Abstract
Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.
Highlights
In contrast to the approaches we criticize, we suggest that explaining the development of moral thinking and action should begin with interpersonal relations from the perspective of a process-relational worldview
Clearly it is necessary to include biological and evolutionary factors as well as social and cultural factors in understanding moral development, the process-relational approach we propose is fundamentally different from a mixture of nativism and empiricism
Rather than assuming pre-existing information encoded in genes, we argue that regularities in the development of moral knowledge can emerge through typical human developmental systems
Summary
It is necessary to include biological and evolutionary factors as well as social and cultural dimensions in understanding moral development, but it is possible to explicate the role of biology either from a gene centered approach, as in nativism, or an alternative, developmental systems approach (Griffiths and Tabery, 2013) that we outline, consistent with a processrelational perspective. We argue that it is not just a matter of knowing where to draw the line in a “middle ground” between nativism and empiricism. Alternative, we outline an approach to moral development from the perspective of the process-relational worldview
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