Most psychologists now accept that morality and our principles as humans are developed within us through our childhood and upbringing, as a factor of those who teach us and who we know. It has been shown that they differ dependant on culture and society, and are clearly different in people across different walks of life. Having said that, there was a time when little was known about why we saw some things as ethically incorrect and many researchers wanted to build on how our upbringing affects this knowledge.
Piaget was one such researcher and he posed an interesting theory about how these rules develop. He suggested that there were two stages. Heteronomous morality, in which our morals are based upon the ideas of those around us and by the rest of society, and autonomous morality, whereby we decide on what is moral or not by ourselves and use these new rules to guide our behaviour. Those with heteronomous morality would not kill someone because they would be sent to prison and everyone would hate them for it, while those with autonomous morality would not do it because they personally felt it was wrong. Young children tend to be heteronomous, since they see rules as inflexible requirements that must be kept or punishment will automatically be a consequence. How bad an action is is judged based on the harshness of the punishment. On the other hand, those with autonomous judgement understand that moral rules are more flexible and that whether an action is moral is determined by the intentions of the actor as opposed to the action itself.
Piaget believed that as children got older, they realised that rules are not naturally occurring and have been imposed by individuals. This enables them to understand that everyone in society must work together to decide what the rules should be and that we cannot just take the rules we are told as undisputable truths. Piaget also suggests that individuals, as they get older, actually start to understand the reasons behind moral decision-making, in that it is reciprocal and achieves the greatest possible happiness for everyone involved.
An evolutionary view of psychology can also provide interesting arguments for why we have morals in the first place. Considering Darwinian principles, such as ‘survival of the fittest’, it makes sense that morals are in fact developed in the way that they are because they offer us the best chance of survival in the world. Those societies that had these rules and moral guidelines in the past were clearly most likely to survive and these civilisations are the ones still with us today. This is why societies across many different cultures all have their own systems of morals, since without them, people would constantly be fighting and everyone would end up killing each other. The rules that have been passed down to us enable us to get along and work together to survive.
Both Piaget’s view, and that of evolutionary psychologists are thought to have merit for explaining this complex behaviour, but Kohlberg, another developmental psychologist wanted to take the concept further and develop a more concrete understanding of moral development. We’ll look at his ideas in the next article on moral development.
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