Suggestions are made for new methods and new directions In the study of moral development. Moral development in adolescence has reached maturity as an area of research. This special issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence, which collects some of the very best investigations on adolescent moral development, is one indication. Expansive reviews of the large literature will also appear in the Handbook of Moral Development (Killeen & Gamesman, In press), the Handbook of Child Development (Damon, In press), and In the most recent volume In the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation series (Carlo & Edwards, in press).
While the burgeoning of literature on moral development in adolescence has been driven in part by the mistaken belief that today’s cohort of youth is particularly immoral, it is also a product of the recognition of the genuine theoretical opportunities offered by focusing on adolescents’ moral capacities. The papers in this issue capitalize on this insight in various ways. One important theme in the papers in this issue is that adolescence is the foundation for adulthood.
Mats and Walker suggest that moral exemplars;Gandhi, for example;can be understood by studying the developing moral commitments of adolescents and young adults. Implicit in their article is the supposition that adult moral character is given some shape in adolescence. In other words, by understanding and eventually controlling the influences acting on the adolescent, adult moral character development can be set on the correct path. The same theme is found in the article by Lapboard and colleagues (Lapboard, Pratt, Hungers, & Pander). Lapboard et al. Suggest that adult generatively has its roots in adolescent experience. The results of their work suggest that young adults who are committed to caring for others are more likely than those less committed to have had good relationships with their parents and community service experiences in adolescence. Similarly, Gamesman and Metzger suggest that civic engagement, which reflects adults’ moral obligations to their communities, is vitally connected to experiences within the family and church. A second theme found in all the papers is that adolescence has qualities that make it developmentally distinct from childhood.
In addition to the prominence of peers, there are a variety of other age-graded changes that distinguish the contexts of adolescents’ lives from those of children. These include transition into large schools, the world of work, and romantic relationships, to name Just a few. As a consequence, moral life has new distinctive contexts and experiences but skills as well. As Ginsberg, Cumberland, Guthrie, Murphy, and Sheppard point out in their article, there is a substantial research base demonstrating that a variety of skills and types of expertise related to oral life are more developed in adolescence than they are in childhood.
For example, Ginsberg and her colleagues review research suggesting that there are improvements in the abilities to infer the perspective of others, to understand the self, and to solve social problems. Development in most of these skills builds upon childhood achievements and, consequently, adolescence does not constitute a unique psychological stage set apart from that of childhood. Nonetheless, the refinements in skills permit adolescents to engage in moral life more effectively than is typically possible for children.
Together, the variety of contexts and new skills make adolescence a particularly interesting period in which to investigate influences on moral development. The research in this special issue examines the effects on moral development of psychological processes (Ginsberg, Cumberland, Guthrie, Murphy, & Sheppard, Mats, & Walker), parents (Lapboard, Pratt, Hungers, & Pander, Gamesman, & Metzger), peers (Parading, Lobber, & Stouthearted-Lobber), social institutions (Gamesman & Metzger), and cultural practices (e. . , volunteering, Lapboard, Pratt, Hungers, & Pander). During childhood, parents mediate children’s contact with social institutions, monitor their contacts with peers, and control their participation in cultural practices. The powerful influence of parents on children makes the study of moral colonization in childhood less complex, and perhaps less challenging, than the investigation of the factors affecting moral growth in adolescence.
Adults, like adolescents, live in a rich milieu of family, friends, institutions, and cultural practices. Unlike adolescents, however, adults do not change rapidly. As William James (1890, p. 121) noted, “It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the harasser has set like plaster, and will never soften again. ” While James probably 226 underestimated the potential for change in adulthood, there is little evidence to indicate that adulthood is as fertile a period in which to examine age-related change as is adolescence.
The result was a line of work that focused on the development of understanding of moral issues such as substantial body of work has accumulated over the last 40 years concerning children’s and adolescents’ understanding of rights, responsibilities, and the principles that can be used to adjudicate among conflicting claims. The gradual elaboration of understanding of Justice and moral claims is not all there is to moral development, of course, and in the last 20 years many theorists and researchers have enlarged the domain of investigation by focusing on other topics.
