Category of Moral Judgment and Attitudes towards Amnesty and the Nixon Pardon

jects ’ attitudes on two socially-relevant moral issues was examin-ed. Using Hogan’s Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA), the phil-osophy of moral rationalism was found to be related to positive attitudes towards the pardon of Nixon and negative attitudes to-wards amnesty for draft evaders. It was argued that these re-sults support an interpretation of the SEA as primarily a measure of political and social preferences rather than as a scale of moral judgment. As research on moral development and moral judgment has become in-creasingly prominent within psychology, a number of investigators have begun to take a closer look at the psychometric and conceptual properties of the various assessment tools used in this research. For example, in one recent review Kurtines and Greif (1974) have pointed out the lack of clear-cut evidence for the reliability and validity of Kohlberg’s Moral Judgment Questionnaire; and Simpson (1974) has critically examine