Laura Stoker

This dissertation proposes the explanatory importance of moral concepts and ethical theories for understanding public opinion and political action. It articulates a conception of politics and political actors that suggests the prominence of judgments of goodness and right, and the importance of public justification. The understanding of 'morality', moral concepts including 'good', 'right', 'duty', 'obligation', and 'virtue', and the nature of moral judgment is developed through an examination of competing perspectives found in normative moral philosophy. This discussion considers consequentialist moral theories, which rest moral judgment on the attainment of intrinsically valuable goods, and non-consequentialist theories, which look beyond consequences in judging the rightness of acts or the goodness of persons. It also develops a distinction between types of value judgments, suggesting that some evaluations are rendered objectively, as claims about what is valuable, while others are rendered subjectively, as claims about what I value. The utility of bringing normative conceptions of judgment to research on political behavior is elaborated, incorporating discussions of how this perspective challenges existing psychological approaches as well as those relying on a conception of political actors as motivated by a concern for their self interest. The significance for public opinion research of the distinction between objective and subjective value judgments is explored empirically, relying on data from the 1987 American National Election Pilot Study and on a survey of University of Michigan undergraduates. Relying on these same data sources, an illustration of the significance of normative ideas to understanding the bases of policy preferences is pursued through a focus on issues of governmental control over abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and euthanasia. This application is embedded in a discussion of the politics of the New Right and of normative issues raised by political elites and liberal theorists when considering public policies of this nature. This research exposes both the significance of normative ideas to the understanding of these policy preferences and the contingency of any normative assessment of persons or their viewpoints on the discovery of these roots of disagreement