development of morality if young children did not have some inkling
of moral concepts. As philosophers used to say, you cannot derive an
oughtfrom an is.There is no simple way to define what "morally
right" means, as distinct from desirable, conventionally agreed on,
positively sanctioned, approved by the authorities, etc.
Because there were two general accounts of moral judgement—in
terms of reasoning based on principles, and of feelings, respectively—
psychologists have tried to explain the acquisition of morality either as
the gradual refinement and abstraction of principles or as the gradual
development of specific emotional reactions. Seen from the first, prin-
ciple-based perspective, children acquire morality by gradually mak- [177]
ing their principles more general, less centered on very specific
actions. In this view, any child who is attentive enough should find out
how to optimize rewards by behaving the way more powerful others,
such as parents and older peers, recommend. Then children would
gradually acquire a more abstract version of the principles, which
would allow them to predict whether a given behavior would be all
right or not. Once the child understands that tormenting a pet is
"bad" but so is maiming a friend or hitting a sibling, they form a more
general concept of "brutal behavior" as punishable because of its
effects. Later, children get even more abstract principles about Good
and Bad in general.
If feelings are the main source of moral understandings, then chil-
dren's development in this domain should be slightly different. Con-
sider a prototypical moral sentiment, like feelings of guilt at harming
others. Morality gives us a (minor) punishment in the form of an emo-
tion that supposedly mirrors the suffering of others. So children
should acquire these feelings as a measure of their capacity to repre-
sent the thoughts and feelings of others. This might happen if their
first sources of moral principles were people whose feelings are easily
perceived, like parents, and whose reactions are so crucial that even
young children are very attentive to them. This capacity for empathy
would gradually extend to others and the norms would become inter-
nal to the child's mind.^5
Both accounts of moral development explained someof the actual
evidence, that is, of how children actually use moral concepts. But
there were some problems too. First, many such studies were based on
interviews designed to elicit explicit moral reasoning. But we know
that this method is not quite sufficient. In many domains where we
have specialized mental systems, there is a large gap between our pre-
WHYDOGODSANDSPIRITSMATTER?