## 1. Introduction



Starting in the early 1950s, with the publication of R.M. Hare's
*The Language of Morals* (1952), a large philosophical
literature began to appear aimed at specifying the distinctive or
essential characteristics of moral judgments and moral principles.
Participants in these discussions often said their goal was to provide
and defend a definition of morality, and *The Definition of
Morality* (Wallace & Walker 1970a) was the title of a valuable
collection of papers drawn from that literature that included essays
by Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, William Frankena, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Peter Strawson, and a number of other well-known
philosophers. Another large literature, much of it quite technically
sophisticated, was inspired by David Lewis's seminal volume,
*Convention*, published in
 1969.[1]
 But it is only much more recently that philosophers have focused on
the distinction between moral judgments and conventional judgments,
and sought to use that distinction in arguments about a wide array of
philosophical topics, ranging from the plausibility of metaethical
theories to the moral responsibility of psychopaths.



The emergence of a philosophical literature analyzing and invoking
what has become known as "the moral/conventional
distinction" can be traced to a growing awareness, among
philosophers, of the enormously influential work of developmental
psychologist Elliot Turiel and his many collaborators, most notably
Melanie Killen, Larry Nucci, and Judith
 Smetana.[2]
 This group of researchers are often called "social domain
theorists". The sections 3 through 10 of this entry will focus
on debates, in both psychology and philosophy, about the existence,
the nature, and the importance of the moral/conventional distinction.
 Section 11
 will consider some of the ways in which the social domain
theorists' account of the moral/conventional distinction, and
related ideas, have been used in philosophical discussions of a
variety of issues.



The literature on convention that emerged in the wake of Lewis's
book is rarely discussed in the work of Turiel and his collaborators
and it plays almost no role in their
 thinking.[3]
 But the philosophical literature on the definition of morality did
play an important role in Turiel's thinking. So before
considering social domain theory, it will be useful to recount a pair
of relevant facts about that literature.


## 2. Two Facts About The Literature on the Definition of Morality



The first fact concerns the goal that philosophers who contributed to
the definition of morality literature were trying to
 achieve.[4]
 That goal is best explained with the help of a crucial distinction.
Often, when we ask whether a person's judgment is moral, what we
want to know is whether her judgment on some moral matter is
*true*--or something in that vicinity: correct, or valid,
or justified, or wise. What we are asking, to use Frankena's
(1967) useful terminology, is whether the judgment is moral as opposed
to *immoral*. But one point on which these philosophers were
crystal clear is that moral truth is *not* what they were
trying to explain. Rather, borrowing again from Frankena, what they
were trying to do was to distinguish moral judgments and principles
from *non-moral* judgments and principles. They wanted to know
how to determine whether a person's judgment was a moral
judgment rather than some other kind of judgment--prudential, or
religious, or aesthetic, or legal. Whether the judgment was true, or
valid, or justified was simply not their concern. When considering the
work of Turiel and his followers, it is particularly important to keep
this distinction in mind, because it sometimes seems that these
authors, and some of their critics, *don't*. After
offering evidence putatively establishing that a particular judgment
is moral rather than conventional (and thus that it is moral rather
than *non*-moral), authors will sometimes go on to write as
though they had established that the judgment is *true* (see,
for example, Nucci 2001: 104-106).



The second fact that will play an important role in our discussion of
social domain theory concerns the outcome of the philosophers'
attempts to find a definition of morality. After decades of effort by
dozens of authors, including some of the most eminent philosophers
writing in the second half of the twentieth century, the project
failed to reach anything close to consensus. Disagreements persisted
on just about every issue of methodology and substance. One central
methodological issue was whether the goal of the endeavor was
*descriptive*, aimed at characterizing how the concept of
morality is actually used, or *normative*, aimed at specifying
how the concept of morality *should* be used. Frankena took the
project to be normative, and he claimed a number of prominent
philosophers, including Richard Brandt and G.H. von Wright, as allies.
But other eminent figures, including R.M. Hare, H.L.A. Hart, and Alan
Gewirth, took the project to be descriptive (Frankena 1967 [1970:
149-151]).



In this philosophical literature, there is a long list of features
that were argued to be necessary if a judgment or a rule is to count
as moral. Perhaps the most widely discussed of these was Hare's
proposal that moral rules must be "universalizable". As
Hare unpacked the notion, it required that there be no names or
definite descriptions in moral rules. Another widely discussed
proposal, also due to Hare, was that moral rules are
"prescriptive". What this means is that the
"action-guiding force [of moral rules] derives from the fact
that they entail imperatives" (Wallace & Walker 1970b: 9). A
third proposal was that if an action guiding principle is a moral
principle for a person, then she must regard it as "overriding
or supremely important" (Frankena 1967 [1970: 155]). "In
cases of conflict between moral and nonmoral principles, the former
are necessarily overriding" (Taylor 1978: 44; for a similar
proposal, see Cooper 1970: 95). Yet another frequently discussed
necessary condition was that moral rules are behavior guiding rules
whose violation is met with social sanctions, "the reproach of
one's neighbors" (Cooper 1966 [1970: 73]) or something
more serious, like ostracism (Sprigge, 1964 [1970: 129 ff]). This was
sometimes paired with the idea that moral transgressions are followed
by the transgressor sanctioning himself with feelings of guilt or
shame or disliking himself (Wallace & Walker 1970: 14; Sprigge
1964 [1970: 130]). All of these proposals were "formal" in
the sense that they did not impose any constraints on the contents of
moral rules or moral judgments. And this is far from a complete list
of the formal conditions that were proposed; there were many more
(Frankena 1963 offers an extensive list, along with many
references).



There was no shortage of critics of these formal conditions.
Wittgensteinians, who maintained that "moral" was a family
resemblance term, denied that there are *any* necessary
conditions for the application of the term. MacIntyre (1957), inspired
by Sartre, argued that many moral judgments were neither
universalizable nor (in Hare's sense) prescriptive. Sprigge
(1964) offered a quite different argument against universalizability,
as did Winch (1965). And so it went. Nothing on the long list of
formal conditions that were proposed achieved anything even close to
consensus in the philosophical literature on the definition of
morality.



Even more controversial was the question of whether more substantive
social requirements should be built into the definition of morality.
For example, Toulmin (1950) argued that a concern for the harmony of
society is part of the meaning of "moral", and Baier (1958
[1970: 199ff]) proposed that moral rules "must be for the good
of everyone alike". On these substantive principles, too, it is
clear that no agreement was reached.


## 3. Turiel's Project



Elliot Turiel (1938-) was a student of Lawrence Kohlberg
(1927-1987), who was, in turn, influenced by the work of Jean
Piaget (1896-1980). All three have done seminal work on moral
development in children and adolescents, and all three share the view
that reasoning and reflection on one's own experience plays a
central role in that process. This view, often called
 "constructivism",[5]
 is commonly contrasted with nativist accounts of moral development
that focus on the role of the child's innate endowment, and with
social learning accounts that emphasize the process of acquiring moral
principles from parents and other important people in the
child's environment (Killen & Smetana
2015: 705-709; Killen & Dahl 2018: 23-25).



Importantly, Piaget and Kohlberg also shared the view that over the
course of development, normative reasoning emerges in stages.
According to both Piaget and Kohlberg, in the first stage of this
process young children's view of morality is
"heteronomous"--it is a set of rules imposed and
enforced by others--and moral behavior is simply a matter of
complying with rules set by adults. On Kohlberg's account,
children from about two and a half years of age to about six judge
that certain behaviors are wrong because they know those behaviors are
likely to be punished, and their understanding of wrongness is, near
enough, exhausted by the idea of punishment: wrong behavior is seen as
simply behavior that is typically punished. Later, as the child
matures, different normative rules come to be viewed in different
ways. As Turiel portrays it,



> 
> 
> [t]his theoretical perspective can be referred to as a
> "differentiation" model in that moral reasoning emerges
> through its differentiation from nonmoral processes: At lower
> developmental levels convention and morality are presumed to be
> undifferentiated, while at higher levels the two are
> differentiated.... (Turiel 1977:
>  78)[6]
> 
> 
> 



Turiel was skeptical of the differentiation model and the claim that
there is only one sort of normative cognition in young children. He
was convinced that moral cognition is distinct from cognition about
social conventions, that the distinction is present quite early in
development, and thus



> 
> 
> that social convention and morality should not be treated as part of
> the same conceptual and developmental package, but as distinct
> domains. (Turiel 1977: 79)
> 
> 
> 



In order to make the case for this claim, he had to show that children
make characteristically moral judgments about some transgressions, and
that their judgments about conventional transgressions were
systematically different. To do that, Turiel needed an empirical test
that would indicate whether a normative judgment made by an
experimental participant--child or adult--was a moral
judgment or a judgment about a conventional matter. In constructing
his test, Turiel drew inspiration from the philosophical literature on
the definition of morality. He focused on several of the necessary
conditions for moral judgments that philosophers had proposed and used
them to guide the construction of the test he needed.



One of these was universalizability. Though Hare had relied on a
linguistic account of universalizability, Turiel interpreted
universalizability as a claim about how a specific moral judgment
might be generalized to situations involving other people, other
places, and other times. "Moral prescriptions", he tells
us, "are *universally applicable* in that they apply to
everyone in similar circumstances" (Turiel 1983: 36; italics in
the original). So if a young participant in an experiment judges that
it is wrong for a child in her own school to push someone off a swing,
and if that judgment is a moral judgment, we would expect the
participant to judge that it is wrong for a child who attends a
different school in another town or in another country to push someone
off a swing in similar circumstances. We'd also expect the
participant to judge that the same action--pushing a schoolmate
off a swing--would be wrong if it happened sometime in the past
or if it were to happen sometime in the future in similar
circumstances.



