Paper Human Development 2002;45:104–124 Why Be Moral? A Conceptual Model from Developmental Psychology

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/hde Key Words Moral development W Moral motivation W Moral identity W Conceptual models This paper is concerned with the relationships among moral reasoning, moral motivation, moral action, and moral identity. It explores how major figures in devel-opmental psychology have understood these relationships, with attention to sche-matic models or conceptual maps. After treating Piaget, Kohlberg, Rest, Colby and Damon, and Blasi, I present a critical synthesis, a conceptual model of how develop-mental psychology might best answer the question, Why be moral? Copyright © 2002 S. Karger AG, Basel Under the powerful influence first of Jean Piaget and then of Lawrence Kohlberg, development psychology has paid relatively less attention to issues of moral motivation than of moral cognition. For Kohlberg, motivation was practically subsumed under cognition. As Kohlberg reports in his essay ‘Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the Platonic View’:... as I have tried to trace the stages of development of morality and to use these stages as the basis of a moral education program, I have realized more and more that its implication was the reassertion of the Platonic faith in the power of the rational good. [1970, p. 57] Although he qualified this philosophical perspective – ‘In speaking of a Platonic view, I am not discarding my basic Deweyism... ’ [1970, p. 59] – many psychologists (and moral philosophers) have objected to what they consider Kohlberg’s excessive rationalism (e.g., Aron, Carr, Flanagan; for a summary of ‘Psychological and Philosoph-ical Challenges to Kohlberg’s Approach’, see Rest et al. [1999] ch. 2). Some developmen