Human Development 2008;51:21–39

DOI: 10.1159/000113154

The Development of Children’s Orientations

toward Moral, Social, and Personal Orders:
More than a Sequence in Development
Elliot Turiel
University of California, Berkeley, Calif., USA

Key Words
Moral epistemology ⴢ Moral judgments ⴢ Social conflicts ⴢ Social domains

Abstract
Lawrence Kohlberg first published details of his research on the development of
moral judgments in Vita Humana (later titled Human Development). Along with a series
of other articles and essays, he greatly influenced research on moral development. He
was instrumental in moving the field out of the narrow confines of analyses of psycho-
logical mechanisms to inclusion of substantive philosophical definitions of the domain.
He persuaded many researchers to take morality seriously as a realm pertaining to peo-
ple’s thinking about how they ought to relate to each other and how social systems
should be organized. Although several aspects of Kohlberg’s theoretical formulations
are now not widely accepted, most researchers (though not all) are concerned with
combining epistemological considerations with psychological analyses and view chil-
dren as possessing moral capacities not solely imposed by adults. One of these theo-
retical perspectives, discussed in this essay, is based on distinctions among social do-
mains. Problems in current research, especially on morality and neuroscience, that fails
to attend to epistemological considerations are discussed.
Copyright © 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel

In 1958, the same year as the first publication of what is now Human Develop-
ment (then titled Vita Humana: International Journal of Human Development), Law-
rence Kohlberg completed a lengthy, ambitious, and impressive doctoral dissertation
at the University of Chicago. The title of the dissertation was The development of
modes of moral thinking and choice in the years 10 to 16. The main component of the
dissertation was Kohlberg’s presentation of research he had conducted on the moral
judgments of children and adolescents. The research itself was innovative and out of
the mainstream of psychology in that it involved in-depth interviews and qualitative

© 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel Elliot Turiel

0018–716X/08/0511–0021$24.50/0 Institute for Human Development
Fax +41 61 306 12 34 Tolman Hall, University of California
E-Mail karger@karger.ch Accessible online at: Berkeley, CA 94720 (USA)
www.karger.com www.karger.com/hde E-Mail turiel@berkeley.edu
analyses of responses. The research and analyses of findings were, at the same time,
mainstream in that Kohlberg took great care to account for scientific considerations.
These included detailed analyses of the rationale for his samples of participants, for
measurement issues, and the use of appropriate statistical analyses in a developmen-
tal study (including the use of the Guttman quasi-simplex correlation matrix and
factor analyses). He combined the qualitative methods and analyses with quantita-
tive analyses. He formulated a rigorous and complex system of coding in an attempt
to account for 30 aspects or considerations that were used in the six ‘types’ of devel-
opmentally ordered structures of thought (in the dissertation these were types 0–5,
which were subsequently changed to 1–6, and later to stages rather than types). The
coding systematized the qualitative analyses in ways that could be put to quantitative
analyses.

A New Vision of Moral Development: Epistemology in Psychology

In his dissertation, Kohlberg also extensively reviewed and critiqued other ap-
proaches to morality. He contrasted his approach with the then dominant behavior-
ist, socialization, and psychoanalytic approaches on several dimensions. One di-
mension of great significance that he emphasized was the need for inclusion of defi-
nitional-philosophical groundings for psychological analyses of morality. Kohlberg
maintained that the failure of mainstream psychological research to attend to the
definitional bases of morality was itself intellectually and scientifically unsound.
Within that context, Kohlberg had a big impact on the field within 10 years of
the completion of his dissertation. Indeed, his first publications in the early 1960s
were very influential. Book chapters published in 1963 (‘Moral development and
identification’) and 1964 (‘Development of moral character and ideology’) were
heavy in the presentation of theoretical arguments and data to refute the dominant
approaches of the time. He later published very influential essays in which he linked
his work on morality to general theory about social development and the child’s in-
teractions with the social environment [e.g., Kohlberg, 1969]. In other essays [e.g.,
Kohlberg, 1971] he tackled in greater detail the problem of connecting social scien-
tific research on morality with substantive philosophical-epistemological formula-
tions about the moral realm. He argued that most of the social scientific research was
inadequate because it identified variables of acquisition apart from considerations of
the nature of that being acquired.
Although Kohlberg did present in those essays the findings of his research and
the formulations of the six-type (stage) progression in the development of moral
judgments, his article in Vita Humana – reprinted in the present volume – was par-
ticularly important because it was the first report of his findings and theoretical for-
mulations in a research article format. In my view, it is far from accidental that the
research was published in Vita Humana/Human Development. It took a nontradi-
tional and interdisciplinary journal (which was then only 5 years old) to publish the
type of innovative research conducted by Kohlberg and presented in a somewhat
unorthodox style. The article is not in the usual style of inclusion of delineated meth-
ods and results sections (but all of the procedures and findings are presented clearly)
and includes, in the tradition of Piaget’s book publications, the liberal use of par-
ticipants’ responses in order to illustrate the meaning of the findings (I venture to

