Ragionamento e giustificazione morale: uno studio empirico

We conducted the first controlled study on the effects of a philosophy class on moral justification abilities. We assigned 65 students, enrolled in non-philosophy university courses and who had never participated in moral philosophy classes, to a "moral" experimental group and a "non-moral" control group. The students in each group responded to a moral dilemma by providing an extended justification for their answer (pre-test). They then read a brief text and participated in a 75-minute class on normative ethics and argumentative logic, respectively. They answered the same dilemma immediately after the class (post-test) and a partially different dilemma one month later (follow-up). We analyzed the participants’ justifications based on six "procedural" competencies for a good moral justification: empirical competence, conceptual competence, logical coherence, sympathetic imagination, bias reduction, and openness to revision. Only in the moral group conceptual competence and logical coherence improved between the pre-test and post-test; conceptual competence also showed long-term improvement, maintaining the effect of the intervention at follow-up (although the effect decreased between post-intervention and follow-up); logical coherence was also maintained between post-intervention and follow-up. The other competencies were either weakly present or tended to decline over time. Although a single intervention may have limited effects, our study suggests that moral reflection stimulated by the teaching of basic theoretical elements of normative ethics can have a significant effect on improving moral justification abilities.