A second feature discussed in the philosophical literature that was
adopted by Turiel was the "categoricalness" of moral
judgments. To motivate this feature of his test he quotes the
philosopher Alan Gewirth:



> 
> 
> Judgments of moral obligation are categorical in that what persons
> ought to do sets requirements for them that they cannot rightly evade
> by consulting their own self-interested desires or variable opinions,
> ideals, or institutional practices. (Gewirth 1978: 24, quoted in
> Turiel 1983: 35)
> 
> 
> 



Since institutional practices cannot alter moral obligations, we
should expect that if an experimental participant has judged that it
is wrong to push someone off a schoolyard swing, and that judgment is
a moral judgment, then the participant would judge that it would be
wrong in another school where there was no rule against pushing people
off a swing, and it would be wrong even if the principal in her own
school said that there was no rule against it. In the jargon that has
developed in the literature growing out of Turiel's work, these
questions are said to probe for "authority independence".
The test that Turiel proposed to determine whether a judgment is a
moral judgment includes one or more questions assessing whether the
participant takes her judgment to be universalizable and one or more
questions assessing whether she takes her judgment to be authority
independent. The examples used and the details of the questions asked
vary with the age of the participant and the details of the
participant's culture (Turiel 1989).



Both universalizability and categoricalness are
"formal"--they do not impose any constraints on the
content of moral rules or moral judgments. But Turiel also held that
there are substantive features that moral judgments share. Moral
judgments, he maintained, deal with issues linked to harm, justice or
rights. Thus if an experimental participant has made a genuinely moral
judgment and is asked to explain why the behavior in question is
wrong, she will typically appeal to the harm that has been done, or to
injustice or the violation of someone's rights. Though Turiel
found inspiration for his focus on harm, justice, and rights in the
philosophical literature he
 favored,[7]
 his choice of these features was largely motivated by his
constructivist account of how children acquire moral beliefs. In
simple "prototypical" cases, he maintained, the child can
see that the behavior has harmful consequences, and that leads the
child to recognize that the behavior is wrong.



> 
> 
> Children's moral judgments are ... derived ... from
> features inherent to social relationships--including experiences
> involving harm to persons, violations of rights, and conflicts of
> competing claims. (Turiel 1983: 3)
> 
> 
> 
> If, for example, one hits another, thereby causing physical harm, an
> individual's perception of that event as a transgression stems
> from features intrinsic to the event (e.g., from a perception of the
> consequences to the victim). (Turiel 1977: 80)
> 
> 
> 



Since the hypothesis that Turiel hoped to establish is that children
distinguish moral judgments from judgments about social convention, he
also needed an account of the distinctive features of judgments about
social convention. Here too, he sought guidance in the philosophical
literature, though his palette was more limited. There are occasional
references to Lewis's *Convention*, and to other authors,
but much of his discussion of convention relies on the work of his
Berkeley colleague, John Searle (1969) (see, for example, Turiel 1983:
37-38). Social conventions, on Turiel's account, are
typically local--they differ in different places and at different
times. So if a young participant judges that an action is wrong at her
school, and if she takes the action to be a transgression of a social
convention, then she will not insist that it would be wrong in other
schools or at other times. Social conventions are also alterable,
since people or their leaders can decide to change them. Thus if a
participant views a transgression to be a violation of a conventional
rule, she will agree that it would not be wrong if an appropriate
authority were to change the rule. The function of social conventions,
according to Turiel, is to facilitate social coordination. So if asked
why a transgression of a social convention is wrong, a participant
will typically focus on the factors that sustain social coordination
and the consequences of disrupting it.



With these putative features of moral and conventional judgments in
hand, Turiel proceeded to construct an empirical test to determine
whether an experimental participant's judgment about a
transgression is a *moral* judgment or a *conventional*
judgment. The test begins with a brief vignette describing a
hypothetical transgression. Since Turiel was interested in determining
whether young children could distinguish moral transgressions from
conventional transgressions, the transgressions typically involve
events that would be familiar to kids. Participants are then asked a
series of questions aimed at determining whether they think the action
described is wrong, whether they think the wrongness of the action is
"authority independent", and whether they would
universalize the judgment, making the same judgment if the
transgression occurred at another place or time. These questions can
be asked in a variety of ways depending on the age of the participants
and the goals of the study. In the jargon favored by Turiel and other
social domain theorists, the responses to these questions are called
"criterion judgments", and criterion judgments are crucial
in determining whether the participant takes the transgression to be
moral or conventional. If the action is judged to be wrong, authority
independent, and generalizable, the participant is classified as
having viewed the transgression as moral, while if it is judged to be
wrong, authority dependent, and not generalizable, the participant is
classified as having taken the transgression to be conventional
(Turiel 1983: 52; Smetana 1993: 115). Participants are
also asked to explain why the transgression is wrong, and responses
are assessed to determine whether they invoke harm, justice or rights,
or whether they invoke factors, like social coordination, tradition,
custom, appeal to authority, or the likelihood of punishment, that
Turiel maintains are the sorts of justifications to be expected if
participants view the transgression as conventional. Turiel calls
these responses "justification categories" (Turiel 1983:
52-53,
 66-68).[8]



From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, this experimental format was
used in a large number of studies where the vignettes recounted events
that the experimenters took to be clear cases of moral transgressions
(like unprovoked hitting, stealing, and destroying someone
else's property) or clear cases of conventional transgressions
(like chewing gum in class, talking without raising one's hand,
and calling the teacher by her first name), and the results,
overwhelmingly, accord with Turiel's prediction. The
transgressions that the experimenters took to be moral were typically
judged to be wrong, authority independent, and generalizable to other
places and times, and judgments that the transgressions are wrong were
usually justified by appeal to the harm the transgression had caused.
The transgressions that the experimenters took to be conventional were
typically judged to be wrong and authority dependent, they were not
generalized to other times or places, and they were justified by
appeal to social expectations, the need for social coordination, the
commands of people in authority, the threat of punishment, and similar
 factors.[9]
 Moreover, these distinctions emerged very early in development. By
their fourth birthday, and often earlier, most children had
systematically different reactions to the sorts of transgressions that
were used. These results were an overwhelming victory for Turiel in
his disagreement with Kohlberg and Piaget. It is *not* the case
that young children think of all normative rules in the same way;
their normative cognition is not "undifferentiated".
Normative cognition in young children is much more subtle, more
varied, and more complex than Kohlberg and Piaget had portrayed it.
This was a major achievement in the study of child development. But
the experimental results and the way they have been interpreted raise
a number of important philosophical and psychological questions.
We'll address these questions in the sections that follow.


## 4. Does the "Moral" Pattern of Criterion Judgments Actually Identify Moral Judgments?



It is clear that studies eliciting criterion judgments and
justification categories demonstrate that children respond quite
differently to different sorts of normative transgressions. But why
should we think that in most or
 all[10]
 cases, when a participant judges that an action is wrong and then
offers what Turiel and other social domain theorists take to be the
moral pattern of criterion judgments, that the participant's
judgment that the action was wrong really was a *moral*
judgment? The question is an important one for assessing
Turiel's achievement. It's also important, as we will see
in
 Section 10,
 because facts about Turiel-style criterion judgments and
justification categories have been used to support claims about the
nature of moral judgments and claims about the moral capacities of
various groups of people, including children and psychopaths.



In formulating his account of criterion judgments indicating that a
participant's normative judgment is a *moral* judgment,
Turiel focused on three features--authority independence,
universalizability in space, and universalizability in time--that
had been discussed by the philosophers who contributed to the
definition of morality literature. But, as noted in
 Section 2,
 those philosophers reached no agreement about whether these features
are necessary conditions for a judgment to count as moral. And Turiel
made no effort to advance or resolve the arguments found in the
philosophical literature. He contributed nothing to the descriptive
project of analyzing the ordinary concept of moral judgment. Nor did
he offer any normative arguments aimed at showing how our ordinary
concept of moral judgment should be revised. Rather, it seems, he
simply picked a cluster of disputed philosophical proposals, and
claimed that they could be used to identify genuinely moral judgments.
So what justification do we have for the claim that the criterion
judgments Turiel uses actually do identify moral judgments? The
problem is nicely, though inadvertently, underscored by Judith Smetana
in a passage describing work using the social domain theorists'
experimental paradigm. "Children", she tell us,



> 
> 
> have been asked to make judgments along a set of dimensions that are
> *hypothesized to differentiate moral and conventional rules*.
> (Smetana 1993: 114-115; emphasis added)
> 
> 
> 



Turiel and other social domain theorists have indeed
*hypothesized* that the criterion judgments they focus on
differentiate moral judgments from conventional judgments. But it is
far from clear how they have *defended* that hypothesis. Can
the claim that these criterion judgments enable us to identify moral
judgments be defended?


## 5. The Natural Kind Defense



One possible defense was sketched by Kelly et al. (2007), and
developed in more detail by Kumar (2015, 2016) and Stich (2019). The
core idea is that the term "moral judgment" can be viewed
as a natural kind term. In his widely discussed paper, "The
Meaning of 'Meaning'", Hilary Putnam (1975) argued
that it is the job of empirical science to determine the essential
features of natural kinds like water and gold, and that these
essential features can be used to specify the meaning of the term
denoting the kind. Devitt (1996) and Kornblith (1998), have provided
insightful accounts of how this process works. Very roughly, their
story goes like this. To begin, the scientist focuses on what seem to
be intuitively obvious examples of the kind in question. She seeks to
discover properties that are shared by most of these intuitively
obvious examples, and that are absent in most things that,
intuitively, are not members of the kind. If this process leads to the
discovery of a cluster of properties that is present in most intuitive
examples and absent in most cases that, intuitively, are not members
of the kind, the scientist then hypothesizes that this cluster of
properties are nomologically linked and that they are the essential
features of the kind.



