Piaget's Theory of Moral Development
by Saul McLeod twitter icon published 2015
Piaget (1932) was principally interested not in what children do (i.e. in whether they break rules or not) but in what they think. In other words he was interested in children’s moral reasoning.
Piaget was interested in three main aspects of children’s understanding of moral issues. They were
Children’s understanding of rules. This leads to questions like
Where do rules come from?
Can rules be changed?
Who makes rules?
Children’s understanding of moral responsibility. This leads to questions like
Who is to blame for “bad” things?
Is it the outcome of behaviour that makes an action “bad”?
Is there a difference between accidental and deliberate wrongdoing?
Children’s understanding of justice. This leads to questions like
Should the punishment fit the crime?
Are the guilty always punished?
Piaget found that children’s ideas regarding rules, moral judgements and punishment tended to change as they got older. In other words just as there were stages to children’s cognitive development so also there were universal stages to their moral development. Piaget (1932) suggested two main types of moral thinking:
Heteronomous morality (moral realism)
Autonomous morality (moral relativism)
Heteronomous Morality (5-9yrs)
The stage of heteronomous morality is also known as moral realism – morality imposed from the outside. Children regard morality as obeying other people's rules and laws, which cannot be changed. They accept that all rules are made by some authority figure (e.g. parents, teacher, God), and that breaking the rules will lead to immediate and severe punishment (immanent justice). The function of any punishment is to make the guilty suffer in that the severity of the punishment should be related to severity of wrong-doing (expiatory punishment).
During this stage children consider rules as being absolute and unchanging, i.e. 'divine like'. They think that rules cannot be changed and have always been the same as they are now. Behaviour is judged as “bad” in terms of the observable consequences, regardless on the intentions or reasons for that behaviour. Therefore, a large amount of accidental damage is viewed as worse than a small amount of deliberate damage.
Research Findings
Piaget (1932) told the children stories that embodied a moral theme and then asked for their opinion. Here are two examples:
There was once a little girl who was called Marie. She wanted to give her mother a nice surprise and cut out a piece of sewing for her. But she didn’t know how to use the scissors properly and cut a big hole in her dress.
and
A little girl called Margaret went and took her mother’s scissors one day when her mother was out. She played with them for a bit. Then, as she didn’t know how to use them properly, she made a little hole in her dress.
The child is then asked, “Who is naughtier?”
Typically younger children (pre-operational and early concrete operational i.e. up to age 9-10) say that Marie is the naughtier child. Although they recognise the distinction between a well-intentioned act that turns out badly and a careless, thoughtless or malicious act they tend to judge naughtiness in terms of the severity of the consequence rather than in terms of motives. This is what Piaget means by moral realism.
Piaget was also interested in what children understand by a lie. Here he found that the seriousness of a lie is measured by younger children in terms of the size of the departure from the truth. So a child who said he saw a dog the size of an elephant would be judged to have told a worse lie than a child who said he saw a dog the size of a horse even though the first child is less likely to be believed.
With regard to punishment Piaget also found that young children also had a characteristic view. Firstly they saw the function of punishment as make the guilty suffer. Paint called this retributive justice (or expiatory punishment) because punishment is seen as an act of retribution or revenge. If you like young children have a very Old Testament view of punishment (“an eye for an eye”). Punishment is seen as a deterrent to further wrongdoing and the stricter it is the more effective they imagine it will be.
They also believe in what Piaget called immanent justice (that punishment should automatically follow bad behavior). For example one story he told was of two children who robbed the local farmer’s orchard (today we might take the example of children who robbed cars). The farmer saw the children and tried to catch them. One was caught and the farmer gave him a thrashing. The other, who could run faster, got away. However on the way home this child had to cross the stream on a very slippery log. This child fell off the log and cut his leg badly.
Now when you ask younger children why the boy cut his leg they don’t say, “because the log was slippery,” they say, “because he stole from the farmer”. In other words young children interpret misfortune as if it were some kind of punishment from God of from some kind of superior force. In other words for young children justice is seen as in the nature of things. The guilty in their view are always punished (in the long run) and the natural world is like a policeman.
Piaget (1932) described the morality described above as heteronomous morality. This means a morality that is formed out of being subject to another’s rules. Of course for young children these are the rules that adults impose upon them. It is thus a morality that comes from unilateral respect. That is to say the respect children owe to their parents, teachers and others.
However as children get older the circumstances of their lives change and their whole attitude to moral questions undergoes a radical change. An example of this is is how children respond to a question about the wrongdoing of a member of their peer group. Young children typically “tell” on others. They believe their primary obligation is to tell the truth to an adult when asked to do so. Older children typically believe that their first loyalty is to their friends and you don’t “grass” on your mates. This would be one example of the two moralities of the child.
Autonomous Morality
The stage of autonomous morality is also known as moral relativism – morality based on your own rules. Children recognize their is no absolute right or wrong and that morality depends on intentions not consequences.
Piaget believed that around the age of 9-10 children’s understanding of moral issues underwent a fundamental reorganisation. By now they are beginning to overcome the egocentrism of middle childhood and have developed the ability to see moral rules from other people’s point of view. A child who can decentre to take other people’s intentions and circumstances into account can move to making the more independent moral judgements of the second stage. As a result children’s ideas on the nature of rules themselves, on moral responsibility and on punishment and justice all change and their thinking becomes more like that of adults.