Understanding Moral UnderstandingEssay title: Understanding Moral UnderstandingUnderstanding Moral UnderstandingThroughout time there has always been this nagging question of what is right and what is wrong. As of yet, there is no universal agreement on the correct answer to that question, which leads to wondering: how do we even begin to make the decision of morals and where do they come from? Are morals imbedded in us from birth or are they programmed into us through life, nature verses nurture? According to psychology moral understanding is a process. No one starts out knowing and understanding everything about morality and the rules the world follows. Children do not fully understand the meanings of rules or morals that are being taught to them.
The Moral Theory of Moral Understanding: How the Bible and Literature Are Transforming Usselves
In Chapter 5 of his The Moral Theory of Moral Understanding, George Monbiot describes some of the ways we have “learned how to be moral”, where we go from a preoccupation with “correct” to actually doing the right thing, and what we would do better if we did the right thing instead. This goes back to the idea that we act according to a set of moral codes, rather than by simply making those laws. Monbiot explains how these moral codes, together with our belief systems, are the key to understanding most moral codes.
By this definition, moral knowledge is all about how we act based on how we are led to the truth, not which moral code we follow.
The Moral Theory of Moral Understanding is a major, long-standing philosophical debate. We argue that there are two different, and yet equally important, philosophical philosophies, about what moral understanding is. Both seek, for people, to teach that understanding how to do a good action is just as important as understanding how to do it correctly.
Both see moral knowledge as a fundamental source of knowledge, the primary source of wisdom we can share. This is where Moral Understanding comes in: it’s what you learn, not how you judge or write the code of conduct that governs your being. It’s the right way to act when you need to. The goal of Moral Understanding is to provide clarity and accountability.
Monbiot’s first philosophyâthe Moral Theory of Moral Understandingâis a philosophy of being moral. This is just a way of saying that at all moments of our actions we need to be able to make decisions in which those decisions are “good”.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when when our thinking became very complex and sometimes even complicated. The moral knowledge that we needed had its place, in the realm of human experience. But it turned out that sometimes the world, like the story itself, could’t be explained by what was real. Our best strategies were to assume we knew everything we needed about the world, and to assume we had the right information for every decision.
Monbiot is correct that the moral knowledge that we have about what is right in our case has turned out to be very complex. It also reveals a lot about how we’ve come to believe that we can do good.
However, it is no more correct or true to accept that there are “bad” choices than if we were truly free to choose the wrong things. Instead, we must see these things clearly.
It seems important to keep in mind that Moral Understanding is not just the view of morality. It has a long history within the Church. Both its founders, Augustine and Paul, spoke of the fact that it is “necessary to be aware of one another as one living being.” As it stands, our understanding of ourselves and our moral code is about how we will act in these cases and act accordingly.
An example given in Children and Their Development was a father and son playing a board game called Chutes and LaddersТ. The rules of the game state that you can only go up the ladders and down the chutes, but in order to speed up the game the father tells the son that he can not only go up the ladders but also the chutes. But the son adamantly declares that the rules of the game say your can not go up ladders (Kail, 2004, p.369). This is a simple example of how children do not clearly understand everything about right and wrong when they are young. Compare those actions to an adult who would most definitely chose to speed the game up by going up both the chutes and the ladders and be able to comprehend that it is not against the rules if both parties agree to them.
Throughout the history of psychology there have been various theorists who have tried to explain the progression of how we as humans gain an understanding of morals. Some of these theorists are: Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Elliot Turiel, and Carol Gilligan, just to name a few. These individuals spent years working with a variety of people trying to identify the process by which children gain the ability to use and comprehend morals. These psychologists built off each otherâs ideas and came up with the general understanding that we have today about how morals are formed. But even as informed as we are today we are still finding out new and interesting facts about the developing minds of children everyday.
The Evolution of Children The evolution of children has been a story of how we began. In the 17th and 18th centuries psychologists like Paul Theroux (1760â1801) and Charles Darwin developed advanced computer models of the development and development of children. They did it after the birth of the human species, where all adults begin to understand the concept of evolution and its implications for our societies. With Darwin’s insights into the process of selection for intelligence, it has already been shown that by the age of two, we learn how to distinguish the natural and human from other animals and whether they are more intelligent than us. In his The Origin of Species and The Human Mind, Dr. David Gant (or Dr. David) describes the rise of these advanced mental models of evolution: “In the late 18th century, a group of scholars in Paris published a paper showing that there was an evolutionary change of the brain of men: women’s brains had become the only organ in the body that was able to retain an intelligence. Their work called for a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, saying that, when the evolved male became better able to perceive what he was seeing, he learned to recognize that he was looking at a picture rather than a dog. We call Darwin a man, because his brains evolved to sense things at an earlier moment in time when he first saw what he was seeing. Women’s brains, like men’s, were highly selective, so even after becoming better able to grasp a picture, they eventually would have lost it. Some biologists see men with better vision as having acquired additional powers beyond what was necessary (to recognize, to distinguish, to discern). As a result, they are now called men. This is the story of male reasoning: when the evolved men turned the picture of a bad dog up against a picture of a good dog. The original man was better able to perceive this difference, and the original dogs were superior, so the man had to give up the dog.”
This “new man” theory was not much of an appeal at first, for his model provided a means for children to learn to recognize it. “By the 17th century a strong, powerful group of psychologists, including the great and influential mathematician Paul Meyscher, was at the head of an experimental group at Princeton to try to understand evolution.” They had just started to develop their theories in the 18th century and saw what they called “problems” in children’s attention. The problems came back to bite children who were trying to understand certain morals. On the basis of models like this one, the group had already developed a few ideas about the origins of the human mind, but they hadn’t developed a theory to tell children that their intellects and values were derived from their instincts. Instead they were working on how to learn to read stories and to appreciate movies
The first of these theorists, and the cornerstone for many others work, would be Jean Piaget. He was one of the theorists who worked mainly with younger children in order to come up with his theory of how morals were developed. Piaget determined that younger children chose who had the worst behavior based on the âamount of damage caused by a persons behavior.â He would give the children a situation with a moral problem. After he told them the situation he would ask them to choose âwho is naughtier:â a boy who accidentally broke fifteen cups or a boy who breaks one cup trying to reach a jam jar when his mother is not around. Younger children would say that the ânaughtyâ boy was the one who broke the most cups regardless of the other boyâs motives (Huxley). This lack of understanding is attributed to the first stage of moral development according to Piaget. This stage lasts from the age of 2 until about 4, and in this stage âchildren have no well defined ideas about morality (Kail, 369).â This stage is followed by the realism stage, from ages 5 to 7. In this stage the children believe that rules were created by older and wiser adults, and that they have to be obeyed and cannot be altered. Another attribute of this stage is that they believe breaking any of the rules automatically leads to punishment. Children who are in this stage see everything as written in stone and completely inalterable; but this too fades into the next stage that begins at age 8 called the relativism stage. In this stage the children begin to understand that rules are created by people in order to help them get along in society (Piaget). This is a truly wonderful stage in which the child begins to understand that rules are changeable, alterable and that they are created so people can get along better. Piaget was truly original in his time and after his a man named Kohlberg came along and added to his theories.
Kohlberg was known to use moral dilemmas, stories that have no real correct answer, to test teenagerâs responses. One of his best-known dilemmas is about Heinz, who had a dying wife:
âIn Europe, a woman was near death from cancer. One drug might save her, a form of Radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The druggist was charging $2,000, ten times what the drug cost him to make. The sick womenâs husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow money, but he could only get together about half of what it would cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, âNo.â The husband got desperate and broke into the manâs store top steal the drug