Abstract
The ontogeny of moral thinking is a key issue in the fields of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology. In the last three decades, scholarly debate on the issue has largely centered on the question of whether moral judgments follow universal ethics such as justice and rights (Kohlberg, 1981; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987), or have culturally specific orientations, for example, towards three distinct yet overlapping ethics: Autonomy, Community, and Divinity (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997). Moral Development in a Global World brings this debate to a new level. It achieves this goal by including chapters that offer provocative hypotheses about cross-cultural patterns in moral development, and chapters that report empirical studies conducted in diverse social and cultural contexts to test those hypotheses.
The book begins with a foreword by Richard A. Shweder, who provides a thumbnail sketch of his original Big Three (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) theory of morality. In the following introduction chapter, Lene Arnett Jensen introduces the developmental-cultural framework that she has developed to account for cultural differences in the degree of use of the three ethics across the life course. The book then presents six chapters that report empirical studies based on these two conceptual frameworks. Four of the studies were conducted within national borders and investigated cross-group (divided by age and religious views) differences in the moral worldviews of children, youth, and adults from India, Finland, and the United States. The other two chapters report studies that compared the ethical views of individuals from multiple societies. These chapters are followed by Jensen’s reflection on how her experience of living in multiple societies has inspired her theorization of cross-cultural differences in moral reasoning.
The highlight of the book, in my view, is its inclusion of two commentaries, by Joan G. Miller and Gisela Trommsdorff, respectively. Miller’s article, in particular, provides an insightful and candid critique of both the theoretical hypotheses and research methods introduced in the preceding chapters, pointing to what I believe to be the key issues raised by this book. Miller suggests three major problems in the ways researchers use the Big Three theory, including some of the studies reported in this book. The first problem, also pointed out by Jacob R. Hickman and Allison DiBianca Fasoli in Chapter 7, is the tendency to treat the three ethics as discreet rather than overlapping outlooks, a practice deviating from Shweder’s original formulation. Related to this problem is the practice of relying on scale measures based on general etic statements to investigate levels of endorsement of the three ethics. Without an understanding based on emic terms, it is impossible for researchers to gain insights into the process underlying their findings. From a different perspective, Miller also points out the problem of focusing exclusively on coding qualitative themes endorsed by respondents, without making distinctions between moral issues and non-moral issues (social convention and personal choice), and without taking a developmental perspective to morality. Miller suggests that, by doing this, researchers risk reverting to an approach to morality that predates the work of Kohlberg.
Miller’s critique raises questions about how to bridge the cultural and developmental traditions to understand morality from an integrated perspective. This is a highly challenging task, as demonstrated by the cultural-developmental model proposed by Jensen. This model aims to provide a template for describing cross-cultural patterns in the developmental trajectories of each of the ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. Miller, however, argues that it is problematic to make context-free claims about developmental patterns and cross-cultural differences in those patterns, for the reason that moral reasoning is highly sensitive to the content under consideration. This argument is supported by my own research on Chinese youth (Zhao, 2015). Contrary to the idea alluded to in the Jensen book that young people in post-Confucian societies (e.g., Taiwan) put more emphasis on the ethics of Community than do their counterparts in the United States, my research suggests that Chinese adolescents’ moral reasoning is characterized by a strong emphasis on the need to protect individuals’ self-esteem and autonomy. For example, in their responses to a hypothetical situation that involves witnessing a student being teased by other students in school, Chinese participants, young and older, urban or rural, all invoke the same discourse of protecting the victim’s self-esteem to justify the different ways they recommend for dealing with the situation, ranging from doing nothing, helping the victim, to dealing with the perpetrators diplomatically.
Age-related differences in moral reasoning also need to be interpreted within specific contexts. For example, the focus group data I collected in the same study show that, while younger adolescents (8th grade) from both urban and rural schools and older adolescents (11th grade) from rural schools use the discourse of protecting the victim’s self-esteem to support their arguments concerning how to be involved in the situation, older adolescents from urban schools use the same discourse to support their arguments concerning whether to get involved in the situation, with the majority of them agreeing that it is a good idea to mind one’s own business and stay out of the situation. Data from multiple sources (survey, interview, and focus group) allowed me to identify the key cognitive and contextual factors that give rise to these group differences. Factors such as socioeconomic and cultural differences between urban and rural settings, higher pressure on older adolescents, especially those attending urban high-achieving schools, to focus on academic work and avoid being distracted by all other issues, as well as developmental differences in young and older adolescents’ evaluations of the demand of their social reality, interact to contribute to the group differences in moral reasoning.
That is to say, in order to understand cross-cultural differences in moral development, researchers need to gain a better knowledge of how within-cultural processes influence the ways that children and adults in diverse societies access and use available cultural discourses related to the ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity, discourses that are both indigenous and non-indigenous in a globalized world.