A Study of Children's Moral Judgments1

The development of moral judgment in the child has been of considerable interest to the social scientist. Among the students of human development, Jean Piaget has been, perhaps, most influential in this area of study (i6). His studies of the child's developing understanding of causality, of physical and temporal reality, and of ethics and moral judgment have been extremely fruitful. This study proposes to test some of Piaget's ideas concerning developmental changes in moral judgment. Moral judgment, for Piaget, consists of a number of areas. These include: (a) immanent justice-the belief in the existence of automatic punishments which emanate from things themselves; (b) moral realism-a belief that acts should be judged in terms of consequences, not on the basis of the motive behind the act; (c) belief that punishment should be retributive vs. belief that punishment should be restitutive (merely restore the equilibrium destroyed by the punished act); (d) acceptance or rejection of the idea that the more severe punishment is more efficacious; and (e) choice of collective (essentially, guilt by association) or of individual responsibility for punishable acts. In his book, The Moral Judgment of the Child, Piaget discusses the work of four writers, Durkheim, Fauconnet, Bovet, and Baldwin, in terms of how they dealt with four problems which were of prime significance