Blackwell Reference Online

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The phrase “moral development” suggests to many educated people the field of moral psychology. This is the academic discipline that is often thought to have the most profound insight into the processes of moral formation. Others, however, think of traditional religion; religious communities, they think, are the primary carriers of the ethical truths and processes of socialization needed to create moral people. Immediately, then, the term moral development raises the specter of the conflict between religion and science. Psychology, it is thought, is a science; religion, it is held, is about our relation to the ultimate about which science, some believe, can tell us very little (see chapter 3).Behind the conflict between science and religion on the moral development of persons is the deeper philosophical conflict between what is generally called “foundationalism” and “non-foundationalism.” This is a conflict about how genuine knowledge, both moral and scientific, should be acquired. Foundationalists believe that it comes from rejecting or bracketing tradition and building knowledge on the basis of objective sense data, scientific experiment, or certain irrefutable a priori ideas. The foundationalists believe that true knowledge about the moral development of persons will be discovered scientifically, most likely from the various fields of psychology, whether psychoanalytic, humanistic, ... log in or subscribe to read full text