Developmental psychology
Chapter 15
Moral reasoning

Reasoning and judgment

Every discussion of the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior must cover the work of Piagent and Kohlberg.

Piaget

The first to study in a systematic way the moral judgments of children.
Piaget presented them with hypothetical moral dilemmas and then asked the children to make judgments.
From responses to dilemmas and to queries concerning the rules of games, Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgment was governed by unilateral respect for adult and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others.
Young children children judge that the greater damage constitutes a larger moral violation, because the intentions will not be salient.
With age children develop a morality of cooperation and social exchange.
Children come to understand that intentions matter, that roles can be reversed, and that moral conflicts must be resolved through discussion and compromise with peers.
Age 10.

Kohlberg

Moral dilemmas to elicit moral reasoning.
Five stages of judgment

1. Heteronomous morality

• Children believe that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are determined by powerful adult figures.
• To act morally is to follow the rules laid down by authorities.
• Little consideration is given to the intentions or desires of individuals other than the self when making moral judgments.

2. Instrumental morality

• Individuals become aware that other people have intentions and desires, and that there are two sides to every argument.
• This awareness influences moral judgment only when others’ desires affect the pursuit of one’s instrumental goals.

3. Interpersonal normative morality

• Individuals in this stage seek to be viewed as ‘good’ and feel guilt when it is likely that others will condemn their behavior.
• An emergent concern for the perspectives of others toward the self.

4. Social system morality

• Individuals recognize that all members of society have intentions and pursue goals, but they understand that rules and laws are necessary in order for society to function and prevent anarchy.
• Moral judgment focuses on the congruence of an individual’s actions with the rules and laws necessary to preserve social harmony.

5. Human rights and social welfare morality

• Individuals make use of ethical principles to guide moral judgments.

Age and stage

Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterized by sequential passage through the stages.
Stages 1 and 2 are most characteristic of children
Stage 3 emerging among adolescents.
Stage 4 increases in salience across adolescence
Stage 5 appears in adulthood although even then it remains fairly rare.

Longitudinal research indicates that individuals move up a single state at a time and that regressions over time is rare.
In another meta-analysis suggests a strong positive linear relationship between educational attainment and moral stage.

Judgment and action

One very common criticism of is that the sorts of justifications offered for moral dilemmas are not associated with action.

The relation of judgment to action is extremely complex and poorly understood.
Those who reason at higher stages are more likely to act prosocially than those who reason at lower stages.
Moral stages represent ways of thinking about moral issues, not specific behavior tendencies.

Comprehensiveness of moral stages

In much of Kolberg’s writing there is an assumption that the states of logical cognition outlined by Piaget are sufficient for an account of the development of intelligence and that the moral stages suffice for a broad understanding of social cognition (the comprehension of social situations).

Young children’s understanding of moral regulation is much more sophisticated than what is allowed by Stage 1 in Kohlberg’s theory.
Young children reasoned in thoughtful ways about sharing in peer context.
Children have considerable experience sharing food and toys with their friends, and this experience is translated into implicit principles.
Young children who have little experience and moral reasoning is muddled.

Two trends:

• Moral cognition. The assumption is that children’s (and adult’s) are made very quickly with essentially no conscious deliberation using rules that are specific to particular kinds of situations and context.
• These intuitions arise early and show relatively little developmental transformation. Even very young humans are capable of sophisticated inferences about the minds of others and can generate appropriate prosocial responses.

The discovery of early sophistication of some forms of moral cognition and prosocial behavior is often linked to an evolutionary perspective.

Distinguishing between moral and non-moral domains

Research of the last 20 years, has demonstrated that children and adolescents make sharp distinctions between moral and non-moral domains, and consequently moral stages are unlikely to be used in reasoning about all social issues.
Researchers have also argued that even within the moral domain there are types of judgments, concerning obligations to the natural world that are not well addressed by Kohlberg’s scheme.

There is now great deal of research indicating that one form of antisocial behavior, aggression, is bets understood in terms of the attributions children make rather than moral stages.

Universality

Cross cultural evidence does not lead to the conclusion that persons from different cultures reason in exactly the same way about moral issues.
Evidence has accumulated demonstrating that there is considerably more to social and moral reasoning than is presented by Kohlberg’s stages.

Moral judgment development and personality

In Western cultures, moral judgment sophistication is associated with academic achievement.
Recent research indicates that moral judgment is associated with personality.