In his 1932 The Moral Judgment of the Child, Piaget concluded that, as with the domain of reasoning and judgment in general, moral judgment is not a pregiven faculty sensitive to some innate recognition of absolute right and wrong, good and bad, etc. Nor is it, however, an entirely arbitrary social construction we simply impose upon reality the way more radical constructivists will posit. Rather, the standard constructivist framework supported by the developmental evidence shows a continual process of ontogenetic equilibration, by means of which individuals continually hone their moral thinking in response to socialized experience and education. Morality, too, is transjectively learned.

In this way, moral judgments appear to transform in tandem with cognitive structures more globally. So the transitions from preoperational to concrete to formal operations map in significant ways to the shifts in moral reasoning. Aspects of early thinking structures such as animism and artificialism, for instance, will profoundly color people’s conclusions about things like guilt and punishment, absolute Good and Evil, etc.

A clear example of this is the preponderance of belief in “immanent justice” in the young mind. Piaget studied how children at different stages in the learning process responded to the following story:

Once there were two children who were stealing apples in an orchard. Suddenly, a policeman comes along and the two children run away. One of them is caught. The other one, going home by a roundabout way, crosses a river on a rotten bridge and falls in the water. Now, what do you think? If he had not stolen the apples and crossed the river on that rotten bridge all the same, would he also have fallen into the water?^[i]

Discounting unclear/uncertain responses (around 1/5 of the total), the percentage of those who responded in the affirmative—that the rotten bridge collapsed because the boy had stolen the apples—clearly declines as one moves from less to more complex thought structures (see Table 2.3).

Table 2.3. Declining Belief in Immanent Justice[ii]

For the mind interpreting meaningful information about moral expectations in the social world through the egocentric filter of animism and artificialism, it makes sense that the bridge “knew” to give way so as to punish the guilty child. Piaget writes:

For nature, in the child’s eyes, is not a system of blind forces regulated by mechanical laws operating on the principle of chance. Nature is a harmonious whole, obeying laws that are as much moral as physical and that are above all penetrated down to the least detail with an anthropomorphic or even egocentric finalism. …In short, there is life and purpose in everything. Why then should not things be the accomplices of grown-ups in making sure that a punishment is inflicted where the parents’ vigilance may have been evaded? What difficulty should there be in a bridge giving way under a little thief, when everything in nature conspires to safeguard that Order, both moral and physical, of which the grown-up is both the author and the raison d’être?^[iii]

Moral meanings will thus shift according the sort of justifications that make sense at different points along the developmental spectrum. How anthropocentrically one views the world affects how one imagines right and wrong to be adjudicated. Is a person’s disease simply the result of unfortunate circumstances (perhaps genetic causes out of their control) or a natural punishment for sins committed? The structure of one’s thinking will naturally impact the sort of meaning one makes of such realities.

Piaget also identified a correspondence with the naïve realism of early learning and the sort of absolutistic stance taken towards social rules at this stage. Just as preoperational thought assumes that names and concepts have as much ontological reality as chairs and tables, so does it assume that the social norms and values handed down from authority figures represent absolute truths about reality itself. Breaking the rule is objectively wrong, regardless of intention or context. Moreover, wrongs are assessed by consequence, not motivation. A big error is worse than a small lie. Accidently breaking five cups is worse than smashing one out of spite.[iv]

Early thought, you could say, is profoundly literalist and legalistic in its interpretation of moral codes, and the meanings people construe from this structuring of thought will be very different from those who possess capacities for greater abstraction, perspective-taking, and relationality. Younger thinkers tend to favor harsh, draconian punishments without regard for “extenuating circumstances.” Only as individuals decenter and learn more about relations, reciprocity, and relativity are they able to consider such abstract concepts as the “spirit of the law” instead of just the letter.

In short, structures of thought organize information processing about ethics and morality and, as we learn more about the world, our social values are inclined to shift accordingly.

Piaget’s research into development generally and moral development specifically was greatly refined and expanded by Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard in the latter half of the 20^th century. Through a 20-year longitudinal study of a group of 72 schoolboys (aged 10 to 16 at the beginning), Kohlberg took a Piagetian approach to trying to identify specific developmental stages to people’s moral reasoning as they progressed through the learning process.[v] The three major phases he came to call the 1) preconventional, 2) conventional, and 3) postconventional forms of morality, each of which were subdivided into two stages.

