Educational Psychology

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rules and merely conventional rules. Apparently they

believe, for example, that it would be wrong to steal toys

or to hit someone, even if adults gave you permission to

do so. But apparently they also know that it would be

OK for traffic lights to use different colors—for red to

mean "go" and green to mean "stop"—provided that

everyone agreed on changing the rule. That is what the

researcher named Turiel apparently meant by

distinguishing convention from morality.

The introduction continued in this challenging style for about two pages, requiring Kelvin to read slowly and
carefully in order to understand its points. Kelvin was not discouraged from continuing, though, because he wanted
to find out more about how, in general, children acquire moral beliefs. Did moral beliefs take time to develop—did
they "grow" on children slowly after initially being borrowed from parents or other adults? In this case, then maybe
Kelvin owed it to his students to adopt and express desirable moral attitudes myself, so as to provide a good model
for their developing beliefs. Or were students’ key moral beliefs already in place when they entered school—almost
as if "hard wired" in their minds, or at least already learned during infancy and the preschool years? In this second
case, it might still be desirable for Kelvin to adopt positive moral attitudes, but not for the purpose of modeling
them for students. Students already “hard wired” for key moral beliefs might not need a model so much as an
enforcer of desirable moral behaviors. Concerning the issue of cheating, for example, the students might already
understand the undesirable nature and implications of this behavior. As a result they might not need
demonstrations of honest integrity from their teacher as much as affirmations from the teacher of the importance
of honesty and integrity, along with consistent enforcement of appropriate sanctions against cheating when it did
occur.

For Kelvin, therefore, the outcomes of research on moral development—including Saltzstein's that he was
currently reading—posed issues of classroom management, both in university classrooms and in public school
classrooms. So Kelvin read on. Saltzstein proposed resolving the issues about the origins of moral development by
distinguishing between moral conflicts and moral dilemmas:

Moral conflicts are conflicts between moral duty or

right and a non-moral desire. An example might be the

conflict between whether to return a wallet to its

rightful owner or keep the coveted wallet with its extra

cash. In contrast, moral dilemmas are conflicts

involving two moral rights or duties. For example, [a

person might feel a dilemma between] whether to steal

a drug to save a spouse's life. [p. 38]

The distinction between conflicts and dilemmas

looked promising to Kelvin. Moral conflicts looked

fairly simple in cognitive terms, even if they were

sometimes difficult emotionally. The "right" action was

obvious. Moral dilemmas were more complex

cognitively as well as emotionally, because two "goods"

were being weighed against each other. The moral

alternatives might both be right and wrong at the same

time, and their relative "rightness" might not be

immediately obvious.

Educational Psychology 359 A Global Text