JOURNAL 2

Nellie Gotebeski 

August 29, 2009

Moral Development

What kind of reasons do I see others use and do I use when deciding how to cooperate with others? Give examples. What kinds of conventional and personal domain distinctions do I see people make? How can I improve my moral reasoning capabilities?

From our study of Piaget, we can confirm that his research created revolutionary theories in developmental psychology. His research also led to interesting findings in the area of moral development. Piaget believed in two moral orientations, which he referred to as heteronomous morality (morality of constraint) and autonomous morality (morality of cooperation). The heteronomous morality claims that as young children we typically have an understanding of morality as obedience to authority. We don’t believe in the flexibility of rules and wrongness is always followed by punishment. On the other hand, the morality of cooperation claims that as you work with your peers you develop morality. When we are interacting with our peers, we are forced to negotiate rules, be aware of different viewpoints, and change rules if it is necessary. This type or morality is specifically related to the concern for the welfare of others. 

Morality of cooperation takes place in a variety of environments; for example, the classroom, the school yard, and our very own houses. Although this cooperation is evident in school-aged children, it is also exhibited in the behavior of the majority of adults. For example, in class we were given a ball and told to create a game and play it three times. This activity exhibited the need to cooperate with others and quickly establish rules to a game. The rules obviously were guidelines for basic moral behavior and penalties were issued for violation of these rules. Basic rules such as no throwing the ball overhand were penalized, but more than that moral issues like cheating could also be addressed. When deciding how to cooperate with others, the big issue taken into account is fairness and the welfare of others. In my opinion, these are the two issues that come to mind in simple forms of cooperation. This year I live in a house with several girls, and therefore, we must each do our part to keep the house clean. This cooperation involved creating a chore chart and rotating our names through the list of chores. When working on the chore chart, we each had different reasons to make sure this process was carried out effectively. I was particularly interested in fairness. I wanted to make sure that each girl in the house had a responsibility, carried it out, and eventually rotated to a different chore each week. The bigger tasks (such as cleaning the kitchen) had more girls assigned to it, because we thought this was a fair way to approach the tasks. Other girls in the house were more concerned with the punishments for broken rules. Their reasoning remained jointed with the idea of enforcing a punishment will keep the process in movement. They believed that if the chore was not carried out for that week the girl responsible for this should have to double up on chores the following week. Therefore, when cooperating with others they reasoned the most important way to do this was establishing strict rules and enforcing them accordingly. Finally, some of the girls believed that cooperation should include the welfare of others. They believed that each month we should change how we assign and carryout chores because for some girls certain methods are more stressful than others. These girls believed that the welfare of others was a top priority and should be fully addressed. For instance, making everyone do a chore on Sundays is a difficult way to carryout the task, because some girls are dedicated to activities on Sunday, burry themselves in the library, or attend church. In sum, I believe that each of these three reasons (fairness, enforcing rules, and the welfare of others) are very important issues and should be addressed when cooperating with others. 

Another topic we addressed in class was the distinction between conventional and moral domains. We read Nucci’s article which directly addressed this issue. Nucci’s research claimed that moral issues were viewed to be independent of the existence of social norms and generalizable to other cultures and societies. Social Conventions are rules within the social system where the rule was formed. Moral issues are mostly concerned with the unfair or harm that actions would cause others and conventional issues are more based on the expectations of authority. Nucci illustrated this distinction with his research into religion. I can also see people make the distinction in that area. For example, I see many of my friends gobble up a slice of pizza before mass, even though Church authority orders Catholics to fast before communion. Other similar dilemmas include dress-codes ordered by specific societies. Other conventional laws include the law banning chewing gum in Singapore. To many Americans, this law is viewed as completely ridiculous and is not deemed morally wrong to break. According to our reasoning, chewing gum does not directly harm or impact the welfare of others and is just a conventional rule in Singapore to keep the country clean. 

I believe moral reasoning can improve with practice and patience. Cooperating with others and listening to their individual process of moral reasoning is a great start to improvement. To excel in moral reasoning an individual needs experience and understanding. The individual should carefully talk about their moral dilemmas and then try to implement what they learned to other moral conflicts in the future.