Moral Concepts

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Morality has to do with our ideas regarding what is right and what is wrong and how right and wrong behavior should be punished and rewarded. The classic work on the moral judgment of children was done by Jean Piaget. His work was later elaborated by Lawrence Kohlberg.

Piaget argued that there are essentially two forms of morality. One of these is derived from the child's experience with adults. The morality of unilateral authority is derived from adults in the sense that the adult sets the rules and enforces them. In general, the morality of unilateral authority appears in early childhood and is objective in the sense that the child believes that badness is associated with the amount of damage done. The young child believes that a child who breaks three cups while helping his mother set the table is more culpable than a child who has broken a single cup while trying to get cookies he was forbidden to eat.

After the child attains concrete operations and begins to interact with his peers and to participate in the culture of childhood, he attains a second form of morality, that of mutuality. In the course of playing with his friends, the child learns to make and break his own rules and to set his own rewards and punishments. At the same time, a new factor enters into his assessments of good and bad and how punishment should be meted out. He now begins to take the person's intentions into account. In the dilemma described earlier, the child of eight or nine is likely to say that the child who broke one cup did something bad and should be punished more than the child who broke three cups because the latter was doing something good.

Unilateral authority thus occasions an objective morality while mutual authority occasions a subjective morality. To illustrate, six- and seven-year-old children regard a pupil who lies about the grades he received on his report card as less culpable than a child who claims he has seen a dog the size of a house. At the early elementary school level, children reason that the child might have received the grade he said he did, whereas a dog the size of a house is physically impossible. The lie about the dog is thus more serious because it is more at variance with the objective world. In contrast, older elementary school children say that lying about the grade is more serious than lying about the dog. They reason that the child who lied about the grade intended to deceive his parents, whereas the child who lied about the dog intended only to amuse them. Deception is a more reprehensible intention than amusement and should be punished more.

The objective character of unilateral morality can also be seen in the young child's judgment regarding punishment. Up until about the age of six or seven, children assess an action's "badness" or "goodness" on the basis of whether it was objectively rewarded or punished. For example, children at this age argue that a child who is unfairly spanked by his mother must, of necessity, have done something bad. Older children, however, recognize that a child can be punished unfairly. For them, objective punishment is not necessarily an index of subjective guilt.