Which theory states that there are different areas of social knowledge and reasoning including moral?

Conclusions and Future Directions

The concept of moral development, introduced by Piaget and Kohlberg, is an Enlightenment notion, based on common human nature and equality of all people. The centrality of benevolence values in morality and increase in reasoning about societal organization with age seem to be universal features. Piaget and Kohlberg assumed that there is a ‘natural’ trajectory of development, which is only diverted by poor institutions. Rousseau's idea of a free and egalitarian society is consistent with observations on hunter-gatherers, who live in an ecological environment where autonomy is needed and equality is functional. By contrast, in conditions with high disease stress and economic scarcity, hierarchy is functional, and the authority, ingroup loyalty, and religious purity (social-stability maintaining) components of morality concur in promoting self-discipline. Increase in economic affluence decreases the need for conformity and creates pressure toward individualism, democracy, and equality. While the weight of conservation values in morality is reduced, no value consensus on universalism (fairness) along the lines of ‘natural’ Rousseau-like development is observed in wealthy societies, but increased value diversity, also among moral values. ‘Human nature’ seems equally inclined to believe in ingroup superiority and ingroup loyalty as in the Golden Rule and universal human rights. The moral–developmental trajectory for citizens in postindustrial democracies is characterized by growth of reflective moral problem-solving skills, based on social perspective taking; i.e., the developmental trajectory described by Kohlberg's stage sequence.

Moral change follows the route predicted by Bardi's and Goodwin's (2011) theory of value change: With increase in wealth and societal equality, the domain of moral values moves along Schwartz's circle from conformity toward universalism and even self-direction. In affluent contexts, ingroup norms, which in less affluent environments are all regarded as moral, get differentiated into conventional and moral ones. As the increase in wealth makes democracy and value plurality more likely, also self-direction values (liberty) become to be thought of as moral values.

While the above review suggests that moral codes tend to be rational given the life circumstances (self-discipline is stressed in conditions of scarcity, universalism in affluent societies, which can afford it), continuity of traditions is a force that is obviously also at work. Wealth does not automatically bring about individualistic values and democracy. As Boer and Fischer (2013) show in their review, the increased opportunities that arise from wealth only give rise to more choice through a cultural emphasis on autonomy (as opposed to embedded and traditional societies) and, we would add, egalitarianism. The possibility of choice (value plurality) is important, but so is the responsibility that egalitarian societies foster in their citizens (see Helkama, 2011).

With decrease in wealth, increase of threats in the environment, or increase in inequality, moral change goes to the opposite direction, as illustrated above: Universalism values become less important and conservation values more important. Since moral judgment (in the Kantian and Kohlbergian sense of ability to solve value conflicts) is less required, level of moral judgment goes down. Possibly, in these contexts the responsibility of making such choices is left to the collective or the authority.

The cross-cultural study of moral development has been fairly one-sided in many ways. Most of it has been carried out starting from Kohlberg's theory. Developmental studies have been restricted to care and fairness. In the future, there is a need for more research using other methods than questionnaires or interviews about hypothetical situations. Mixed-method approaches that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches will become more common.

Brain research is one of the most rapidly expanding areas in psychology. Integrating results from these studies (like Narvaez's (2008) Triune Ethics) with cross-cultural data will increase our knowledge of the interaction of affective and cognitive factors in moral development as well as of long-term influence of childhood experiences.

The accumulation of representative databases from earlier time periods and development of more sophisticated statistical techniques like multilevel modeling make it possible to better understand the short-term historical and temporal dynamics of societal and psychological change in moral development and, e.g., the interplay of normative and value regulation.

The increased heterogeneity of societies implies increase in the number of people who simultaneously belong to groups that differ in their values and moral outlooks. As Sverdlik et al. (2012) point out, one important future direction is to find out how membership in multiple ingroups could be translated into a permissive moral outlook.

Adolescence (13–19 Years)

Adolescents' sexual development, moral development, increased ability to comprehend abstract concepts, and their involvement in broader social networks and social events result in further changes in trust. As a consequence, adolescents' trust extends to sexual matters such as birth control and the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS (see Lear, 1997). Also, adolescents begin to prepare for their role in democracy from their school involvement and to display concern with the moral issues pertaining to wider groups within society that bear on trust (see Flanagan and Stout, 2010; Settle et al., 2011). Adolescents' trust in institutions is lower than those found in older adults (Quintelier, 2007), and younger generations demonstrate lower generalized trust in others than do older generations (see Flanagan and Stout, 2010).

