Discussions of Moral Dilemmas
Complex text often presents moral dilemmas, problems for which there are at least two equally defensible courses of action based on moral or ethical principles. The discussion of moral dilemmas in literary or informational text challenges students to higher levels of critical thinking as they analyze and evaluate a course of action using a hierarchical framework for moral reasoning developed by Lawrence Kohlberg, (1927–87). Students can use this framework to evaluate solutions presented in the text and to pose new ones.