Review of Handbook of Moral Development.

Abstract

MELANIE KILLEN and JUDITH G. SMETANA (Eds.) Handbook of Moral Development Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006, 808 pages (ISBN 0-8058-4751-0, US$195.00 Hardcover) Reviewed by MICHAELW. PRATT This is a big book on a big topic. Editors Melanie Killen and Judith Smetana have solicited 26 chapters on the topic of moral development, including many of the key authors and researchers currently working in the field. While the editors themselves share the perspective of theory, the breadth of the current volume is much wider. Indeed it provides a representative overview of work ranging across the entire landscape of moral development research today. The 26 chapters are organized into six sections: structuralism and moral stages, social domain theory, conscience development and internalization, social interactional and comparative approaches, emotions and empathy, and moral education. In general, each chapter reviews recent work on a particular topic within these six areas, provides a theoretical context and overview of the research and typically discusses the author(s)' own research program in detail. Many of the chapters also consider, if only briefly, ideas and prospects for future research as well. The chapters are thus up-to-date, generally well-written, and approachable for advanced students and scholars within the field. This volume is timely in many ways. The field of moral development was dominated for many years by the seminal work of Lawrence Kohlberg, who followed on the early research of Jean Piaget on children's moral thinking, and elaborated a sequence of six stages of moral reasoning development. Over the past 15 years, however, the dominance of this cognitive developmental model has been challenged in a variety of ways, and the field has been moving toward a greater diversity of perspectives on how people understand, feel, and behave regarding matters of right and wrong. In general, moral development over the past two decades since Kohlberg has come to be seen as more complex in nature and as involving many more strands that connect it as a domain to other research in developmental psychology. Much of this vigorous new work and diversity is captured in the contributions to this volume. Researchers have been probing ways in which moral development is connected to the wider field of developmental psychology, and trends in the broader field of development are clearly recognizable here. There are chapters on early moral development in very young children, on the development of emotion and emotion regulation in the moral domain, on the biological bases of morality, and on education and character development, much of which would have been outside the scope of traditional moral reasoning research. As an example, a theme that is particularly strongly represented in this volume (albeit one which was also of great interest to Kohlberg), focuses on the relations of culture and moral development. Here, however, this topic is treated from several different viewpoints: from the social domain perspective (Helwig, Wainryb), the sociocultural perspective (Tappan), the perspective of cultural psychology (Miller), and that of anthropology (Fry). It is simply not possible for me to review the many fine chapters in this volume in any detail here, so I must mention only a few representative chapters that I found especially interesting, and encourage readers to sample the wider volume as a whole themselves. The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) by Elliot Turiel provides an overview of issues within the field from the perspective of social domain theory (which holds that children and adults distinguish the type of reasoning they apply depending on the interactional domain involved - moral, conventional, or personal matters). Turiel ties this model to its Piagetian roots, and discusses important current controversies regarding the role of culture, of emotion, and of intuition versus reflection in moral development. …