ABSTRACT. Moral text processing was used as an ecologically valid method for assessing implicit and explicit moral understanding and development. The authors tested undergraduates, seminarians, and graduate students in political science and philosophy for recall of moral narratives and moral expository texts. Multivariate analyses of covariance using educational experience as an independent variable, age and moral judgment score as covariates, and recall of embedded moral arguments as dependent variables revealed a relation between education and level of moral arguments recalled. Lower-stage moral reasoning was best recalled by undergraduates, whereas higher-stage reasoning was best recalled by graduate students, with seminarians intermediate for both types of text. Moral judgment score was related to recall of the highest-level moral arguments even when age and educational experience were controlled. Moral judgment development appeared to be particularly helpful in recall of expository compared with narrative texts.

Recently, intuitionist theories have been effective in capturing the academic discourse about morality. Intuitionist theories, like rationalist theories, offer important but only partial understanding of moral functioning. Both can be fallacious and succumb to truthiness: the attachment to one’s opinions because they “feel right, ” potentially leading to harmful action or inaction. Both intuition and reasoning are involved in deliberation and expertise. Both are malleable from environmental and educational influence, making questions of normativity— which intuitions and reasoning skills foster—of utmost importance. Good intuition and reasoning inform mature moral functioning, which needs to include capacities that promote sustainable human well-being. Individual capacities for habituated empathic concern and moralMoral Complexity 2 metacognition—moral locus of control, moral self-regulation, and moral self-reflection— comprise mature moral functioning, which also requires collective capacities for moral dialogue and moral institutions. These capacities underlie moral innovation and are necessary for solving the complex challenges humanity faces.