Thinking and Deciding

394 MORAL JUDGMENT AND CHOICE
appeal to the law against theft, or to the expectations of what a good husband would
do. At the highest level, which is not reached by many adults, people distinguish
morality and convention and thus admit the possibility that the morally right thing to
do might go against the law or social expectation.
Kohlberg used open-ended interviews about moral dilemmas. Subsequent researchers
have found that very young children can often distinguish morality and
convention if they are asked direct, simple questions. Some of the same researchers
have defined more carefully the properties of different kinds of judgments.
Specifically, Turiel (1983) and others following in his tradition (e.g., Nucci,
2001) found that most children and adults in the U.S. and several other countries
make a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules. Turiel and his collaborators
asked the children whether it would be okay to call one’s teacher by her
first name if everyone thought it was okay, or to bow instead of shaking hands, or
whether it would be okay for a bully to push another kid off the top of a slide if everyone
thought it was okay. Even most second graders said it would be okay to change
the conventions but not the moral rules: It would still be wrong to push someone off
of a slide, even if everyone thought it was not wrong.
Many children, however, fail to distinguish morality and convention. They think
that it would be wrong to call the teacher by her first name, for a boy to come to class
wearing a dress, or for children to take off their clothes at school when the weather
got too hot, regardless of whether others thought it was wrong or not. Shweder,
Mahapatra, and Miller (1988) found such responses among adults and children in a
Hindu village in India.
Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) presented subjects — children and adults in the
U.S. and Brazil — with actions, some of which were intended to be both harmless
and offensive, such as “A family’s dog was killed by a car in fron of their house.
They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and ate it.”
Another case was, “A brother and sister like to kiss each other on the mouth. When
nobody is around, they find a secret hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth,
passionately.” Of interest was whether subjects considered the action to be morally
wrong. This relied on two probe questions. One asked whether it was legitimate
for others to stop or punish the activity. The other, which distinguished morality
and convention, asked whether the activity was wrong even if everyone in a country
thought it was acceptable. The subjects were also asked if they would be bothered
witnessing the action, and whether the action had bad consequences. In general,
subjects from higher social classes in both countries were less likely to see the actions
as morally wrong. Some subjects in these groups, however, did see the actions as
wrong, and, when they did this, they tended to say that there were bad consequences.
The subjects in lower classes tended to see the actions as morally wrong. Although
they did not think that the wrong actions were always harmful, they did usually
say that they would be “bothered.” These children apparently failed to distinguish
morality and convention in much the way that Kohlberg proposed.
Other questions concern whether a rule can be changed by anyone (by citizens,
by the pope, by ministers of a church) or whether it is still a moral requirement even