Steven Pinker The Moral Instinct

This paper is written to examine various influences on the moral development of young children. Specifically, the paper will speak to the definition of moral development, the views held by educators Piaget and Kohlberg on this area of development in young children and the application of moral development theories by Early Childhood Educators. Theories posited by Sigmund Freud with regards to the psychological development of children in the early childhood arena will be discussed as well. Suggestions for parents on supporting the moral development of their children will also be addressed.

Children ask countless questions as they mature. Children often turn to their parents for guidance. If a parent is unable or unwilling to answer these questions, a child, left to their own devices, will look for answers from their friends, the internet, and other authority figures. In his article “I Listen to My Parents and I Wonder What They Believe,” Robert Cole explains that children have an inborn desire to build their own morals by questioning authority figures around them, especially their parents. Therefore, A parent’s guidance influences a child’s morals as he/she develops.

Hypothesis and overview of the essay (approximately 1 to 2 pages) This section should focus on using clear, concise writing to introduce your argumentative position based on the "Moral Instinct" editorial.

On the other hand, some parents force their values on their children. A balanced moral upbringing emboldens children to hold their beliefs with confidence. An excessive amount of influence from parents shelters a child from other helpful perspectives. When a parent forces his/her own opinion on a child without any true reasoning, the child asks others their opinions on the topic.

Infants are taught to show respect to adults along with other people by morals. Parents fight to enforce these values into their children for their own personal good with establishing what’s considered right and wrong. Moral values teach an individual that being honest improves the chance to be recognized while achieving their goals. The important role in moral values is overall stability.

Children do not live in ignorance to the social and moral matters in the world. They perceive the issues that plague the world and need answers. Some parents worry their children will lose their innocence once educated on moral guidelines. Yet, the multiple channels of moral worldviews a child receives draw a blurry line for a child to follow. Robert Coles expounds upon these topics in his article, “I Listen to My Parents and I Wonder What They Believe.” Parent’s failure to provide their child with a moral worldview detrimentally affects the way children develop their own thoughts.

As soon as birth, children are exposed to new things; new life experiences that will develop the path of which direction their life will take. Adolescence is the most important time in a child’s life because it is where they learn appropriate behavior from their family and the outside world. Some children are able to use these experiences to differentiate at an early age what is right and what is wrong and hopefully carry this into adulthood. What happens when children are exposed to the wrong experiences at an early age? What happens if children assume that what they are seeing is okay because one of their parents are

Author Steven Pinker’s essay, "The Moral Instinct," states that we have a tendency to rationalize rather than use reason when we make our moral judgments we then moralize and search for a reason later. He outlines this with a few hypothetical circumstances, including sex between brother and sister, using the American flag as a cleaning cloth, and eating a dog. Pinker also shows the apparently odd gap between individuals decision to moralize something and their justification for doing so with the "Trolley Problem," which found that several different people could legitimize their decision to pull a switch to execute one and spare many however, couldn't push a man onto a track to kill one and spare many. Pinker clarifies that moral goodness is

In “The Moral Instinct” Steven Pinker claims that people can think that something is wrong, but cannot prove that it is amoral. Pinker explains that this is because morality varies from person to person. Another point in the essay is made about whether the greater good is equal to helping the greater number of people in a situation. In some of his examples the moral dilemma involves killing one person to save five other people’s lives. Both scenarios are very similar, but one involves using a lever to switch the direction of the trolley, while the other involves throwing a person off of a bridge to save the other five people. Each scenario involve the same end result; one person dying to save the other five people, but people are less likely

A quite popular idea is that a person's childhood has the greatest influence on their personality and their moral standards. As stated by Patrick Crispen in Criminal Minds, a child's morals are learned and set by the age of ten years old (67). Also stated in Criminal Minds, is the assumption that a sixth-grade teacher could look at a class of students and determine who will be successful, who will be a "trouble-maker", and so forth (70). This is a deeper example of how

In contrast, allowing children to be passive makes it more difficult to teach them to be doers. Passivity leads to more passivity, not to action.” Morality already is a grey area. There are numerous ways to weave around scenarios, and there are endless laws that are determined by different cultures as right and wrong. Thus the importance to teach and educate children in how to be moral remains a

In The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, the genre choice of the graphic novel vividly portrays the life-experience that Satrapi herself gone through as a youth growing up in Iran back in the 1980s. Satrapi utilizes a unique drawing style to emphasize the influence that the Islamic Republic has brought to her. The recurring action of teachers implanting Islamic values in children throughout Marjane’s education in Iran is demonstrated through a set of related images, which implicitly reflect on the destruction of childhood that is caused by a totalitarian regime. For instance, the teachers force the girls to wear veils on page1 and tells the parents that “either [girls] obey the law, or [they are] expelled” (Satrapi, 98) later on. Also, the background of these images takes place where Iran is involved in both revolution and war; it contributes to children’ miserable situation even more.

In Iran, full of corruption, citizens want change. Thousands of people, young and old, are dying due to their different beliefs. Nonetheless, people continue to fight for justice and express their opinions. The graphic novel Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, explores a child’s perspective of the Iranian Revolution. Marjane sees the violence and lives through the terror of the Revolution, but she tries to fabricate the best out of the horrible situation. Throughout the book, the reader begins to see how children become involved in expressing their opinions. In Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, the author explores Marjane's development from a naive, biased girl to an involved citizen, in order to illustrate how the Iranian Revolution

The theory of moral development, advanced by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg is one of the most well-known persuasive theories in the field of cognitive science and stems from the work of Jean Piaget, which hypothesizes on the direct correlation that exists between moral and cognitive development. Kohlberg speaks of the appearance and understanding of what is right and wrong from childhood to adulthood and explains by this transition through the identification of various levels of morality known as pre-conventional, conventional and post conventional. People will make decisions based on the understanding of the possible outcome and through reasoning of morals. (Target Concept)

Children develop their ability to think and act morally through several stages. If they fail to reach the conventional stage, in which adolescents realize that their parents and society have rules that should be followed because they are morally right to follow, they might well engage in harmful behavior. Whereas boys tend to use formal rules to decide what is right or wrong, girls tend to take personal relationships into account.