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The Moral Judgment
of the Child
The Moral Judgment
of the Child
B 7
JEAN PIAGET
Doctor of Science > Professor at ike University of Geneva, Director of the
International Bureau of Education, Co-Director of the Institut
f. J. Rousseau^ Geneva; Author of "Language and Thought
of the Child t " "Judgment and Reasoning in the Child"
"The Child's Conception of the World," "The
Child** Conception of Causality "
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SEVEN COLLABORATORS
THE FREE PRESS
GLENCOE, ILLINOIS
Translated by
MARJORY GABAIN
Printed in U.S.A,
CONTENTS
FACE
FOREWORD ........ vii
CHAPTER I. THE RULES OF THE GAME . . i
i. The rules of the game of marbles, p. 4. 2. The
interrogatory and its general results, p. 13. 3. The
practice of rules. I. The first two stages, p. 19. 4. The
practice of rules. II. Third and fourth stages, p. 32.
5. Consciousness of rules. I. The first two stages,
p. 41. 6. The consciousness of rules. II. Third stage,
p. 56. 7. A girls' game : " flet cachant ", p. 69.
8. Conclusion : I. Motor rules and the two kinds of
respect, p. 76. 9. Conclusion : II. Respect for the
group or respect for persons. Search for a guiding
hypothesis, p. 95.
CHAPTER II. ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL
REALISM ..... 104
i. The method, p. 107. 2. Objective responsibility.
I. Clumsiness and stealing, p. 116. 3. Objective
responsibility. II. Lying, p. 135. 4. Lying and the
two kinds of respect, p. 159. 5. Conclusion. Moral
realism, p. 171. General conclusion, p. 192.
CHAPTER III. COOPERATION AND THE DEVELOP-
MENT OF THE IDEA OF JUSTICE . 195
i. The problem of punishments and retributive justice,
p. 197. 2. Collective and communicable responsibility,
p. 231. 3. Immanent Justice, p. 250. 4. Retributive
justice and distributive justice, p. 262.- 5. Equality
and authority, p, 275. 6. Justice between children,
p. 297. 7, Conclusion ; the idea of justice, p. 312.
CHAPTER IV. THE Two MORALITIES OF THE CHILD
AND TYPES OF SOCIAL RELATIONS 326
i. The theories of Durkheim and Fauconnet on respon-
sibility, p. 327. 2. Durkheim 's doctrine of moral
authority. I. Introduction. Durkheim's, p. 341.-
3. The theory of authority according to Durkheim.
II. Moral education, p. 355. 4- M. Pierre liovet's
theory, p. 375. - 5, The point of view of J, M. Baldwin,
p. 392.- 6. General conclusions, p. 401.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS ...... 415
INDEX OF NAMES ...... 418
CM 2 f> 3 4 8
FOREWORD
READERS will find in this book no direct analysis of child
morality as it is practised in home and school life or in
children's societies. It is the moral judgment that we
propose to investigate, not moral behaviour or sentiments.
With this aim in view we questioned a large number of
children from the Geneva and Neuchcltel schools and
held conversations with them, similar to those we had
had before on their conception of the world and of
causality. The present volume contains the results of
these conversations.
First we had to establish what was meant by respect
for rules from the child's point of view. This is why we
have begun with an analysis of the rules of a social game
in the obligatory aspect which these possess for a bona
fide player. From the rules of games we have passed
to the specifically moral rules laid down by adults and
we have tried to see what idea the child forms of these
particular duties. Children's ideas on lying were selected
as being a privileged example. Finally we have examined
the notions that arose out of the relations in which the
children stood to each other and we were thus led to
discuss the idea of justice as our special theme.
Having reached this point, our results seemed to us
sufficiently consistent to be compared to some of the
hypotheses now in favour among sociologists and writers
on the psychology of morals. It is to this final task
that we have devoted our fourth chapter.
We are more conscious than anybody of the defects
as of the advantages of the method we have used. The
great danger, especially in matters of morality, is that
of making the child say whatever one wants him to say.
vii
Vlll
FOREWORD
There is no infallible remedy for this ; neither the good
faith of the questioner nor the precautionary methods
which we have laid stress upon elsewhere * are sufficient.