22 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
guess that Kohlberg would have encountered difficulties in getting the article pub-
lished in standard journals).
In the intervening years much has occurred in theorizing and research on mor-
al development, a good deal of which was influenced by Kohlberg. In my view, the
most important consequence of Kohlberg’s writings is that the psychological study
of morality was taken out of the confines of narrow, strictly psychological analyses
of biological determinism, learning, analyses of mechanisms of acquisition, and psy-
chodynamic processes. Much of the extant psychological research had simply at-
tempted to apply hypothesized psychological constructs regarding values or behav-
ioral acquisition to explain some vaguely defined notions of morality. Accordingly,
constructs like learning through stimulus-response reinforcement, imitation, mod-
eling, internalization through identification, the effects of different child rearing
practices, and learning of self-control – to name a few – were studied in relation to
the child’s acquisition of such features as social rules, values, norms, and sometimes
arbitrarily defined restrictions established in laboratory or naturalistic settings. For
the most part, the moral outcome variables, lacking theoretical formulations related
to definitional criteria, were by-products stemming from the necessity for measures
of moral acquisition to connect to the psychological constructs. In some of these for-
mulations, especially psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories, there was a conscious
intellectual effort to remove morality from its status as a unique realm of autono-
mous decision making through propositions that it is psychologically determined
and that decisions reflect unconscious processes (lack of awareness or deeply uncon-
scious in the Freudian sense). In conjunction with the epistemological consider-
ations, Kohlberg [1963, 1964] reviewed evidence bearing on the prevalent ideas re-
garding the ways children acquired morality. He showed that the evidence did not
lend support to the propositions that parental child rearing practices, positive and
negative reinforcements, and processes of identification and imitation were associ-
ated with ‘strength of conscience’ or extent of feelings of guilt, adherence to societal
rules or norms, or the acquisition of abilities to resist temptation.
It could be said that psychological and anthropological positions asserting that
morality involves the incorporation of the values, standards, or norms of one’s cul-
ture did include, at least implicitly, definitional criteria. This is because in some of
these positions it was maintained that morality obtains its force by virtue of its place
in the cultural context and, therefore, morality needs to be seen in relativistic terms.
Norms are arbitrarily determined and comparisons of relative adequacy cannot be
made between cultures. Kohlberg provided incisive critiques of this type of cultural
relativism as well [see especially Kohlberg, 1971].
Kohlberg’s critiques of the standard psychological explanations and of cultural
relativism were not solely based on his formulations of the substance of morality. The
critiques and assertions that substantive definitions of morality were not independent
of psychological functioning were also based on theoretical propositions regarding
thought and development in children, adolescents, and adults. He extended and de-
veloped theoretical propositions touched upon by others for the social and moral
realms [e.g., Baldwin, 1906; Piaget, 1932] that had been applied more extensively to
nonsocial cognitive development (especially by Piaget and his colleagues, and Werner,
1957 and his colleagues). To state it simply, humans are thinking beings and their men-
tal development is a function of their interactions, starting in infancy, with complex
and multifaceted environments. In these views, thought is not independent of emo-

Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, Human Development 23

and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
tions [Kohlberg, 1969; Piaget, 1981; Turiel, 2006]. As stated by Kohlberg in the reprint-
ed article, a goal of his research was to understand the relation of ‘the development of
moral thought to moral conduct and emotion’ (p. 8). Two features are important to
note in this regard. One is that the primary emotions associated with morality are
positive ones like sympathy, empathy, and respect; they are not negative or aversive
emotions like fear, anxiety, disgust, and guilt. The second is that emotions do not drive
thought and behavior and individuals do not simply act nonrationally or irrationally
because of unconscious or unreflective emotional reactions. Emotional appraisals are
part of reasoning that involves taking into account the reactions of others and self
[Nussbaum, 1999]. The emotional reactions of people are a central part of moral judg-
ments, and it is reciprocal interactions, along with reflections upon one’s own judg-
ments and cultural practices or societal arrangements, that influence development
[Kohlberg, 1969; Turiel, 2002]. Moral thinking is not a function of the internalization
of social or cultural content. As put by Kohlberg [this issue, p. 19], ‘While these suc-
cessive bases of moral order do spring from the child’s awareness of the external world,
they also represent active processes of organizing or ordering the world.’
Although many researchers were persuaded by Kohlberg’s arguments and them-
selves applied his six-stage formulations to questions of their own interest, Kohl-
berg’s influence was even wider and deeper. In my estimation, he at least indirectly
influenced many researchers who took alternate theoretical perspectives. Research-
ers began to take the realm of morality seriously and did not view children as unwill-
ing or reluctant recipients of coerced or imposed values, standards, or norms.
As an example, cultural psychologists like Shweder [Shweder, Mahaptra, &
Miller, 1987; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997] took an epistemological
standpoint in maintaining that there are alternative types of ‘duty-based’ and ‘rights-
based’ moralities which stem from fundamentally different rationalities pertaining
to conceptions of self and social relations that can differ by cultural frameworks.
These analyses of the development of morality differ from prior culturally relativis-
tic conceptions of morality as incorporation of standards, in that children are viewed
as developing an organized moral system through participation in and communica-
tions about a system of cultural practices.
Another shift of some significance is that many researchers began to view chil-
dren as possessing moral capacities, not imposed by adult authorities, at early ages.
Researchers have attended to children’s spontaneous reactions of a positive kind, as
well as to their nonaversive emotional propensities. Observational studies were con-
ducted to examine whether children engage in behaviors like helping others and
sharing [Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman, 1983]. It was well documented
that children react to the needs and pain of others and act to further their welfare.
Researchers also attended to emotions like sympathy and empathy, instead of solely
or mainly looking to aversive emotions [Eisenberg & Fabes, 1991; Hoffman, 1984,
2000].
More generally, there was increased interest in placing the study of morality into
the contexts of developmental transformations and judgments about issues of jus-
tice. Different aspects of justice, as guided by philosophical formulations, have been
examined in younger and older children. This includes studies of concepts of dis-
tributive justice [Damon, 1977, 1980] and fairness in institutional contexts like
schools [Thorkildsen, 1989]. Another influence, I believe, is that the study of action
is now usually connected to judgments [e.g., Blasi, 1993; Colby & Damon, 1992], as

24 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
opposed to the earlier and common view that moral judgments are disembodied
from individuals’ actions [e.g., Aronfreed, 1968]. Some have proposed that connec-
tions between moral judgments and actions are mediated by the strength of a sense
of a moral self or a commitment to an identity strongly structured by morality [Bla-
si, 1993; Colby & Damon, 1992]. By contrast, I have proposed that actions are close-
ly tied to moral and other social judgments for most people because of the embodi-
ment of reasoning in action, and that coming to decisions in thought and actions
involves a coordination of different types of judgments (moral and otherwise) in
particular contexts [Turiel, 2003, in press a].

