Making sense of Turiel's dispute with Kohlberg: the case of the child's moral competence

This study attempts to make conceptual and empirical sense of Turiel's dispute with Kohlberg concerning the child's moral competence. Forty-eight children from two age-levels (24 6-year-olds, and 24 8-year-olds; Experiment 1), and 20 young adults aged between 17 and 21 years (Experiment 2) were confronted with hypothetical situations in which two apparently immoral acts (stealing and lying) were right if a principled or reversible exchange of perspectives were adopted. Contrary to what would be expected from Turiel's claim about the child's sophisticated moral competence, children, but not young adults, judged the acts at hand more in accord with a pattern of pseudo-moral necessity or fuzzy traces of morality than with a pattern of a developing idea of principled morality or “necessary” moral knowledge. The paper also argues that one is in a better position to make sense of Turiel's dispute with Kohlberg when one becomes aware of (a) Wittgenstein's idea of grammatical investigations, (b) Piaget's distinction between false, true, and necessary (cognitive) knowledge, and (c) Kohlberg's distinction between pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional moral reasoning as a distinction that, to an extent, corresponds in the moral domain to Piaget's epistemic types of knowledge in the cognitive domain.