invoking abstract principles is irrelevant; that a course of action is in
actual fact right or wrong regardless of how the agents themselves
explain their behavior. If you think that stealing a friend's pen is
wrong, you think it is wrong not just from your viewpoint but also
from anyone else's viewpoint. Whether the perpetrator of this minor
offense can invoke self-serving excuses or not is completely irrelevant.
Whether the owner of the pen minds the theft or not is equally irrele-
vant.
This is what philosophers call "moral realism"—the assumption
that behaviors in themselves have specific moral values. In general,
[180] being a realist consists in assuming that the qualities of things are in
the things themselves; if a poppy looksred it is because it isred. If we
place it under blue light it does not appear red any more but we have
the intuition that it still isthat color, that it has some intrinsic redness
that is difficult to detect under these special circumstances. (Obvi-
ously, our common intuitions are not always congruent to how a sci-
entist would approach the question, here as in many other domains.)
Moral realism is the same, only applied to the ethical aspect of
actions, so that wrongness is thought to be as intrinsic to stealing as
redness is to a poppy. Moral philosophers are not in general too keen
on moral realism because it creates difficult paradoxes. But that is
precisely the point: the children studied by Turiel and others are not
philosophers. That is, they are not in the business of making ethical
principles explicit, testing their application to difficult cases and
checking that the overall results are consistent. They just have spon-
taneous moral intuitions with a realistic bias, and when this bias cre-
ates an ambiguity they just live with it.
Now this realist assumption does not change much with develop-
ment, which is remarkable because in other domains children gradu-
ally form more and more sophisticated descriptions of the difference
between their own and other people's viewpoints on a situation. This
"perspective-taking" is an indispensable skill in a species that depends
so much on social interaction. You have to monitor situations not only
as you see them but also the way others see them, and to assess what
creates the difference between these viewpoints. So it is all the more
interesting that no such change is observed in the domain of moral
intuitions. For the three-year-old as well as for the ten-year-old and
indeed for most adults, the fact that a behavior is right or wrong is not
a function of one's viewpoint. It is only seen as a function of the actual
behavior and the actual situation.
RELIGION EXPLAINED