Taking the Mind, the Person, and Morality Seriously

My propositions regarding social actions as part of embodied human function-

ing that involves coordination of different types of judgments and their application
in social contexts were put forth about 40 years after Kohlberg’s publication in Vita
Humana. Although aspects of these propositions diverge from some of Kohlberg’s
formulations, they are consistent with the general developmental, structural, and
moral framework he pioneered. The idea that moral and social judgments are close-
ly linked to actions is based on the assumptions that individuals are active in think-
ing about the social environment, that they have mental/emotional propensities to
care about the welfare of others and fairness in their relationships, that they scruti-
nize their world and reflect upon their own and others’ judgments and actions, and
that in the process they are not driven solely by emotional or unconscious biological
or psychological forces to act without choice. These are all assumptions embedded
in Kohlberg’s approach (as well as that of Piaget).
On a personal note, my work was directly influenced by Lawrence Kohlberg and
his powerful theory, which was buttressed by sound empirical research (as embodied
in the reprinted article). As a beginning graduate student in 1960 at Yale University
I was able to study with Kohlberg (subsequently at longer distance as he moved to the
University of Chicago). As a more advanced graduate student and later as a colleague,
I collaborated with him on several projects (we also taught together).
I took up the important question emerging from Kohlberg’s formulations as to
how transformations occur from one stage to the next. One side of that question also
entails specifying criteria to explain why one stage of thought represents an advance
over previous stages. In recognizing the need to address the latter question directly
in any developmental formulation, Kohlberg (and I for a time) worked with what
seemed to be a promising model at the time. It was that development involves a pro-
cess of differentiation and integration [Werner, 1957], and that any given stage of
thought entails differentiations of moral value from nonmoral considerations. Each
stage, therefore, would bring clarity (and increased equilibration) to matters that
were previously confused (not differentiated from each other).
As Kohlberg discussed in the reprinted article, type (stage) 1 thinking entails
recognition that the moral value of life is undifferentiated from material value. The
thinking that characterizes this earliest developmental phase ‘involves a failure to
differentiate the self’s point of view from that of others, or to differentiate what the
community holds as a shared or moral value (the value of life) and what the indi-
vidual holds as a private value (the desire for furniture)’ (p. 13). In the next type (2)

Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, Human Development 25

and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
of thinking there is a differentiation of the viewpoints of self and others so that
there is ‘an increase in the use of reciprocity’ and in ‘notions of relativism of value’
(p. 14). However, a morality of need and reciprocity is not sufficiently advanced to
account for a sense of obligation (see p. 15). Kohlberg’s analyses of the next four types
are also based on specifications of increased differentiations with each developmen-
tal advance. In a later essay [Kohlberg, 1971], he summarized the differentiation pro-
cess across stages as follows:

The individual whose judgments are at stage 6 asks ‘Is it morally right?’ and means by mor-
ally right something different from punishment (stage 1), prudence (stage 2), conformity
to authority (stages 3 and 4), etc. Thus, the responses of lower-stage subjects are not mor-
al for the same reasons that responses of higher-stage subjects to aesthetic or other mor-
ally neutral matters fail to be moral. … This is what we had in mind earlier when we spoke
of our stages as representing an increased differentiation of moral values and judgments
from other types of judgments and values. (p. 216)

This proposition about developmental progressions was not implausible and led
to research on the processes of transition, in adolescence, from thought supposedly
lacking a differentiation of morality and rules, authority and conventions (stage 4)
to the next form of thinking (stage 5), in which a morality of justice and rights is dif-
ferentiated from convention [Turiel, 1974]. However, a series of studies [Nucci & Tu-
riel, 1978; Turiel, 1975, 1978, 1979] showed that adolescents as well as younger chil-
dren make judgments about the contingency of social conventions (i.e., they are
contingent on rules, authority, and coordination in social systems) that differ from
their judgments about the noncontingency and generalizability of moral issues based
on furthering welfare, justice, and rights. It has now been very well documented (and
widely reported) that judgments about the domain of morality differ in type from
judgments about the conventions of social systems and about arenas of personal ju-
risdiction [for reviews, see Nucci, 2001; Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1983, 1998, 2002,
2006]. At early ages (4–6 years), children do not confuse morality with nonmoral is-
sues like prudence, conformity to rules and authority, or personal choices. These
constitute distinct social domains with separate developmental pathways.
Identifying judgments from different domains requires disentangling different
components of social situations. Many social situations include moral and nonmor-
al components, perhaps posing people with conflicts, the need to coordinate the dif-
ferent domains of judgment, and to draw priorities among them [Turiel, in press b].
Many of the situations used by Kohlberg to elicit responses were multifaceted in
these ways. An example is the story in which a doctor is deciding whether or not to
adhere to the wishes of a dying woman in pain that he give her ‘a good dose of pain-
killer like ether or morphine’ to make her die sooner. Although this situation raises
moral issues of the value of life, the responsibilities of doctors to patients, and legal
issues, it also raises issues about the quality of life and personal choices in that regard
and when it is legitimate for an individual to end her life in the context of a terminal
illness and great pain. Recognizing that the doctor’s decision has pragmatic conse-
quences for him, the 10-year-old boy, Jimmy, quoted by Kohlberg [this issue, p. 14],
said, ‘From the doctor’s point of view, it could be a murder charge.’ Recognizing that
the situation confronted the dying woman with personal choices regarding the qual-
ity of her life and the great pain she was experiencing, he said, ‘It should be up to her;
it’s her life, not the law’s life.’