Socialization Theories

Historically, socialization theories have conceptualized moral development primarily in terms of children's internalization and compliance with adult and societal rules and requests, although they differ in their view of the role of emotions and affect in this process. Approaches emphasizing morality's affective components have their roots in the psychoanalytic tradition of Sigmund Freud. In line with his broader theory of psychosexual development, Freud believed that moral development entailed the internalization of societal standards through the child's identification with parents. This process resulted in the creation of the conscience, or the superego in Freudian terms, which functions as an internal regulator of behavior. The conscience inhibits the innate impulses and urges toward selfishness and aggression that, if left unchecked, would otherwise prevent humans from living in society. From this perspective, aversive emotions such as guilt, shame, and anxiety are thought to serve as the driving motivations for the child's successful inhibition of impulses and internalization of external norms.

Other socialization researchers have been influenced by behaviorist and learning theory principles as exemplified in the work of B.F. Skinner. Like Freud, Skinner did not distinguish between moral norms and other types of social rules or expectations. In contrast to Freud, however, Skinner postulated that moral behaviors are learned through conditioning and reinforcement. Behaviors valued by society are rewarded, while undesirable behaviors are punished. Some social learning theorists, such as Albert Bandura, incorporated cognitive processes, such as observational learning or imitation, to account for how novel behaviors could be acquired independent of reinforcements. Additionally, affective responses like fear and empathy retained a role in other versions of learning theory, although they were interpreted as stemming from conditioned responses resulting from the pairing of feelings of pleasure and pain with external stimuli such as punishment (Eisenberg, 1986).

Moral Dilemma Discussion

Kohlberg's (1984) research on moral development was part of the ‘cognitive revolution’ that reshaped American psychology in the 1970s. For Kohlberg, the limitations of behaviorist and social learning accounts of socialization mapped directly onto Piaget's (1932) criticisms of Durheim's (1925) vision of moral education, and traditional approaches to character education. Kohlberg (Kohlberg and Turiel, 1971) mocked the appropriation of Aristotelian philosophy by traditional character education as reducing moral education to the teaching of an arbitrary ‘bag of virtues’ defined by the unexamined social values of character education proponents. Moreover, he viewed the socialization approach advocated by traditional character education as contributing to the consolidation of conventional moral reasoning rather than contributing toward moral development.

Instead of teaching moral values directly, Kohlberg proposed that the core of moral education should be a focus upon moving students through the progression of stages of moral reasoning toward principled morality. Following Piaget, Kohlberg held that the process of stage change occurs gradually as a result of the efforts of individuals to resolve the contradictions or conflicts that result from the application of their moral understandings to actual moral situations. Kohlberg applied this general principle to his work on education through the use of moral dilemma discussion. Early research on the social experiences that contribute to stage change indicated that development is enhanced when individuals are drawn into a discussion about a moral conflict and asked to provide both a solution and justification for their position, and when counterarguments are one stage above the moral reasoning level of the targeted students (Blatt and Kohlberg, 1975). Later, more refined studies indicated that the key to successful moral discussion was less a matter of achieving an ‘optimal mismatch’ in the moral reasoning stage of discussion participants, than the degree to which members of a discussion actively engaged in efforts to reconcile or integrate competing moral arguments with the goal of arriving at a shared moral position (Berkowitz and Gibbs, 1983). The ‘transactive’ discussion patterns that Berkowitz and Gibbs (1983) identified in their research were structurally similar to what Jurgen Habermas (1991) has defined as the ‘communicative discourse’ requisite for the social construction of a rationally defensible morality. The actual classroom applications of Kohlberg's moral stage theory to moral dilemma discussion did not fare as well. This approach to moral education did not translate into changes in student conduct, nor was it easily integrated within the natural flow of academic activities valued by classroom teachers (Power et al., 1989). As will be discussed below, however, recent work has effectively revived the use of classroom discussion as a tool for moral education (Nucci, 2009).

Developmental Psychology

Kohlberg's (1981) theory of moral development and research methods were widely adopted by child psychologists in the 1970s and 1980s to study the cognitive development of moral reasoning and moral judgment in children of varying ages in different cultures. Based on the assumption of cross-cultural universality in moral development, Kohlberg claimed that “All individuals in all cultures use the same basic moral categories, concepts, and principles, and all individuals in all cultures go through the same order on sequence of gross stage development, though they vary in rate and terminal point of development” (Kohlberg, 1971: p. 175). His theory consists of six universal stages of cognitive development in moral judgment.

Kohlberg's theory adopts the perspective of evolutionism, which is based on a normative model and classifies a great diversity of moral discourse from a multitude of cultures into several categories arranged in a formal sequence. According to his theory, the development of moral reasoning follows a universal invariant sequence toward the goal of thinking with universal ethical principles.

