New Perspectives on Moral Development

Charles C. Helwig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317283959
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume presents a selection of some of the most exciting new perspectives on moral development that have emerged over the last decade and have transformed our understanding of the field.

The contributors to this book cut across traditional boundaries to provide an innovative and integrative approach to fundamental questions dealing with the nature and acquisition of morality. In addressing these questions, the chapters draw on new work on the origins of morality in infancy and the early years, comparative approaches examining morality in primates, new perspectives on moral emotions such as guilt and empathy, and new perspectives on the emerging moral self in childhood and moral identity in adolescence. The book also examines the roles of parenting and culture in children's and adolescents' moral development. Each chapter is framed in theory and methodology and provides illustrative examples of new research to address important questions in the field.

This book is essential reading for researchers and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying moral development and developmental psychology. It will also be of interest to academics and professionals in related fields such as education and public policy.

1
Prosociality and Morality in Children and Chimpanzees

Jan Engelmann and Michael Tomasello

The modern study of moral development began with Piaget’s (1932)The Moral Judgment of the Child, which although originally published in the 1930s only became internationally known in the 1960s through its influence on Kohlberg’s theory (e.g. Kohlberg, 1981). Piaget and Kohlberg were both explicit that they were not studying children’s moral motivations or behaviour, but only their judgements, indeed typically judgements about other people’s interactions from a third-party perspective. Much of the work in social domain theory championed by Turiel (1983), though coming from a somewhat different theoretical perspective, also focused on children’s judgements about third parties’ interactions.

In a contemporary perspective, there are two issues with this general research paradigm, one methodological and one theoretical. The methodological issue is that in almost all of the classic research moral judgement means verbally expressed moral judgement. In the preface to his book, Piaget stresses that verbal judgements might not reflect children’s true understanding or attitudes, as they might be influenced by many factors, including judgements overheard or taught to them by parents or other adults. Piaget and others in this paradigm therefore employed “clinical interview” techniques, probing children to reveal the rationale underlying their answers. This method has yielded many important insights into children’s moral development upon which subsequent research has been built. However, it is important to emphasize that making judgements is one thing and expressing them verbally is another. It is clear that 2-year-olds make some social judgements, but they are mostly not able to formally articulate them; their judgements are manifest only in their decision-making and action.

The theoretical issue is related. Over the past few decades research on moral development has become ever more influenced by an evolutionary perspective. The claim is that the nature of human morality and its development is at least partially the result of processes of natural selection as they have shaped the nature of human sociality in general (Tomasello, 2016). The methodological focus has thus shifted from children’s verbalizations to their decisions and actions because in evolution it is action, and only action, that matters in the end. An organism’s cognition and thinking, as well as its motivations and emotions, are subject to natural selection only indirectly through their influence on adaptive action. Knowing that a predator is coming and being motivated to flee are of crucial importance – but only if one is actually capable of fleeing. In this way of looking at things, children’s moral judgements are still of primary importance, but mainly in the context of how these judgements influence their decision-making and actions, which are also influenced by other factors. It is possible, for example, that children’s verbally expressed moral judgements about third parties are only one among many factors determining how they behave when facing a problem of resource sharing.

The most obvious consequence of this methodological choice to focus on moral decisions and actions has been greater attention to younger children, whose limited verbal abilities make them poor candidates for clinical interviews. One such approach has focused on preverbal or just-verbal infants using methods such as violation of expectation or partner preference (e.g. choosing to touch or play with a puppet who has done good things rather than bad things). The approach is evolutionary in the sense that the major theoretical claim is that moral development does not originate in adult socialization or child learning; it is simply the way that humans have evolved to be, as manifest already in infancy. Research from this approach has revealed many heretofore unsuspected abilities of infants to make social, perhaps even moral, evaluations of the actions of others, yielding new insights on a regular basis (see e.g. Bloom, 2013; Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). However, one may argue whether a simple expectation or preference reflects a moral judgement per se. I may be surprised when others do not share fairly, but this may just be a statistical generalization. I may prefer to interact with those who do share fairly, but this may just be prudence on my part to interact with cooperative partners. However, beyond simple expectations and preferences, when I give up resources myself in order to distribute them fairly among partners – or when I am resentful that I have not been treated fairly by others – there is a good chance that my decisions and reactions are coming from a sense of what are the right and the wrong things to do.

In the current chapter we review some recent research from a somewhat different evolution-inspired approach. In this approach we begin with humans’ nearest primate relatives to see whether and to what degree they engage in morally-relevant social behaviour. The focus is then on young children of different ages and how they move from this general primate mode of social interaction to a more specifically human mode of social, perhaps moral, interaction. Methodologically, in this research the focus is primarily on children’s decision-making, and this is not only in third person situations as observers, but also in second person situations in which they are participating. We organize our review around three modes of social engagement and their related social expectations. First are children’s sympathy-based social expectations – often leading to acts of helping – which are unidirectional (the helpee need not even know she is being helped) and which are shared to some degree with other great apes. Second are children’s species-unique fairness-based social expectations, which are “second-personal” in the sense that they are grounded ultimately in the way that individuals relate to one another (the notion of fair requires at least two individuals and a social comparison between them). Third are children’s species-unique justice-based social expectations, which are agent-independent or impersonal in the sense that they emanate from more universal judgements about social norms and principles that apply to all moral beings equally.