26 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
 Kohlberg interpreted these responses solely in terms of judgments of a moral
kind: that morality for the 10-year-old is instrumental, hedonistic (pleasure and
pain), and based on a person’s ownership rights. An alternative interpretation is that
the boy viewed the woman’s wishes in terms of her legitimate realms of personal ju-
risdiction and the doctor’s choices, which the boy assumed to be one of helping her
or putting himself in legal jeopardy. Subsequent research showed that children of
this age, as well as younger and older people, do form judgments in domains of per-
sonal choices, including pragmatics, that are different from moral considerations
[Nucci, 1981, 1996]. Therefore, it may well be that Jimmy was making judgments
about what he saw as nonmoral features of the situation and that he was not defining
morally right action instrumentally or in terms of hedonistic calculations.
We do not actually know whether Jimmy was making differentiations between
the moral and personal domains since his responses to those complex and domain-
multifaceted situations were not analyzed for such a possibility. We do know, how-
ever, that children even younger than Jimmy make distinctly moral judgments when
responding to straightforward (labeled prototypical) situations about issues of wel-
fare, justice, and rights. Although the research on domains indicates that the six-
stage sequence proposed by Kohlberg is inaccurate, it verifies several of his key prop-
ositions. In the first place, it was through attention to the definitional parameters of
the moral realm and how it differs from other social realms that we were able to un-
cover the ways children make distinctions in social judgments. Moreover, the re-
search shows that morality is a substantive and independent domain of thinking (but
starting quite a bit earlier in age than thought by Kohlberg), that moral judgments
are constructed through children’s interactions with the social world, and not the
incorporation of preexisting values [Nucci & Turiel, 1978; Nucci & Nucci, 1982a,
1982b; Nucci & Weber, 1995], that moral judgments are connected with early emerg-
ing positive emotions [Arsenio, 1988], and that moral judgments and emotions are
associated with social actions [Turiel, 2003, in press a]. The identification of the do-
mains of moral, social, and personal judgments has provided a better window into
how individuals make decisions since in doing so they coordinate different consid-
erations in social situations [Turiel, in press b].
The issue of rights, an important aspect of morality, provides a clear example of
how individuals coordinate different considerations in coming to decisions. In vari-
ous disciplines, including philosophy, political science, and psychology, there has
been a tendency to approach the concept of rights as either well understood and ap-
plied uniformly across situations or poorly understood and therefore subordinated
to other moral or social considerations [e.g., Protho & Grigg, 1960; Sarat, 1975]. For
instance, findings from large-scale public opinion surveys that most people endorse
rights in some situations but not in other situations have been interpreted to reflect
inadequate understandings of rights. A psychological approach to rights as inade-
quately or adequately understood is evident in Kohlberg’s six levels of conceptions of
rights (see p. 10), as one of the cognitive aspects of morality, whereby it is not until
levels 5 and 6 that there emerges a conception of universal rights having priority over
other pragmatic, relativistic, and social considerations.
An alternative view taken by some philosophers [Dworkin, 1977; Gewirth, 1982]
is that rights can be well understood and yet weighed against competing moral and
social norms. Consistent with the domain approach and the proposition that deci-
sions can involve coordination of different considerations, Helwig [1995, 1997] has

Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, Human Development 27

and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
shown that by early ages children do uphold and understand rights (e.g., freedom of
speech and religion) in the abstract as obligatory norms that should apply to differ-
ent groups or cultures. Across ages, including adulthood, rights are upheld in some
situations and not in others. For example, in some contexts rights are given less pri-
ority than preventing psychological harm (e.g., a public speech with racial slurs),
physical harm (a speech advocating violence), and inequalities (advocating exclu-
sion). The research indicates that those who subordinate rights to other such consid-
erations do not fail to understand concepts of rights.
A number of other studies point to the need to identify domains of judgment
and coordination in social and moral decision making. In research on adolescents
and parents it has been found that different domains are at play in both conflicted
and harmonious relationships [Smetana, 2002]. In turn, adolescents’ social interac-
tions differ in accord with the moral, conventional, and personal domains [Smetana,
1995]. A series of studies with children and adolescents on social exclusion, as re-
lated to prejudice and discrimination, has used an analogous approach to the re-
search on rights [Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stagnor, 2002]. Children do judge
exclusion based on gender, race, or ethnicity to be morally wrong in the abstract and
in particular situations. However, they also consider other group activities, such as
goals in team competitions, in judging acts of exclusion. Group goals, as well as in-
dividual prerogatives, are coordinated with moral goals in coming to conclusions
about the validity of excluding people from activities [see also Killen, Sinno, & Mar-
gie, 2007].
Honesty and deception are topics of recent research that exemplifies several of
the principles of structure, thought, development, people’s propensities to try to dis-
criminate among different aspects of social relationships, as well as their continual
scrutiny of justice in social relationships, systems of societal arrangements, and cul-
tural practices. That honesty does all this work is somewhat ironic since the topic has
so often been treated as a straightforward, quintessential moral good. Honesty is al-
ways at the forefront of lists of character traits and virtues given by those who regard
morality to be the consistent application of one’s acquired moral dispositions [Ben-
nett, 1993; Ryan, 1989; Wynne, 1985]. In many studies, children’s internalization of
morality was assessed by placing them into experimental and classroom situations
where they would have the opportunity to cheat or lie [Aronfreed, 1968; Grinder,
1961, 1964; Hartshorne & May, 1928–1930; Parke & Walters, 1967]. Children’s acts
of cheating or lying in these situations were regarded as indicators of a still insuffi-
cient incorporation of morality in their lives. Conceptions of trust and related hon-
esty have also been regarded as central to the development of moral judgments [Col-
by & Kohlberg, 1987; Piaget, 1932].
Honesty is important in the realm of morality. It is not, however, a straightfor-
ward or simple indicator of more (acting honestly) or less (acting deceptively) ade-
quate moral development or moral decisions. Two examples – one hypothetical, used
in philosophical discourse, and the other from real-life events – can serve as a means
to briefly illustrate that honesty is not the straightforward moral good it is often as-
sumed to be. Philosophers arguing that acts of deception are not necessarily mor-
ally wrong have used the example of how one should respond to a murderer who asks
where his intended victim has gone [Bok, 1978/1999]. In this case, saving a life would
take precedence over acting honestly. For those who hid Jews from Nazis and lied
about it during World War II, deception at great risk to themselves was judged to be

