The Moral Judgment of the Child

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The Moral Judgment of the Child The Moral Judgment of the Child

Foreword

READERS will find in this book no direct analysis of child morality as it is practised in home and school life or in children's societies. It is the moral judgment that we propose to investigate, not moral behaviour or sentiments. With this aim in view we questioned a large number of children from the Geneva and Neuchâtel schools and held conversations with them, similar to those we had had before on their conception of the world and of causality. The present volume contains the results of these conversations.

First we had to establish what was meant by respect for rules from the child's point of view. This is why we have begun with an analysis of the rules of a social game in the obligatory aspect which these possess for a bona fide player. From the rules of games we have passed to the specifically moral rules laid down by adults and we have tried to see what idea the child forms of these particular duties. Children's ideas on lying were selected as being a privileged example. Finally we have examined the notions that arose out of the relations in which the children stood to each other and we were thus led to discuss the idea of justice as our special theme.

Having reached this point, our results seemed to us sufficiently consistent to be compared to some of the hypotheses now in favour among sociologists and writers on the psychology of morals. It is to this final task that we have devoted our fourth chapter.

We are more conscious than anybody of the defects as of the advantages of the method we have used. The great danger, especially in matters of morality, is that of making the child say whatever one wants him to say. There is no infallible remedy for this; neither the good faith of the questioner nor the precautionary methods which we have laid stress upon elsewhere are sufficient. The only safeguard lies in the collaboration of other investigators. If other psychologists take up our questions from different view-points and put them to children of differing social environment, it will be possible sooner or later to separate the objective from the arbitrary elements in the results which we bring forward in this work. An analogous task has been undertaken in various countries with regard to child logic and children's ideas on causality; and while certain exaggerations of which we had been guilty came to light in this way, the results up to date in no way tend to discourage us in the use of the method we have adopted.

The advantages of this method seem to us to be that it makes evident what observation left to itself can only surmise. During the last few years, for example, I have been engaged in taking down the spontaneous remarks made by my two little girls, to whom I have never set the questions examined in The Child's Conception of the World or in The Child's Conception of Causality. Now, broadly speaking, the tendencies to Realism, Animism, Artificialism and dynamic Causality, etc., come very clearly to light, but the meaning of these children's most interesting "whys," as of many of their chance remarks, would have almost completely eluded me if I had not in the past questioned hundreds of children personally on the same subjects. A child's spontaneous remark is, of course, more valuable than all the questioning in the world. But in child psychology such a remark cannot be seen in its right perspective without the work of preparation constituted by those very interrogatories.

The present book on child morality is just such a preliminary piece of work. It is my sincere hope that it may supply a scaffolding which those living with children and observing their spontaneous reactions can use in erecting the actual edifice. In a sense, child morality throws light on adult morality. If we want to form men and women, nothing will fit us so well for the task as to study the laws that govern their formation.