Kelly and colleagues suggested that this idea might be useful in
interpreting Turiel's work. On this interpretation, the ordinary
term "moral judgment" is hypothesized to be a
psychological natural kind term, and it is the job of psychology to
determine the essential features of the psychological natural kind
that the term denotes. The obvious way to do this would be for
psychologists to discover a cluster of nomologically linked properties
that are shared by most instances of what they take to be intuitively
clear cases of moral judgments, one or more of which is missing in
most cases of judgments that they intuitively take *not* to be
moral judgments. This, Kelly and colleagues suggested, looks to be
exactly what Turiel and his colleagues have done. Turiel and other
social domain theorists take some of the transgressions they use in
their experiments to be intuitively obvious cases of moral
transgressions, and these are judged, by most participants, young and
old, to be authority independent, and generalizable to different
locations and to different times. The experimenters take other
transgressions to be intuitively obvious cases of conventional
transgressions, and these are judged, by most participants, to be
authority dependent and not generalizable to different locations or to
different times. If all of that is true, then--for the reasons
set out by Putnam, Devitt, and Kornblith--Turiel and his
colleagues can plausibly claim to have shown that both moral judgments
and conventional judgments are indeed psychological natural kinds, and
to have discovered the essential features of those kinds. And that
would provide an excellent reason to think that the pattern of
criterion judgments that is hypothesized to identify moral judgments
actually does identify moral judgments, and that the pattern of
criterion judgments that is hypothesized to identify conventional
judgments actually does identify conventional judgments.



For this natural kind defense to work it must, of course, be the case
that the features that are used to identify moral and conventional
judgments actually do form nomological clusters, and that most
intuitive cases of moral judgment evoke the moral pattern of criterion
judgments while most intuitive cases of conventional judgment evoke
the conventional pattern of criterion judgments. Do the empirical
findings support the natural kind defense? There is a large literature
indicating that they do. The pattern of criterion judgments that the
natural kind defense requires has been found in studies with
participants ranging in age from toddlers to adults (Nucci &
Turiel 1978; Smetana 1981; Nucci & Nucci 1982). It has also been
found in participants of a number of different nationalities and
religions (for reviews see Tisak 1995; Smetana 1993; Nucci 2001) and
in children with a variety of developmental disorders, including
autism (Blair 1996; Blair, Monson, & Frederickson 2001; Nucci
& Herman 1982; Smetana, Kelly, & Twentyman 1984; Smetana,
Toth, et al. 1999). There have been a few studies that did not fit the
expected pattern, notably Nucci and Turiel (1993) who found that
orthodox Jewish children judged that a variety of intuitively
non-moral religious norm transgressions were authority independent
though they were not generalizable, and Nichols (2002) who found that
American college students judged that an intuitively conventional
etiquette transgression was authority independent though not
generalizable. But as Kumar notes, the nomological clustering that the
natural kind defense requires "is not supposed to be
exceptionless" (Kumar 2015: SS5; 2016: SS3.2).



However, in almost all of the studies cited in the previous paragraph,
the intuitively moral transgressions used were the sorts of behavior
that would be familiar to children. Kelly et al. (2007) dub them
"schoolyard" transgressions. This was also the case in
Blair's (1995) study in which the experimental participants
included incarcerated psychopathic murderers! In a pair of more recent
studies Kelly et al. (2007) and Fessler, Barrett, et al. (2015) used a
range of more "grown-up" intuitively moral transgressions
including whipping, slavery, stealing, wife beating and rape. Both
studies found fairly dramatic departures from the pattern of criterion
judgments that the natural kind defense requires.
 [11]
 Stich (2019) argues that these studies pose a major challenge to the
natural kind defense of the claim that Turiel's
"moral" pattern of criterion judgments can be used to
identify genuine moral judgments. But both the methods and the
analyses used in the Kelly et al. and the Fessler et al. studies have
been challenged, and these critiques have led to lively
 debates.[12]
 So perhaps the best conclusion to be drawn at this writing is that
the success of the natural kind defense is very much an open
question.


## 6. The Definition of Morality



The argument set out in the previous section suggests that
"moral judgment" can be viewed as a psychological natural
kind term, and the essential features of moral judgments are that the
person making them takes them to be authority independent and
generalizable to other times and other places. On the view urged by
Putnam, Devitt, and Kornblith, these three features enable us to
provide a scientifically justified definition of "moral
judgment". But while Turiel and his collaborators employ these
features as "criterion judgments" used to determine
whether a participant's normative judgment is a moral judgment,
they do not treat them as providing a *definition* of
"moral judgment". This is not because the social domain
theorists are uninterested in definitions. Quite the opposite! Many of
their publications include discussions of "the definition of
morality" (or of "the moral domain"). Those
discussions often acknowledge the influence of philosophical accounts
of morality, and some of them discuss philosophical literature in
considerable detail. Indeed, according to Turiel and Davidson,



> 
> 
> more than any other discipline, philosophy has provided a basis for
> definitional criteria ..., [and] the working definitions guiding
> our research on concepts of convention and moral judgments ...
> borrowed liberally from some of those philosophical
> treatments.... (1986: 118)
> 
> 
> 



However, these definitions of morality, which have evolved somewhat
over time, can be rather puzzling. It is often less than clear what
the definitions are, what their status is, how they are to be
evaluated, and what role they play in the research of social domain
theorists. What is clear is that the definitions have provoked a great
deal of controversy. Some of the most trenchant and empirically
sophisticated critiques of Turiel's work have focused on his
definitions of morality. The primary goal of this section is to offer
an account of the ways in which claims about the definition of
morality interact with other aspects of the work of Turiel and his
colleagues. The two sections that follow will consider some of the
more influential critiques of Turiel's definition.



Let's start with a few examples. In Turiel (1977: 80) we are
told: "The distinction between convention and morality implies a
narrow definition of morality as justice". Much the same idea
appears in Nucci and Turiel (1978). After maintaining that
"social conventions are defined relative to the social
context", they go on to say that "moral issues are
... structured by underlying concepts of justice" (1978:
400-401). But later in that paper, they describe their study in
which "events classified as moral involved the justice, welfare,
or rights of individuals or groups" (1978: 402). This
anticipates the formulation used in a frequently quoted passage at the
beginning of Turiel's *The Development of Social
Knowledge* (1983), where we're told that



> 
> 
> the moral domain refers to prescriptive judgments of justice, rights
> and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.
> (1983:
>  3)[13]
> 
> 
> 



Social domain theorists often characterize diminishing someone's
"welfare" as causing "harm", and in many
places the term "harm" replaces "welfare" in
their
 definition.[14]
 This is particularly important because in the vast majority of
studies by Turiel and other social domain theorists the transgressions
that they take to be moral result in obvious harm to the victim, and
as we'll see in the following sections, the role of harm in
characterizing moral transgressions has become a central focus in the
literature. In some recent publications by social domain theorists,
*fairness* and *equality* have been added to the
 definition.[15]



What is the status of these evolving definitions? One obvious proposal
is that they are simply terminological *stipulations* intended
to inform the reader about how these authors have decided to use the
term "morality". But that's clearly not what's
intended, since Shweder, Turiel, and Much (1981: 289) insist that
"[t]he meaning of 'morality' is something
discovered, not stipulated". Another possibility is that the
definitions are attempts to capture the ordinary meaning of the term
as it is used by speakers of contemporary English. But that proposal
is also clearly mistaken. "The terminology", Turiel tells
us,



> 
> 
> does not necessarily correspond to general, nonsocial scientific usage
> of the labels "convention" and "morality".
> Clear or systematic patterns of general use of the labels would be
> difficult to discern. As labels, the terms are often used
> interchangeably or even inconsistently; sometimes they correspond to
> the definitions provided here and sometimes they are inconsistent with
> them. (Turiel 1983: 34)
> 
> 
> 



In trying to understand the status of these definitions, one useful
hint is that Turiel and his associates often talk about
*improving* or *refining* them (see, for example, Killen
& Smetana 2008: 4). In Turiel, Killen, and Helwig (1987: 169)
we're told that



> 
> 
> [t]he general strategy has been a recursive one: using definitions of
> domain to inform data-gathering procedures and data to inform the
> descriptions insofar as they apply to individuals' judgments. As
> stressed elsewhere (Turiel & Davidson 1986), these procedures must
> be regarded as efforts based on working hypotheses, since the range
> and boundaries of domains are still not precise. The working
> definitions for the domains have also been partly guided by
> philosophical treatments....
> 
> 
> 



And in Turiel and Davidson (1986), the strategy is further elaborated
as follows:



> 
> 
> The formation of systems for classifying domains of knowledge is both
> a definition and a research issue in that definitions and data
> interpretations feed back on each other. Our strategy has been one of
> moving from (a) initial domain identification and definitional
> criteria..., to (b) the gathering of data bearing on how subjects
> use and distinguish the categories, to (c) reformulations of the
> categories and criteria--and so on. (1986: 114)
> 
> 
> 



These passages suggest the following account of the role and
justification of definitions of morality in the work of Turiel and his
collaborators, and of the way philosophy contributed to their project.
As noted in
 Section 3,
 the philosophical literature played a role in designing the initial
experiments that enabled Turiel to show that children distinguish
different sorts of normative transgressions and thus that their
normative judgments are not "undifferentiated". The
features probed by criterion judgment questions--authority
independence and generalization to other places and other
times--were suggested by the philosophical literature. Having
shown that a modest number of schoolyard transgressions that seem,
intuitively, to be moral evoke the (putatively) moral pattern of
criterion judgments, a natural question to ask was how to characterize
the full set of transgressions that would evoke moral criterion
judgments. Characterizing that set of transgressions would constitute
a "definition of morality". Here again philosophy played a
role by suggesting what Turiel, Killen, and Helwig (1987) characterize
as their "working definitions" of the moral domain. Using
such a working definition, Turiel and his colleagues could fine tune
the transgression descriptions and criterion judgment questions used
in their experiments. And sometimes the results of the experiments
required modification of the working definition of morality, which
expanded from matters involving *justice*, to *justice,
rights, and welfare or harm*, and then expanded again to include
matters involving *fairness* and *equality*. This back
and forth between definitions and data-gathering procedures is the
"recursive" strategy that Turiel, Killen, and Helwig
(1987) were alluding to.


