Moral Reasoning
A.P. Psychology / Name:
Hour:

**What is morality?

  • Morality implies an ability:
  • To know right from wrong (cognitive)
  • To be able to act on this distinction (behavioral)
  • To feel good about doing right and feel guilt about doing wrong (affective)
  • ABCs – Affective, Behavior, Cognitive

Moral Action vs. Moral Reasoning

  • Piaget’s final cognitive stage – formal operations – includes development of reasoning ability
  • New ability to deduce consequences of hypothetical behaviors
  • New ability to detect inconsistency and/or hypocrisy
  • What is the difference between moral acts and moral thoughts?
  • Can 1 be the same and the other different?
  • Can an act be moral without moral reasoning or inverse?
  • Acting in a way to be perceived as moral
  • Bystander Effect

**Piaget’s Views on Morality

  • Premoral (to age 4)
  • No moral sense
  • If it hurts it’s wrong, if not, it’s right.
  • Heteronomous Morality (4-7 years)
  • Rules are universal and unchangeable, not controlled by people
  • Characteristic: “Immanent Justice” – punishment immediately follows transgression
  • Ex: child can not accept playing a game differently than it was learned
  • Autonomous Morality (10 – older)
  • Awareness that rules and laws are created by people
  • Realization that in judging action, one considers intentions and consequences
  • Opposite Ex: child now creates his/her own rules to games

Lawrence Kohlberg

  • Piagetian – sought to describe moral reasoning (developmentally)
  • Studies: posed moral dilemmas to children, adolescents, and adults and analyzed answers for evidence of stages of moral reasoning.

Kohlberg’s Moral Ladder

Preconventional Level (4- 9 or 10)

  • Obey to avoid punishment or attain rewards.
  • Key: Self interest

Conventional Level (10 - ?)

  • Uphold laws and rules because they are the laws and rules.
  • Key: Social approval

Postconventional Level (adulthood or never)

  • Attainment of this level is controversial – see criticisms of Kohlberg
  • Person follows what they personally perceive as ethical principles.
  • Key: ethical principles

Criticisms of Kohlberg

  • Cultural Bias? – Western societies more individualistic
  • Studies of Postconventional level show it is most common in America and Western Europe – possible difference in ideology not morality.
  • Carol Gilligan
  • Especially critical of “Postconventional Stage” – maintains that the focus on the individual and impersonal principles is biased against women, whose view of morality is more based on caring relationships.

Morality as an Intuition

  • Jonathan Haidt – “Social Intuitionist” account of morality
  • Challenges idea that moral action comes from moral reasoning
  • Rather, it is a “gut-feeling” which triggers moral reasoning mostly to convince others of what we intuitively feel.
  • Moral Dilemma (Moral Paradoxes provide support here)
  • A Runaway trolley is headed for 5 people. All will be killed unless you throw a switch that diverts the trolley onto another track, where it will kill 1 person. Should you throw the switch?
  • Now imagine the same dilemma – except now to save the 5, you are required to push a large stranger onto the tracks to stop the trolley.
  • Same logic (save 5, kill 1), different answers
  • Brain imaging shows only 2nd instance utilizes emotional centers

Looking at it “Backwards”

  • Moral action feeds moral attitudes
  • Helping neighbors, tutoring, assisting the elderly, etc increases sense of competence and desire to serve.
  • Become more productive, socially responsible, and academically successful