Morality and Social Convention

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Children in any society are expected to learn to conform to a number of social rules and expectations if they are to become participants in the culture. This is a point frequently made by traditional educators (Ryan, 1989; Wynne & Ryan, 1993) and something we will return to at various points in this book. Among the rules that children in our society are expected to learn are that certain classes of adults (such as teachers and doctors) are addressed by titles, that males and females use separate restroom facilities, and that women but not men wear dresses. These are examples of social conventions. In the absence of such a shared norm, the acts are neither right nor wrong. For this reason, conventions may be said to be arbitrary. For example, we could just as easily have students address teachers by first names as have them call teachers by their last names and formal titles of Mr. or Ms.

Conventions, however, serve an important function by providing predictability and order to social life. Without social conventions it would be impossible to organize social institutions such as schools, and societies as organized systems could not exist. The arbitrariness of conventions makes their importance difficult for children to figure out. It is not until some time in adolescence that children come to fully understand the function that these arbitrary conventions serve to provide predictability and order to our social interactions.

In contrast with issues of convention are matters of morality. Morality refers to issues of human welfare, justice, and rights that are a function of the inherent features of interpersonal relations (Turiel, 2002). Because of this, the right and wrong of moral actions are not simply determined by social consensus or the views of authority. For example, it is not possible to hit another person with force and not hurt the other person. Similarly, it is not possible to steal something valuable from someone else and not cause the person to experience the sense of loss. A moral judgment about unprovoked harm (“It is wrong to hit”) would not be dependent on the existence of a socially agreed upon rule or standard but could be generated solely from the intrinsic effects of the act (i.e., hitting hurts). Similar analyses could be done regarding a broader range of issues that would extend beyond direct harm to concerns for what it means to be just, compassionate, and considerate of the rights of others.

These two forms of social regulation, morality and convention, are both part of the social order. Every major cultural and religious group is governed by a code that contains both conventional and moral rules. Morality and convention are not, however, reducible to each other. Instead, our concepts of morality and social convention form discrete frameworks or domains. This distinction between morality and convention is nicely illustrated by the following example. The excerpt is from an interview conducted in the U.S. Virgin Islands by one of my former students, Gloria Encarnacion-Gawrych (Nucci, Turiel, & Encarnacion-Gawrych, 1983), with a 4-year-old girl talking about her perceptions of spontaneously occurring transgressions at her preschool.