28 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
the morally right and courageous course of action. Research findings support the
idea that people commonly weigh varying moral and social considerations in decid-
ing whether to be honest. Although most people value honesty, research shows that
deception is also judged to be necessary in some contexts. Deception is judged ac-
ceptable in order to spare the feelings of others, to protect people from physical harm
and avoid injustices, and to promote perceived legitimate personal ends in the face
of relationships of unequal power [Abu-Lughod, 1993; Lewis, 1993; Perkins & Turiel,
2007; Turiel, 2002; Turiel & Perkins, 2004; Wikan, 1996].
As one example with adults, it was found that physicians judged deception of an
insurance company acceptable if it was the only means of obtaining treatment for
patients with serious medical conditions [Freeman, Rathore, Weinfurt, Schulman, &
Sulmasy, 1999]. Physicians (reluctantly) endorsing deception in such situations gave
priority to protecting the welfare of their patients over honesty. Other research [Per-
kins & Turiel, 2007] similarly shows that adolescents judge it acceptable to lie to par-
ents who attempt to get them to act in ways they consider morally wrong. The ado-
lescents also judged deception acceptable as a way of circumventing perceived undue
control by parents regarding issues considered to be legitimately part of the adoles-
cents’ personal jurisdiction. It is important to note, however, that the adolescents did
judge deception wrong in contexts where parents exercise their legitimate authority
or in relationships of greater equality (with peers). Corresponding results were ob-
tained with adults regarding the acceptability of deception in the context of inequal-
ities and power differences in marital relationships [Turiel & Perkins, 2004].
The uses of deception in relationships of inequality involve moral and social op-
position and resistance to existing societal arrangements. It also involves resistance
to cultural practices that foster inequalities in gender relationships within tradition-
al, patriarchal contexts [Abu-Lughod, 1993; Wikan, 1996]. Moral opposition and
resistance occur in everyday life, at varying ages (at least by early adolescence) and
in Western and non-Western cultures. The ubiquity of opposition and resistance
shows, first of all, that scrutiny of existing norms and practices are not activities un-
dertaken only by those at ‘advanced’ levels of moral development. Kohlberg did leave
room in his theory for moral resistance, but he thought that it came only with ad-
vancement beyond a ‘morality of conventional role-conformity’ to a ‘morality of self-
accepted moral principles’ (the two highest stages). He also implicitly assumed that
it would not occur in all cultures since he thought that people in some cultures rare-
ly advanced beyond the ‘conventional’ stages [Kohlberg, 1969, 1971]. That morally
motivated opposition and resistance occurs at relatively young ages in a variety of
social situations and various cultures provides additional support for the proposition
that a differentiated domain of morality develops early.
The examples of resistance through acceptance and use of deception also point
to the importance of reasoned choices in emotionally laden situations. Those deci-
sions are by no means hard, cold calculations. As examples, Abu-Lughod [1993] and
Wikan [1996] observed rural Bedouin and urban (in Cairo) women who engaged in
acts of deliberate and planned deception in order to get around restrictions imposed
by men on many of their activities, including work, education, and leisure. The re-
strictions evoked strong emotions of resentment and associated judgments of unfair-
ness. The acts of resistance, in spite of fears of the risks involved, were motivated by
emotional commitments to their justice. Part of the reasoned choices people make
stem from their critical scrutiny of their social interactions.

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and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
 Progress and Regress in the Study of Morality

Thus far, I have discussed what I consider to be social scientific advances in the
study and explanations of moral development in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and
in subsequent work in a plurality of theoretical frameworks. Perhaps analogously to
development, social scientific advances occur with starts and stops, progress and
reversions to old ways. I believe we are experiencing reversions in some quarters in
the study of moral development. We are witnessing a reversion to a reliance on psy-
chological and biological variables to the exclusion of definitional-epistemological
considerations and people’s minds. Psychological and biological processes of emo-
tional and thereby nonrational types are taken as given and seen as determining
moral reactions.
The field of psychology always seems to be drawn to explaining people’s deci-
sions and actions as different from what they appear to be in laypersons’ perceptions.
Of course, the most visible and most popular theories during a good part of the twen-
tieth century – psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories – took that approach. Psy-
choanalytic theory essentially transformed human beings into actors whose con-
scious thoughts, feelings, and actions for the most part disguised true but unknown,
deep unconscious motivations. Equally radical behaviorist theories transformed hu-
mans into mechanistic responders whose actions were due to ways they had been
shaped by environmental forces (reinforcement, conditioning). Behaviorism began
with forceful denials of the existence of consciousness, which was treated as a secular
version of the idea of a soul [Watson, 1924]. B.F. Skinner [1971] famously proclaimed
that just about all our mentalist terms, such as thinking, personality, autonomy, free-
dom, dignity, and choice, are illusions, with no psychological reality, that people
maintain to elevate him or herself.
One does not have to be a Freudian or Skinnerian to provide psychological ex-
planations based on the idea that people’s decisions are not what they appear to be to
laypersons or that many of their understandings are illusory. Two strands of this sort
have been prominent. One is that the mind continually plays tricks on us (though
‘us’ does not usually include the theorists) and the other is that we are driven by our
emotions, not our reasoning, and we are often fooled into believing that it is our rea-
soning and choices that produce decisions and actions. The field of social psychol-
ogy, dating back at least to theories of cognitive dissonance [Festinger, 1957], is re-
plete with experiments aimed at demonstrating the ways attitudes, thinking, and
irrational processes most often override behaviors. Recently, there has been a focus
in research on the use of ‘heuristics’ and biases, which presumably explain how peo-
ple’s use of cognitive short cuts results in nonrational economic decisions (e.g., that
go against one’s self-interest) and probabilistic choices [Kahneman, Slovic, & Tver-
sky, 1982]. Heuristics produce errors in judgment since they involve the application
of rules of thumb instead of use of evidence and/or knowledge about probabilities
[for a critique, see Turiel, in press b].
Another current trend is to explain decisions in many realms as overdetermined
by subconscious brain functions. Conscious, reasoned, or reflective decisions, as
well as autonomy and choice, are seen to be as illusory as Skinner thought all men-
talist explanations. One line of research has attempted to show that consciousness or
awareness of decisions come after the decisions were already made. As an example,
it has been found that in experimental situations actions like pressing a button or