## 7. Empirical Challenges to Turiel's Definition of Morality: Does It Fail in Other Cultures?



The definition of morality proposed by Turiel and his associates is an
empirical hypothesis about the sorts of transgressions that will evoke
moral criterion judgments. And while the hypothesis has evolved over
the last four decades, a core feature of work in the Turiel tradition
is that harm plays a central role. Most of the experiments designed to
explore the boundaries of the moral domain include transgressions that
cause obvious harm, and it is predicted, almost always correctly, that
these will lead participants to make moral criterion judgments. It is
also predicted that transgressions that do not cause obvious harm, and
that are not obvious examples of injustice or the violation of
rights--or, more recently, of unfairness or of treating people
unequally--will *not* evoke moral criterion judgments, and
thus that people do not treat them as moral transgressions. But this
second prediction has been the focus of a widely discussed empirical
critique of Turiel's definition of morality. The critics'
central contention, in Jonathan Haidt's memorable phrase, is
that Turiel's definition of morality "does not travel
well" (Haidt 2012: 22).



The first influential challenge along these lines was mounted by
Richard Shweder and colleagues who argued that the sort of normative
judgments that Turiel would classify as conventional play a much
smaller role in many non-Western societies, and that in those
societies the moral domain--the class of transgressions that
Turiel's test or something in that vicinity would classify as
moral--includes a wide range of actions in which no one is
harmed, no injustice is done, and no rights are violated.



Much of the evidence Shweder offered for this claim came from an
extensive study of the normative judgments of orthodox Hindus in India
and of Christians and Jews in the USA (Shweder, Mahapatra, &
Miller 1987). The Indian participants lived in a residential community
surrounding an eleventh and twelfth century Hindu temple in the city
of Bhubaneswar. The Americans were recruited from a middle class
neighborhood near the University of Chicago. The study collected
judgments about a wide range of normatively regulated practices
including



> 
> 
> forms of address..., sleeping arrangements, incest avoidance,
> dietary practices, forms of dress, ... begging, nepotism,
> monogamy, wife beating, ... the protection of persons from
> physical and psychological harm, funeral rites .... (1987: 4)
> 
> 
> 



A major goal of the study was to test Turiel's hypothesis that
transgressions that did not involve harm or other elements included in
Turiel's definition of morality would be judged to be
conventional rather than moral using questions similar to
Turiel's criterion judgment questions. Participants were
presented with a variety of brief vignettes, including these:


1. While walking, a man saw a dog sleeping on the road. He walked up
to it and kicked it.
2. The day after his father's death, the eldest son had a
haircut and ate chicken.
3. A widow in your community eats fish two or three times a
week.



Not surprisingly, both the Indian and the American participants judged
the behavior described in (1) to be wrong, and using the questions
that Schweder and colleagues constructed to determine whether
participants regarded a judgment to be moral or conventional, both
groups regarded (1) to be a moral transgression. That, of course, is
what Turiel would predict. But the responses to (2) and (3) appeared
to be much more problematic for Turiel. Though the American
participants did not judge them to be wrong at all, the Indian
participants judged them to be quite serious transgressions, and their
responses to questions designed to determine whether they viewed the
transgressions as moral or conventional indicated that they viewed
them as moral. Since neither the son's behavior in (2) nor the
widow's behavior in (3) does any obvious harm, commits no
obvious injustice, and seems to violate no one's rights, Shweder
and colleagues argued that these responses, along with the Indian
participants' responses about many of the other vignettes, posed
a major challenge for Turiel. The class of transgressions treated as
moral by the Indian participants was much larger than Turiel's
definition of morality predicted, and the class of conventional
transgressions was vanishingly small.



Turiel was not convinced. In a lengthy response, Turiel, Killen, and
Helwig (1987) argued that Shweder's putatively troubling
examples relied on profound differences between the non-moral beliefs
of Shweder's Indian and American participants. For the
Americans, getting a haircut, eating chicken, and eating fish are all
entirely harmless, so it is no surprise that they judged the
son's behavior and the widow's to be unproblematic. But,
as Shweder himself had noted in an earlier paper, the Indians believed
that if a son were to eat chicken the day after his father's
death, it would result in his father's soul not receiving
salvation (Shweder & Miller 1985: 48). They also believed that
fish is a "hot" food that would stimulate the
widow's sexual appetite and might lead her to have sex, which
would offend her husband's spirit and lead to great suffering
(Turiel, Killen, & Helwig 1987: 209). The Indian participants
classified more transgressions as moral, Turiel and colleagues argued,
not because they have a more inclusive definition of morality, but
rather because they believed many more actions to be harmful.



This response led Jonathan Haidt to design a study in which he
explored people's reactions to what he characterized as
"harmless taboo violations", (Haidt 2012: 19). Several of
these, including the two below, were, and were intended to be, rather
shocking:


* *Dog:* A family's dog was killed by a car
in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious,
so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for
dinner.
* *Kissing:* A brother and sister like to kiss
each other on the mouth. When nobody is around, they find a secret
hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth, passionately.



Another vignette that Haidt used has become quite famous:


* *Chicken:* A man goes to the supermarket
once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken,
he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
(Haidt, Koller, & Dias 1993: 617)



After each vignette, rather than simply assuming that participants
believed the actions described to be harmless, Haidt asked, "Is
anyone hurt by what [the actor] did? Who? How?" (Haidt, Koller,
& Dias 1993: 617).



Since Haidt was interested in Shweder's claim that the moral
domain was much larger for people in non-Western societies, his study
was designed to compare the judgments of participants near his own
university, in Philadelphia, with those of participants in two
Brazilian cities--Porto Alegre, in the south, which was
industrialized, westernized, and relatively wealthy, and Recife, in
the north, which was much poorer, less industrialized, and less
westernized. As Shweder would have predicted, Haidt found that
participants in Recife were more likely than participants in
Philadelphia to view behaviors like those in
 *Dog*,
 *Kissing*, and
 *Chicken*
 as moral transgressions, using Haidt's version of the questions
intended to determine whether a participant regarded a transgression
as moral or conventional. Participants in Porto Alegre were in between
the two. But there was also a surprise in the data. Haidt and
colleagues had collected information about the socio-economic status
(SES) of their participants, and they found that lower SES groups
"moralized" more than higher SES groups in all three
cities, and that the effect of SES was much larger than the effect of
location.



Haidt's study posed an important and influential challenge to
Turiel's harm-anchored definition of morality. But it was not
without problems. In constructing the questions they would use to
determine whether participants regarded a judgment to be moral or
conventional, Shweder and colleagues had included a question about
punishment:



> 
> 
> Do you think a person who does (*the practice under
> consideration*) should be stopped from doing that or punished in
> some way? (Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller 1987: 42)
> 
> 
> 



And Haidt retained a version of the punishment question in his study:
"Should [the actor] be stopped or punished in any way?"
(Haidt, Koller, & Dias 1993: 617). However, though Turiel and his
colleagues sometimes collect judgments about punishment, they
explicitly reject their use in assessing whether participants view a
transgression as moral or conventional, since both moral and
conventional transgressions are often punished. Smetana, Rote, et al.
(2012: 683) insist that judgments about punishment "are not a
formal criterion for differentiating the domains". And Smetana,
Jambon, and Ball (2018) tell us that while they



> 
> 
> commonly assess children's judgments of ... the degree of
> censure that the transgressor deserves,.... these evaluations are
> less informative than criterion judgments because all rule violations
> are, by definition, unacceptable, wrong, and punishable. (2018:
> 270)
> 
> 
> 



The other question Haidt asked in his pared down version of queries
intended to determine whether participants regarded a judgment as
moral was aimed at assessing whether participants generalized their
judgment:



> 
> 
> Suppose you learn about two different foreign countries. In country A
> people [do that act] very often, and in country B, they never [do that
> act]. Are both of these customs OK, or is one of them bad or wrong?
> (Haidt, Koller, & Dias 1993: 617)
> 
> 
> 



Since Turiel's version of the criterion judgment questions also
includes one or more questions aimed at determining whether
participants view their judgment to be authority dependent or
authority independent, it is not clear that Haidt's two probes
(or the questions that Shweder used) constitute a fair test of the
hypothesis that the transgressions evoking the moral pattern of
criterion judgments all involve harm.



During the last three decades, there have been a number of studies
that cleaved more closely to the authority independence and
generalization criterion judgments advocated by Turiel and his
associates and explored the sorts of transgressions that evoked those
judgments in a variety of religions groups and a variety of cultural
 settings.[16]
 Most of the studies undertaken by Turiel and researchers associated
with him used intuitive moral transgressions that seemed (to
contemporary Western observers) to be obviously harmful, and intuitive
conventional transgressions that seemed (again, to contemporary
Western observers) to obviously not be harmful. These studies confirm
the prediction that transgressions that evoke moral criterion
judgments are harmful and transgressions that don't evoke moral
criterion judgments aren't. But none of these studies are
problem free. None of them follow Haidt's lead and actually
*ask* participants whether the transgressive behavior is
harmful. Also most of the transgressions used in these studies are of
the tame "schoolyard" variety that can be comfortably used
with children. None of these studies used anything like the more
flamboyant "harmless taboo violations" that were center
stage in Haidt's study. So we do not know whether people in
these cultures and religious groups would offer moral or conventional
criterion judgments in response to transgressions like the ones that
Haidt used.