1. Beginning at a preconventional level (correlated with the early levels of cognition), he found that at Stages 1 and 2, individuals act primarily from a self-centered orientation in an effort to protect or advance themselves with little regard to the wellbeing of others. Moral judgments are framed in terms of obedience to absolutistic rules established by authorities. The psyche is only ever “looking out for number one,” so to speak, and assumes others are doing likewise. Morality at this level is thus highly transactional. It acknowledges a basic sense of reciprocity, an instrumental logic of “quid pro quo.”

2. With declining egocentrism and increasing perspective-taking, however, individuals can develop the sort of interpersonal relationships of mutual regard that make identity in a shared social world of customs and norms possible. With this, the Stage 3 psyche comes to see the value of “fitting in” with the rest of society and so conforms to the moral codes of the community. At this conventional level of morality, doing right entails maintaining the good will of others and fostering mutual relationships of trust. What’s good for the group is good for oneself. The Golden Rule represents the sort of abstract creed regulating group harmony. In its more advanced form (Stage 4), this comes to be understood more abstractly, as the responsibility of individuals generally to act in accordance with the social order for the sake of the collective good. Cognitively, this reaches into late formal operational thinking.

3. Based on his research, though, Kohlberg identified forms of thought that seemed to gesture beyond this. Whereas Piaget had studied children and adolescents, Kohlberg followed the development of his subjects into adulthood, where he found evidence of still more abstract moral reasoning based on still more abstract principles. For individuals at Stage 5, it is not enough that a given society holds certain values; if morality is to be grounded in something more than parochial norms, it must satisfy something deeper than mere custom. As people explore this domain of moral reasoning, they enter a postconventional level of regard, where ethics are embraced according to higher-order principles based on the interconnection and interdependence between self and society.[vi] The later stage of such postconventional thinking, the truly universal ethics of Stage 6, was found in philosophical thinkers but not empirically seen in any of Kohlberg’s subjects.

The six stages that unfolded across these three broad phases were shown to constitute a universal and cross-culturally validated sequence in human moral development,[vii] each representing qualitatively distinct moral logics emerging along the developmental spectrum, though postconventional morality was appreciably rare (see Table 2.4).

Table 2.4. Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development[viii][ix]

Based on his longitudinal findings, Kohlberg and colleagues developed an instrument for measuring moral judgment—the Standard Issue Scoring System (SISS), which has been used to score a large number of interviews from a diverse sample. For the interview, subjects are presented with various moral dilemmas and asked what they think is the right thing to do in each circumstance and why.

Here is one example scenario:

Joe is a 14-year-old boy who wants to go to camp very much. His father promised him he could go if he saved up the money for it himself. So Joe worked hard at his paper route and saved up the $60 it costs to go to camp, and a little more besides. But just before the camp fees came due, his father changed his mind. Joe’s father was short of the money it would cost to go on a special fishing trip with some of his friends, so he told Joe to give him the money he had saved from the paper route. Joe doesn’t want to give up going to camp, so he thinks of refusing to give his father the money.

What should Joe do?

Stage 1

An answer at the level of Stage 1, or “Heteronomous Morality,” sees right and wrong in black-and-white terms established by unquestioned authorities. According to Kohlberg and colleagues:

The perspective at Stage 1 is that of naive moral realism. That is, there is a literal reification of the moral significance of an action such that its goodness or badness is seen as a real, inherent, and unchanging quality of the act just as color and mass are seen as inherent qualities of objects. This realism is reflected in an assumption that moral judgments are self-evident, requiring little or no justification beyond assigning labels or citing rules. …Morality at Stage 1 is heteronomous in the Piagetian sense. That is, what makes something right or wrong is defined by the authority rather than by cooperation among equals.[x]

So, as for what Joe should do, a Stage 1 subject from Kohlberg’s interview data responds:

Stage 2

At Stage 2, “Instrumental Morality,” the psyche can now cognize its needs and desires relative to other people’s and opportunistically seek its own ends. Unlike Stage 1,

Stage 2 is characterized by a concrete individualistic perspective. There is an awareness that each person has interests to pursue and that these may conflict. …Since each person’s primary aim is to pursue his or her own interests, the perspective at Stage 2 is pragmatic: to maximize satisfaction of one’s needs and desires while minimizing negative consequences to the self. The assumption that the other is also operating from this premise leads to an emphasis on instrumental exchange as a mechanism through which individuals can coordinate their actions for mutual benefit.[xii]

An exemplary Stage 2 response to the moral judgment interview runs as follows: