Moral development plays a crucially important role
in a child�s growth, but is also extremely difficult to do empirical research
on. The first hurdle is the same for any discipline discussing morals, which
involves refining our intuitive definition of morality. Obviously, we don�t
expect infants to spring forth armed with a fully-formed conception of the Ten
Commandments, but given the common-sense explanation of moral development as
being an example of infants� ability to learn and imitate their parents, so
many psychologists have seized Kant�s categorical imperative as best and most
empirically-testably embodying the spirit of morality:
�Act as if the
maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law of
nature.�
Important means of judging the extent that children
can distinguish right from wrong focus on: their ability to place the moral
value of an action on the intentions rather than the consequences; immanent
justice; universality; autonomy and heteronomy; and assigning higher value to
moral rules rather than social or personal conventions.
Piaget�s
investigations into moral development centred around his idea of reversibility
again, and how young children who lack it display egocentricity because they
are unable to reverse their perspective and so cannot appreciate other
people�s. He claims this egocentricity is strengthened by parents and other
adults who act like an �unintelligent
government � content to accumulate laws in spite of their contradictions�.
Piaget used paired stories, juxtaposing good
intentions with bad consequences and vice versa, to generalise from how the
child viewed protagonists in each story to their understanding of how
intentions and consequences made an act more or less morally right. He found
that younger children (5-9 years) used the consequences as the criteria for
morality, whereas older children judged by intentions. He concluded that the
irreversibility of their cognitive status prevented them from understanding
others� intentions and making proper moral judgements. By this, one assumes
that although Piaget was satisfied that the child was empathising enough with
the protagonist, he felt that the child could not empathise enough with the
�victim� of the consequences, in this case the mother who owns the broken
crockery. However, the experiment can still be criticised, even if one accepts
that the medium works, because the stories themselves disconnect the nature of
the transgression from the bad outcome. Further experiments have been carried
out, using a 2x2 matrix of good/bad intentions and serious/light consequences:
these showed that if the consequences are controlled (i.e. stay the same whatever
the intention) then children judge on the basis of intent, but if the
intentions are controlled, they take consequences into account, even though
they should be morally irrelevant.
Piaget also
told stories where the misdeeds led to a disconnected bad consequence for the
perpetrator, this time testing children�s concept of immanent justice (i.e. a
sort of just divine retribution). Young children tended to strongly link the
wrong behaviour to the subsequent disaster but criticisms have been made that
the story itself is influential, requiring a proper study of children�s causal
understanding.
Piaget also
investigated the idea of universality in moral rules by contrasting them with
man-made social conventions (a distinction which philosophers make more guardedly),
such as the rules of marbles. Further experiments by Danazzo showed that changes were more readily accepted in the rules
the easier the game and the older the child. Turiel took the idea of degrees of universality of rules further,
with his tri-partite distinction beween moral (universal) and conventional and
personal (both non-universal) rules, arguing however that young children can
distinguish between them at an early age. Nucci
& Turiel�s comparison between children�s and adults� conceptions of the
universality of certain rules as applied to events observed at schools
demonstrated a strong agreement between children and the adult judge.
Furthermore, these children (aged between 2 and 5) remonstrated moral
infringements just as much as the adults did, while the adults responded more
than the children to infringements of conventions. The Nucci/Turiel hypothesis
also falls down when studies in countries like Brazil and India demonstrate
that the distinction between moral and social rules blurs. It is difficult to
judge where this ability to distinguish morality from conventions comes from,
given that some conventions such as tidying rooms are probably reinforced more
often than stealing, for example, though perhaps punished less strongly.
Interestingly though, �conventions� such as religious dietary requirements
could be regarded as universal in terms of the categorical imperative in
proselytising religions, but in other religions which are less missionary in
outlook, such rules would not be universal, since there would be no inculcation
in the child of wanting all others to follow the same rules. Smetana used strength of response to an
event to compare naturally occurring moral or conventional transgressions. This
produced exactly the same results as before, with the toddlers responding
mainly to the moral transgressions and the adults responding to both,
especially the conventional transgressions. Nucci
used cartoon strips with moral (e.g. lying, stealing, hitting), conventional
(calling the teacher by the first name) and personal violations (long hair,
smoking at home). 7-19 year old children had to judge how wrong each action
was. Interestingly, the experiment showed no difference between the age groups,
and a universally stronger response to the moral violations. Smetana used
pictorial representations of various infringements, trying to see whether the
conventional infringements would be permissible if there were no rule against
them. However, the choices made by the experimenter present the moral choices
as all hurting others while the conventional ones were comparably innocuous.
However, again the results indicated that moral infringements were judged more
serious by both three and four year olds (with a slight extra priority again
being given to conventional infringements by the older children) and that
conventional infringments were more admissible to a change of rules.
A longtidinal
study by Kohlberg using moral dilemmas indicated sequential development, after
which he developed a theory which brought together the issues of intentionality
and moral/conventional rules, arguing for three broad stages:
1.
preconventional �
concentration of acts, such as punishment
2.
conventional �
intentions are given weight, but only conventional intentions, such as obeying
the law and being nice
3.
post-conventional �
judgements are based on the good of society as a whole
This almost
seems to be implying that maturation inevitably leads to a semi-utilitarian
outlook.
The question,
�when are children�s sense of morals fully developed?� is meaningless. Rather,
one could say that, according to Piaget, their understanding of intentions is
not complete until about 8 years old. Piaget seems to be trying to use
intentionality as an indicator of heteronomy, which might only hold if a
heteronomously-guided child also held a concrete conception of immanent
justice. On the other hand, their conception of moral as opposed to
conventional rules is largely developed very early on. In fact, as they grow
older, the emphasis placed upon conventional rules grows until adulthood.