Abstract

The philosophic lineage of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and James Rest has been traced to Kant, but elements of cognitive moral development are evident from Aristotle forward. Kohlberg's constructs of stages or levels, of upward movement through those stages, and valuated end-states are congruent with how ethics and epistemology were advanced in empiricists' and rationalists' exchanges. Since developmentalists share journalism's common ethical heritage, introducing cognitive moral developmentalism into the study of journalism ethics heightens perspectives on ethical practices already latent in the business and academicians' study of journalism ethics. ;Rest's Defining Issues Test yielded a domain-general Principled moral score, and the Journalist's Instrument measured a domain-specific Principled score of journalists' ethical thought. The theoretical difference between the DIT and the JI was the introduction of a Craft element, which elucidated ethical distillates within the trade that are primarily procedural in nature. A survey, derived from past studies of journalists, obtained data from a population of 71 from across the United States. Based on how ethicists and epistemologists built theory by reflection and exchanges, interviews with another 85 journalists sought behavioral evidences of stages, movement, and valuated end-states as they dealt with constructed dilemmas. ;In terms of cognitive moral development, journalists are an above-average group who outscored other groups on the DIT with more formal education--the strongest predictor in other studies. They also continued to mature into the age of post-formal development as median-age adults rather than leveling off at around age 24. Regression analysis showed journalists' education, their perceptions of levels in life, and their values were significant predictors of cognitive moral development. As long as journalists produced stories, they matured. ;The differences in their domain-general and domain-specific scores seemed to result from reliance on procedural rather than principled thinking and look-ahead behaviors associated with expertise. Strong evidence indicated that the dilemma-like nature of news stories resets default hierarchies in the non-monotonic, defeasible thinking of journalists on ethical issues. Also, it appeared possible that one story could have a strong enough impact to reset the default hierarchy an entire stage in a journalist's thinking