ABSTRACT
The main topics of this chapter are children’s constructions of moral judgments bearing on welfare, justice, and rights through social interactions, actions, and reflections upon thought and action. Development also involves the construction of other domains of thought, particularly the conventional and personal. Consequently, decisions about social situations can entail recognition of different components within the moral domain, as well as other domains. Social decisions involve processes of coordination or the weighing and balancing of different considerations and goals. As a means of illustrating processes of coordination in behaviors, the acts of researchers and participants in the studies by Milgram on so-called obedience to authority are analyzed. The actions of participants are interpreted not as obedience but as entailing conflicts between concerns with pain inflicted by the instructed supposed electric shocks and concerns with fulfilling the scientific aims of the research enterprise (similar to the processes involved in the decisions of the researchers). More generally, research on children’s judgments of the roles of authorities is considered, showing that across ages, they make distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate commands from persons in positions of authority. Processes of coordination are involved in the development of moral thinking and in judgments leading to actions.
