Abstract
The Measure of Moral Orientation (MMO) is designed to measure one’s decision-making preferences in terms of voice (either "care" or "justice") and self-perception (either "self-care" or "self-justice"). This review highlights basic features of the MMO and makes suggestions for its use in the liberal arts education arena. The theories behind this instrument are based primarily on the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. Kohlberg’s work discusses morality in the framework of social justice and equality. Gilligan’s is a reaction to this, purporting that morality can, in addition to the logical social justice side, be based in an ethic of ‘care,’ where relationships with others matter as much as logic. The MMO is an 83-item instrument in two sections. First, nine dilemmas of college-student life are presented, each with several opinion questions designed to measure a care or justice "voice," or preference for making decisions based on interactions with others. A 14-item self-description questionnaire follows, designed to measure the participant’s self-perception in terms of orientations of "self-justice" or "self-care." Several studies demonstrate the instrument’s validity and reliability, and the author compares the MMO to qualitative methods typically used for discerning a higher-order outcome like morality.