Jean Piaget - The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932)

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Generally speaking, one can say that motor intelligence contains the germs of completed reason. But it gives promise of more than reason pure and simple. From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad, but master of his destiny. Now, if there is intelligence in the schemas of motor adaptation, there is also the element of play. The intentionality peculiar to motor activity is not a search for truth but the pursuit of a result, whether objective or subjective; and to succeed is not to discover a truth.

Jean Piaget
The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.

Jean Piaget
Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But — and this is where rules come into existence — as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy.

Jean Piaget
The relations between parents and children are certainly not only those of constraint. There is spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to very touching demonstrations which are in no way prescribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that morality of good which we shall see developing alongside of the morality of right or duty, and which in some persons completely replaces it.

Jean Piaget
The need to speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the constraining relations between superior and inferior that often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore on cooperation.

Jean Piaget
The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world. Thus the adult leads the child to the notion of objective responsibility, and consolidates in consequence a tendency that is already natural to the spontaneous mentality of little children.

Jean Piaget
Thus we see that the child is almost led to tell lies — or what seem to us lies from our point of view — by the very structure of his spontaneous thought. Given this situation, what will be the result of the laws laid down by adults about truthfulness? On the occasion of the first very obvious lies, or of those connected with some offense or other and told therefore with the object of averting punishment or scolding, the parents point out to the child that he has just done something very wrong and thus inculcate in him the respect for truth.

Jean Piaget
There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism. It may be that the genesis of these experiences is to be sought in the unique situation of the very young child in relation to adults. The theory of the filial origin of the religious sense seems to us singularly convincing in this connection.

Jean Piaget
In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought.

Jean Piaget
Alongside of the rare cases of true conversation where there is a genuine interchange of opinions or commands, one can observe in children between 2 and 6 a characteristic type of pseudo-conversation or "collective monologue", during which the children speak only for themselves, although they wish to be in the presence of interlocutors who will serve as a stimulus. Now here again, each feels himself to be in communion with the group because he is inwardly addressing the Adult who knows and understands everything, but here again, each is only concerned with himself, for lack of having dissociated the "ego" from the "socius".

Jean Piaget
For the fundamental fact of human psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words, social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown, whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc., cannot be constituted, transmitted or preserved by means of an internal biological heredity, but only through the external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other.

Jean Piaget
The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children the history of the game of marbles has quite as much importance as the history of religion or of forms of government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magnificently spontaneous; and it was therefore perhaps not entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the social behaviour of children amongst themselves.

Jean Piaget
Egocentrism in so far as it means confusion of the ego and the external world, and egocentrism in so far as it means lack of cooperation, constitute one and the same phenomenon. So long as the child does not dissociate his ego from the suggestions coming from the physical and from the social world, he cannot cooperate, for in order to cooperate one must be conscious of one's ego and situate it in relation to thought in general. And in order to become conscious of one's ego, it is necessary to liberate oneself from the thought and will of others. The coercion exercised by the adult or the older child is therefore inseparable from the unconscious egocentrism of the very young child.

Jean Piaget
If mutual respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by opposition.

Jean Piaget
To perceive is to construct intellectually, and if the child draws things as he conceives them, it is certainly because he cannot perceive them without conceiving them. But to give up gradually the spurious absolutes situated away and apart from the context of relations that has been built up during experience itself is the work of a superior kind of rationality. When the child comes to draw things as he sees them, it will be precisely because he has given up taking isolated objects in and for themselves and has begun to construct real systems of relations which take account of the true perspective in which things are connected.

Jean Piaget
Considering that the square game is only one of the five or ten varieties of the game of marbles, it is almost alarming in face of the complexity of rules and procedure in the square game, to think of what a child of twelve has to store away in his memory. These rules, with their overlapping and their exceptions, are at least as complex as the current rules of spelling. It is somewhat humiliating, in this connection, to see how heavily traditional education sets about the task of making spelling enter into brains that assimilate with such ease the mnemonic contents of the game of marbles. But then, memory is dependent upon activity, and a real activity presupposes interest.

Jean Piaget
It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires.

Jean Piaget
As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice of games and the mystical respect entertained for rules. This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.

Jean Piaget
The child who defines a lie as being a "naughty word" knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word "lie".

Jean Piaget
There are in existence two distinct ideas of justice. We say that an award is unjust when it penalizes the innocent, rewards the guilty, or when, in general, it fails to be meted out in exact proportion to the merit or guilt in question. On the other hand, we say that a division is unjust when it favors some at the expense of others. In this second adaptation of the term, the idea of justice implies only the idea of equality. In the first acceptation of the term, the notion of justice is inseparable from that of the reward and punishment, and is defined by the correlation between acts and their retribution.

Jean Piaget
In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. … There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.

Jean Piaget
In real life the child is in the presence, not of isolated acts, but of personalities that attract or repel him as a global whole. He grasps people's intentions by direct intuition and cannot therefore abstract from them. He allows, more or less justly, for aggravating and attenuating circumstances. This is why the stories told by the children themselves often give rise to different evaluations from those suggested by the experimenter's stories.

Jean Piaget
The notion of good, which generally speaking, appears later than the notion of pure duty, particularly in the case of the child, is perhaps the final conscious realization of something that is the primary condition of the moral life — the need for reciprocal affection. And since moral realism is, on the contrary, the result of constraint exercised by the adult on the child, it may perhaps be a secondary growth in comparison to the simple aspiration after good, while still remaining the first notion to be consciously realized when the child begins to reflect upon morality and to attempt formulation.

Jean Piaget
Before games are played in common, no rules in the proper sense can come into existence. Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there, but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot call forth that submission to something superior to the self which characterizes the appearance of any rule.

Jean Piaget
Between the various types of rules which we shall give there will therefore be at once continuity of function and difference of structure. This renders arbitrary any attempt to cut mental reality up into stages. The matter is further complicated by the "Law of conscious realization" and the resulting time-lag. The appearance of a new type of rule on the practical plane does not necessarily mean that this rule will come into the subject's consciousness, for each mental operation has to be relearned on the different planes of action and of thought.

Jean Piaget