Going Above and Beyond? Early Reasoning About Which Moral Acts Matter Most

• In Event: Developing Judgments about Moral Obligation

Abstract

Part of being a good person involves fulfilling one’s obligations, such as keeping promises and supporting friends and family. But there is more to moral goodness. Moral exemplars like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. don’t simply follow the rules; they go above and beyond what is required of them. That is, they perform supererogatory acts. The notion that morally supererogatory actions are more praiseworthy than morally obligatory acts—one is likely to receive more praise for donating a kidney than for refraining from killing their spouse—is an idea that pervades much of modern western philosophy, and appears to be part of our everyday moral intuitions.

If this reasoning is part of our fundamental moral psychology, we might expect it to be universal and early emerging. One approach to exploring this is to investigate the developmental trajectory of moral praise and blame for supererogatory and obligatory acts. To explore this question, we conducted three studies examining both how adults reason about supererogatory actions, and the origins of this reasoning in 5- to 8-year-old children.

In Experiment 1, 80 children and 413 adults were asked to judge how morally good it was to perform a series of eight obligatory (e.g., telling the truth) or supererogatory (e.g., shoveling a neighbor’s driveway) actions. As expected, adults rated supererogatory acts higher then obligatory ones (p < .001). However, children gave the opposite response, rating obligatory actions as more morally good than supererogatory ones (p = .059).

Experiment 2 followed the same design as Experiment 1, and also included questions designed to confirm that children understood, like adults, which actions were obligatory, and which were supererogatory. Eighty children and 101 adults were shown the same scenarios and asked the same questions as in Experiment 1, as well as whether it would have been ok if the character had not done the action. Along with replicating the results of Experiment 1, children judged, like adults, that supererogatory actions were not mandatory but obligatory actions were (p < .001).

Experiment 3 set up a strong test of these findings. Eighty children and 120 adults were asked to make a forced choice between two characters who performed the same morally good action, but one character did so out of obligation (e.g., their parent told them to) while the other did it voluntarily (e.g., they thought to do it on their own). Again, we replicated the developmental difference observed in the previous studies. Adults judged that the character who did the action voluntarily (e.g., in a supererogatory manner) was more morally good (p < .001) while young children judged the character who was obligated to do it as more morally good (p = .001).

Across three experiments, adults tended to judge supererogatory actions as more morally praiseworthy, while 5- to 8-year-olds tended to judge obligatory actions as more morally praiseworthy. These results reveal intriguing developmental differences in judgments about supererogatory actions, and lead to the prediction that future research may uncover some striking cultural differences as well.

Authors

• Umang Khan, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Maia Jaffer-Diaz

• Anahid Najafizadeh

• Christina Starmans, University of Toronto