This expansion is evident in the papers in this special issue. In their contribution to this issue, Ginsberg and her colleagues present their latest findings on adolescents’ proboscis reasoning. Ginsberg was one of the leaders in the movement to broaden the study of moral development beyond the boundaries of the study of conflicts of rights and n understanding of Justice (see, for example, Ginsberg-Berg, 1979), and the work on proboscis moral reasoning in this issue, and her research on the emotional components to moral life (e. G. Ginsberg, in press), continues this effort. Like Ginsberg and her colleagues, Mats and Walker focus on the proboscis domain. They seek to understand the roots of sustained proboscis action by examining the life stories provided by dedicated volunteers, a line of research much followed by personality researchers. Lapboard, Pratt, Hungers, and Pander study generatively, which they define as “care and concern for the next generation,” a construct drawn from Erosion’s (1968) influential theory of psychosocial development, which has evident proboscis qualities.
Gamesman and Metzger focus on civic participation, a form of obligation to the public good that is most frequently 227 studied by political scientists (e. G. , Putnam, 2000). Finally, Parading, Lobber, and Stouthearted-Lobber are concerned with beliefs about anti-social or delinquent activity. Each of the topics examined in the articles in this issue bears clear connections to our everyday notions of morality. Moreover, the diversity of the topics represents well the breadth of investigations in moral development, a breadth necessary to track the complexity of real life.
The concern for practical morality; charity to others, caring for the next generation, delinquency, civic engagement; make the field more relevant to policy makers and the general public than moral development research was 30 years ago, when its principal focus was moral judgment sophistication. The cost of this increased relevance is that it is difficult to abstract clear boundaries for the moral domain from the collection of topics in this sue.
If the study of moral Judgment that dominated the field 30 years ago sometimes seemed irrelevant for understanding moral life, it did offer fairly clear criteria demarcating its subject matter. This clarity now seems lost. For example, it is difficult to read the article by Parading, Lobber, and Stouthearted-Lobber on delinquency and discern clear conceptual links to the research on civic engagement by Gamesman and Metzger. Similarly, one could as easily read the paper on generatively by Lapboard, Pratt, Hungers, and Pander or the article by Mats and Walker on the life like this one on moral development.
In our view, there is conceptual benefit in seeking the essences of notions like “morality’ even if the collection of topics in this issue makes evident how difficult this search is likely to be. The outline of topics within the moral domain offered by Bernard Williams (1995, p. 551) is particularly useful in this regard. Williams suggests that moral philosophy seeks answers to three questions: ‘What is the right thing to do? ,” “How is the best possible state of affairs achieved? ,” and ;What qualities make for a good person? These three questions, which correspond to the deontological, utilitarian, and virtue traditions, respectively, overlap and yet, are not identical to each other. One of the benefits of a broad outline of the moral domain such as this one is that it helps prevent parochialism. The deontological line of investigation, which gained ascendancy in psychology as a result of Kohlrabies pioneering work, elicited controversy concerning whether it construed morality “correctly’ or “incorrectly. In retrospect, the energies of those involved in the debate might have been better spent complementing research in the deontological tradition with investigations best framed within the virtue and utilitarian traditions. 228 Williams outlining of the moral domain not only alerts researchers in the field to the full range of issues that merit consideration, it also helps to distinguish the study of moral development from investigations in the related areas of personality development, social development, cognitive development, and positive psychology.
For example, the study of positive psychology, which has grown rapidly over the last decade, has as its foci Nailed subjective experiences” such as happiness, “positive individual traits,” and “civic virtues and the institutions which move individuals toward better citizenship” (Salesman & Sentimentally, 2000, p. ). Clearly, there is an overlap in the investigations of moral development and positive psychology (the study of civic engagement, for example, may fall within both).
Nonetheless, the questions that the two lines of work seek to answer are quite different. Positive psychology seeks to answer questions such as “How can human flourishing be promoted? ,” while moral theories, as we noted earlier, seek answers to questions such as ‘What is the right thing to do?