Sympathy-based prosociality in chimpanzees and children

Chimpanzees

Our nearest primate relatives live in large, multi-male, multi-female social groups and as a consequence display a variety of highly complex social behaviours. Most relevant for current purposes, in response to deeply hierarchical social structures chimpanzees form long-term and stable cooperative social relationships, which are aimed at outcompeting conspecific rivals. Within these relationships, chimpanzees display and engage in a series of morally-relevant behaviours, such as mutual grooming and food sharing. Observational evidence from the wild indicates that chimpanzees’ prosocial behaviours are heavily skewed toward cooperative partners: male chimpanzees extend as much as 66–81 per cent of their grooming toward their top three partners, and the sharing of food follows a similar pattern (reviewed in Muller & Mitani, 2005; see also Engelmann & Herrmann, 2016). The crucial question is whether these behaviours qualify as altruistic in the sense that they proximately enhance partner welfare and at the same time entail nothing but costs for the donor.

While natural observations alone cannot answer this question, as benefits for the partner cannot be systematically manipulated (e.g. grooming might prove to be beneficial not only to the groomee but also to the groomer who might gain access to fleas in the process), carefully controlled experiments can distinguish between different motivations underlying the same behaviour. In fact, a number of recent studies provide evidence that chimpanzee helping is indeed the real thing, and not motivated by hidden benefits to donors. Specifically, in a series of experiments captive chimpanzees have been shown to help a conspecific by fetching an out-of-reach tool, opening a door, and making food available (Melis et al., 2010; Warneken, Hare, Melis, Hanus, & Tomasello, 2007; Yamamoto, Humle, & Tanaka, 2012). All of these studies involve control conditions, ruling out the possibility that chimpanzees act only for personal or self-serving goals. Furthermore, chimpanzees’ behaviour cannot be interpreted in terms of immediate strategic goals, like the improvement of their reputation as cooperators. Recent work suggests that chimpanzees do not show concern for reputation, and do not selectively help more when they are observed by a conspecific compared to when they are alone (Engelmann, Herrmann, & Tomasello, 2012; Engelmann, Herrmann, & Tomasello, 2016a).

One hypothesis is that chimpanzee behaviour in helping contexts is motivated by the underlying emotion of sympathy. Indeed, recent work on the mammalian bonding hormone oxytocin and its facilitation of instances of bonding and cooperation in chimpanzees provides support for this explanation. Crockford et al. (2013) and Wittig et al. (2014) found that oxytocin is involved in grooming and food sharing in wild chimpanzees, and that the individual initiating these behaviours (as well as the recipient) experiences an increase in this social bonding hormone.

Close social relationships are defined in terms of attitudes and intentions to trust, help, support, and share preferentially with friends. A second, no less important part of interpersonal relationships consists of forming and holding each other to certain expectations (Scanlon, 2008; Wallace, 2013). That is to say, morality is not only expressed in what I do for others, but also in what I expect them to do for me. Thus, one further source of evidence for chimpanzees’ moral sense comes from their reactions to these social expectations being unmet.

Little work has directly addressed the question of whether great apes form and hold special expectations of their friends and experience reactive attitudes when such expectations are disappointed. However, a re-interpretation of two studies by Brosnan and colleagues (Brosnan, Schiff, & deWaal, 2005; Brosnan, Talbot, Ahlgren, Lambeth, & Schapiro, 2010) using the inequity aversion task suggests that they do. The basic result is that chimpanzees reject food given to them by a human experimenter (food they would otherwise readily accept) if a conspecific gets better food for the same or even less effort. The authors interpret this finding in terms of social comparison, and thus ultimately as a burgeoning sense of fairness. However, a different interpretation, suggested by Roughley (in press) and Tomasello (2016), is that chimpanzees’ reactions in those studies are not based on a comparison of how they have been treated compared to a conspecific, but rather on how they are being treated by the human experimenter with whom they share a cooperative relationship. A recent study lends support to this alternative interpretation. Engelmann, Clift, Herrmann and Tomasello (2017) contrasted two conditions in which food is distributed by either a machine or a cooperative partner, and found that chimpanzees indeed react negatively only in the latter context. Furthermore, chimpanzees show negative emotional reactions to their food-distributing partner independent of whether a conspecific was present or not, further supporting the hypothesis that the inequity aversion task reveals special expectations of cooperative partners and not fairness considerations. The social anger displayed by chimpanzees in the inequity aversion task is thus distinctively interpersonal, and, in Tomasello’s (2016) words, might take the form: “I am angry that you are treating me without sympathy”.

