warm up” to reasoning about moral values connected to the common good as they attend to the relevant details of the dilemma); 2) they promote the likelihood that one can elicit from the subject a moral “reflection without interference from preconceptions” (Walker, 1990) – the moral dilemmas “set the mind working” (Brown & Herrnstein, 1975) in a fresh and spontaneous way, rendering more likely the production of scorable reasoning, that is, patterns of thinking that are generic rather than idiosyncratic.

The dilemmas are designed similarly to Kohlbergian dilemmas (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987), except that each story involves situations of public ethics related to:

• legal obligation - legal obligations – connected, for example, to issues of corruption or bribery (such as encouraging a person in a public competition not to follow the waiting lists ), or to circumstances that involve not following the law because it is judged too costly or disadvantageous (as, for example, building on land improperly), or to evading the taxes owed to the State for the person’s own business, etc. Consider the following example: “Daniela lives in a small rented apartment with her husband and

three children. Daniela owns nearby land in an environmentally protected area where it is not possible to build. The area is a tourist attraction and is located right next to a river. On the surrounding land, despite the restrictions, many owners are building, counting on the possibility of a subsequent amnesty. Daniela is considering whether to build herself a house”;

• not strictly normed obligations but to general rules of ethics – the reference is, therefore, to scenarios relating to the protection of strictly “common” “goods”: material common goods (such as the environment, the beauty of the landscapes, water, peace) or more abstract common good such as justice, truth, etc. Consider the

following example: “Joan, along with her husband and two

daughters, owns a media company that produces parts for home appliances. She is now considering the possibility of moving the bulk of her production from her country to other countries, as a lot of competing companies have already done so, reducing costs. The cost of labour is in fact significantly lower”.

The hypothetical moral dilemmas were constructed in order to represent an internal value conflict between the four different orientations to the common good hypothesized and generally described in the first chapter – personal, group, national and global. The situations refer to really relevant matters for the subjects, fictitious but plausible situations, which are very likely to exist in real life. Each dilemma focuses on different issues that were chosen in order to represent the central value conflict between personal, group, national and global orientation to the common good and to elicit different levels of reasonable response by the subjects. For example, in the previous “Daniela dilemma” (related to the decision to build a house illegally), the conflict is between the value of a) preserving the needs of her own family (giving them a home), b) or, antithetically, the safety of other known residents (who would be put at risk by building in a dangerous area), c) upholding law established for equity and justice in all the nation, d) and, finally conserving nature as a whole. Any specific, more or less “reflected” reason assignable to one of the four

specific orientations of the common good can be then understood at different levels by the subject. So, always following the above example, the person can choose in this conflict the global interest just because “nature comes first” or because “to safeguard nature is our reciprocal right and duty because we all belong to humanity and nature is essential for the life of each of us”. Both answers are based on the same assumption or moral common good, but only in the second case does there seems to be an argument that justifies the choice. The dilemmas are intended as a device for activating different orientations to the common good (to the extent that a person has developed them) and for assessing them in terms of judged importance. Thirty situations were identified, coming from different fields of expertise, substantially related to the world of work or to the widening spaces of communities – the phenomenon of migration, the widespread poverty, the social cost of public corruption, the issues related to wars, the protection of nature or the question of pollution, and so on. Particular attention was paid to making the scenarios as varied as possible, referring to different types of circumstances: a) some concern a person (the protagonist of the story), faced with a choice between different possible actions; b) others concern a situation, for which a number of people in a group (e.g. a committee) decide what direction to take; c) others where the subject is presented with an individual who has made choices, and should review these choices.

2. IMPLEMENTATION OF RESPONSE ALTERNATIVE ANSWERS