Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper describes some preliminary results of an experiment to collect, analyze and compare protocols of arguments concerning practical ethical dilemmas prepared by novice and more experienced ethical reasoners. We report the differences we observed between the novice and experienced reasoners' apparent strategies for analyzing ethical dilemmas. We offer an explanation of the differences in terms of specific differences in the difficulty of the strategies' information processing requirements. Finally, we attempt to explain the utility of case-based ethics instruction in terms of the need to inculcate information processing skills required by the experienced reasoners' strategy.