250 mind
interaction (this is why social conventions and moral imperatives are so easily
distinguished). They provide an initial basis on which children can understand
adult moral views. This capacity for entertaining abstract intuitions about the
moral nature of courses of action (without, of course, being able to explicate
them) was found also in children with various amounts of experience with
other children,^30 in different cultures,^31 and even in children with exceptional
experiences of abuse or neglect.^32
That children have early moral concepts does not mean that they have the
same moral understandings as adults, far from it. First, young children have
more difficulty in figuring out other agents’ intentions and feelings; second,
they do not have a rich repertoire of past episodes to draw from when repre-
senting the key features of a situation; third, they may not be aware of local
parameters of social interaction (they may resist sharing their toys with a
cousin, noticing that their parents are not giving their car to the cousin’s par-
ents). But what is important here is that, from an early age, (a) children’s moral
understandings are founded on theintuitionthat some courses of action are
right and others are not, (b) this intuition stems from feelings that cannot be
further explicated, and (c) it is assumed that a course of action is right or wrong
in itself, regardless of who is considering it. All three assumptions are found
in adults too, and form an intuitive basis for moral inferences. Obviously, they
are also supplemented by explicit understandings of moral principles, as well
as (in some places) their connections with religious concepts.
The main conclusion to draw from this research is that moral understand-
ings, far from being dependent upon socially transmitted (e.g., religious) ex-
plications, appear before such concepts are intelligible, indeed, they develop
regardless of whether there areanyreligious or other concepts in the child’s
cultural environment. But another aspect of these cognitive findings is also
important. Early developed moral understandings may well provide a context
in which concepts of supernatural agents become more salient.
To the extent that people represent a situation in a way that triggers par-
ticular moral intuitions and feelings, they generally assume that these intui-
tions and feelings are true regardless of who is considering the situation. They
also assume that the only way to disguise the true moral nature of an action
is to mislead people about the action itself. If you want to exculpate yourself,
you cannot argue that beating up one’s sibling is right, but you can claim that
whatseemedto be beating up one’s sibling was something entirely different.
You assume that, to the extent that people share your information (or infor-
mation you hold true) about what happened, they probably share the same
moral intuition about it, and therefore will be led to react to it in similar ways.
In other words, the way our moral intuitions allows for an empty place-
holder, for the position of “some agent who has access to my information about
the situation at hand.” The moral system itself does not provide any description
of that agent, although we try and make other people become such agents by