Reference no: EM133252802

It is widely believed that morality is something that is learned rather than innate. Developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have claimed that young children get their morality from their parents. Whatever their parents tell them is right is what they believe to be right. Recent research suggests, however, that this notion of moral development is mistaken. William Damon, chair of Brown University's education department and director of the Center for the Study of Human Development, has found that even very young children seem to have a sense of right and wrong that is independent of what their parents say: Damon's idea for his research grew out of a job he took after college as a caseworker in a New York City settlement house for immigrant preteens-rough-and-tumble kids clearly headed for trouble. "I noticed that even the very young ones, four and five, had ideas about family, other people, emotions, and morality that were much more advanced and sophisticated than anything developmental psychologists had been writing about," he recalls. The experience was a revelation. "I had a feeling [one] has very few times in a lifetime. I felt I had discovered something others had not seen." When he later entered graduate school, Damon devised some experiments with nursery-school children that involved asking them to distribute toys and candy among their friends. "I was struck with how child after child, whatever school I went to, all said the same kinds of things," he remembers. "They gave reasons why they had to share: 'If I don't share with her, she won't play with me.' 'I'll hurt her feelings if I don't share with her.' They had a sense of reciprocity and a sense of empathy." Next he asked, "What if your mother or your teacher told you not to share your lunch or candy or your bike with your friend?" The children answered, "That would be wrong. I would do it anyway." Kohlberg and other psychologists had been saying that, before adolescence, children get all their moral values from their parents; to a child, whatever the person in power says is right is right simply because she says so. "But kids were saying, 'My mother would be wrong. That's not nice. That's not fair to my friend.'"18 Damon believes that children are born with a natural predisposition to moral behavior. That predisposition has to be nurtured to develop, but it is something that, as humans, we all share.

Does Damon's research lend credibility to the claim that there are absolute moral standards? Why or why not? Do you feel that morality is defined the same elsewhere?