30 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
flicking a finger occurred slightly (1/2 s) after the occurrence of brain signals associ-
ated with the actions. These types of findings are interpreted to mean that conscious
awareness of decisions comes after the decision has already been taken in a subcon-
scious way. Therefore, our beliefs that we deliberatively or consciously make deci-
sions and choose from alternatives are merely illusions. They are after-the-fact ex-
planations for what we have no alternative to doing1. Often there is little in the way
of explanation of how it is that we act in these automatic ways – except that somehow,
invoking material cause, the brain does it. Perhaps the most common explanation as
to why the brain does it is that of genetic inheritance. The process of evolution has
resulted in hard-wired, genetic makeup determining thoughts and actions.
Some of these propositions regarding moral evaluations are betwixt and be-
tween psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories in ways that render them with little
explanatory power. Brain functioning, intuitions, or emotions that simply exist apart
from awareness are said to result in (predetermined?) actions. By contrast, at the
heart of psychoanalytic theory was an attempt to explain how and why conscious
perceptions and awareness become deeply unconscious and placed out of awareness.
The structure and functions of unconscious processes were described, which includ-
ed explication of forces accounting for conscious unavailability. For strict behavior-
ists, the explanation of actions as independent of conscious awareness or reasoning
was based on a duality between actions and mind, with actions following laws hav-
ing nothing to do with cognitive activities.
Some speculate that individuals’ moral positions are just there. They are just
there as emotionally buttressed intuitions, which may be reinforced by cultural prac-
tices [Haidt, 2001]. I label these speculations because of the lack of evidence to sup-
port the position and because of the minimal effort at explanation of their existence
(that they are just there). The speculations go further with unsubstantiated and high-
ly implausible, reductionist claims that reasoning is used only after decisions are
reached as a means of either justifying the decision or, in a deprecation of human
thinking, as lawyer-like ways of convincing others to agree with one’s position. These
claims rest on the idea, already discussed, that moral responses, which are emotion-
ally based, occur automatically and rapidly, with no thought, reflection, or scrutiny
[Haidt, 2001]. Understandings of issues of welfare, justice, and rights are merely af-
ter-the-fact justifications and not the fundamental bases of morality that people are
deluded to think they are. The layperson uses after-the-fact ideas instrumentally to
justify predetermined decisions as would a lawyer (and not the psychologist putting

1
By necessity, experiments assessing actions and electroencephalograph brain wave activity have
used simple motor actions like pressing a button. The implied generalization to more complex choices
(say professional avenues to pursue, deciding where to live, or which restaurant or opera to go to) has
little supportive evidence. Even with regard to seemingly straightforward decisions, the expectations
that unconscious, unknown, and nonrational processes determine decisions and choices may not be
warranted. For instance, it may well be that with regard to many arithmetical calculations (including
ones as simple as 2 + 2 = 4) some type of brain activity could be noticeable before conscious awareness
of calculations. Most adults would automatically and immediately respond, perhaps with a lag in con-
scious awareness. Such findings would only show that well-developed and well-understood ideas are
implicit and, after some point of acquisition, do not require much deliberation. A better way of examin-
ing conscious awareness of this type of knowledge and decision making would be to present people with
an example of a different conclusion, such as 2 + 2 = 5. Most likely, conscious activity would be in-
volved.

Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, Human Development 31

and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
forth these propositions) in attempts to convince a jury of a position on the case. The
deprecation of layperson thinking (not to mention the implicit deprecation of law-
yers) is based on a few dramatic examples taken as prototypical of morality and gen-
eralized to the many moral issues people confront. One is the issue of incest. Presum-
ably, people react with intense negative emotions (perhaps disgust) in a rapid fashion
in evaluating incest as wrong even when presented as occurring between consenting
adults who take all the necessary precautions to avoid pregnancy. Another example
is that people in some cultures respond in a similar way to eating dog meat [Haidt,
Koller, & Dias, 1993]. The line of reasoning is that since these types of issues evoke
(supposedly) rapid emotional and unexplainable reactions, all of morality functions
that way. These generalizations from the few examples to all the familiar moral is-
sues and issues of social justice people deal with all the time are left untested. More-
over, the position by necessity must be absent of epistemological criteria for the mor-
al realm since it is seen as a realm uninfluenced by analytic criteria. Moreover, it is
the nature of behavioral reactions that renders an act moral. That is, the only avail-
able criterion for morality is the following: an issue that evokes an intense emotion-
al evaluation or reaction of a rapid type would be moral by virtue of its reaction [for
further discussion of these issues, see Turiel, 2006]. In these formulations, the prop-
osition central to Kohlberg that individuals engage in active processes of organizing
the world is denied in favor of the proposition that morality is due to how individu-
als are buffeted by their own psyches. Morality is almost entirely taken out of the
realm of philosophy and psychologized.
Recent neuroscience research on morality has also been insufficiently con-
cerned with epistemological analyses and relies too much on a few dramatic exam-
ples (though different from incest and eating dog meat) involving tricky problems
(the ‘gotcha’ kind too commonly used in psychological research). Neuroscience re-
search on morality has failed to take into account established findings from devel-
opmental psychology, which might help guide the choices of tasks in neuroimaging
studies. The result, I would argue, is a proliferation of mechanistic explanations in
that the only features examined underlying moral decisions are brain functions and
subconscious emotional reactions.
The lack of concern with epistemological issues in evolutionary and biological
studies of morality goes back a number of years to when the sociobiologist, E.O. Wil-
son, proclaimed that ‘Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibil-
ity that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of
the philosophers and biologicized’ [Wilson, 1975, p. 562]. At the time, Wilson’s proc-
lamation of independence from philosophy received a fair amount of criticism, not
for the call for inclusion of biological analyses of morality, but for the call for exclu-
sion of philosophy. Wilson’s call went largely unheeded until recently when evolu-
tionary psychologists and neuroscientists turned their attention to the biological side
of morality without systematic or rigorous grounding in definitions of the moral
realm.
Two prominent lines of research illustrate how this is the case. One line stems
from researchers who study people with brain impairments [e.g., Damasio, 1994;
Koenigs, Young, Adolphs, Tranel, Cushman, Hauser, & Damasio, 2007]. Although
these researchers have appropriately stated an interest in studying connections
among biology, rationality, emotions, and feelings [Damasio, 1994], the analyses of
morality leave much to be desired regarding the types of emotions involved and how

