er what they say about me and what will it mean…I made the right decision not to, because my real friends accepted my decision.] Adapted from Gilligan and Antunucci (1990) Two Moral orientations in Mapping the Moral Domain p.75.Keefer and Olson (1995) are of the opinion that gender differences in moral orientations are due to women’s propensity to present dilemmas of a relational nature and men have the proclivity to relate dilemmas of a more impersonal nature. They claim that may ‘ indeed focus on different “content” but the modes of thought used in planning action and in justifying courses of action may be the same as men.’ (p.2.)The research presented here aims to :1.Investigate if there are any sex-related differences in the moral orientations of members of the Irish Defence Forces and the American Defence Forces.2.Investigate whether or not males and females have a tendency to present dilemmas with different content and if, so does it possibly account for the difference found if any in their orientations?To conduct this investigation, 4 members of the Irish Defence Forces (2male, 2 female) were interviewed by the researcher and asked to discuss a real-life personal dilemma and a further three members of the American Defence Forces were recruited via an Internet military website and were interviewed asynchronously through email. Real –life dilemmas were chosen to be discussed as;1.Hypothetical dilemmas may obscure moral orientations because the researcher has preconstructed the moral problem unlike real-life dilemmas where the participant constructs the problem as well as evaluates it’s resolution. (Gilligan et al.,1982). 2.Real-life dilemmas were also...
