Keywords

moral relativism, judgement

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In his 2011 book Lost in Transition, sociologist Christian Smith investigates the way “emerging adults” make sense of moral choices. Smith’s findings are not encouraging: many emerging adults are unable to engage questions about moral problems or dilemmas in a meaningful way and sometimes seem unaware that they ever confront such dilemmas. Six out of ten emerging adults in the study believed that “morality is a personal choice, entirely a matter of individual decision.” When asked to identify a moral dilemma they had faced in recent years, 66 percent of emerging adults in this study either could not think of anything or described dilemmas that are not moral—for example, “simple household decisions, such as whether to buy a second cat litter box."