By contrast, two recent studies by Berniunas and his colleagues
(2016, 2020) did use Haidt-style transgressions, including eating a
pet dog who has been run over, using the national flag to clean the
toilet, and defecating in a Buddhist temple. They also followed Haidt
in explicitly asking whether anyone was harmed by these actions. But,
unlike Haidt, they solicited Turiel-style criterion judgments using
questions that cleaved quite closely to those used by Turiel and other
social domain theorists. They found that many of the transgressions
that the participants themselves characterized as harmless evinced
*moral* rather than *conventional* criterion
judgments.



Overall, the bottom line is that on the question of whether
Turiel's hypothesis about the definition of morality applies
cross-culturally, the jury is still out. Many of the earlier studies
confront serious methodological issues. And while the two recent
studies, by Berniunas and colleagues, that avoid earlier
methodological problems report findings that challenge Turiel's
definition, much more methodologically fastidious research is
needed.


## 8. Empirical Challenges to Turiel's Definition of Morality: Does it Fail with "Non-Prototypical" Transgressions?



Thus far our focus has been on work that sought to test
Shweder's contention that Turiel's definition of morality
would not travel well because people in other cultures would offer
moral-pattern criterion judgments about transgressions that do not
involve harm or justice or rights. But Haidt's analysis of the
responses of low SES American participants to transgressions that are
edgier than the ones Turiel and his colleagues typically use suggests
that we do not have to travel abroad to gather data that might
challenge Turiel's definition of morality. This was an idea that
had occurred to Turiel quite independently. Two years before
Haidt's study appeared, Turiel, Hildebrandt, and Wainryb (1991)
published a lengthy monograph in which they explored judgments of
American high school and college students about a variety of what they
labeled "nonprototypical" transgressions. "In the
moral domain", they tell us,



> 
> 
> prototypical stimuli essentially present actions entailing harm,
> fairness, or violations of rights in the absence of strong conflicting
> concerns. (1991: 7)
> 
> 
> 



The prototypical moral transgressions they used in these studies were
killing and rape; the non-prototypical transgressions were abortion,
pornography, homosexuality, and incest. Though they did not explicitly
ask whether anyone was harmed by these behaviors, they used responses
to the justification questions to determine whether participants
thought that the behaviors were harmful. Not surprisingly, many of the
participants who thought that abortion was "not all right"
justified their judgment by appealing to the harm done to the unborn
child. Many participants also thought that pornography caused harm,
and they used this belief to justify their negative evaluation of
pornography. The role of these beliefs is similar to the role of Hindu
beliefs about the consequences of eating chicken the day after
one's father has died. Participants who have these beliefs see
harm, and offer negative assessments about actions that people who
don't share the beliefs find unproblematic.



But for our purposes, the most interesting nonprototypical
transgression used by Turiel and his colleagues was incest. "Of
all the nonprototypical issues we investigated", they tell us,
"incest was most closely assimilated to reasoning in the moral
domain" (1991: 78). A substantial number of participants judged
that incest was "not all right", they generalized the
judgment to other countries, and they indicated that their judgment
was authority independent--*not* contingent on the laws or
practices that prevailed in the United States or elsewhere. So their
responses fit the "moral" pattern of criterion judgments.
But typically these participants did not justify their judgments by
appeal to harm, justice or rights. Rather, they appealed to what
Turiel and colleagues labeled "deterministic beliefs",
which are "standards dictated by psychological normality,
biological order or religious order" or to "custom and
tradition" (1991: 24 & 78). So the pattern of criterion
judgments about incest provided by these participants looks to pose a
direct challenge to Turiel's definition of morality. They
exhibit the "moral" criterion judgment pattern, but they
do not judge that the transgression is harmful.



Intriguingly, in summing up these findings, Turiel and his colleagues
appear to walk back the claim that "[t]he meaning of
'morality' is something discovered, not stipulated".
They recognize that the judgments about incest offered by some
participants would be classified as moral on the basis of their
criterion judgments. But for several reasons the authors have
"not chosen this alternative". They



> 
> 
> believe that it is more precise to restrict "moral" to
> prototypical judgments and use different terms for judgments that are
> somewhat different....
> 
> 
> 



Also, and



> 
> 
> most important, our terminology reflects a concern with identifying
> the components of reasoning, as well as assumptions about reality,
> that form part of social and moral judgments. (1991: 86)
> 
> 
> 



Though this passage, like much of Turiel's writing, is less than
crystal clear, it seems to be saying that restricting the term
"moral" to judgments about "prototypical"
transgressions (those that involve "harm, fairness, or
violations of rights in the absence of strong conflicting
concerns") and not applying it to judgments about incest is just
a terminological choice.


## 9. The Origin of Moral Judgments: Reason, Emotion, Social Learning or Innate Cognitive Machinery



By the time they reach their fourth birthday, many children offer what
social domain theorists take to be the "moral" pattern of
criterion judgments about transgressions that involve harm. How do
they recognize that these behaviors have a distinct status? According
to Turiel's "constructivist" account, both
perception and reasoning play a central role. Here is a passage in
which Turiel describes the process in some detail. It focuses on the
hypothetical example of "Event A" in which a child in a
nursery school who wants to use a swing that is being used by another
child pushes the other child off the swing and hits him.



> 
> 
> For the child to regard the act in Event A as wrong or as a
> transgression, it is not necessary to be told by others that it is
> wrong, or that he or she model others, or to perceive the act as a
> rule violation. Rather the child can generate prescriptions through
> abstractions from the experience itself (either as an observer or
> participant). Important elements in the perception of such an event
> would be the pain experienced by the victim and the reason for the
> offender's act. By coordinating these different concepts, the
> child can generate prescriptions regarding the event. For instance,
> the child will connect his or her own experience of pain (an
> undesirable experience) to the observed experience of the victim. In
> turn, this will be related to the perceived validity of the
> child's motive for harming the other person. Moreover, when the
> child is the victim, the perception of the undesirability of the
> offender's act is even more direct and vivid.
> 
> 
> 
> One of the ways children form judgments of moral necessity regarding
> actions of the type depicted in Event A would be through comparison of
> performance of the act itself with its opposite. In the case of the
> act described in Event A, its negation (in the child's mental
> activities) would result in a comparison of its occurrence with its
> nonoccurrence. If the constructed consequences of its nonoccurrence
> (the victim is unharmed) are judged to be more desirable than the
> consequences of its occurrence (the victim is harmed), then inferences
> will be made regarding how people *should* act under those
> circumstances (e.g., people ought not to hit each other). In
> attempting to understand their social experiences, children form
> judgments about what is right or wrong and fair or unfair. Such
> judgments evolve from the child's experiences but are not latent
> in the experiences themselves. (Turiel 1983: 43)
> 
> 
> 



This account makes it clear why Haidt favors the term
"rationalist" for views like Turiel's. The young
child is portrayed as doing quite a lot of reasoning. But there is
much in this account that is puzzling. The child is said
*perceive* the *validity* of the assailant's
motive. How does he do that? How does he know which motives are valid
and which are not? The child also *judges* that it would be
*more desirable* if the victim is unharmed than if the victim
is harmed. Why does the child find this outcome more desirable? Having
judged that it is more desirable if the victim is unharmed, the child
then makes an *inference* about how people *should*
act--"people *ought not* to hit each other".
But this conclusion does not follow logically from the premise that it
is more *desirable* if the victim is unharmed. So if the
child's inference is deductive then presumably the child is
invoking one or more additional premises. What are they and how did
the child come to believe them? If the inference is not deductive,
what sort of inference is it, and how does the child come to have the
capacity to make this sort of inference? Having made the judgment that
the act in Event A is wrong the child will, if asked, make
moral-pattern criterion judgments. How does he do *that*?
Obviously, Turiel's constructivist account of the processes
underlying the formation of criterion judgments in response to
questions about harmful transgressions leaves a lot unexplained.



One influential researcher who has offered a widely discussed
alternative account is Shaun Nichols. Social learning is the process
in which normative rules are acquired from parents and other important
people in a child's environment. And while Turiel and other
social domain theorists downplay the importance of social learning, it
plays a central role in Nichols' theory. Another widely
discussed idea is that emotion or affect is important in moral
development and moral cognition. This is a central theme in
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume and in the work of many contemporary
philosophers (Kauppinen 2014 [2018]). Though emotion is rarely
mentioned in Turiel's work, it is a key element in
Nichols' explanation of how people distinguish conventional
transgressions from transgressions involving harm.
 [17]



On Nichols' account, as children mature they acquire an
increasingly sophisticated cluster of rules--a normative
theory--that specifies which actions are prohibited. The
normative theory is acquired primarily via social
 learning[18]
 and includes both moral rules that proscribe harming others under a
wide variety of circumstances, and conventional rules about such
matters as appropriate clothing, etiquette, and classroom behavior.
However, Nichols maintains, Turiel's work has shown that both
children and adults draw an important distinction in the class of
behaviors that are prohibited by the normative theory they have
acquired. Questions about transgressions in which a victim has been
harmed and questions about harmless transgressions like wearing
inappropriate clothing evoke very different responses. What explains
the fact that people react differently to different kinds of
transgressions? According to Nichols, the answer is provided by the
affect system. Thinking about some transgressions--most notably
those that cause someone to suffer--arouses strong affect in
people, and questions about normative transgressions that induce this
strong affective reaction evoke different responses than questions
about affectively neutral transgressions. However, transgressions
involving harm and suffering are not the only ones that evoke a strong
affective response. And this leads Nichols to an intriguing
prediction.