32 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
morality is defined. As one example, Damasio lists a hodgepodge of emotions pre-
sumably associated with morality: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride,
jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, indignation, contempt, and disgust. No effort
is made to distinguish these very different types of emotions, some of which are
positive and some aversive, or to specify which play what role in moral acquisition
or moral decisions. Similarly, undifferentiated definitions are provided, which fail to
account for the types of domain distinctions evident in the judgments of children
and adults [Turiel, 2006; see also Killen & Smetana, 2007]. Damasio reverts to vague
notions, lumping together terms like social conventions, ethical rules, religious be-
liefs, law, and justice. No analyses are provided of these categories or how they are
formed. Other references by Damasio [2003] to the moral realm include the idea that
social conventions and ethical rules are manifestations of homeostatic and coopera-
tive relationships regulated by culture. As we have seen, however, morality entails
goals other than equilibrium and cooperation since it importantly involves struggle,
opposition, and resistance to perceived unfair practices of inequality and hierarchy
that are regulated by culture. By contrast, Damasio sees conventions and social rules
as mechanisms for achieving homeostasis within social groups in the context of so-
cial hierarchies and inequalities: ‘It is not difficult to imagine the emergence of jus-
tice and honor out of practices of cooperation. Yet another layer of social emotions,
expressed in the form of dominant or submissive behaviors within the group, would
have played an important role in the give and take that define cooperation’ [Dama-
sio, 2003, p. 163]. The types of critical scrutiny of relationships of dominance and
subordination documented in the research discussed above has little place in these
formulations.
A second and related line of research has focused on neuroimaging studies of
people making moral decisions. The apparent strategy is to use tasks or moral prob-
lems that clearly seem to have moral relevance and that can be approached from a
utilitarian-philosophic perspective. The tasks have clear moral relevance because
they pertain to the question of saving lives. However, the tasks are anything but
straightforward regarding the issues of the value of life and decisions on acting to
save lives. The way I would characterize it is that participants in these studies are es-
sentially posed with the problem of whether it is permissible for them to act as execu-
tioners. In addition, the tasks are set up so as to maximize that people would make
contradictory decisions (the gotcha part of proclivities in some psychological re-
search). Participants are asked to ‘act as executioners’ by presenting them with what
are referred to as trolley-car-bystander and trolley-car-footbridge scenarios. The by-
stander scenario is as follows: ‘A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five
people, but a bystander can throw a switch that will turn the trolley onto a side track,
where it will kill only one person.’ This scenario presents participants with the night-
marish problem, from a moral point of view, of whether it is alright to act as an ex-
ecutioner since the question posed is: ‘Is it permissible to throw the switch?’ The
scenario involves a utilitarian calculation as to whether it is better to sacrifice one
life to save more lives. The ‘trick’ part of the research comes in the even more night-
marish footbridge version: ‘A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five peo-
ple, but a bystander who is standing on a footbridge can shove a man in front of the
train, saving the five people but killing the man.’ Still acting as utilitarian execution-
ers, participants need to decide if it is permissible to save five lives by sacrificing one,
but in this case by actually pushing a man to his death.

Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, Human Development 33

and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
 It has been found that people respond to the two scenarios differently. Most state
that it is permissible to throw the switch in order to save five people, but most state as
well that it is not permissible to push a man even though that act would save the same
number of people. Since the utilitarian calculations are the same in the two scenarios,
these findings are taken to mean that moral decisions are often non-rational, but in-
stead intuitive, and emotionally determined. The argument is supposedly buttressed
by findings that different parts of the brain are activated in the two scenarios.
There are several serious problems with these methods of study and interpreta-
tions of the findings that I briefly list here. First, the researchers treat the trolley car
tasks as representative examples of moral problems involving utilitarian calcula-
tions. In real life, however, a decision as to whether to take a life in these ways is
highly unusual for most people, poses complex considerations, and is particularly
charged with emotion because of the very issues that make it moral: the perceived
value and sacredness of life and prohibitions against taking a life. These scenarios
are hard cases because meeting the value of life requires repudiating the value of life.
Such situations pose very difficult decisions involving several considerations and
requiring their coordination.
A second and related problem lies in the presumption that rationality entails
utilitarian calculations only. It is this presumption that leads to the conclusion that
as people judge the two trolley car problems differently they are acting out of emo-
tion and intuitively. However, the trolley-car-footbridge scenario most likely consti-
tutes a different situation from the trolley-car-bystander scenario. The former pre-
sents a compounded problem involving the saving of lives, taking a life, the natural
course of events, the responsibility of individuals altering natural courses, and caus-
ing someone’s death very directly. The emotions and coordination involved are more
complex in one than the other. Another scenario that has been used in this line of
research contains even more complex coordination. It is a scenario in which it is
stated that a doctor can save five patients who are dying from organ failure by cut-
ting up and killing a sixth healthy patient to use his organs for the others. In an even
more complex way than the footbridge scenario, the ‘transplant’ scenario also raises
issues about a doctor’s duties and responsibilities, the power granted to individuals
to make life-and-death decisions, the legal system, and societal roles and arrange-
ments. Not very surprisingly, very few judged it permissible for the doctor to use a
healthy patient’s organs to save five others.
Therefore, these types of scenarios pose particular types of emotionally laden
problems with multiple considerations that are difficult to reconcile without violating
serious moral precepts in order to achieve serious moral goals. In this sense, the sce-
narios used in the neuroscience studies have affinities with the types of moral situa-
tions used by Kohlberg in his research. In both cases there has been a lack of attention
to how individuals think and feel about the various components, and their coordina-
tion, in these types of situations. In the neuroscience research, gross generalizations
are made from these unusual situations to moral functioning in general. The seeming
inconsistencies in responses to the supposedly same situations (i.e., the utilitarian cal-
culations) have been taken to mean that morality is due to evolutionarily determined,
emotionally based intuitions and that reasoning is merely rationalization of and jus-
tification for subconscious decisions. These approaches to moral acquisition and func-
tioning entail one-dimensional, causal explanations rather than ones that attempt to
integrate biology, individual-environment interactions, thought, and emotions.

34 Human Development Turiel

2008;51:21–39
 Conclusion

The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Human Development provides

a good opportunity to reflect upon progress and lack thereof in several areas of the-
ory and research on human development. Reprinting a classic article by Lawrence
Kohlberg helps bring to conscious awareness the role and influence he has had in
promoting greater understandings of morality and its development, and has allowed
me to reflect upon shifts that have occurred over the past 40 years and more. In the
process, I have used the opportunity to point to what I view as lessons missed or ig-
nored from Kohlberg’s rich theoretical formulations, sound empirical work, and in-
cisive reflections about and critiques of social scientific analyses of morality.
One lesson to be learned, in my view, is that we should not psychologize or bio-
logicize morality and its development. By this I mean that morality, and much else
in human functioning, should not be approached solely from the viewpoint of bio-
logical determinism or particular mechanisms that essentially serve to reduce mor-
al functioning to processes that are strictly psychological mechanisms. The moral
realm should not be rendered a one-dimensional, causal psychological phenomenon
because much more is at work. Kohlberg pointed us in the right directions with a
multifaceted conception of morality that included analyses of the integration of
thought, emotions, actions, and development. In my view, he captured necessary as-
pects of morality through his emphasis on how, starting at an early age, individuals
attempt to understand their social worlds, deal with how people should relate to one
another, engage in reciprocal interactions, and in the process construct judgments
about welfare, justice, and rights. Reciprocal interactions and moral concepts per-
tain to individuals’ immediate relationships with others and their connections to
cultural practices and systems of societal organization.
All this occurs because people are active in their concerns about their own
plights in the world, the plights of others, and how to best establish personal, social,
and moral orders. All this means that most of the time people are not prisoners of
their genetic makeup, the effects of particular experiences, or tricks of their minds.
Just as social scientific researchers and theorists engage in processes of thought to
understand their disciplines of study, laypersons engage in thought to understand
the multiple aspects of their worlds. As some philosophers have stressed, ‘human be-
ings are above all reasoning beings’ [Nussbaum, 1999, p. 71], and as reasoning beings
‘all, just by being human, are of equal dignity and worth, no matter where they are
situated in society, and that the primary source of this worth is a power of moral
choice within them, a power that consists in the ability to plan a life in accordance
with one’s own evaluation of ends’ [Nussbaum, 1999, p. 57].
The philosophical tradition of which Nussbaum speaks presents a rather differ-
ent picture (but one consistent with that of Kohlberg) of human functioning and
capabilities from the deterministic view in some psychological traditions I have
mentioned. Indeed, those psychological traditions have given little credence to rea-
soning, choice, and planning one’s life. They have often led to one form or another
of attempts at human engineering. For a time, behaviorist principles were used, not
only in works of fiction [Skinner, 1948], but in real-life educational programs and
enterprises of behavior modification, to attempt to shape people’s actions in accord
with someone else’s conceptions and evaluations of ends. As is well known, psycho-
logical interpretations have been used to try to manipulate and control behavior

Children’s Orientations toward Moral, Social, Human Development 35

and Personal Orders 2008;51:21–39
through many means, including methods of advertising, presentation of subliminal
messages, marketing techniques, and manipulation of strategies and messages in
political campaigns. These efforts come and go with little success. I believe that the
lack of success is because people reason about their experiences, and are in recipro-
cal interactions with others; attempts to manipulate them are met with efforts to
understand and evaluate what is being done to them. As the philosopher Peter Sing-
er put it: ‘Reason is like an escalator – once we step on it, we cannot get off until we
have gone where it takes us’ [Wade, 2007, p. D3].
Morality is an area that defies efforts at human engineering and that has the
property of the escalator. Humans strive for social and moral harmony, but these
qualities have proven difficult to achieve. Issues of fairness, justice, and rights per-
meate social relationships and result in constant struggle, conflicts, social opposi-
tion, and moral resistance. Conflicts are by no means restricted to group conflicts.
Moral and social struggles are as evident within groups and even between people,
such as males and females, in close units. Moral goals are often in conflict with per-
sonal and social goals. People’s moral goals often clash with the social institutional-
ization of moral goals. Imperfect social institutions and cultural practices are chal-
lenged by reasoning individuals with their capacities to stand back and take a critical
view from the perspective of their moral judgments.

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