“Doing the right thing for my friend”: How children with intellectual disabilities reason about fairness, kindness, and care in inclusive classrooms

Moral development research has long proceeded on the assumption that moral reasoning worth studying in its own right, reasoning that is genuinely the child’s own rather than recited rule-following, presupposes a threshold of general cognitive ability, leaving children with intellectual disabilities largely absent from the empirical literature since this journal last addressed the question four decades ago. Using adapted vignette interviews, a weekly reflective diary, and classroom observation with twelve children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities in two inclusive primary schools, together with semi-structured interviews with their homeroom teachers, this qualitative study examined how these children reason about fairness, kindness, and care. Reflexive thematic analysis, informed by social domain theory, showed that most children distinguished moral from conventional transgressions independently of adult authority, reasoned about fairness through concrete arithmetic of sameness, and grounded kindness in specific friendships rather than general obligation. Whether this reasoning was voiced, however, depended on whether adults paused long enough to hear it rather than narrating judgments on children’s behalf. These findings suggest that this population’s empirical invisibility reflects listening practices as much as capacity. The article draws out the implications for moral education research and practice, whose major traditions, from character education to the just community and the ethics of care, have yet to address children with intellectual disabilities as moral learners in their own right.