As a whole, multiple lines of evidence suggest that chimpanzee prosociality toward their friends is the real thing in that it is, proximately speaking, driven by genuine altruistic motivations. Chimpanzee helping is flexibly tailored to their friends’ needs and connected to the prosocial emotion of sympathy. The flip side of such prosociality is that chimpanzees form special expectations that their friends will treat them with sympathy in turn. We have reviewed evidence suggesting that chimpanzees respond to failures to meet these expectations with a distinct reactive attitude, namely social anger.

Children

Whether they encounter an adult needing a door to be opened, or reaching for an out-of-reach object, or missing an object needed to continue an activity, human infants from as young as 14 months reliably react to these situations by helping (Svetlova, Nichols, & Brownell, 2010; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006, 2007). Several experimental paradigms confirm that children’s helping behaviour at this age emerges spontaneously and naturally, with no need for external incentives. Having their mother watch passively or even actively encourage them to help does not increase helping levels (Warneken & Tomasello, 2013), and children will even help adults in situations in which the helpee doesn’t know that he needs help (Warneken, 2013). Perhaps most convincingly, rewarding a child for helping actually decreases levels of helping over time once the reward is taken away (Warneken & Tomasello, 2008). Indeed, children’s sensitivity to potential external rewards for cooperative behaviour does not seem to emerge until 5 years of age, when they show the first signs of more strategic forms of helping and sharing – for example, to improve their reputation (Engelmann et al., 2012; Engelmann, Over, Herrmann, & Tomasello, 2013) or to benefit from acts of reciprocity (Warneken & Sebastián-Enesco, 2015).

Children’s early forms of helping are rooted in sympathetic concern for the plight of others. Support for this view comes from studies suggesting that children preferentially help, even at a high cost to themselves, individuals displaying signs of justified emotional distress (Hepach, Vaish, & Tomasello, 2012a; Nichols, Svetlova, & Brownell, 2009), and that children’s own level of distress in response to a harmed individual is positively correlated with subsequent helping behaviour (Vaish, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). Moreover, using direct physiological measures of emotional arousal, pupil dilation and body posture, Hepach, Vaish and Tomasello (2012b, in press) found that young children are equally satisfied both when they help someone in need and when they see that person being helped by a third party – and more satisfied in both of these cases than when the person is not being helped at all – suggesting that their motivation is not to provide help but only to see that the other person is helped.

Unlike their great ape cousins, by around their second birthday young children show an expanded sympathetic concern that includes non-kin and non-friends in the circle of recipients. It is only around 3 years of age that children begin to selectively help their friends more than their non-friends, similar to chimpanzees (Engelmann, Haux, & Herrmann, 2017). To our knowledge, no previous study has specifically addressed whether, and to what extent, young children this age form special expectations of their peers and caretakers. However, our analysis of chimpanzees’ emotional reaction to being treated without sympathy by closely bonded individuals suggests that this form of social anger is a familiar experience for young children also.

Second-personal morality

As we have seen in the previous section, chimpanzees and infants show morally-relevant behaviours like helping and sharing and even expect their conspecifics to treat them with sympathy. But are chimpanzees and infants moral agents? The sympathy-based prosocial intentions and expectations that we have discussed are not sufficient (Korsgaard, 1996, 2010; Tomasello, 2016). A moral agent helps you not only because she feels sympathy for you, but also because she feels that she owes it to you, that you have a claim on her treating you in a certain way. In other words, she knows that it would be wrong for her not to help you. The moral agent furthermore knows that if she fails to act in this way you will blame her for it and hold her responsible. Finally, and most importantly, the moral agent will agree with you, will know that you are right when you reproach her for not treating you like you deserve to be treated, and as a consequence will engage in a form of self-punishment by experiencing guilt. The key point that distinguishes prosocial intentions and expectations from moral intentions and expectations is that the latter involve normative concepts such as “ought”, “owe” and “blame”. The key question concerns the source of these feelings of ought. In other words, what is the most likely birthplace of the capacity to be motivated to do something by the thought that you ought to do it?

The natural home for the development of this obligation-based morality, according to Tomasello (2016), is cooperative activity for mutual benefit. “The primal scene of morality”, says Korsgaard (1996, p. 275), “is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something toge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Prosociality and morality in children and chimpanzees
• 2 Helping, hitting and developing: toward a constructivist–interactionist account of early morality
• 3 Emotions and morality: new developmental perspectives
• 4 Children’s moral self as a precursor of moral identity development
• 5 Moral identity theory and research: a status update
• 6 “I hurt him”: from morally relevant actions to moral development, by way of narrative
• 7 Parenting, morality and social development: new views on old questions
• 8 Culture, autonomy and rights
• Index