> 
> 
> On the account of moral judgment that I've proposed, the
> moral/conventional
>  task[19]
>  really taps a distinction between a set of norms that are backed by
> an affective system and a set of norms that are not backed by an
> affective system. On this theory, affect-backed normative claims will
> be treated differently than affect-neutral normative claims. Thus, the
> account predicts that transgressions of other (non-harm-based) rules
> that are backed by affective systems should also be treated as
> non-conventional. As a result, if we find that other affect-backed
> norms are also distinguished from conventional norms along the
> dimensions of permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency, and
> justification type, then this will provide an independent source of
> evidence for the account of moral judgment that I've
> proposed.... To test the prediction we need to exploit a body of
> (non-harm based) rules that are backed by an affective system. (2002:
> 227-228)
> 
> 
> 



The affectively potent non-harm based rules Nichols focused on are
those that proscribe behaviors likely to evoke disgust. In his first
experiment designed to test the theory, Nichols administered his
version of the moral/conventional task to participants who had read
short vignettes describing prototypical moral transgressions, like one
child hitting another, prototypical conventional transgressions, like
a child wearing pajamas to school, and vignettes describing
normatively proscribed disgusting behavior. In one of these, Bill, a
man at a dinner party, spits in his water glass before drinking it. To
assess whether participants viewed Bill's transgression to be
authority independent, Nichols' asked:



> 
> 
> Now what if, before Bill went to the party, the hosts had said,
> "At our dinner table, anyone can spit in their food or
> drink". Would it be O.K. for Bill to spit in his water if the
> hosts say he can? (2002: 229)
> 
> 
> 



The results were consistent with Nichols' theory.
Participants' judgments about the disgusting transgressions
differed from their judgments about the prototypical conventional
transgressions, and resembled their judgments about the prototypical
moral transgressions, though the justifications that participants
provided were disgust-based rather than harm-based.



In a second experiment, Nichols sought to confirm that it was the
emotion of disgust that was responsible for the fact that participants
in the first experiment treated disgusting transgressions like
prototypical moral transgressions, rather than like prototypical
conventional transgressions. To do this, he employed the same
experimental strategy used in the first experiment, and then asked
participants to fill out a questionnaire that assesses sensitivity to
disgusting stimuli. He found that participants who scored high on the
disgust sensitivity scale rated the disgusting transgressions as
significantly more serious than participants who scored low on disgust
sensitivity. Moreover, the low disgust-sensitivity participants were
more likely than the high disgust-sensitivity participants to judge
that the disgusting transgressions were authority contingent (2002:
231).



The conclusion Nichols urges is that norms prohibiting harmful
behavior and norms prohibiting disgusting behavior are part of an
important class of norms that he labels "norms with
feeling". Though Nichols calls the test that he uses to identify
violations of these norms "the moral/conventional task",
the class of transgressions that evoke what he calls the
"non-conventional" response pattern is a much larger, more
heterogenous, and arguably much less philosophically interesting class
of transgressions than the ones Turiel claimed to be in the moral
domain.



Nichols' theory provoked trenchant criticism from Royzman,
Leeman, and Baron (2009), who are more sympathetic to Turiel's
view that transgressions involving harm are central to moral
cognition. Their most telling critique focuses on methodological
problems with Nichols' work. Though Nichols' studies were
done about a decade after Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993) had stressed
the importance of asking participants in Turiel-style studies whether
*they* thought the action they were considering had caused any
harm, Nichols did not ask participants whether anyone was negatively
affected by the behavior of the protagonists in his disgust scenarios.
When Royzman et al. repeated Nichols' spitting in the water
glass experiment and explicitly asked "was anyone negatively
affected by [the protagonist's] action?" 71% of their
participants judged that other guests at the diner table *were*
negatively affected, and those who thought the disgusting behavior was
harmful were more likely to judge that the protagonist's
behavior was not permissible even if the party host allowed it (2009:
166-167).



In a second experiment, Royzman and colleagues explored the
possibility that participants' responses to Nichols'
disgust sensitivity questionnaire might have been influenced by their
recent judgments about the disgusting transgression. When they
administered the disgust sensitivity questionnaire two weeks
*before* participants were asked about the disgusting
transgressions, they found that disgust sensitivity was not correlated
with responses to questions about whether the action would be wrong
under a range of counterfactual circumstances--if there were no
social norm against it, for example, or if it occurred in another
country where it was thought to be OK. Royzman and colleagues call
judgments that don't vary under these counterfactual
circumstances *socially transcendent*, and they argue that
social transcendent judgments should be taken to be the fundamental
component of the moral/conventional task. They found that social
transcendence correlated only with ratings of current harm, and not
with disgust sensitivity. These experimental findings are, of course,
a direct challenge to Nichols' "norms with feeling"
 view.[20]
 What seems to be responsible for "non-conventional"
responses on the moral/conventional task used in Royzman et
al.'s experiments is not affect, as Nichols' theory would
urge, but a judgment that someone is harmed.



Royzman and colleagues conclude that their findings



> 
> 
> are largely consistent with Turiel's basic insight that the
> process of selective moralization is effected by a system oriented
> towards a particular rule content, and that this content is largely
> defined by acts or dispositions deemed intrinsically harmful to
> others. (2009: 172-173)
> 
> 
> 



But they do not endorse Turiel's constructivism. Rather, to
explain how people acquire the ability to distinguish moral and
conventional transgressions they propose a sophisticated version of
nativism.



> 
> 
> [T]he data and reflections presented ... appear to constrain the
> answer to the question about the formation of the
> moral-conventional distinction to the point where it may be
> plausible to suggest that humans possess, as part as of their evolved
> cognitive machinery, something analogous to Azimov's
> "First Law of Robotics" (in a nutshell: "harm no
> human" [even if commanded so via the authority of another human,
> including one's human master]), a hard-wired
> *proto-prohibition* that serves to automatically imbue the
> socially transmitted rules of a certain kind (those concerned with
> one's impact on the utilities of others) with a special
> (rule-/authority independent) status that registers as social
> transcendence on the moral-conventional distinction task and that
> appears to be an aspect of moral competence world-wide. (2009:
> 173)
> 
> 
> 



Haidt's findings comparing high and low SES participants suggest
that there is substantial and systematic variation in judgments about
which transgressions are socially transcendent. It might be thought
that this variation is best explained by differences in socially
transmitted rules like those that Haidt and his colleagues have
explored in their more recent work on Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt
& Joseph 2007; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek 2009; Haidt 2012;
Graham, Haidt, Koleva, et al. 2013). But Royzman, Landy, and Goodwin
(2014) proposed a different, and more disquieting, explanation for
SES-linked variation in judgments about the social transcendence of
transgressions. Social domain theorists recognize that some of the
transgressions they classify as conventional can lead to harm by
upsetting onlookers (as in Nichols' table manners case) or by
disrupting established social routines. But, Royzman and colleagues
note, those harms



> 
> 
> are *contingent* upon aspects of an existing normative regime
> that could themselves be deemed arbitrary and modifiable by consensus.
> (2014: 178)
> 
> 
> 



By contrast, the harms caused by what social domain theorists take to
be moral transgressions "involve acts that are (perceived to be)
*intrinsically* harmful to others (Turiel 1983, e.g., p. 44, p.
221)" (2014: 178). To discern the difference between
transgressions that are intrinsically harmful and those that are
contingently harmful, one needs to engage in counterfactual thinking.
One must ask questions like:


1. Would it still be harmful to torture a puppy even if everyone in
the community thought it was OK? [Yes, it would.] and
2. Would it still be harmful to wear pajamas to school even if
everyone in the community thought it was OK? [No, it
wouldn't.]



It is questions like this that are used in some versions of the
moral/conventional task to assess whether a transgression is socially
transcendent. But, Royzman and colleagues note, not everyone is
equally inclined to engage in counterfactual thinking or equally good
at it. And in a striking experiment they found that people with lower
scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, which measures people's
tendency to give reflective answers instead of following their
immediate intuitions, were more likely to judge that behaviors that
are not intrinsically harmful (like wearing pajamas to work) would not
be OK in a culture, even if everyone in that culture had come together
and decided that it would be OK (Royzman, Landy, & Goodwin
2014).



Royzman and colleagues conclude that we should not assume that the
sort of socioeconomic differences that Haidt found in his
moral/conventional task studies are due to fundamentally divergent
values. Rather, since poverty has been linked to impaired cognitive
performance, they speculate that the differences between Haidt et
al.'s high- and low-SES participants is "a product of the
low-SES participants' cognitive limitations" (Royzman,
Landy, & Goodwin 2014: 187) Needless to say, the suggestion that
some of the moral judgments made by low SES people in the USA and
abroad are the result of impaired cognitive performance is more than a
bit provocative! Much more work is needed before accepting this
conclusion, and careful skepticism is warranted: Instead of
speculating about the causal role of alleged "cognitive
limitations" in explaining why low- and high-SES judgments vary,
Royzman and colleagues could have actually collected data from both
socio-economic groups and tested the claim directly; unfortunately
they didn't. But if Royzman, Landy, and Goodwin are right, then
Turiel and other social domain theorists may have been on to something
important when they claimed that harm plays a central role in
characterizing the moral transgressions picked out by the
moral/conventional task, though because of their cognitive style
economically challenged people may be less able to assess the moral
importance of cases involving harms that are not intrinsic.