The only safeguard lies in the collaboration of other
investigators, If other psychologists take up our questions
from different view-points and put them to children of
differing social environment, it will be possible sooner or
later to separate the objective from the arbitrary elements
in the results which we bring forward in this work. An
analogous task has been undertaken in various countries
with regard to child logic and children's ideas on causality ;
and while certain exaggerations of which we had been
guilty came to light in this way, the results up to date
in no way tend to discourage us in the use of the method
we have adopted.
The advantages of this method seem to us to be that
it makes evident what observation left to itself can only
surmise. During the last few years, for example, I have
been engaged in taking down the spontaneous remarks
made by my two little girls, to whom 1 have never set
the questions examined in The Child's Conception of the
World or in The Child's Conception of Causality. Now,
"broadly speaking, the tendencies to Realism, Animism,
Artificialism and dynamic Causality, etc., come very
clearly to light, but the meaning of these children's most
interesting " whys ", as of many of their chance remarks,
would have almost completely eluded me if I had not in
the past questioned hundreds of children personally on
the same subjects. A child's spontaneous remark is, of
course, more valuable than all the questioning in the
world. But in child psychology such a remark cannot
be seen in its right perspective without the work of
preparation constituted by those very interrogatories.
i See The Child's Conception of the World, Kegan Paul, which in the
sequel will be designated by the letters C.W. My other books, Language
and Thought in the Child, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, and
The Child's Conception of the World, will be referred to by the initials
L.T., /.JR., and C.VK. respectively.
FOREWORD ix
The present book on child morality is just such a
preliminary piece of work. It is my sincere hope tljat
it may supply a scaffolding which those living with
children and observing their spontaneous reactions can
use in erecting the actual edifice. In a sense, child
morality throws light on adult morality. If we want to
form men and women nothing will fit us so well for the
task as to study the laws that govern their formation.
The Moral Judgment of the Child
CHAPTER I
THE RULES OF THE GAME 1
CHILDREN'S games constitute the most admirable social
institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as
played by boys, contains an extremely complex system
of rules, that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of
its own. Only the psychologist, whose profession obliges
him to become familiar with this instance of common
law, and to get at the implicit morality underlying it, is
in a position to estimate the extraordinary wealth of these
rules by the difficulty he experiences in mastering their
details.
If we wish to gain any understanding of child morality,
it is obviously with the analysis of such facts as these
that we must begin. All morality consists in a system
of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought
for in the respect which the individual acquires for these
rules. The reflective analysis of Kant, the sociology of
Durkheim, or the individualistic psychology of Bovet
all meet on this point. The doctrines begin to diverge
only from the moment that it has to be explained how
the mind comes to respect these rules. For our part,
it will be in the domain of child psychology that we
shall undertake the analysis of this " how ".
Now, most of the moral rules which the child learns
to respect he receives from adults, which means that he
i With the collaboration of Mme V. J, Piaget, MM M. Lambercier
and L. Martinez.
A I
2 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
receives them after they have been fully elaborated, and
often elaborated, not in relation to him and as they are
needed, but once and for all and through an uninterrupted
succession of earlier adult generations.
In the case of the very simplest social games, on the
contrary, we are in the presence of rules which have been
elaborated by the children alone. It is of no moment
whether these games strike us as " moral " or not in
their contents. As psychologists we must ourselves adopt
the point of view, not of the adult conscience, but of
child morality. Now, the rules of the game of marbles
are handed down, just like so-called moral realities, from
one generation to another, and are preserved solely by the
respect that is -felt for them by individuals. The sole
difference is that the relations in this case are only those
that exist between children. The little boys who are
beginning to play are gradually trained by the older ones
in respect for the law ; and in any case they aspire from
their hearts to the virtue, supremely characteristic of
human dignity, which consists in making a correct use of
the customary practices of a game. As to the older
ones, it is in their power to alter the rules. If this is not
" morality ", then where does morality begin ? At least,
it is respect for rules, and it appertains to an enquiry
like ours to begin with the study of facts of this order.
