Internal resources available to the moral learner What, if anything, is contributed to the learning situation by the child?

Moral nativists claim that the non-moral learning resources available to the empiricist are inadequate to account for the complex task of moral acquisition. The POMS argument is severely weakened if an account can be given of how the child’s moral learning resources can be enriched. There are numerous capacities involved in making the moral/conventional distinction that arrive long before children actually show the ability to make that distinction. Here I will look at these non-moral resources and show how they contribute to the acquisition process. (In section 2.5 we will see how these resources contribute to the specific properties of the moral/conventional distinction.)

We saw earlier that young children initially only make the moral/conventional distinction over a small class of norm violations, namely those pertaining to emotionally salient moral issues involving physical harm and welfare. This is important, because it suggests that the young child’s emotional sensitivities are one of the primary resources they have for making this distinction (Nichols 2004, 2005; Dunn 2006; Smetana 2006; Prinz 2007, 2008a). We are born primed for assessing our emotional worlds – not only our own emotional reactions but also the emotional displays of others (Saarni and Harris 1989).

Although pro-social emotions alone are not sufficient for genuine moral judgement (Joyce 2006), they make the task of moral learning significantly easier. Emotional capacities contribute to moral learning by making particular aspects of the environment more salient, narrowing the learner’s search space. Children use the affective consequences of acts to make inferences about whether they are moral or conventional norm violations (Arsenio 1988). At an early age, they have the resources to see that primitive rule violations are moral when the consequences of those violations elicit emotions such as empathy, and that they are conventional when they don’t.

Experimental studies support this claim. Children consistently rate moral transgressions as more affectively salient. They also attribute negative emotions to the recipients and observers of the transgression due to harm, loss or injury to the victim. In the case of conventional transgressions, young children attribute “neutral or somewhat negative”

emotions to the participants, more specifically attributed to those in positions of authority who did not want their rules to be violated (Dunn 2006; Turiel 1998; Smetana 2006). Additionally, the justifications that children give for their moral classifications pertain to the emotionally salient features of the acts such as the harm and welfare of victims, whereas their justifications for conventional classifications typically appeal to authority. Smetana concludes that “[c]hildren’s direct experiences (as victims and observers of transgressions) provide one source of knowledge about the intrinsic consequences of acts for others’ welfare and rights” (2006:136; see also Dunn 2003;

Dunn 2006). We have good reason to think that early proficiency on the moral/conventional task is affect based and therefore is more indicative of the child’s affective capacities than moral competence.

Soon after birth infants show an ability to adopt the emotional states of others around them (Saarni and Harris 1989). ‘Emotional contagion’ provides a direct, pre-theoretical resource which forms the developmental foundation for interpreting the emotional states of others. By the end of the first year the learning child has developed the capacity for

‘social referencing’, using the emotional expressions of others to evaluate novel objects or situations. For example, children are more likely to cross a glass-covered cliff or play with novel toys if their mothers display positive emotional states, whereas the opposite is true if they display negative states. In this way children use affective information in their environments to make decisions and guide their actions (reviewed in Thompson, Meyer

et al. 2006). Both of these skills are essential for the future ability to assess the emotional states of others when identifying moral violations and using that information to make decisions with regards to those violations.

Between the ages of 12 to 18 months toddlers start to respond to others’ negative emotional states in the form of ‘distress reactions’. They will show concern and display prosocial behaviour towards another’s distress by attempting to comfort them through both physical action and talk (Dunn 2003). Here we see that from a very early age children are motivated to prevent or reduce the harm caused to others. This is important for marking the qualitative difference between emotion-inducing moral violations and non-moral violations, as well as providing a motivational dimension to moral learning.

Children are motivated to prevent harm, not because they are necessarily told to by an authority figure, but because they are independently motivated to do so. Distress reactions also indicate the perceived seriousness in the eliciting event. These facts are significant when we consider that moral violations are deemed independent of authority and more serious than conventional norms (see discussion below in section 2.5). Infants also show the ability to use facial and vocal displays as a means of identifying different emotional states in others, such as fear and sadness (Harris and Saarni 1989). Abilities like these are vital tools for identifying the various emotional states of victim, transgressor and admonisher in moral learning. Learning the emotional consequences of actions enables us to identify distinctions between the various causal components of both moral and conventional violations.