A series of empirical studies have been conducted using Kohlberg's standardized moral dilemmas and scoring manuals (Marchand-Jodoin and Samson, 1982; Parikh, 1980). After careful examination of the literature, Snarey (1985) found that because stage skipping and stage regressions were rare, progress from Stage 1 to Stage 3 or 4 was virtually universal, but that the presence of Stage 4/5 or 5 was extremely rare in all populations. Nearly all samples from Western middle-class groups and 91% of Eastern urban populations exhibited some Stage 6 principled reasoning. No tribal or folk cultural groups of the non-Western world showed any postconventional thinking. Postconventional thinking upholds individual rights or universal ethical principles.

Many of the moral reasoning data collected in collectivist or communalistic societies of the non-Western world either could not be scored according to the standardized manual or could not be explained in the context of Kohlberg's theory (e.g., Maqsud, 1979; Sullivan, 1977; White et al., 1978). Such anomalistic facts have been used to challenge Kohlberg's theory. Critics charge that though Kohlberg's preconventional and conventional stages are well based on empirical operative judgments, his descriptions of higher stage reasoning at postconventional stages are primarily based upon Kant, Rawls, and other Western philosophers (Snarey, 1985). This perspective entails Western ideologies of rationalism, individualism, and liberalism, and therefore assigns the values of male, Caucasian, American intellectuals as the end point of moral maturation (Buck-Morss, 1975; Edwards, 1985). The theory's ethical objectivism ignores the moral discourse prevailing in many non-Western societies, and fails to recognize their substantial ethical philosophies (Weinreich-Haste and Locke, 1983). Imposing Kohlberg's theory as well as his scoring system on the moral reasoning of non-Western peoples may result in systematic bias originating from Western ethnocentrism.

Gibbs (1979) tried to revise Kohlberg's theory in terms of Piaget's phylogenetic perspective. According to Piaget, human intelligence is a holistic phenomenon encompassing social, moral, and logico-physical aspects. Its development follows a standard sequence that is predetermined by epigenetic factors like those of other species. Along with completion of physical maturation and the singular achievement of intellectual development over the course of the adolescent years, there is a progressive ability for people at the highest stage of standard development to reflect on the very conditions of their existence in the world. Reflection on one's own existence may motivate one to define a moral theory to justify one's basic moral principles from a particular standpoint that is either inside or outside the society (e.g., Stacey, 2011).

As many studies have shown, different cultures show wide variety in their philosophies of morality. These normative philosophies may provide material for second-order thinking or metaethical reflection when individuals try to define their own moral theories. It is impossible for individuals to eliminate cultural influences from the contents of their own moral reasoning. Considering this fact, a better way to conduct cross-cultural research on morality would be to use ethnographic analysis to describe the patterns of moral conduct and moral thinking that consistently emerge in the daily social life of people in a particular culture.

Two Moralities and Two Types of Social Interactions

Piaget examined the organization of children's thinking and how they interpret events. In his work on moral development, he observed children's use of rules in playing games, sharing (distributive justice), punishment (retributive justice), and intentions or consequences in assessing responsibility for transgressions. He proposed a sequence of two broad levels of children's moral judgments connected to two ways they relate to others. In the first, children (approximately 4–7 years) are heteronomous in their moral thinking and have unilateral respect for adults in authority. Heteronomy is characterized by absolutistic judgments, whereby social rules are regarded as fixed and requiring strict adherence. As an example, young children reify game rules, judging that they cannot be altered even if all the participants were to agree to the changes. They also believe that adults' commands must be followed to the letter. Children also judge actions by their material consequences rather than by the actor's intentions.

In part, heteronomous thinking is due to inherent relationships of inequality. Young children attend mainly to the greater power and status of adults – which imbues adults with moral authority. In later childhood there is a shift in moral thinking that occurs with increasing interactions with peers, which provide children with more opportunities to experience mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation. As a consequence children shift from heteronomy to autonomy, defined as involving participation in the elaboration of norms (as opposed to receiving them readymade). Through the reciprocity in relationships of equality children construct understandings of justice and mutual respect, which they differentiate from obedience to authority and strict adherence to rules.

Actions

Although previously proposed actions soften material desires, diminish unethical behavior, decrease high risk home loans, clean up the securities market, and facilitate human growth and moral development, they can also reduce purchases and disturb the global economy. Whereas purchases made with risky debt must be restrained to avoid future crises, these actions should also promote normal and economically beneficial buying. Two actions here involve building global consumer confidence through communication and economic policies.

