ABSTRACT
The behavior-analytic viewpoint of the processes underlying the development of moral behavior patterns emphasizes that those behavior patterns are determined by the environmental contingencies effected by the consequences resulting from those behaviors. This chapter focuses on the processes of acquisition of overt moral actions, without appealing to value principles, developmental-stage notions, or dimensions of sociomoral knowledge. Mechanisms that underlie moral action are outlined for pre- and post-language acquisition individuals, and take into account behaviors that are public or private, physical or verbal, and that may denote altruism, empathy, self-sacrifice, sharing, caring, conscience, justice, loyalty, or virtue. In a developmental context, it is shown how the operant-learning paradigm—with its emphasis on action and extrinsic stimuli—can account for both moral behavior and moral rules as joint outcomes of conditioning processes. Also explained are how the mechanisms underlying direct contingency-shaped behaviors and rule-governed behaviors operate to determine the child’s moral acts in diverse contexts, even acts that, by leading unambiguously to apparent unpleasant or aversive consequences, could seem paradoxical. Moral behavior is seen as under the control of nonverbalizable direct contingencies in prelinguistic children, and later, with advances in the child’s language skills, much of that behavior is seen as coming under the control of verbalizable explicit rules (including both those that are self formulated and those provided by others). Because the social-conditioning approach to moral development outlined here deals with action outcomes as well as with antecedent and concurrent verbalizations of action (including verbal reasoning and moral judgment that have been 154the focus of cognitive-developmental theories), it can provide some leads on how to deal with overt actions in the moral realm. This approach details the features of the operant-learning paradigm to explain the very same phenomena in the moral realm that nonbehavioral cognitive and other theories have targeted, at the same time that it attempts to fill in the details that Kohlberg’s and Piaget’s cognitive-developmental postulates require.
