Social Learning Theory, Self-Regulation, and Morality

Abstract

Moral psychology divides nicely into three relatively autonomous domains: cognitive-developmental theories of moral judgment, psychoanalytic theories of motivational processes, and social learning theories of moral behaviors and inhibitions. For instance, a well-known review of the literature on moral development opens by correlating these three domains with the romantic view of man as innately perfectible, the reformationist view of man as naturally inclined to evil, and the empiricist conception of the mind as a tabula rasa. Its author, Martin Hoffman, is a prominent social learning theorist, but the same principles of division recur in similar reviews by Lawrence Kohlberg and Jane Loevinger, to name just two major figures in the cognitive-developmental and psychoanalytic traditions, respectively.' Both of these domains have been surveyed in detail by philosophers over the last several years. However, considerably less has been said philosophically about the third one, at least as far as morality is concerned. This is regrettable for many reasons, not the least of which is the dominant position social learning theory holds in present-day American psychology. The neglect is not altogether benign: social learning theory has grown up out of behaviorism, and many philosophers regard behaviorist accounts more as capitulations to the opacity of the data than as explanations. It is to remedy this neglect as well as for the intrinsic interest of the issue that I shall discuss some recent variations in social learning theory on a theme that moral philosophy has long regarded as a formal feature of