## 10. What Does the Moral/Conventional Task Tell Us About Moral Judgments?



A question that has been center stage in several preceding sections
is: What sorts of transgressions do Turiel's moral criterion
judgments, and other related experimental procedures (collectively
dubbed the "moral/conventional task"), classify as moral?
Social domain theorists claim that the task picks out transgressions
that involve harm, justice, and rights (and more recently fairness and
equality). Haidt, Shweder, and others claim that their versions of the
task picks out a wide range of transgressions, and that different
sorts of transgressions are picked out in different cultures. Nichols
claims that his version of the task picks out transgressions of
socially learned norms that engender high affect. And Royzman and
colleagues argue that for experimental participants who are able to
think clearly about counterfactual issues, their version of the task
picks out harmful transgressions, where harm is construed broadly.



Why is this question important? Turiel and other social domain
theorists maintain that the moral/conventional task enables us to
identify genuine moral judgments, and Haidt, Shweder, and Royzman
agree, though each focuses on a somewhat different version of the
 task.[21]
 If that's right, then determining the sort of transgressions
that the task classifies as moral will enable us to characterize the
content of moral judgments. So, for example, if Royzman and colleagues
are right, then all moral judgments are about behaviors that are taken
to be harmful, and normative judgments that are not about behaviors
taken to be harmful are not *moral*
 judgments.[22]
 Moreover, if it's true that the moral/conventional task picks
out genuine moral judgments, this fact would be of enormous importance
for psychologists and neuroscientists who want to study the processes
underlying moral judgments and the factors that can influence them,
since it gives these researchers a way of identifying the judgments
they want to
 study.[23]
 And, as we'll see in the following section, a test that enables
us to identify genuine moral judgments can also be a valuable tool for
philosophers, since a number of philosophical arguments turn on the
claim that various categories of people--including children and
psychopaths--can, or can't, make genuine moral
judgments.



Royzman, Landy, and Goodwin rightly note that the moral/conventional
task is "one of the most widely used measures of mature moral
judgment" (2014: 178). But why should we believe that any
version of the moral/conventional task really does enable us to pick
out genuine moral judgments? As we noted in
 Section 2,
 there is a great deal of philosophical work aimed at providing a
definition of morality, and while some philosophers offered accounts
that are compatible with features of the moral/conventional task, many
philosophers disagreed. So there is no philosophical consensus about
the definition of morality that would support the claim that
Turiel's moral/conventional task, or anything in that vicinity,
can be used to identify moral judgments. One way around this impasse,
as we saw in
 Section 5,
 is the suggestion that "moral judgment" can be regarded
as a natural kind term, and the hypothesis that the features used in
the moral/conventional task are the essential features of the natural
kind the term denotes. For that hypothesis to be plausible, it would
have to be the case that the features used in the moral/conventional
task form a nomological cluster. But a number of authors, including
Kelly and colleagues (2007); Fessler, Barrett, and colleagues (2015);
Kumar (2015); and Stich (2019) have argued that findings like those we
have reviewed in
 Section 5
 challenge the claim that the features used in the moral/conventional
task form a nomological
 cluster.[24]
 The study by Fessler, Barrett, and others poses a further challenge
to versions of the moral/conventional task that include questions
about seriousness since it found that harmful transgressions were
judged to be less bad when they occurred long ago or far away.
Moreover, in cultures around the world there is a wide range of
behaviors that are considered serious transgressions that are far
removed from the familiar schoolyard transgressions typically invoked
by social domain theorists--transgressions like apostasy and
blasphemy, necrophilia and speaking ill of the dead, marrying a
cousin, failure to circumcise one's sons, and many more. Most of
these have never been used in moral/conventional task studies. Since
people's judgments about transgressions like these have never
been studied, we simply do not know whether they would evoke the
pattern of judgments that social domain theorists find for schoolyard
transgressions. If they don't, that might provide additional
evidence against the claim that moral/conventional task judgments form
nomological clusters. On the other hand, Royzman, Landy, and Goodwin
(2014) alert us to the possibility that poor reasoning may be
responsible for some, perhaps all, cases where the components of the
moral/conventional task come unglued. So much more work will be needed
before we can draw a confident conclusion about whether Turiel's
"criterion judgments" version of the moral/conventional
task, or any other version, actually enables us to determine which of
a person's normative judgments are moral judgments.


## 11. The Uses of The Moral/Conventional Task in Philosophy



Susan Dwyer was the pioneer in introducing Turiel's work to
philosophers. In her 1999 paper, "Moral Competence", she
proposed an analogy between the psychological mechanisms underlying
moral competence and Chomsky's account of the psychological
mechanisms underlying linguistic competence. The universality of the
moral/conventional distinction and the fact that it emerges very early
in development, Dwyer argues, are both best explained by the
hypothesis that "children come equipped with something akin to a
Universal *Moral* Grammar" (Dwyer 1999: 169). Prior to
Dwyer's paper, references to Turiel and other social domain
theorists were infrequent in the philosophical literature, and we know
of no substantive discussions of the philosophical implications of
their findings. But that soon changed.



As we saw in
 Section 9,
 Turiel's work played an important role in Nichols' (2002)
elaboration and defense of his version of moral sentimentalism. In
another pair of publications (Nichols 2004: Ch. 4; 2007) Nichols
invoked the work of the social domain theorists (Turiel 1983; Smetana
1989, 1993; Tisak 1995) to mount an argument against what he took,
plausibly enough, to be the most visible and carefully developed
alternative version of sentimentalism, developed by Alan Gibbard
(1990). The problem with Gibbard's theory, Nichols maintains, is
that it is "seriously overintellectualized" and
"*too* ingenious to be a plausible account of normal
moral judgment" (Nichols 2007: 261 & 259). On
Gibbard's account,



> 
> 
> what a person does is *morally wrong* if and only if it is
> rational for him to feel guilty for doing it and for others to resent
> him for doing it. (Gibbard 1990: 42, quoted in Nichols 2007: 258)
> 
> 
> 



But, Nichols argues,



> 
> 
> if moral judgments are judgments of the appropriateness of guilt, then
> *an individual cannot have the capacity to make moral judgments
> unless she also has the capacity to make judgments about the
> appropriateness of guilt*. (Nichols 2007: 259, italics in the
> original)
> 
> 
> 



and developmental psychologists tell us that "children
don't understand complex emotions like guilt ... until
around age 7" (Nichols 2007: 261). However, according to
Nichols, children make moral judgments much earlier. The crucial step
in Nichols' argument for this latter claim is that "a
basic capacity for moral judgment is reflected by passing the
moral/conventional task" (2004: 89). And, as Turiel and his
colleagues have repeatedly shown, children succeed at the
moral/conventional task--they give typical adult responses to
schoolyard examples of moral and conventional transgressions--by
the age of four or earlier. Since four year-olds can make moral
judgments but don't understand guilt, Nichols concludes that
Gibbard's version of sentimentalism is incompatible with the
empirical
 facts.[25]



Over the last two decades, discussion of the work of social domain
theorists became substantially more common in the philosophical
literature. Joseph Heath offers an intriguing explanation for some of
the philosophical interest in this work. It is, he maintains,
motivated by the widespread resistance, among moral philosophers,
"to the idea that morality could simply be a part of
*culture*, because ... many elements of culture vary
enormously from place to place..." (2017: 277). These
philosophers, Heath contends,



> 
> 
> are inclined to think that what is morally acceptable or unacceptable
> is universal and invariant, so that certain actions are morally
> *wrong* even if the prevailing set of norms in a culture fails
> to condemn them as such .... Acknowledging ... that moral
> rules are a species of social norm, and that they have a lot in common
> with rules of etiquette, appears to set in motion a dynamic that leads
> to moral relativism.
> 
> 
> 
> In recent years, the impulse to distinguish moral rules from other
> types of social norms has received what many philosophers take to be
> empirical support from the psychological research of Elliot Turiel and
> his collaborators. Turiel is well-known for having argued that there
> are two distinct "domains" of social cognition, the
> "moral" and the "conventional," and that even
> very young children are able to distinguish the two. Many philosophers
> have been quick to jump on this, as proof that moral rules are
> fundamentally different from "conventional" social norms.
> Jesse Prinz, for instance, appeals to Turiel's authority in
> claiming that "By the time children are 3, they recognize that
> some rules are moral (e.g. don't hit other children) and others
> are merely conventional (don't talk without raising your
> hand)" (Prinz 2006, 29-43; see also Joyce 2006[a],
> 136-137; Nichols 2004, 5-7). Gerald Gaus, again citing
> Turiel, writes that "even children see moral rules as
> non-conventional" (2010, 172). This is often a prelude to the
> claim that moral judgments are generated by some special moral
> faculty, or set of emotional reactions, or rational capacity, that
> puts them outside the space of social norms (and thus, many will
> argue, exempts them from cultural variability). (Heath 2017:
> 277-278)
> 
> 
> 



The idea that moral judgments are generated by a "special moral
faculty" can be developed in a variety of ways, some of which
have led to a resurgence of interest in moral nativism. As noted
earlier, Turiel and his fellow social domain theorists are
constructivists who reject nativist accounts of the morality. But a
number of philosophers, including Susan Dwyer (Dwyer 1999, 2006, 2007;
Dwyer, Huebner, & Hauser 2010), Richard Joyce (2006a, 2006b), John
Mikhail (2014, 2022), and Shaun Nichols (2005) have used the findings
of the social domain theorists in arguments aimed at establishing that
substantial aspects of morality are innate. Some of these authors go
on to argue morality is the product of natural selection and that it
is an adaptation. Other philosophers, notably Jesse Prinz (2007a: ch.
7; 2007b) and Edouard Machery and Ron Mallon (2010) have elaborated
detailed responses.



