More recently, however, as a consequence of what has been called the “cognitive revolution,” there has been a recognition that knowledge is not uniform but is structured within different domains or conceptual frameworks. Verbal and mathematical knowledge, for example, are not reduced to one another, and the teaching of reading and arithmetic call upon different curricula and teaching strategies.
While it may seem fairly obvious that moral cognition is something different from mathematics or text comprehension (reading), it has been less apparent that morality is a domain apart from knowledge of other social values. For the most part, researchers and educators have accepted the everyday usage of the term morality (standards of social right and wrong) as defining the field of inquiry or instruction. Moral education, according to this conventional view, involves the socializing of students into socially accepted standards of behavior so that they learn to know “right” from “wrong” (Ryan 1996). This global approach draws no distinctions among very disparate forms of social right and wrong, and it offers no criteria for inclusion or exclusion within the moral category of social norms. Behaviors as different as harm to another person and failure to wear conventional dress are both considered “wrong” and, therefore, subject to moral socialization. Thus, there is no sense in which morality is viewed in this conventional perspective as something apart from knowledge of social norms in general.
Within philosophy, however, attempts have been made to establish criteria for determining what ought to count as a moral value. According to formalist ethics1 (e.g., Dworkin 1977; Frankena 1978; Gewirth 1978;
Habermas 1991), this notion of ought carries with it two related ideas. One is that what is morally right is not something that is simply subject to individual opinion but carries with it an “objective” prescriptive force. The
second, related idea, is that what is morally right, because it is “objectively” prescriptive, holds generally and can be universalized across people. These two criteria, prescriptivity and universality, are linked together in philosophical analyses to issues of human welfare, justice, and rights.
What we have learned through research over the past twenty-five years is that people in general, and not just philosophers, also do not hold global conceptions of social right and wrong, but reason very differently about
matters of morality, convention, and personal choice (Nucci 1977, 1996; Turiel 1983). More specifically, these conceptual differences become apparent when people are asked to evaluate different actions in terms of criteria similar to those set out in formalist ethics.
Within the domain theory of social development, morality refers to conceptions of human welfare, justice, and rights, which are a function of the inherent features of interpersonal relations (Turiel 1983). As such, prescriptions pertaining to the right and wrong of moral actions are not simply the function of consensus or the views of authority. For example, it is not possible to hit another person with force and not hurt that other person.
That is because hurting is an inherent consequence of hitting. Amoral judgment about unprovoked harm (“It is wrong to hit.”) would not be dependent on the existence of a socially agreed-upon norm or standard but
could be generated solely from the intrinsic effects of the act (i.e., hitting hurts). In this example, the prescriptive force of the moral standard “It is wrong to hit.” is objective in the sense that the effects of the act are independent of the views of the observer, prescriptive in the sense that the issue of wrong stems from the objective features of the act, and generalizable in the sense that the effects of the act hold across people irrespective of background. Similar analyses could be done regarding a broader range of issues pertaining to human welfare that would extend beyond harm to concerns for what it means to be just, compassionate, and considerate of the rights of others. In studies on reasoning about a broad range of issues, it has been found that moral judgments are structured by the person’s understandings of fairness and human welfare (Turiel 1983).
In contrast with issues of morality are matters of social convention. Conventions are the agreed-upon uniformities in social behavior determined by the social system in which they are formed (Turiel 1983). Unlike
moral prescriptions, conventions are arbitrary because there are no inherent interpersonal effects of the actions they regulate. For example, among the many conventions children in our society are expected to learn
is that certain classes of adults (e.g., teachers, physicians) are addressed by their titles. Since there are no inherently positive or negative effects of forms of address, society could just as easily have set things up differently (e.g., had children refer to their teachers by first names). Through accepted usage, however, these standards serve to coordinate the interactions of individuals participating within a social system by providing
them with a set of expectations regarding appropriate behavior. In turn, the matrix of social conventions and customs is an element in the structuring and maintenance of the general social order (Searle 1969).
These two forms of social regulation, morality and convention, are both a part of the social order. Conceptually, however, they are not reducible one to another and are understood within distinct conceptual frameworks or domains. This distinction between morality and convention is nicely illustrated by the following example (collected in the U.S. Virgin Islands during the research for Nucci, Turiel, and Encarnacion-Gawrych 1983) taken from an interview with a 4-year-old girl regarding her perceptions of spontaneously occurring transgressions at her preschool.
MORAL ISSUE: Did you see what happened? Yes. They were playing and John hit him too hard. Is that something you are supposed to do or not supposed to do? Not so hard to hurt. Is there a rule about that? Yes. What is the rule? You’re not to hit hard. What if there were no rule about hitting hard, would it be all right to do then? No. Why not? Because he could get hurt and start to cry.
CONVENTIONAL ISSUE: Did you see what just happened? Yes. They were noisy. Is that something you are supposed to or not supposed to do? Not do. Is there a rule about that? Yes. We have to be quiet. What if there were no rule, would it be all right to do then? Yes. Why? Because there is no rule.
As I stated earlier, the distinction between morality and non moral norms of social regulation, such as convention, has not been generally made in values education. Traditional values educators, such as Kevin
Ryan (1996) and Edward Wynne (1989), hold that moral values are established by society. They treat all values including morality as matters of custom and convention to be inculcated in children as a part of what they refer to as character education. The kind of distinction drawn here is also at variance with accounts that have had the greatest impact on developmental approaches to moral education. In contrast with behaviorism and traditional approaches to moral education, the accounts of moral development offered by Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1984) were informed by and included philosophical distinctions between morality and convention.
However, while differing in their interpretations of the ages at which such changes take place, both Piaget (1932) and Kohlberg (1984) maintained that only at the highest stages of moral development can morality
be differentiated from and displace convention as the basis for moral judgments.
Over the past twenty-five years, however, more than sixty published articles have reported research demonstrating that morality and convention emerge as distinct conceptual frameworks at very early ages and undergo distinct patterns of age-related developmental changes. This research is reviewed in detail in Helwig, Tisak and Turiel 1990; Smetana 1995a; Tisak 1995; and Turiel 1998a. Three main forms of evidence have
been offered in support of the contention that morality is a conceptual system distinct from understandings of nonmoral social norms.
The first consists of studies examining whether or not individuals make conceptual distinctions between moral and nonmoral social issues on the basis of a number of formal criteria. The second form of research consists of observational studies of children’s social interactions to determine if the pattern of social interactions associated with moral issues is different from the form of social interactions around nonmoral issues. The third form of research has examined the age-related changes in the ways in which people reason about moral and nonmoral concerns. Most of the attention of each of these three forms of research has been upon the distinction between matters of morality and social convention. Other work has looked at the development of understandings of personal prerogative and issues of self-harm (prudence). What follows is an overview of the research on the moral–conventional distinction.
Read More : Identifying the moral domain