Of course the phenomena relating to the game of marbles
are not among the most primitive. Before playing with
his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is
subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations,
and even before language he becomes conscious of certain
obligations. These circumstances even exercise, as we
shall see, an undeniable influence upon the way in which
the rules of games are elaborated. But in the case of
play institutions, adult intervention is at any rate reduced
to the minimum. We are therefore in the presence here
of realities which, if not amongst the most elementary,
should be classed nevertheless amongst the most spon-
taneous and the most instructive.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 3
With regard to game rules there are two phenomena
which it is particularly easy to study : first the practice
of rules, i.e. the way in which children of different ages
effectively apply rules : second the consciousness of rules,
i.e. the idea which children of different ages form of
the character of these game rules, whether of something
obligatory and sacred or of something subject to their
own choice, whether of heteronomy or autonomy.
It is the comparison of these two groups of data which
constitutes the real aim of this chapter. For the relations
which exist between the practice and the consciousness
of rules are those which will best enable us to define the
psychological nature of moral realities.
One word more. Before embarking upon an analysis
of the practice or of the consciousness of rules, we must
first give some account of the actual content of these
rules. We must therefore establish the social data of the
problem. But we shall confine ourselves only to what
is indispensable. We have not attempted to establish
the sociology of the game of marbles ; this would
have meant finding out how this game was played in
the past and how it is now played in different parts of
the world (it is actually played by negro children). Even
confining ourselves to French Switzerland, we believe
it would need several years of research to discover all
the local variants of the game and, above all, to outline
the history of these variants throughout the last few
generations. Such an enquiry, which might be useful to
the sociologist, is superfluous for the psychologist. All
the latter needs in order to study how rules are learned
is a thorough knowledge of a given custom in actual
use, just as in order to study child language, all he needs
is to know a given dialect, however localized, without
troubling to reconstruct all its semantic and phonetic
changes in time and space. We shall therefore confine
ourselves to a short analysis of the content of the game
as it is played in Geneva and NeucMtel, in the districts
where we conducted our work.
4 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
i. THE RULES OF THE GAME OF MARBLES. Three
essential facts must be noted if we wish to analyse
simultaneously the practice and the consciousness of rules.
The first is that among children of a given generation
and in a given locality, however small, there is never one
single way of playing marbles, there are quantities of
ways. There is the " square game " with which we shall
occupy ourselves more especially. A square is drawn on
the ground and a number of marbles placed within it ;
the game consists in aiming at these from a distance and
driving them out of the enclosure. There is the game of
" courate " where two players aim at each other's marble
in indefinite pursuit. There is the game of " troyat "
from " trou " (=hole) or " creux " (= hollow), where the
marbles are piled into a hole and have to be dislodged
by means of a heavier marble, and so on. Every child
is familiar with several games, a fact that may help
according to his age to reinforce or to weaken his belief
in the sacred character of rules.
In the second place, one and the same game, such as
the Square game, admits of fairly important variations
according to when and where it is played. As we had
occasion to verify, the rules of the Square game are not
the same in four of the communes of NeucMtel l situated
at 2-3 kilometres from each other. They are not the
same in Geneva and in Neuchtel. They differ, on
certain points, from one district to another, from one
school to another in the same town. In addition to this,
as through our collaborators 1 kindness we were able to
establish, variations occur from one generation to another.
A student of twenty assured us that in his village the
game is no longer played as it was " in his days ". These
variations according to time and place are important,
because children are often aware of their existence. A
child who has moved from one town, or merely from one
school building to another will often explain to, us that
such and such a rule is in force in one place but not in
1 Neuch&tel, La Coudre, Hauterive and Saint-Blaise.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 5
tlie other. Very often, too, a child will tell us that his
father played differently from him. Last of all, there
is the boy of 14 who has given up playing because he is
beginning to feel superior to the little ones, and who,
according to his temperament,. laughs or mouras over the
fact that the customs of his generation are going by the
board instead of being piously preserved by the rising
generation,
Finally, and clearly as a result of the convergence of
these local or historical currents, it will happen that one
and the same game (like the Square game) played in the
playground of one and the same school admits on certain
points of several different rules. Children of n to 13 are
familiar with these variants, and they generally agree
before or during the game to choose a given usage to the
exclusion of others. These facts must therefore be borne
in mind, for they undoubtedly condition the judgment
which the child will make on the value of rules.
