ABSTRACT
Social scientists are engaged in a lively debate about value change in modern industrial societies. This chapter discusses two examples of value change, namely the attitudes toward abortion and toward military service. N. Haan and C. Gilligan claim that Kohlberg's rigid principled morality is typical of the male way of thinking and that the contrasting morality of a more flexible context orientation is typical of the female way of thinking. Stages in the socio-cognitive theory of development represent "structured wholes," which are generalized styles of thinking. Moral development is thus a kind of "master variable," because the acquisition of a particular moral stage presupposes that the corresponding cognitive and socio-cognitive developmental processes have been completed. The influence of a further aspect of moral consciousness also arises, namely, moral reliability. The effectiveness of better moral arguments in a given situation hinges in turn on moral reliability.
