2014/01/01 by Aner Govrin · 2 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Child and Animal Learning Development #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Psychology #Moral development #Morality #Social cognitive theory of morality #Moral disengagement #Moral psychology #Moral reasoning #Social psychology #Epistemology #Process (computing) #Moral authority #Cognitive psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00006
openalex publication_date 2014/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
As with other cognitive faculties, the etiology of moral judgment and its connection to early development is complex. Because research is limited, the causative and contributory factors to the development of moral judgment in preverbal infants are unclear. However, evidence is emerging from studies within both infant research and moral psychology that may contribute to our understanding of the early development of moral judgments. Though its finding are preliminary, this proposed paradigm synthesizes these findings to generate an overarching, model of the process that appears to contribute to the development of moral judgment in the first year of life. I will propose that through early interactions with the caregiver, the child acquires an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how right/wrong judgments are to be construed, used, and understood. By breaking moral situations down into their defining features, the attachment model of moral judgment outlines a framework for a universal moral faculty based on a universal, innate, deep structure that appears uniformly in the structure of almost all moral judgments regardless of their content. The implications of the model for our understanding of innateness, universal morality, and the representations of moral situations are discussed.