Having mentioned these points, we shall give a brief
exposition of the rules of the Square game, which will
serve as a prototype, and we shall begin by fixing the
child's language so as to be able to understand the reports
of the conversations which will be quoted later on.
Besides, as is so often the case in child psychology, some
aspects of this language are in themselves highly in-
structive.
A marble is called " un marbre " in NeucMtel and " un
coeillu " or " un mapis " in Geneva. There are marbles
of different value. The cement marble has the place of
honour. The " carron " which is smaller and made of
the more brittle clay is of less value because it costs less.
The marbles that are used for throwing l and are not
placed inside the square are called according to their
consistency " corna " (if in carnelian), " ago ", or " agathe ",
1 The English technical equivalent is the generic term " shooter "
which we shall use in the interrogatories given below. For the rest
we have generally retained the French words as one cannot be sure
that the English terms mean exactly the same. [Trans.]
6 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
" cassine " (glass ball with coloured veins), " plomb "
(large marble containiBg lead), etc. Each is worth so
many marbles or so many " canons ". To throw a
marble is to " tirer " (shoot) and to touch another marble
with ones own is to " tanner " (hit).
Then coifies a set of terms of ritual consecration, that is,
of expressions which the player uses in order to announce
that he is going to perform such-and-such an operation and
which thus consecrate it ritually as an accomplished fact.
For, once these words have been uttered, the opponent
is powerless against his partner's decision ; whereas if he
takes the initiative by means of the terms of ritual
interdiction, which we shall examine in a moment, he will
in this way prevent the operation which he fears. For
example, in order to play first in circumstances when it
is possible to do so, the child will say (at NeucMtel)
lt prems " obviously a corruption of the word ' ' premier "
(first). If he wants to go back to the line that all the
players start from at fheir first turn and which is called
the " coche 'V he simply says " coche ". If he wishes
to advance or retreat to a distance twice as great, he
says " deux coches ", or if to a distance of one, two, or
three hand-breadths he says " one (or two, or three)
empans " (spans). If he wishes to place himself in
relation to the square at a distance equal to that at
which he finds himself at a given moment, but in another
direction (so as to avoid the probable attacks of his
opponent) he says " du mien" (mine), and if he wishes
to prevent Ms opponent from doing the same thing he
says " du tien " (yours). This applies to Neuchatel.
In Geneva these displacements are expressed by the
terms " faire une entasse " or " entorse " (to make a
twist). If you wish to give up your turn and be " dead "
until your opponent has moved, you say '" coup passe "
(my turn passed).
As soon as these terms have been uttered in circum-
stances which of course are carefully regulated by a
1 English, pitch-line (sometimes). [Trans.]
THE RULES OF THE GAME 7
whole juridical system, the opponent has to submit.
But if the opponent wishes to anticipate these operations,
it is sufficient for him to pronounce the terms of ritual
interdiction, which at Neuchatel are simply the same
terms but preceded by the prefix " fan ", from " defendu "
(forbidden). For example, " fan-du-mien **, " fan-du-
tien ", " fan-coche ", " fan-coup-passe ", etc. Some
children, not having understood this prefix, which does
not, after all, correspond with anything in the speech they
hear around them, say " femme-du-tien ", " femme-
coche ", etc.
Two more particularly suggestive terms of consecration
should be noted, which are .current among the little
Genevans : " glaine " and " toumike ". When a player
places a marble of superior value in the square, thinking
that he has put down an ordinary marble (say an " ago "
instead of a " coeillu ") he is naturally allowed, if he has
noticed his mistake, to pick up his " ago " and put an
ordinary marble in its place. Only a dishonest opponent
would take advantage of his partner's absent-mindedness
and pocket this " ago " after having hit it. The children
we questioned on this point were unanimous in pronounc-
ing such procedure equivalent to stealing. But if, on the
other hand, the opponent spots his partner's mistake in
time and utters the word " toumike " or (by doubling
the last syllable) " toumikemik ", then the absent-minded
player no longer has the right to pick up his " ago " ;
he must leave it on the ground like a common-or-garden
" coeillu ", and if one of the players succeeds in hitting it,
this player will be allowed in all fairness to take possession
of it. This shows us a very interesting example of a
word consecrating a mistake and by doing so changing
a dishonest action into one that is legitimate and recognized
as such by all. We have here for the first time an example
of that formalism, which belongs to certain aspects of
childish morality, and into whose nature we shall go more
deeply in the sequel in connection with objective
responsibility.
