2/11 Pg 427-464 Flashcards
French physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
Victor “the wild child”
Deep-seated, unlearned sense of justice
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Inherent moral nature
- > infants are pure in heart and mind and would always behave in morally appropriate ways if not for the corrupting influences of society
- > Interacting with preexisting moral natures
William Golding
classical novel Lord of the Files
- > children=selfish creatures need to be civilized by society
- > filled with base impulses that need to be controlled and suppressed by civilization
Empiricist’s Origins of Moral Thought
No inherent moral characteristics and must learn about morality from their social and cultural experiences
-> No cognitively and emotionally capable of moral thought
Evolutionary psychology
considers morality from the standpoint of how certain moral behaviors and patterns of thought might have been selected in the course of evolution
- > Mixtures of all sorts of basic moral components
- > Learning and culture
- > Survival
Cultural psychology
study of moral thought and behavior by focusing on how cultures install ways of thinking and fostering certain behaviors
- > Some basic universal moral concerns
- > Richard Snweder: different culture with different patterns of moral reasoning
- > Three clusters of basic moral values to justice, community, spirituality
Characterizing the Basis of Moral Thought
- No reason to consider moral thought-> window dressings that come to bear long after we commit an action
- Emotions= intrinsically interwoven with moral thought in a complex web of interactions (British empiricist David Hume)
- Cognition about moral situations is slow-> do all our moral computations only after entering situation and appraising it
- > instant response, moral schemas
- > Patterns of reasoning to encode or frame action
Piaget’s Stages of Moral Reasoning and Experiment
Experiment: Children’s moral beliefs vs game’s rules; Children’s use of rules vs stages of moral reasoning
Stage 0: Premoral Development
Stage 1: Heteronomous Stage
The Transition between Stage 1 and Stage 2
Stage 2: Autonomous Stage
Stage 0: Premoral Development
4 years: for fun, without knowing rules
- > Imitate others, without understanding guidelines
- > Do not assess culpability/have intuitions about justice
Stage 1: The Heteronomous Stage
Age of 4-10; preoperational to concrete
- > External set of laws or control
- > Rules= inviolate and unalterable, immutable, fixed for all time
- > Egocentrism: make up own rules
- > Ignore intentions and focus on consequences
- > Same way on lies
Immanent Justice
Accidents= cases of divine retibution
The Transition between Stage 1 and Stage 2
Age 7-11 and more concern on winning, realizing that maintaining uniform rules is central
Stage 2: Autonomous Stage
age 10/11
- > See rules= human conventions
- > Understand that people create rules for purposes of organizing an interaction and that people can change the rules as well
- > Moral principles not equal to external laws
- > Norms and individual beliefs
- > Intentions
- > Fairness and justice
- > Punishments
- > No immanent justice
Social Conventions
arbitrary rules jointly agreed to by a group or society to facilitate interaction and coordinate activity
- > Game rules are closer to social conventions but not moral laws
- > Preschoolers understand essential differences on social conventions (crazy), moral laws (bad), and physical inviolable laws (magic)
Information integration theory
how children integrate different dimensions of a problem to gain understanding and make decisions
Younger: one dimension
Older: integrating several dimensions at one time
Margaret Mead: Immanent Justice
Papua New Guinea
- > reasons of natural events
- > Younger: simple, concrete causal explanations to reject metaphysical explanations
- > Adults: supernatural explanations involving
Lawrence Kohlberg
Study of moral development with close attention to Piaget’s work
-> Not think seriously about what morality itself is
Moral= central to proper study of moral development and how children become moral thinkers not incidental
-> Construct morality by developing system of beliefs about concepts like justice and individual rights
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning
Preconventional morality: arises from basic needs and drives (2-10)
Stage 1: Obedience/ Punishment
Stage 2: Self-interest
Conventional morality: arises from conforming to expected roles and pleasing others (9)
Stage 3: Conformity
Stage 4: Law and order
Postconventional morality: arises from abstract principles that transcend individual circumstances and local cultural contexts (12 and above)
Stage 5: Human rights
Stage 6: Universal human ethics
Evaluating Kohlberg’s Theory
- Unclear stages
- Cross-cultural variations
- Possible gender bias
