Moral reasoning skills: what they are and how they can be furthered in health professions education.

It is widely agreed that moral reasoning skills are an important aspect of ethical competency in the health professions and that students should acquire those skills. Nevertheless, ethics instructors might find it difficult to choose specific exercises and methods to further those skills because there is no shared understanding of what the term "moral reasoning skills" implies. As a result, there is a didactical gap between learning objective and methodology. In this paper, I demonstrate that and why the term "moral reasoning" is an underdetermined concept in the didactics literature of the health professions. With reference to the discipline of informal logic I will introduce a definition of the term and quality criteria for good moral reasoning that facilitate didactical interventions. I introduce three basic suggestions that instructors can follow if they want to further moral reasoning skills in students. I show how the three suggestions translate into specific learning objectives, which help instructors design exercises and choose appropriate methods for teaching and learning. Towards the end, I will discuss the critical factor of time in educational settings.