8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
In the same way, the word "glaine" legitimatizes
piracy in certain well-defined conditions. When one of
the players has succeeded, either by luck or by skill,
in winning all his partners' marbles, it is a point of honour
similar to that which sociologists designate with the
term " potlatch " that he should offer to play a fresh
set and should himself place in the square the necessary
marbles, so as to give his less fortunate playmates the
chance of recovering a portion of their possessions. If
he refuses, of course no law can force him to do this ;
he has won and there is the end of it. If, however, one
of the players pronounces the word " glaine " then the
whole gang falls- upon the miser, throws him down,
empties his pockets and shares the booty. This act of
piracy which in normal times is profoundly contrary to
morality (since the marbles collected by the winner
constitute his lawfully acquired possession) is thus changed
into a legitimate act and even into an act of retributive
justice approved by the general conscience when the
word " glaine " has been pronounced. 1
At NeucMtel we noticed neither " glaine " nor " tou-
mik ", but, on the other hand, we found " cougac ".
When one of the players has won too much (therefore in
the situation just described) his defeated partner can
force him to offer to play another set by uttering the
word " cougac " (probably derived from coup-gagne just
as " prems " was from premier). If the winner wishes to
evade the obligation laid upon him by the fateful word,
he has only to anticipate the blow by saying " fan-cougac ".
Our reason for emphasizing these linguistic peculiarities
is only to show from the first the juridical complexity of
game rules. It is obvious that these facts could be
analysed more fundamentally from other points of view.
1 This word, " glaine " really has a wider sense. According to several
children it entitles whoever pronounces it simply to pick up all the
marbles that are on the ground when a discussion arises about them,
or if a player forgets to take possession of what is his due. It is in
this sense that the word is taken, for instance, in Philippe Monnier's,
L* Livre de Blaise (3rd ed., p. 135).
THE RULES OF THE GAME 9
One could, for example, work out the whole psychology
of consecration and interdiction in connection with the
child and, above all, the psychology of social games.
But these questions are really outside our scope. 1 Let us
therefore return to what is the essential point so far as we
are concerned, namely, the rules themselves.
The Square game thus consists, in a word, in putting
a few marbles in a square, and in taking possession of
them by dislodging them with a special marble, bigger
than the rest. But when it comes to details this simple
schema contains an indefinite series of complications. Let
us take them in order, so as to get some idea of their
richness.
First of all, there is the " pose J> or outlay. One
of the players draws a square and then each places his
" pose ". If there are two players, each one puts down
two, three, or four marbles. If there are three players,
each puts down two marbles. If there are four or more
players, it is customary to put down only one marble
each. The main thing is equality : each one puts down
what the others do. But in order to reach equality the
relative value of the marbles must be taken into account.
For an ordinary marble, you must put down eight
" carrons ". A little " corna " is worth eight " marbres ",
sixteen " carrons ", and so on. The values are carefully
regulated and correspond roughly to the price paid at
the shop round the corner. But alongside of financial
operations proper, there are between children various
exchanges in kind which appreciably alter current
values.
Then the game begins. A certain distance is agreed
upon where the " coche " is drawn ; this is the line from
which the players start. It is drawn parallel to and generally
one or two metres away from one of the sides of the
square, and from it each player will fire his first shot.
1 With regard to social games we are awaiting the publication of
R. Cousinet's book which will incorporate all the valuable material which
this author has been accumulating for, so many years.
io THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
(To " fire " is to throw one's shooter" agathe " or
" comaline " into the square.)
All, therefore, start from the coche. In some games
yon return to the coche at each fresh turn, but it is more
usual after the first shot to play from the place that your
marble has rolled to. Sometimes this rule is limited by
saying that the marble must not be further removed
from the square than the coche. Thus if your marble
has rolled two metres away from the square in any
direction whatsoever, you bring- it back to a distance of
im. 50 if this is the distance at which the coche itself
stands.
