Moral dilemmas and representations of justice in young people

This paper has been written to help shed some light on a popular idea of justice, namely the conception of justice held by young people. It look at the work of those scholars who, after analyzing “feelings of justice” and “normative social representations”, have suggested new ways of reconciling morals and sociology. Our work on young people has aimed at identifying their actual moral competence and analyzing their perceptions and representations of justice-related issues, some of which were particularly complex and dilemmatic. Another objective is to assess whether and how participatory experiences had an influence on these representations. In this short paper we have introduced a brief illustration of our theoretical framework, followed by a presentation of some data related to a specific field of inquiry (moral dilemmas), provided as an example of our work. Finally, we have shown the picture emerging from this study and draw some general conclusions.