How Does Moral Development and Understanding Change with Age?

When studying in any area of the discipline of social science, one must be especially careful to avoid cultural biases, as much as is possible. This is typically done by taking a broad and inclusive view of the many different cultures in the world today. Due to the extreme differences in what different peoples of our world consider moral, it is especially important to be aware of cultural differences when studying moral development; the purpose of morality is to judge which of our actions are good, which bad, and as one researcher has observed, "there is apparently no specific act that has been prohibited in all cultures in all circumstances" (2048, Gabennesch).

Unfortunately, due to the truth of this statement, it has been thus far impossible for any researcher to present a descriptive set of stages which the majority of the people in every culture progress through as they age. The most interesting studies, then, have been those that have been primarily cross-cultural in nature, those that have examined specific differences in moral growth, and why those differences exist. When thinking about morality, the terms 'conventional' morality and 'universal' morality are useful to distinguish between. A conventional morality, or simply a convention, is something that a person believes to apply only to their society, and it is present only because that society has found it helpful in some manner. A convention need not apply to other peoples. Something considered to be a universal moral, however, would be something that one would consider fundamental to humanity. A member of any culture believes that what they hold to be universal ought to be obeyed by every person, regardless of any cultural differences.

One of the major contributors to the domain of moral development has been Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development comprised of three stages - preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. In his first stage, it is argued that moral reasoning is internally non-existent; the actions of the subject, typically a child in this stage, are thought to be controlled solely through punishments and rewards. Later, in the conventional stage, Kohlberg believes that the subject, typically an adolescent, begins to develop moral standards on which he uses to judge his acts, but those standards are not his own; subjects in this stage take the standards of others who are around them, and, perhaps, those whom they admire. In the third stage, postconventionalism, Kohlberg argues that the subject has fully adapted a set of abstract principles for himself, concepts of justice, equality, and fairness, by which he can judge what is and is not morally good. Another researcher, Turiel (1983), came up with seven different stages of moral maturation which he believed people progressed through from the ages of 6 to 25. Turiel's seven-stage theory resulted from research that was much more defined than Kohlberg's. Turiel studied, longitudinally, a group of 60 students of various ages as they progressed through 1-3 years of schooling. He found that a significant amount (52%) progressed through the stages he defined as they aged.

Both Kohlberg's and Turiel's stage theories apply very well to a large number of people, the problem is that all of those people are of the same culture. As Schweder (161) points out, in Western society, people tend to become more conventional and pluralistic in their judgments with age. Abstract principles form the foundation of moral reasoning, and this corresponds with the highest stages of moral development for both Kohlberg's theory as well as Turiel's. There are other societies, however, in which people grow in the opposite direction as they age. In India, for example, "as Indians grow older they show a greater and greater tendency to view their practices as universally binding and unalterable" (161, Schweder). Unless one believes that morality is subjective and that there can be two methods of moral thinking, opposed to one another that are equally viable, one must think that one method is superior to the other. Naturally, Kohlberg and Turiel, perhaps unaware, side on their own side.

In all cases, research that is done that is not cross-cultural is, of course, not nearly as valuable as research done that can be applied to a wide variety of cultures. Most of the research that has been done in moral development has been flawed in this sense, but perhaps not at the fault of the researchers. In order to develop a series of stages that are cross-culturally viable, one must first be able to define, precisely, what is and is not moral. Frequently it is impossible to get a consensus inside merely one culture when this question is applied to different social contexts; in Western society, for example, issues of abortion, stem-cell research, and the use of the death penalty will never be agreed upon. Some may argue that stances on either side of any particular issue can be arrived at by using the highest level of moral reasoning in any particular method, and in some cases, especially intra-cultural ones, this may be true, but in many it is not. Orthodox Hindus, for example, view their practices as "direct expressions of natural law" (Schweder, 160). Some of these practices, such as widowed women refraining from eating fish, are so foreign to Western ways of thinking that they simply cannot be melded into one of the highest stages of moral reasoning, even when the person expressing this view is obviously views as wise and intelligent in his own culture. The fault must be placed either at the feet or the theory, or at the feet of the society it is evaluating. Few would venture to claim that the moral reasoning of an entire society is simply below that of another.

Moral judgment and understanding then, while they universally grow more complex with age, are vastly culture-dependent in terms of what kind of reasoning any specific person acquires. In traditional, non-Westernized India, it is rare for one to become 'postconventional' in the Kholbergian sense; the wisest members of the community do not place a high value on abstract principles such as justice and equality. These values, key to the modern Western thinker for judging actions, are found to be unnecessary. It seems unlikely that any one set of stages for moral growth could be constructed that would be accepted to fit every culture in our world. We are simply too diverse not only in how we think, but also in how we learn to think. Far from being obsolete, however, stages of moral growth can still be quite useful to psychologists in their own specific cultures, so long as one views them in the light of this diversity and applies them only where they are intended and useful to be applied.

Bibliography

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Gabennesch, Howard: (1990) The perception of social conventionality by children and adults; Child Development, 61:6, Pgs. 2047-2059.

Fowler, J.W., Nipkow, K.E., & Schweitzer, F. (Eds.). (1991). Stages of faith and religious development: Implications for church, education, and society. London: SCM Press Ltd. Pgs 19-36.

Hinde, Robert A. (2002). Why Good is Good: the sources of morality. London and New York: Routledge.

Santrock, John W. (2005). (10^th ed). Adolescence. New York: McGraw Hill. Pgs 271-300

Schweder, R., Mahapatra, M., & Miller, J.G. (1987). Culture and moral development; in: Kagan, J., & Lamb, S. (eds.): The emergence of morality in young children: University of Chicago press.

Turiel, E. (1982). The development of social knowledge; Cambridge University Press. Pgs. 100-157.