Moral development

Moral development occurs as one result of an increasing ability to perceive objective reality, to organize and integrate experience, and to form finer discriminations and more comprehensive generalization. One necessary (but not sufficient) condition for principled morality is therefore general intelligence. The main experiential determinants of moral development are held to be the amount and variety of social experience, and the opportunity to take a number of roles and to encounter other perspectives. Developmental change can be fostered in a classroom situation with children exposed to a moral education curriculum of a series of increasingly complex moral dilemmas. Stimulating such development depends upon identification of the child's current stage and presenting him with dilemmas that cannot be easily solved with the modes of thinking characteristic of that stage. The child then becomes uneasy with his own judgements and finds superior principles which provide more equilibrium and logical satisfaction.

Moral and religious education are distinguished from each other since moral duty may be taken as duty towards one's fellow men, whereas religious duties are to one's God. It has been objected that morality is dependent on religion, but this is true of any subject in a religious environment and does not preclude their treatment as separate subjects. Moral education has in some cases replaced religious education in current Western secular society and is part of the normal school curriculum in many countries.

To some extent moral education must depend upon the society in which it takes place; but a morality taught simply on the basis of obedience to the present regime (whether parental, scholastic or social) is held to be non-progressive. A more enlightened aim is to communicate a sense of personal, social, civic and international responsibility. Using [justice]

as the organizing principle for moral education is held to meet satisfactorily all the necessary criteria: guarantee of freedom of belief; use of a philosophically justifiable concept of morality; and the basis of the psychological facts of human development. Individuals are believed to acquire and refine the sense of justice through a sequence of invariant developmental stages which are:< 1. Orientation to punishment and reward, and to physical and material power.

2. Hedonistic orientation with an instrumental view of human relations with notions of reciprocity based mainly on exchange of favours, not on loyalty, gratitude or justice.

3. Conformity to stereotypical images of majority or "natural" behaviours, seeking to maintain expectations and win approval of the immediate group morality.

4. Orientation toward authority, law, the maintenance of a fixed order (whether social or religious) which is assumed as a primary value.

5. A social-contract orientation, generally with legalistic and utilization overtones, emphasizing equality and mutual obligations within a democratically established order.

6. Orientation toward the decisions of conscience and toward self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality and equality of human rights, respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons.

A more recent (1984) approach of L. Kohlberg to these stages lists 7, each describing the distinctive way in which people at that stage reason out a decision in the face of conflict between competing claims. They are in many ways analogous to the above 6: 1. Heteronomous morality. 2. Individualistic, instrumental morality. 3. Interpersonally normative morality. 4. Social system morality. 5. Human rights and social welfare morality. 6. Morality of universalizable, reversible and prescriptive general ethical principles. 7. A hypothetical stage based, not on reason, but on the more metaphysical or religious question of why be moral at all.

Other approaches consider moral judgement and reasoning too narrow a focus for the discussion of moral development; and attempt to include other factors, such as intention, perception, outlook, disposition, habit and values, among others. This would focus more on development of personal responsibility in relation to character and relate this intentionality to those moral intentionalities that transcend the life of the individual and, indeed, social life. An 8-stage epigenetic cycle relating ego strength development to basic human virtues (Erik Erikson) goes some way to formulating such a system.

Moral delinquency or degeneracy, previously equated with physical characteristics from general ugliness to flat feet, is now said to derive from continual exposure to stimulations which dull the senses (in particular, to over-loud pop music) and to mass media which titillate the weak-minded to emulate the scenes of brutality and pornography they witness. Higher degenerates are said to be those with high verbal ability but no moral stamina, who gravitate towards cults, politics and fads which demand much talk but little disciplined action. They simultaneously hold that freedom is everything, while vehemently denying it to those whose opinions do not agree with theirs.