cise intuitions and the explicit concepts that would justify them. The
gap is even larger in children, who lack the verbal sophistication to
explicate their own intuitions; so subtler experimental techniques are
necessary. Here is a simple illustration: Six-year-olds, like adults, have
the intuition that it is wrong to lie, or rather, that it is wrong to com-
municate information (either true or false) with the intention of
deceiving someone. However, young children also tend to use the
word "lie" in the narrow sense of "communicating false information,"
which is why they would sometimes call a genuine mistake a lie, and
conversely fail to identify as a lie an elaborate deception that used only
[178] true information. Their moral concept of "lying" is quite similar to
the adults' but their use of the word does not correspond to that con-
cept. You will not understand their moral judgements if you just ask
them explicit questions such as "Is it wrong to lie?" because of this dis-
crepancy, which may extend to other moral concepts as well.^6
Indeed, when psychologist Eliot Turiel used indirect tests he found
that even young children had sophisticated moral understandings.
Turiel wanted to find out whether children make a distinction
between violations of moral principles (for instance hitting people) and
violations of conventional rules (for instance chattering while the
teacher is talking). The violation of a convention disappears if there is
no convention; if the teacher did not insist on silence then chattering
is no offense. Moral transgressions, in contrast, are such that they
remain violations even in the absence of explicit instruction. The dis-
tinction points to what is specific about ethical rules as such. So if chil-
dren made such a distinction, this would suggest that they had the first
rudiments of a special concept of ethical behavior.
Turiel found that even some three- and four-year-olds have the
intuition that hitting people would be wrong both in those contexts
where it had been explicitly forbidden and in those where there was no
prohibition. On the other hand, shouting in class is perceived to be
wrong only if there was an explicit instruction to keep quiet. Slightly
older children (but still as young as four or five) also have precise intu-
itions about the relative seriousness of various violations. They can
perceive that stealing a pen is not quite as bad as hitting people; in the
same way, shouting in class is only a minor violation of convention,
whereas boys wearing skirts would violate a major social convention.
But they find it much easier to imagine a revision of majorsocial con-
ventions (e.g., a situation where boys would wear skirts) than a revi-
sion of even minormoral principles (e.g., a situation where it would be
RELIGION EXPLAINED