Situation Based Moral Evaluation

Abstract

In this paper an endeavour has been made to contest against the idea of a narrow 'universalistic' definition of morality, and to emphasize on the diverse nature of the moral domain. This diversity can be attributed, both to the cultural input on a larger scale; as well to the specificity of the immediate context in which the moral incidence unfolds.Tracing back this area of study to the pioneer works of Piaget (1932/1965), and Kohlberg (1969, 1981) morality was conceptualized primarily as pertaining to the issues of 'justice'. Piaget's classical open ended clinical interviews questioned children about rules of the marble games, if they could be changed under any circumstance ;and questions based on the short stories revolving around intentions and consequences (ill-intentioned protagonist causing more damage, than the well intentioned character, so who is naughtier?). Kohlberg who extended Piaget's work further, presented moral dilemmas to his participants, and on the basis of their reasoning proposed eight hierarchical stages of moral development. According to him the highest stage of moral reasoning is characterized by abstract rules of human welfare, which holds good across all situations and time. Thus, according to these pioneers morality can be defined as justice, pertaining to the issues of harm, and fairness. Later researchers like Shweder (1997) and Haidt and Graham (2009) broadened the domain of morality, by bringing in the inputs of the culture. Shweder et al. (1997) gave 'three ethics' of moral discourse: the ethics of autonomy, the ethics of community, and the ethics of divinity. As an extension of Shweder's three ethics, Moral foundation theory was proposed (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Haidt & Graham 2009). In their theory they tried to identify the best candidates for being the psychological foundations upon which the cultures create an enormous variety of moral systems. The five hypothesized foundations are: 1) Care/ harm, (2) Fairness/ cheating, (3) loyalty/ betrayal, (4) Authority/subversion (5) Sanctity/ degradation. The first two foundations of Haidt and colleagues can be said to be parallel to Shweder's dimension of'autonomy', which is closest to the traditional definition proposed by Piaget and Kohlberg. Thus, the moral domain goes beyond 'harm' and 'fairness', to include other cultural values.As was mentioned in the beginning of the paper that moral domain is diverse by virtue of the inputs from the culture, as well as by being governed by the immediate context. By immediate context we imply that the meaning of a particular moral value is determined by the context in which the moral incidence unfolds, and thus can undergo metamorphosis with time, as well as can be contingent on certain specific aspects of the situation. This idea seems to be in contrast to what Turiel and colleagues (1987) had proposed in their famous moral/ convention distinction. According to the mmoral judgments, apart from being related to harm, welfare and fairness, are also generalizable across situations, culture, and time. In contrast conventions pertain to the issue of social organization, and are restricted to specific situations and culture. The issue of gcncralizability with regard to morality has been criticized by Kelley, Stich, Flalcy, Eng, and Fessier (2007) and is supported by their empirical work. In their study they provided participants with different instances of harm varying along the dimension of time, place, and authority. It was found that participants' decision as to whether it is ok to inflict harm depended on factors like time, place and whether it was prohibited by the authority.The present study too adds to the research evidence in favor of Kelly and his colleagues. It discusses how moral value is not pervasive, i.e. they do not hold good under all situations. Rather their meanings change with time, and are contingent on some situational factors. For the purpose of understanding how context influences morals, everyday discourse between parents and children were recorded, and subjected to discourse analysis. …