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Moral Difference and Moral Conflict

Personal action is always embedded within a moral order, or a set of assumptions about what is real, how we know reality, and what is right. The moral order is a set of ideas on which we rely (Wong, 1984).

As such, it is a kind of common sense (Lakoff, 1996; Wentworth, 1989), a tradition of thought (Stout, 1988), or a grammar of rules (Wittgenstein, 1972). Largely cultural, the moral order is infused with symbols and ways of seeing the world (Carbaugh, 1985; W. B. Pearce & Littlejohn, 1997). The moral order is a kind of knowledge base, or epistemic field, complete with a system for judging the truth of claims (Willard, 1996, p. 73). In the following section, we discuss the basis for moral difference and the charac­teristics of moral conflict. We also present an illustrative case.

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Source: Oetzel John, Ting-Toomey Stella. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. SAGE Publications,2013. — 912 p.. 2013

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