Nichols Shaun, Folds-Bennett Trisha
Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424, USA.
Cognition. 2003 Dec;90(2):B23-32. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(03)00160-4.
Researchers working on children's moral understanding maintain that the child's capacity to distinguish morality from convention shows that children regard moral violations as objectively wrong (e.g. Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, one traditional way to cast the issue of objectivism is to focus not on conventionality, but on whether moral properties depend on our responses, as with properties like icky and fun. This paper argues that the moral/conventional task is inadequate for assessing whether children regard moral properties as response-dependent. Unfortunately, children's understanding of response-dependent properties has been neglected in recent research. Two experiments are reported showing that children are more likely to treat properties like fun and icky as response-dependent than moral properties like good and bad. Hence, this helps support the claim that children are moral objectivists.
研究儿童道德理解的人员认为，儿童区分道德与习俗的能力表明，儿童将违反道德视为客观错误的行为（例如，努奇，L.（2001年）。道德领域的教育。剑桥：剑桥大学出版社）。然而，一种阐述客观主义问题的传统方式不是关注习俗，而是关注道德属性是否像“恶心”和“有趣”等属性那样取决于我们的反应。本文认为，道德/习俗任务不足以评估儿童是否认为道德属性取决于反应。不幸的是，儿童对取决于反应的属性的理解在最近的研究中被忽视了。报告的两项实验表明，与“好”和“坏”等道德属性相比，儿童更有可能将“有趣”和“恶心”等属性视为取决于反应。因此，这有助于支持儿童是道德客观主义者这一观点。
