“A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.”
It’s likely the story disgusts you. It’s likely something doesn’t feel right, yet… has anyone committed anything morally wrong? The dog was already dead, the whole thing was a private affair – you could say no harm was done, hence nothing morally wrong was committed.
This is likely to be a libertarian viewpoint. On the other hand, someone might be of the opinion that regardless of no harm done, some actions are just plain wrong.
The Origin of Morality (Take 1)
In 1987, moral psychology researchers did focus studies on children to answer the question of how children know right from wrong, and how the concept of fairness is instilled in young minds.
The two obvious answers are nature and nurture. If you pick the first, you are a nativist. You think moral knowledge is native in our minds—perhaps inscribed by God, as the Bible says, or in our evolved emotions, as Darwin argued.
If you incline towards nurture, you might be an empiricist . As in the view of John Locke, you believe children to be blank slates at birth. We can observe such a variety in morality throughout time and culture, how then could it be so innate?
Yet we have a third answer, and in 1987 moral psychology was focused on this: rationalism, which says kids figure out morality by themselves.
Piaget : Kids Reason Morality
Jean Piaget, the greatest developmental psychologist of all time, ran a variety of focus studies on children where he played games, testing taking turns, making mistakes, cheating, with results pointing to how kids figure out things by themselves in correspondence to what their cognitive ability allows.
Children’s understanding of morality seems neither innate nor learned behaviour from adults but rather self-constructed as kids play with other kids. “Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.”
Kohler : Harm is Wrong
In 1960, Lawrence Kohlberg extended these studies and developed ways to quantify Piaget’s observations.
He asked children of various ages to give judgments on a set of moral dilemmas, and most importantly, he asked the reason behind their judgments.
This resulted in a six-stage progression in children’s reasoning about the social world, which matched with the stages Piaget had found in children’s reasoning of the physical world.
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Young children judged right and wrong based on whether you were punished for the action—if the adult punished you, you must be wrong.
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Empathy leads to Morality