Moral Reasoning in a Multicultural Society: Moral Inclusion and Moral Exclusion STEFANO PASSINI The issue of how people develop moral knowledge and moral judgment is still of theoretical and empirical importance in psychological literature. Since Piaget’s (1932) and Kohlberg’s (1969) studies on moral development, scholars have focused on how children develop moral reasoning and how they learn to deal and cope with the social and moral norms and conventions that regulate human interactions. In this sense, the study of moral reasoning is of fundamental rel- evance in understanding the relationships between individuals and the function- ing of society, in that norms regulate social interactions and expectations both within and between groups. Indeed, individuals do not grow within a “social vacuum:” they construct their moral knowledge, their sense of justice and their representation of the functioning of the world through their interactions with the society in which they live. In this sense, the increasingly multicultural nature of almost all of today’s societies around the world raises new questions in the study of moral reasoning. Specifically, is the individual’s level of moral reasoning unambiguous and unequivocal when applied to the judgment of moral issues or does the group membership of the person to be judged exert an influence? That is, does a sort of “moral prejudice” exist such that moral reasoning is determined not only by the moral dilemma but also by the group membership of the person being judged? In this sense, if prejudice is defined as a preconceived belief, opinion or judgment toward a group of people (Brown, 1995), we could define moral prejudice as preconceived moral judgment toward a person due to his/her group membership. Recent events have shown that at times people judge the same action differently owing to the group membership of the person involved. For instance, almost every week in Italy there are news reports of people being run over and even killed by drunken drivers. People’s reactions to such events change radically depending on whether the culprits are Italians or foreigners, as we are currently assessing in a specific study on the news reports from different newspapers. When the aggressors are foreigners, the media do not simply evaluate these events as serious news items related to the issue of road safety. Instead, they customarily relate these events to the question of immigration and national security. This is clear by looking to the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 40:4 0021-8308 © 2010 The Author Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.