ABSTRACT
Interpretations of moral motivation in science, philosophy and psychology are discussed. In science, moral behaviour is caused by individual’s biological and social needs, and in rationalistic philosophy moral behaviour is motivated by pure reason – the sheer consciousness of necessity of the moral imperative. In contrast, from the perspective of psychology a free moral action has to be motivated by a feeling that cannot be reduced to natural causes – the feeling of a person’s participatory identification with the moral rule. Precursors of the development of psychological moral motivation in children are discussed, such as language, voluntary behaviour and the ability to cheat. A new method for diagnostic of the presence of psychological moral motivation – the BAB task – is proposed. Experiments are presented that showed the presence of such moral motivation in approximately 20% of 3- to 6-year-old children. Intervention experiment is reviewed that compared two explanations of the emergence of psychological moral motivation: ‘cognitive identification’ and ‘emotional identification’ scenarios. It is argued that emotional identification with a moral norm in the situation of free moral choice cannot be explained in cause–effect terms and belongs to the domain of the Inexplicable.
