all right to steal an eraser). Also, children differentiate between moral
principles and prudential rules (e.g., "Do not leave your notebook next
to the fireplace!"). They justify both in terms of their consequences
but assume that social consequences are specific to moral violations.^7
One might think that Turiel's young subjects were special because
they lived in a particular culture. But studies in North Korea and
America gave similar results. Or perhaps their attitude to moral trans-
gressions was special to the context of schooling. But psychologist
Michael Siegal found that newcomers who had just enrolled in a
kindergarten were if anything stricter in their moral attitudes than
old-timers (that is, four-year-olds who had spent two years in day [179]
care). Or perhaps one might think that Turiel's subjects were special
because they led a relatively stress-free existence in which serious vio-
lations of moral rules were in fact uncommon. But neglected or
abused children seem to have similar intuitions.^8
So experimental studies show that there is an early-developed spe-
cific inference system, a specialized moral sense underlying ethical
intuitions. Notions of morality are distinct from those used to evaluate
other aspects of social interaction (this is why social conventions and
moral imperatives are easily distinguished by very young children).
Having principled moral intuitions—intuitions that apply only to a
specific aspect of social interaction and that are directed by particular
principles—does not mean that you can articulate them explicitly.
Also, obviously, that young children have early moral concepts does
not mean that they produce the samemoral judgements as adults; far
from it. Children are different for a variety of reasons. First, they have
some initial difficulty in representing what others believe and feel.
Intuitive psychology is among their capacities, but it requires a lot of
fine-tuning before it can provide reliable descriptions of mental states
in other people. So whether someone was hurt by one's own action is
not quite as easy to figure out as adults may think. Second, children
need to acquire all sorts of local parameters in order to understand, for
instance, what counts as "hurting" in a particular social context.
Third, older children and adults have a much larger repertoire of pre-
vious situations and judgements about these situations on the basis of
which to produce case-based analogies.
Despite these differences, it is quite striking that some important
aspects of reasoning do notreally change with development. Our
moral intuitions specify that behavior is either right or wrong or
morally irrelevant; that whether we are able to justify our intuition by
WHYDOGODSANDSPIRITSMATTER?