DP Moral Critical Analysis

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  • Created by: Psych951
  • Created on: 09-05-19 18:46

DP Moral Critical Analysis

Advantages

  • Evidence suggests possible innate preferences for moral behaviour, potentially due to adaptive evolutionary function
  • Kohlberg's model aligns with developmental trends and there is support for the invariant order aligning with cognitive development
  • Enculturation helps to understand how competing moral biases are overcome to develop distributive justice
  • Preferences against out-group may support evolutionary account of survival
  • Helps to understand successful functioning in social interactions and can understand deficits in functioning

Disadvantages

  • Only social factors, not evolutionary, can account for the nature/content of moral behaviour and reasoning
  • Kohlberg's model overgeneralises the concept of morality and overgeneralises to other cultures
  • Little understanding of the processes needed to overcome selfish bias in distributive justice
  • Theories fail to explain inconsistency between moral reasoning and behaviour
  • Altruism is grounded in social cues
  • Parenting techniques largely impact moral reasoning and behaviour
  • Kohlberg's moral dilemmas do not allow assessment of infants
  • Studies may be ethically questionable due to modelling antisocial behaviour
  • Evolutionary adaptiveness explanation  cannot be falsified

Evaluation

It is clear that socialisation processes have a large impact on moral development, which may help to understand inconsistencies. However, despite some methodology issues, evidence clearly supports the idea that moral development is based on and guided by innate preferences for moral behaviour. 

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