Transcript Moral development

 Manner, character and proper behaviors
 morality means a code of conduct which is held to be
authoritative in matters of right and wrong.
 Moral development is the process through which
children develop proper attitudes and behaviors
toward other people in society, based on social and
cultural norms, rules, and laws.
 What are some examples of moral violations to
you?
 How do you know they are moral violations?
 Are all moral violations cultural violations?
 8 and 10 year old Sudanese boys.
 Would be home alone from after school until 8
pm. They would play in the neighborhood and use
‘as the crow flies’ navigation system, not sidewalks
and streets.
 8 and 10 year olds are routinely left alone in Sudan,
fences don’t exist.
 Is this a moral violation?
 Legislator from western Nebraksa bathed with his
daughters, outside.
 Age 4,12,15
 Married to a Hmong woman. In Hmong tradition it is
common.
 Is it immoral, why?
 In Falls City a 15 year old mentally challenged young
woman got pregnant. The father was a 20 year old
mentally challenged young man. They married (with
the parent’s approval) and lived with her parents who
helped raise the child.
 Is this immoral, why?
 Have you seen or read of anything that you found
morally questionable?
 Sharing and cooperation vs. competition
 What are some games you played as a child?
 Games:
 Ju!houisi have no known competitive games
 Organized
 Competition, achievement, skills, rules, success
 Freestyle
 Organization, participation, adapting rules for
everyone’s enjoyment, understanding where you
naturally fall in
 Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
 1. Obedience and punishment orientation
 2. Self-interest orientation
 (What's in it for me?)
 Level 2 (Conventional)
 3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
 (The good boy/good girl attitude)
 4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
 (Law and order morality)
 Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
 5. Social contract orientation
 6. Universal ethical principles
 (Principled conscience)
 In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer.
There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a
form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently
discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was
charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for
the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick
woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the
money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of
what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him
to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I
discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz
got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his
wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19)
 http://youtu.be/YxJ07klMhr0
 Schweder (2003) found that many people from
non-European countries and women exhibit moral
reasoning equal to adolescents in the west.
 Ethics of autonomy: immoral if directly hurts
another or infringes on their rights
 Ethics of community: immoral if you fail to uphold
your interpersonal duties and obligatins
 Ethics of divinity: immoral if act you do not
uphold the sanctity of a world created by god.
 All cultures have adults reasoning at the
conventional level
 No adults are preconventional…(probably a good
thing)
Post conventional reasoning: only western samples
(not one person from traditional societies use
postconventional reasoning)
 Evolutionary perspective would say that traditional
societies do not provide the educational
opportunities needed to reason about justice and
individual rights
 Relativist perspective would emphasize that
industrialized societies are one type and people
develop moral frameworks to best fit their
environments.
 If you only live around kin, do you need to reason
about justice and individual rights?
 Caring orientation
 (tend and befriend)
 Justice orientation
 (fight or flight)
 What constitutes criteria for the fair distribution of
goods and resources in a society? (Damon, 1973)
 Need, equality or equity?
 Sweden: most needs based: everyone recieves
according to their needs
 US (work ethic): effort based: Everyone receives
according to their effort.