www.uni-konstanz.de/ag-moral/ Review and Appraisal of the Moral Judgment Test (MJT)

Lawrence Kohlberg defined moral judgment competence as „the capacity to make decisions and judgments which are mo-ral (i.e., based on internal principles) and to act in accordance with such judgments ” (Kohlberg, 1964, p. 425; emphasis added). The Moral Judgment Test (MJT) has been constructed in 1975-77 to assess subjects ’ moral judgment competence in ac-cordance with this definition. It is a behavioral test of a subject’s ability to judge controversial arguments in a discussion about a moral problem on the basis of moral principles and orientations rather than on the basis of other criteria like opinion-agreement or opinion domain. The counter-arguments are the central feature of the MJT. They represent the mo-ral task that the subjects has to cope with. In the standard version of the MJT, the subject is confronted with two moral dilemmas and with arguments pro and contra the subject‘s opinion on solving each of them. This competence is indexed by the so-called C-score or C-index, which ranges from zero (lowest score) to one hundred (highest score).1 Another unique feature of the MJT is that it is possible to measure not only cognitive aspects of moral judgment behavior but also affective aspects simultaneously. It provides measures of subjects ’ moral attitudes: To which degree does a subject prefer or reject each of the six Kohlbergian stages of moral reasoning? (See Kohlberg et al., 1990); and gives several other measures of the cognitive and the affective aspect of moral judgment behavior. For a discussion of these and other indices, see Lind (1978; 2000a), and Lind and Wakenhut (1985) and Heidbrink (1985)