Clearly communicate goals and expectations: When people expect positive outcomes, any deviation—however slight—causes disappointment. In an economy, disappointment diminishes confidence and tightens buying behavior. However, when people know what to expect, they can adapt and make purchasing decisions based on affordability rather than on fear-driven expectations. Prior actions hit people in their bank accounts. They depress bonuses and insert accountability. They delay gratification for some and prevent others from buying homes or spending what they don’t have. Citizens of all countries must adjust their expectations to accept a standard of living that is not founded on intolerable risk and will not grow for a while. To ease their disappointment, people need the hope of a better tomorrow. Government and industry leaders should devise a comprehensive economic plan, perhaps using the proposed actions as a foundation. They must clearly share the future-oriented intent behind that plan, speak honestly about its repercussions, and provide frequent updates on progress. And they must implement it together.

Adjust tax, benefits, interest, and budgetary policies: Act as stewards for the future rather than as consumers in the present. It is difficult to judge whether supply-side policies that encourage production or demand-side policies that stimulate demand or a combination of the two would be most effective in today’s economies.36 Though macroeconomic and fiscal policy is beyond the scope of this book, we can deduce that future policies should maintain a slow-growing or level economy as nations recover from excessive debt. Furthermore, the U.S. must regain its credit standing to exit from the vicious circle of excessive debt that lowers credit ratings and causes it to borrow money at higher rates, thus further increasing debt. Other nations, too, must escape extreme reliance on sovereign debt37 whose risk depends on their economic health and monetary exchange rates.

A Platform for Theory Testing

Because infancy is a period of life that precedes the onset and influence of (much) experience, traditional ‘nature–nurture’ debates about mental and moral development have persistently turned to infancy for thought experiments and field studies, and different grand theories made specific (and sometimes) testable predictions about infants. What do we know before we have any experience in the world? What kinds of knowledge require what kinds of experience? Infancy has long been a platform for theorizing and hypothesizing.

Philosophers from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and W.V. Quine directly appealed to infancy for answers to questions that seek the origins and nature of human knowledge. Extreme views on epistemology were proposed by empiricists, who asserted that all knowledge derives from the senses and grows by way of experience; and by nativists, who reasoned that some kinds of knowledge cannot possibly rely on experience and thus human beings must enter the world with a mental apparatus equipped (at the very least) to order and organize their percepts and cognitions.

Empiricists contend that there is no endowed knowledge at birth, that knowledge is learned, and that development proceeds through experience and association. The empiricist's view of the nature of the mind early in life can be characterized by two separate, though conceptually related, schools of thought. One derived from John Locke (1632–1704), who in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book II, Chapter 1.2) described the mind at birth as a ‘white paper’: Mental life begins ‘without any ideas,’ and understanding the world depends wholly on the accumulation of experiences. A slightly different empiricist view can be attributed to William James (1842–1910), who in Some Problems of Philosophy (1924: p. 50) described sensible life as a big ‘blooming buzzing confusion’ out of which experience organizes and creates knowledge and order. According to empiricist beliefs, the naive infant does not share the same world of the experienced adult. Empiricism is inherently developmental because, by whatever mechanism postulated, human beings grow from immature to mature.

By contrast, extreme nativists postulated that human beings are not ‘created’ mindless and that the knowledge that humans possess cannot be achieved by learning alone in so short a span of time as infancy or even childhood. As a consequence, philosophers like René Descartes (1596–1650) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of humans as endowed from birth with ‘ideas’ or ‘categories’ of knowledge. The nativist program holds that the human mind naturally and from the beginning of life imposes order on experience, and infant and adult share many capacities. For those abilities that are congenital, nativism is not a developmental view; for those abilities that mature, however, nativism is developmental in outlook.

When psychology turned from nineteenth-century philosophical speculation to twentieth-century empirical investigation, Myrtle McGraw's studies of Johnny and Jimmy; Arnold Gesell's Atlas and Embryology of Behavior; Jean Piaget's attentiveness to his own three infants: Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent; John Watson's immortal pronouncements on the determinism of association; B.F. Skinner's demonstrations of his daughter in a box; and John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's identification of pervasive and enduring effects of attachment drew serial notice to infants as proofs for one or another theory. This tradition continues in comparisons of monozygotes and dizygotes reared apart or treated differently from infancy, in tracing the long-term consequences for children removed from the dire straits of orphanages before or after the end of infancy, and so forth. Infancy continues to provoke enduring philosophical, biological, social, and juridical debate and question. When is the developing fetus a child? When do legal rights of an individual begin?

