MORAL JUDGMENT AND SEX OR - IS THERE A FEMALE MORAL

This study presents the hypothesis that women judge moral conflicts mainly with the judgement style ''Care'', which is a moral of care and responsibility, while men rather prefer the judgement style of ''Justice'', which corresponds to a moral of justice. Furthermore it is differentiatedly assumed that these judgements are not found in professional settings, where both sexes prefer the judgement style ''Justice'' - the reason being the changed roles of sexes. Considerable differences, however, seem to exist in family moral conflicts and in extra-family and extra-professional areas. To investigate these hypotheses six moral dilemmas were constructed and 80 subjects, 40 women and 40 men, were confronted with them. The results explicitly confirm the above assumptions. The means of different areas in life show highly significant differences of gender in moral judgement: women mainly argue with principles of care, while men argue with principles of justice. This result, however, needs to be differentiated further, as women conform their style of judgement totally to the male style in the professional area - here both sexes definitely prefer ''Justice''. An explanation could mainly be found in processes of emancipation of the female role, enabling a better coping with the professional challenges. The question, however, remains how far a polarization of the judgement style in analogy to the sexes is desirable, and which potential developmental tasks would result.