MORAL DEVELOPMENT, BIOETHICS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP IN MORAL DECISION-MAKING IN HELPING PROFESSIONS

Abstract

Moral development begins early in life and has its most notable progress during
childhood and adolescence. It represents an important domain of developmental
and moral psychology while interacting with other close scientific domains, such as
bioethics. On its part, bioethics is specifically concerned (but not limited to) with
moral principles and decisions in the context of medical practice, policy, and research.
Research shows that the formal and informal bioethics education is significantly
related to moral development of children and adolescents, since they influence
the process of acquiring moral values, shaping one’s identity and system of beliefs,
as well as stimulating development of moral reasoning. Other valuable examples can
be found in the process of moral decision making of professionals from so-called “helping
professions” (ex. physicians, psychologists, dentists, etc.), where the transformation
of moral thinking into moral behaviour becomes obvious almost on daily bases.
Since abstract moral thinking proved not to be the best explanation of individual’s
moral behaviour, “intermediate concepts” were developed. This paper discusses
the need and the importance of continuous usage of knowledge that both moral development
and bioethics provide, in order to better understand the mechanisms lying
in the process of making real-life moral decisions.