Daniel Vanello
Affiliation: Institute of Education, UCL
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Early childhood moral development, Constructivism, Autobiographical narrative
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 18:00
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Cognitive Development
Audun Dahl’s constructivist-interactionist account of early childhood moral development has recently become one of the most influential accounts seeking to identify the developmental components in the emergence of moral concerns in early childhood (Dahl and Freda, 2017; Dahl, Waltzer and Gross, 2017; Dahl and Killen, 2018; Dahl, 2018; Turiel and Dahl, 2019; Dahl, 2019; Dahl et al., 2023). Dahl’s account commits to two theoretical claims: (i) constructivism and (ii) the moral/conventional distinction. The aim of this talk is to argue that a commitment to the moral/conventional distinction is in tension with the moral epistemology of constructivism. My talk has three parts.
First, I articulate Dahl’s commitment to the moral/conventional distinction. The distinction is championed by Social Domain Theory (SDT) (Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 2015; Turiel and Dahl, 2019; Dahl, 2023). According to SDT, the moral domain is constituted by norms categorically different from the norms constituting the social conventional domain. According to SDT, the difference is that moral norms, unlike social conventional norms, are (a) universalizable i.e. they apply in any situation that is relevantly similar, (b) categorical i.e. they are justified independently of a local authority, and (c) agent-neutral i.e. they are valid independently of the specific individuals involved. SDT argues that children as young as 3 can distinguish between moral and social conventional norms. Paradigmatic examples used in experiments appeal to the act of hurting someone. Dahl’s commitment to SDT leads Dahl to conceive “moral concerns” as obligatory concerns with other people’s rights and welfare. This conception of moral concerns is meant to capture the thought that moral concerns respond to moral norms only. Dahl’s account should therefore be understood as the attempt to identify the developmental components needed for children in the early years to acquire an understanding of norms that are universalizable, categorical, and agent-neutral.
Second, I articulate Dahl’s commitment to constructivism. Constructivism is the view that children acquire an understanding of the moral wrongness or rightness of actions in social interactions with both adults and peers where these social interactions have the function of allowing children to actively negotiate their own understanding of the moral wrongness of rightness of a given event (Piaget, 1932; Kohlberg, 1971; Killen and Smetana, 2015; Dahl et al., 2017; Killen and Dahl, 2018). A key claim made by constructivism as Dahl conceives it is that social interactions are the location for children’s active negotiation of their moral understanding in virtue of the types of experiences that these social interactions involve. As Dahl conceives it, then, the moral epistemology of constructivism is empiricist. Dahl contrasts constructivism to both (a) socialization theory which he portrays as arguing that children learn morality by automatically accepting norms and values from authorities such as parents independently of their own experiences (Kochanska and Aksan, 2006), and (b) nativist accounts that argue that moral dispositions are innate and that experience does not have a causal effect on their development (Bloom, 2012; Hamlin, 2015). A paradigmatic example appealed to in supporting constructivism is a child disagreeing with an adult’s command or evaluation of a given event. Dahl’s commitment to constructivism is further evidenced by his claim that experimental data on children’s early moral development must be complemented by data from observations in naturalistic settings that focus on children’s lived experience (Dahl, 2016; Rogoff, Dahl and Callanan, 2018; Dahl and Turiel, 2019; Langenhoff, Dahl and Srinivasan, 2022).
Third, I rely on the two preceding parts to argue that Dahl’s SDT-informed conception of moral concerns leads him to ignore types of experiences that should be thought as crucial in children’s acquisition of moral concerns as he conceives them, thus creating a tension with his commitment to the moral epistemology of constructivism. Dahl’s constructivist-interactionist account distinguishes three steps in the emergence of moral concerns. First, the child learns that hitting causes pain. Second, the child develops an aversion to seeing pain in others. Third, the child learns that hurting others, because it causes pain, is morally wrong. It is only at this third stage that morality enters the child’s judgement. According to Dahl, the experiences that the child needs to undergo in order to arrive at the third stage are observational in kind. The child observes others in relevant situations, such as harming one another, and learns from these observations that it is morally wrong. I argue that this opens up the question of whether observational experience can by itself allow the child to progress from the second to third step. I argue that it is not clear that it can. To do so I appeal to the work by developmental psychologists researching the role of autobiographical narrative in the development of moral agency (Pasupathi and Waynrib, 2010; Recchia et al., 2014; Mansfield, Pasupathi, and McLean, 2015).
I argue that (i) a key claim about moral epistemology made by these developmental psychologists is that to introduce morality in one’s judgement, children undergo not merely observational experiences but also, and crucially, first-personal experiences of being wronged and wronging others. According to these studies, it is essential to the acquisition of an understanding of the moral wrongness and rightness of an event that, at least sometimes, the perpetrator or the victim is oneself. This gives the opportunity to the child to reflect on his/her experiences, often with the help of a caring adult, and extract a generalisable moral understanding whose content is at the same time connected to one’s own first-person experience of being wronged or wronging someone else. (ii) I argue that this claim should fit within a constructivist moral epistemology and that it is missed by Dahl. (iii) I also argue that the reason why it is missed by Dahl is commitment to SDT. Since moral concerns are conceived as agent-neutral i.e. as valid independently of the specific individuals involved, Dahl conceives the type of experiences allowing children to progress to the third stage independently of the first-personal element of the experience. The upshot is that if Dahl wants to stick to constructivism, he needs to revise his commitment to SDT.