But Mr. Pals chose to depart from the script to assert that Mr. Romney's shift in recent years against abortion was not a "flip-flop" but the result of a "thoughtful moral process".
This model describes the psychological process of moral behavior in four steps: moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, moral commitment (decision) and moral action.
In his seminal 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stan Cohen outlined the process of a moral panic: A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to society's values and interests.
Carpendale has argued that Kohlberg's theory should be modified to focus on the view that the process of moral reasoning involves integrating varying perspectives of a moral dilemma rather than simply fixating on applying rules.
As Hafferty has written: "until we come to accept that medical training is, at root, a process of moral enculturation and... medical schools function as moral communities, the reform that is needed--the reform that the public deserves--will remain both elusive and enigmatic" [ 21].
The conception of moral reasoning found in the Mencius offers important material for reflection on the process of moral judgment, especially for those who have come to reject the simple model of judgment as deduction from premises including a general moral principle and a description of the conditions that make the principle applicable to the situation at hand.
If we understand the terms this way, the argument can be read not as showing that the faculty of reason (or the beliefs it generates) cannot cause us to make moral judgments, but rather as showing that the reasoning process (comparing ideas) is distinct from the process of moral discrimination.
The process of moral deliberation, without appeal to religion, reflects the approach of the greatest moral theories in the western tradition, whether Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's deontology, Mill's utilitarianism or contemporary Feminist ethics.
He then designed a protocol for measuring the process of moral development in individuals at various points in life, and set about interviewing thousands of subjects drawn from many different cultures.
"If we dare engage in their discomfiting art, we are forced to confront the very process of moral and ethical decision making," Mr. Kleeblatt writes about the artists in his show.
