ABSTRACT
All of morality, in Piaget's view, consists of a system of rules, and the task of genetic psychology is to determine how it is that children come to know these rules and, critically, come to respect them. In The Moral Judgment of the Child Piaget reports a wide range of empirical evidence that documents the developmental characteristics of these two broad moral orientations. Immanent justice is the belief that moral laws are immanent in the forces of nature and that the physical universe will automatically exact retribution even when adults fail to detect a transgression. The social learning approach, in contrast, suggests that moral judgments are learned the way other behaviors are learned, through imitation, modeling, and reinforcement. The critique of the domains approach goes to the very heart of Piaget's theory of moral judgment.
