Moral Judgment, Religious Judgment, World View and Logical Thought: A Review of Their Relationship Part Two

Abstract

Is moral development a necessary condition for religious development, or is it the other way around? Or could each development be conceived of as self‐directed yet interactive? All three views have their advocates. What is the role of a (religious) world view in this context? We attempt to answer these questions by way of analyzing empirical data within a developmental framework. After explicating this framework and defining moral judgment (MJ), religious judgment (RJ), and world view (WV), we compare Kohlberg's MJ and Oser's and Gmünder's RJ stages. The result helps to hypothesize a dynamic model for the MJ‐RJ‐WV relationship and logical thought. Data from about a dozen empirical studies in various domains are then compared with the predictions from the model. Not unexpectedly, some data match the expectations, for other data the predictions are not detailed enough. However, there are two clear results: (1) essential expectations derived from the ‘standard’ model ('moral development is a necessary but insufficient condition for religious judgment') are not borne out by the data. (2) a dynamic model, varying with stage, and with socialization and/or a given subject's experience, does seem to be required to explain the ‘discrepant’ findings concerning questions like ‘In the life of a given individual, which stage should be higher than which?’, or ‘Which development should benefit from which stimulation?’ Refined empirical relationship studies are proposed for deepening our understanding, and improving the hypothesized dynamic model.