Introduction

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Morality can be seen as a cultural structure designed to enable people to live together in harmony (Baumeister and Exline, 1999). Moral psychologist James Rest (1994) defined moral development as a means to organize cooperation in society. Thus, the key conception that develops over time is people's understanding of how it is possible to organize cooperation. Moral judgment represents people's problem-solving strategies, and Rest argues that along with the moral development, the scope of human interaction is widened, more things are considered, and the higher stages deal with more complex moral problems than the lower stages. Development represents growth toward greater cognitive differentiation and integration. From the perspective of peace and conflict resolution, the ability to organize cooperation, understand different perspectives, and integrate them are essential. What kind of cooperation helps us to enhance peace and harmony among human beings or societies? What can help us to understand each other better in conflicting situations?

Concerning human values, there is widespread agreement that people's value priorities play an important role in predicting their attitudinal and behavioral decisions. Moral psychologists have been puzzled about what motivates individuals to behave according their judgments. Why were some high-scoring respondents able to resist temptation and some were not? Because the level of moral judgment may be insufficient, per se, to provoke moral behavior (Rest, 1986), Kristiansen and Hotte (1996), for instance, claimed that values may provide transsituational ideals regulating beliefs about what people ought to do and, thereby, their attitudes and behavior. Values, then, can strengthen the effect of moral judgment in forming cooperation. How are moral judgment and values related? This is scrutinized further in this article from a moral psychological viewpoint.

Rest (1986) argued in his four-component model of moral behavior that moral judgment was only one psychological process going on in moral behavior. The others were:

moral sensitivity, referring to interpreting the situations from a moral viewpoint;

moral motivation, i.e., being motivated to act according to adopted moral principles and willingness to give priority to moral values above other personal values in moral behavior; and

moral character, referring to courage and implementing skills to carry out a line of action even under pressure.

The basic assumption is that the underlying psychological processes of moral behavior are distinct from each other, although they might interact and influence one another. For instance, a person might be capable of making adequate moral judgments but be insensitive to different moral aspects of the situation, or vice versa. Rest did not divide morality into cognitive, affective, and behavioral components—as had traditionally been done—which each have their separate developmental paths. Instead, he claimed that these three components are always interconnected, and that cognition, affect, and behavior are incorporated in his model's components. Cognition and affect could be linked by several ways; there is not just one connection. Thus, this article deals with interconnections of two components from the Rest's model, moral judgment, and motivation.

Another View of Moral Development?

One core issue concerns the relationship between judgment and action. This problem has been dealt with in several ways. First, the claim was raised and empirically supported that consistency will increase with moral development (Kohlberg and Candee, 1984; Blasi, 1980). This makes sense given that subjects referring to self-serving concerns will be assigned to lower stages. Later, responsibility judgments (expressing the personal relevance of moral judgments, Higgins et al., 1984; Blasi, 1984), and the distinction between types A (considering pragmatic concerns) and B (exclusively focusing on moral values) have been introduced (Kohlberg, 1984; Colby and Kohlberg, 1987). These additions are remedies to deal with the fact that individuals differ in intensity of moral commitment – as is especially clearly evidenced by Colby's and Damon's (1994) ‘moral exemplars.’

A more far reaching theoretical revision, however, may be called for in view of recent studies on children's moral understanding. Turiel (1983) and Nucci and Turiel (1993) have shown that young children distinguish between moral rules (enjoying universal, unalterable, intrinsic validity) and conventional or religious rules (that depend on authorities or God and are valid only for in-group members). Nevertheless, most young children expect a wrongdoer to feel good and only gradually begin to ascribe negative emotions (Nunner-Winkler and Sodian, 1988). Until about 6 or 7 years (i.e., before self-reflexive role-taking is developed) these predict moral behavior. By about 10 years almost all children (even those low in moral motivation) say they expect a wrongdoer to feel bad. In justifying these negative emotions most children tend to refer neither to impending sanctions nor to empathic identification with the victim but to the fact that a wrong had been committed. These departures from Kohlberg's description of preconventional thinking result from differences in problems addressed and measurement procedures used: Turiel and Nucci and Lee questioned children's understanding of norm validity. Nunner-Winkler focused on the intensity and type of moral motivation. Kohlberg asked for action recommendations in moral dilemmas. Until they begin to care about morality children will guide these along prudential rather than moral considerations.

A new reading of moral development suggests itself. Universally, children acquire an early understanding of the categorical ought: they know that moral norms are intrinsically valid and motives should not be self-serving. Thus, from early on, all have a good cognitive grasp of the constitutive feature of the moral domain – its deontic character. Moral competence, however, requires more. Sociocognitive development (which constitutes the structural core of Kohlberg's stage descriptions) and the acquisition of knowledge are needed for passing judgments in more complex situations. Moral motivation is needed to translate knowledge into action. These requisites are acquired in later and differential learning processes.