Culture and the quest for universal principles in moral reasoning

Abstract

The importance of including cultural perspectives in the study of human cognition has become apparent in recent decades, and the domain of moral reasoning is no exception. The present review focuses on moral cognition, beginning with Kohlberg’s model of moral development which relies heavily on people’s justifications for their judgments and then shifting to more recent theories that rely on rapid, intuitive judgments and see justifications as more or less irrelevant to moral cognition. Despite this dramatic shift, analyses of culture and moral decision-making have largely been framed as a quest for and test of universal principles of moral judgment. In this review, we discuss challenges that remain in trying to understand crosscultural variability in moral values and the processes that underlie moral cognition. We suggest that the universalist framework may lead to an underestimation of the role of culture in moral reasoning. Although the field has made great strides in incorporating more and more cultural perspectives in order to understand moral cognition, theories of moral reasoning still do not allow for substantial variation in how people might conceptualize the domain of the moral. The processes that underlie moral cognition may not be a human universal in any simple sense, because moral systems may play different roles in different cultures. We end our review with a discussion of work that remains to be done to understand cultural variation in the moral domain.

L’importance d’inclure une perspective culturelle dans l’étude de la cognition s’est imposée au cours des dernières décennies. Le domaine du raisonnement moral ne fait pas exception à cette règle. Le présent relevé de la documentation porte sur la cognition morale, nous présentons d’abord le modèle du développement moral de Kohlberg qui repose avant tout sur les justifications que les gens donnent à leurs jugements, puis nous passons aux théories plus récentes qui reposent, elles, sur des jugements rapides, intuitifs et qui considèrent les justifications données comme étant plutôt non pertinentes par rapport à la cognition morale. Malgré ce changement spectaculaire, les analyses de la culture et de la prise de décision morale ont été formulées comme étant une recherche et une mise à l’épreuve de principes universels du jugement moral. Dans ce relevé de la documentation, nous discutons des défis qui demeurent pour tenter de comprendre la variabilité entre les cultures en ce qui concerne les valeurs morales et les processus qui sous-tendent la cognition morale. Nous proposons qu’un cadre universel peut conduire à une sous-estimation du rôle de la culture dans le raisonnement moral. Même s’il y a eu de grands pas de fait dans ce domaine en incorporant de plus en plus les perspectives culturelles pour comprendre la cognition morale, les théories du raisonnement moral ne font toujours pas une place suffisante à la variation substantielle dans la conceptualisation de la moralité selon les gens. Les processus qui sous-tendent la cognition morale pourraient ne pas être partagés universellement de façon simple parce que les systèmes moraux pourraient jouer différents rôles dans différentes cultures. Nous terminons notre relevé de la documentation avec une discussion concernant le travail qu’il reste à faire pour comprendre la variation culturelle dans le domaine moral.

En las últimas décadas se ha vuelto aparente la importancia de incluir una perspectiva cultural en el estudio de las cogniciones humanas, y el área del razonamiento moral no es una excepción a esta generalización. El presente artículo se focaliza en la cognición moral, comenzando con el modelo del desarrollo moral de Kohlberg, el cual se apoya en gran medida en las justificaciones que hacen las personas de sus juicios personales; luego, se traslada a teorías más recientes que se apoyan en juicios personales más rápidos e intuitivos, que perciben los juicios personales como más o menos irrelevantes a la cognición moral. A pesar de este cambio dramático, los análisis de cultura y la toma de decisiones morales han estado enmarcadas como una búsqueda y una prueba de principios universales de juicios morales. En esta reseña, se analizan los desafíos que quedan al tratar de entender la variabilidad cultural en los valores morales y los procesos subyacentes a las cogniciones morales. Se sugiere que un marco universal puede llevar a subestimar el papel de la cultura en el razonamiento moral. Aunque esta área ha hecho grandes avances al incorporar más y más perspectivas culturales para entender la cognición moral, las teorías de razonamiento moral aún no permiten una variabilidad considerable en la manera en que las personas conceptualizan la esfera de lo moral. Los procesos que subyacen la cognición moral no pueden ser universales en ningún sentido simple, porque los sistemas morales pueden tener distintos roles en distintas culturas. El artículo finaliza con una descripción del trabajo que aún resta para entender la variación en la esfera de lo moral.

Keywords:

• Cultural psychology
• Cognition
• Moral reasoning
• Sociocultural approaches

Notes

¹A frequently used example in Kohlberg’s interviews: “A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it 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: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

²Jainism is a major Indian religion, followed by about 4 million people. It is purported to have begun somewhere in the firth to sixth century BC. Jainism teaches a profound respect for all living things and strongly condemns violence of any sort.

³A gotra refers to descendants of an unbroken male line from a common ancestor.

⁴Although rights- and duty-based systems of morality do appear to map closely on to the different construals of the self, a potentially interesting future line of work will be to look at the nature of rights and duties within these different types of self-construal. We imagine that duties in a culture that emphasizes and enforces interdependence (through a host of other factors) would have very different content and behaviors associated with it than duties in a culture where independent self-construals are more prevalent. The same reasoning holds for the nature of rights across cultures.

⁵As noted above, hierarchical relations may be more prevalent in duty-based cultures. Thus, it is conceivable that sacrifice for a respected monarch or other valued community member may be laudable. In these cases, the needs of a single person could certainly win out over the needs of many.

⁶Anecdotal evidence from the first author’s fieldwork in India as well as consultation from the second author, a faculty member in India and a native speaker of Hindi.