DOES EMOTIONAL MATURITY HELP TO EXPRESS MORAL BELIEFS? EVALUATING ‘MORAL GAMES FOR TEACHING BIOETHICS’ AMONGST ROMANIAN AND POLISH STUDENTS
Abstract
The recent development of biotechnology generated a new set of individual and public moral dilemmas gathered under the name of bioethics or biopolitics. These issues are specific because they merge – as nothing else before – moral, private and political spheres. Thus, public awareness of these cases and of any elements that can influence personal bioethical decisions must be stimulated. One of such methods is the academic teaching of bioethics. Since Darryl R.J. Macer defined the latter as “the love of life, reflecting the hope that bioethics may value life in a process involving emotions and rationality” we found interesting to investigate the role of emotional maturity (EM) in solving bioethical dilemmas. The study involved 103 Polish and Romanian students asked first to fill the Friedman’s emotional maturity form and then solve chosen exercises based on UNESCO’s Moral Games for Teaching Bioethics. The results indicate that a high level of emotional maturity correlates positively with the students’ ability to express their moral beliefs for Romanians and negatively for Poles; therefore, the results indicate there is a need to modernize the actual standards for teaching bioethics by enriching them with either emotional or rational components according to the cultural premises.
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