The most extensive appeal to empirical work on the moral/conventional
distinction in the philosophical literature has been in the
intertwined debates over moral internalism and the moral
responsibility of psychopaths. To explain these debates, a bit of
background is needed. When someone judges that an action is the
morally right or morally required thing to do it is often the case
that she goes on to *do* it. Why? What is her motivation for
doing what she judges to be morally required? From the ancient Greeks
onward, philosophers have been interested in moral motivation, and in
recent decades debates over the nature of moral motivation have played
a prominent role in metaethics. One central component in this
multi-faceted discussion is the debate between various versions of
*internalism*, which hold



> 
> 
> that motivation is internal to moral judgment, in the sense that moral
> judgment itself motivates without need of an accompanying desire,
> 
> 
> 



and various versions of *externalism* which insist that



> 
> 
> moral motivation occurs when a moral judgment combines with a desire,
> and the content of the judgment is related to the content of the
> desire so as to rationalize the action.
> 
> 
> 



The quotes are from Rosati's outstanding *Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy* overview of the moral motivation
literature (Rosati 2016: SS3; entry on
 moral motivation)
 in which she goes on to note that



> 
> 
> debates between internalists and externalists often center on the
> figure of the "amoralist"--the person who apparently
> makes moral judgments, while remaining wholly unmoved to comply with
> them.
> 
> 
> 



Internalists typically insist that the amoralist is a conceptual
impossibility, and that



> 
> 
> the person who *appears* to be making a moral judgment while
> remaining unmoved, must really ... be speaking
> insincerely.... [S]he judges an act "right" only in
> an "inverted commas" sense (R.M. Hare, 1963)....
> (Rosati 2016: SS3)
> 
> 
> 



However, some philosophers think that psychopaths provide a *prima
facie* challenge to this claim.



Psychopaths, who are diagnosed using a standard psychopathy checklist
(Robert Hare 1991) are individuals who appear to be cognitively
normal. They typically do not have impaired reasoning abilities, and
they are aware of and seem able to comprehend prevailing moral and
social rules. However, psychopaths often engage in antisocial behavior
and they manifest no guilt or remorse for their morally aberrant
behavior. Since psychopaths apparently can, and often do make moral
judgments that they are not motivated to comply with, they seem to
pose a problem for internalists. Indeed, borrowing an apt locution
from Roskies (2003), psychopaths would appear to be "walking
counterexamples" to
 internalism.[26]



It's at this point that the moral/conventional distinction
becomes relevant. In an influential paper, psychologist R. James Blair
(1995) reported using a version of the moral/conventional task with
incarcerated psychopathic offenders of normal intelligence and with
incarcerated non-psychopathic offenders, all of whom were charged with
murder or manslaughter. The responses of the non-psychopathic
offenders were similar to those that social domain theorists have
reported with normal adults, but the responses of the psychopathic
offenders were notably different. They responded in the same way to
moral and conventional
 transgressions.[27]
 Similar results were reported in a study that compared children with
psychopathic tendencies to non-psychopathic children who had other
emotional and behavioral issues (Blair 1997). These results led a
number of authors to conclude that psychopaths do not have
"normal moral concepts" (Prinz 2007a: 42-47), or
that their moral concepts are "impaired" (Schroeder,
Roskies, & Nichols 2010: 96; Nichols 2004: 19 & 113), and thus
that they "do not mean what the rest of us mean when using moral
terms" (Kennett & Fine 2007: 175). If that's right,
then, these authors maintained, psychopaths do not really make moral
judgments, as ordinarily understood, and they pose no challenge to
internalism. However, Kumar (2016) argues that philosophers have often
overinterpreted Blair's findings. Though the studies indicate
that psychopaths "do not have a full grasp of moral
concepts", Kumar maintains that the studies do not show that
psychopaths "completely fail to grasp them". So while
psychopaths don't make "full-fledged moral
judgments", they can and do make what Kumar calls "proto
moral judgments". Because of this, Kumar maintains, the
implications of research on psychopaths for the debate between
internalists and externalists is "less straightforward"
then philosophers have assumed. In a similar vein, Roskies (2007: 204)
argues that studies of psychopaths do not establish "that they
lack moral concepts or an adequate understanding of them" or
that they are "incapable of anything but moral judgments in an
inverted comma sense".



In addition to being invoked in debates between internalists and
externalists, Blair's studies have also played a role in
philosophical discussions of the conditions under which people are
morally responsible for their behavior. Neil Levy has argued that
psychopaths "ought to be excused moral responsibility for their
wrongdoing" because their "failure to grasp the
moral/conventional distinction" indicates that they do not
understand "what makes a moral norm moral" (Levy 2007b:
163-164).



> 
> 
> Psychopaths know, at least typically, that their actions are widely
> perceived to be wrong, to be sure, but they are unable to grasp the
> distinctive nature and significance of their wrongness. Psychopaths
> apparently take harm to others to be wrong *only because* such
> harms are against the rules. For them, stealing from, or hurting,
> another is no more wrong than, say, double-parking or line-jumping.
> But the kind and degree of wrongness, and therefore blame, that
> attaches to infringement of the rules is very different, and usually
> much less significant, than the kind and degree attaching to moral
> wrongs. For psychopaths, all offences are merely conventional, and
> therefore--from their point of view--none of them are all
> that serious. Hence, their degree of responsibility is smaller,
> arguably much smaller, than it would be for a comparable harm
> committed by a normal agent. Indeed, there are grounds for excusing
> them from moral responsibility altogether. (Levy 2007a: 132)
> 
> 
> 



Fine and Kennett defend a very similar conclusion:



> 
> 
> [W]hile psychopathic offenders certainly appear to know what acts are
> prohibited by society or the law (and therefore know that their
> transgressions are legally wrong), they do not appear to have the
> capacity to judge an act to be morally wrong.... We would argue
> that psychopathic offenders, who fail to understand the distinction
> between moral wrongs and conventional wrongs, cannot be considered to
> be moral agents. (2004: 432)
> 
> 
> 



Since Levy, Fine, and Kennett all take moral responsibility to be
necessary for criminal responsibility, they maintain that psychopaths
are not criminally responsible.



Other authors draw quite different conclusions from Blair's
studies. Both Maibom (2008) and Vargas and Nichols (2007) note that
despite their apparent inability to distinguish moral from
conventional transgressions, psychopaths are sensitive to the fact
that there are norms prohibiting a wide range of behaviors, and that
violating these norms can lead to sanctions. For Maibom, this
awareness is enough to undergird both moral and criminal
responsibility. Endorsing a similar view, Vargas and Nichols note that
"we do think it is appropriate to blame and punish transgressors
of conventional rules". Why, they ask, "is this not enough
to blame and punish psychopaths?" (2007: 159).



David Shoemaker (2011) is skeptical about drawing any conclusions
about the moral or criminal responsibility of psychopaths based on
Blair's studies. In support of his skepticism, he draws
attention to critiques of work in the Turiel tradition by Nissan
(1987); Haidt, Koller, and Dias (1993); Kelly et al. (2007); and
others. More pointedly, he stresses that judgments about the
seriousness of a transgression play a central role in Blair's
version of the moral/conventional task, and he challenges the
assumption that moral transgressions are judged to be more serious
than putatively conventional transgressions. Shoemaker references a
study by Elizabeth Fitton and Ann Dowker who controlled for perceived
seriousness and found that



> 
> 
> when the so-called conventional transgressions matched the so-called
> moral transgressions in perceived seriousness ... [normal]
> children failed to differentiate the domains "in terms of rule
> contingency, perceived obligations and the justifications used."
> Indeed, these children tended to judge that the conventional behaviors
> were *more* obligatory than the moral ones. (Shoemaker 2011:
> 107, italics in original, quoting a 2002 paper presented at the MOSAIC
> conference in Liverpool "Qualitative and Quantitative Dimensions
> of Domain Differentiation")
> 
> 
> 



Shoemaker's skepticism about the philosophical importance of
Blair's findings is reinforced by the work of Aharoni and
colleagues (2012) who undertook a conceptual replication of
Blair's prisoner study using a modified version of the
moral/conventional task that focused on authority independence and
used a forced-choice format to minimize strategic responding. Their
study included 109 incarcerated criminal offenders. (In Blair's
original study there were only ten psychopathic participants and 10
non-psychopaths.) To assess the level of psychopathy for each inmate
participant, they used Hare's Revised Psychopathy Checklist
along with two other measures. The crucial finding was that



> 
> 
> total psychopathy score did not predict performance on the
> [moral/conventional] task.
> 
> 
> 



Aharoni and colleagues conclude that



> 
> 
> contrary to earlier claims, insufficient data exist to infer that
> psychopathic individuals cannot know what is morally wrong. (2012:
> 484)
> 
> 
> 



The moral/conventional task is not the only tool that psychologists
have used to explore deficits in moral reasoning. In a survey of the
literature, Schaich Borg and Sinnott-Armstrong (2013) review the
findings of studies with psychopaths using the moral/conventional task
and five quite different tools. Their conclusion is hardly encouraging
for philosophers who hope that studies of moral cognition in
psychopaths will yield important philosophical payoffs.



> 
> 
> The studies reviewed in this chapter support a tentative and qualified
> conclusion: If psychopaths have any deficits or abnormalities in their
> moral judgments, their deficits seem subtle--much more subtle
> than might be expected from their blatantly abnormal behavior. Indeed,
> the current literature ... suggests that psychopaths might not
> have any specific deficits in moral cognition, despite their
> differences in moral action, emotion, and empathy. (2013: 123)
> 
> 
> 



The take-home message of this section is that authors who invoke
studies using the moral/conventional task in arguing for philosophical
conclusions should be very cautious. There are many different versions
of the task, and it is far from clear that any of them give us
reliable information about the nature of moral cognition or about the
moral cognition of children, psychopaths or other groups of
philosophical interest.