Evidence from studies of atypical populations also shows that capabilities are essential for the ability to make the moral/conventional distinction. Psychopaths, who show diminished emotional responses towards the suffering of others, also show diminished abilities in making the distinction from an early age (Blair 1995; Nichols 2004). Yet emotions are not the only mechanisms involved in the moral acquisition process. Autistic children who show deficits in theory of mind and intentional attribution can successfully make the distinction but have trouble with respect to violations that require mind reading capacities to understand the event, such as instances involving lying (James and Blair 1996; Nichols 2002a). This is consistent with autistic children showing less of an ability to lie than normal children (Sodian and Frith 1992). Moral acquisition involves many cognitive abilities: the ability to identify causal chains and consequences; reason

counterfactually; follow norms; make abstractions and generalisations. This is especially true in the case of complex moral competencies. Many of these are in place in early infancy. 12-month-old children, for example, start to show an awareness of others as

“deliberate and subjective partners” as seen through such displays as expectation, imitation and joint attention (Thompson, Meyer et al. 2006). The ability to perceive intentional behaviours of others is an important tool in generating the relevant causal structure of more complex events involving the attribution of purposeful vs. accidental behaviours and deceptive behaviours.

By integrating additional informational resources into their evaluations, children make more nuanced and complex moral judgements. Arsenio and Love (1995) argue that young children’s sensitivity to the emotional states of others provide them with the information needed to anticipate the morally relevant consequences of their behaviours.

These ‘emotion-event expectancies’ provide information from which children, over time, can construct abstract and generalisable moral principles. However, Arsenio and Love also point out that it is not solely the emotional capacities that allow the construction of these principles; it is through the integration of various experiential and developing cognitive resources that the child comes to make more subtle evaluations of their moral worlds. Young children initially view all perpetrators of moral violations as happy because the child thinks the perpetrator has gained from the transgressing act. But, as the child’s social and affective experience increases and is combined with the development of various other cognitive skills, the child comes to appreciate that the perpetrator may not necessarily be a “happy victimiser”. Children come to understand that perpetrators may also be sensitive to the negative effects of their actions. The important point is that moral cognitive abilities develop in conjunction with the development of other capacities. As these come online, the resources available to the moral learner grow, allowing the acquisition of greater moral competence.

The upshot so far is that the data-to-theory gap has been narrowed by the child without employing innate, domain-specific moral mechanisms. The internal resources contributed by the learning child help to identify basic norms specific to the moral domain, resources which form the basis of moral acquisition. Whether any of these specific capacities themselves are innate or not is an open question but one that is not under examination here. What is important is that these capacities are not specifically moral. Each is readily

employed in domains other than moral cognition. This is an important point that Jesse Prinz (2008a) emphasises in his non-nativist account of moral acquisition. He explains that the awareness and assessment of the emotional states of others, for example, arise in domains far beyond that of morality; emotions such as empathy are invoked in instances such as car accidents and natural disasters, as well as other contexts such as interpreting the mental states of others (Shaun Nichols (2005) also makes this point). Looking at other resources available to the child we see that situational assessment via social referencing is, again, not specific to morality. Nor are consequential, counterfactual, general reasoning, theory of mind and norm following abilities. These internal resources are not specific to morality; they cannot be considered a unique part of any domain-specific moral faculty.

So far we can conclude that the child’s mind is a biased learning machine – non-moral mental resources contribute substantially to reducing the learning gap. Importantly, children also learn by doing. As we will see later, it is their active, embodied participation in a highly structured moral world that facilitates the transmission of external moral information to the learning agent (see chapters 4 to 6). Children interact with and explore their worlds, and importantly their moral worlds interact with them. We will now look at some of the ways in which the structured moral world contributes substantially to moral acquisition.