PSY 1200 Lecture : Chapter 13
28 May 2023
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1 Domains of
Moral
Development
WHAT IS MORAL
DEVELOPMENT?
Moral development involves changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
regarding standards of right and wrong. Moral development has an
intrapersonal dimension, which involves a person’s activities when she
or he is not engaged in social interaction, and an interpersonal
dimension, which regulates social interactions and arbitrates conflict. To
understand moral development, we consider five basic questions:
● First, how do individuals reason or think about moral decisions?
● Second, how do individuals actually behave in moral
circumstances?
● Third, how do individuals feel about moral matters?
● Fourth, what characterizes an individual’s moral personality?
● Fifth, how is the moral domain different from social
conventional and personal domains?
As we consider various theories and domains in the following sections,
keep in mind that thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and personality often are
interrelated. For example, if the focus is on an individual’s behavior, it is
still important to evaluate the person’s reasoning. Also, emotions can
influence moral reasoning. And moral personality encompasses
thoughts, behavior, and feelings.
MORAL THOUGHT
How do individuals decide what is right and wrong? Are children able to
evaluate moral questions in the same way that adults can? Jean Piaget
had some thoughts about these questions. So did Lawrence Kohlberg.
Piaget’s Theory
Interest in how children think about moral issues was stimulated by
Piaget (1932), who extensively observed and interviewed children from
the ages of 4 through 12. Piaget watched children play marbles to learn
how they used and thought about the game’s rules. He also asked
children about ethical issues—theft, lies, punishment, and justice, for
example. Piaget concluded that children go through two distinct stages in
how they think about morality:
● From 4 to 7 years of age, children display heteronomous
morality, the first stage of moral development in Piaget’s theory.
Children who are in this stage of moral development think of
justice and rules as unchangeable properties of the world,
removed from the control of people.
● Page 430From 7 to 10 years of age, children are in a transition
showing some features of the first stage of moral reasoning and
some features of the second stage, autonomous morality.
● From about 10 years of age and older, children show
autonomous morality. They become aware that rules and laws
are created by people, and in judging an action, they consider the
actor’s intentions as well as the consequences.
Because young children are heteronomous moralists, they judge the
rightness or goodness of behavior by considering its consequences, not
the intentions of the actor. For example, to the heteronomous moralist,
breaking twelve cups accidentally is worse than breaking one cup
intentionally. As children develop into moral autonomists, intentions
assume paramount importance.
Piaget extensively observed and interviewed 4- to 12-year-old children as they played games
to learn how they used and thought about the games’ rules.
Yves de Braine/Black Star/Stock Photo
The heteronomous thinker also believes that rules are unchangeable and
are handed down by all-powerful authorities. When Piaget suggested to
young children that they use new rules in a game of marbles, they
resisted. By contrast, older children—moral autonomists—accept change
and recognize that rules are merely convenient conventions, subject to
change.
The heteronomous thinker also believes in immanent justice, the
concept that if a rule is broken, punishment will be meted out
immediately. The young child believes that a violation is connected
automatically to its punishment. Thus, young children often look around
worriedly after doing something wrong, expecting inevitable
punishment. Immanent justice also implies that if something
unfortunate happens to someone, the person must have transgressed
earlier. Older children, who are moral autonomists, recognize that
punishment occurs only if someone witnesses the wrongdoing and that,
even then, punishment is not inevitable.
How do these changes in moral reasoning occur? Piaget argued that as
children develop, they become more sophisticated in thinking about
social matters, especially about the possibilities and conditions of
cooperation. Piaget stressed that this social understanding comes about