But before the game begins you must settle who is to
play first. For the first player has the advantage of
" firing " into a square full of marbles, whereas ,'those
who follow are faced only with what is left after the
gains of the preceding players. In order to know who
is to begin, a series of well-known rites are put in action.
Two children walk towards each other stepping heel to
toe, and whichever steps on the other's toe has the right
to begin. Or else rhymed formula or even syllables
devoid of any meaning are recited in sacramental order.
Each syllable corresponds to a player, and he on whom
the last syllable falls is the lucky one. In addition to
these customary usages there is a method of procedure
peculiar to the game of marbles. Each boy throws his
" shooter " in the direction of the coche or of a line
specially traced for the purpose. Whoever comes nearest
up to the line begins. The others follow in order of
their nearness up to the line. The last to play is the
boy who has gone beyond the coche, and if several have
gone beyond it, the last to play will be the boy whose
marble has gone furthest.
The order of the players having been settled in this
way, the game begins. Each player in turn stands behind
the coche and " fires " into the square. There are three
ways of throwing one's marble : " Piquette " (Engl.,
" shooting ") which consists in projecting the marble by
THE RULES OF THE GAME n
a jerk of the thumb, the marble being placed against the
thumb-nail and kept in place by the first finger ; " Rou-
lette " (Engl., " bowling J> ) which consists simply in
rolling your marble along the ground, and " Poussette "
(EngL, " hunching ") which consists in addition in carrying
your hand along with it over a sufficient distance to correct
the initial direction. Poussette is always banned and
may in this connection be compared to the push stroke
of a bad billiard player. At Neuchatel it is customary
to say " fan-poussette " or again " femme-poussette ".
In Geneva, the simpler expression " defendu de trainer "
(dragging forbidden) is in use. Roulette (" bowling ")
is also generally banned (" fan-roulette ") but is at times
tolerated, in which case everyone will of course have the
right to play in this way, and absolute equality before
the law will even be agreed upon at the beginning of the
game.
The players are therefore throwing in the manner that
has been agreed upon. Suppose one of the marbles
included in the square has been hit. If it has gone outside
the square it becomes the property of the boy who has
dislodged it. If it remains inside the enclosure it cannot
be taken. If, finally, it remains on the line the case is
judged by the partners : a marble which is half outside
is regarded as out, not otherwise. Here, naturally, a
whole lot of subsidiary rules will establish the procedure
in disputed cases. There remains the case of the marble
with which one shoots (the shooter, or taw, etc.) remaining
in the square or failing to lie beyond one of the lines of
the square by at least half of its diameter : its owner
is " cuit " (dished), i.e. he cannot play any more. If this
marble is projected outside the square by that of another
player, it becomes, like the others, the latter's property,
except in the case of special conventions generally agreed
upon at the beginning of the game. Finally, there are
the possible complications arising from cases of rebounding
marbles. A marble that bounces out of the square off
another is sometimes not held to be won, and a fortiori
12 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
in the case of a marble of value. 1 In other cases, every-
'thing that goes outside the enclosure belongs to the
player who has expelled it. The particular cases that
arise in this way are settled in conformity with principles
that are established either before or during the game by
mutual agreement between all the participants.
Then comes the question of the number of " shots "
to be allowed to each. The player who has succeeded
in winning one or more marbles has the right to play
again, and so on, for as long as he wins. But sometimes
the following reservation is made : for the first round in
each game every player plays once in turn, independently
of gains or losses. Here again, therefore, it is a matter
of previous arrangement.
In addition and this is an essential rule everyone
has the right not only to " fire " at the marbles in the
square; but also to " tanner " (hit) his neighbour's shooter,
even outside the enclosure and indeed wherever it may
happen to be in the course of the game. And of course
the great difficulty is to shoot at the square without
placing yourself within reach of your partners. This is
why, when a shot would involve too many risks, you are
allowed to say " coup-passe " and to remain where you
are, provided, of course, that no one has foreseen this
decision and said " fan-coup-passe ". And this, really,
is why you are allowed to change your position provided
you place yourself at the same distance from the square
as before, and provided you first say " du mien " (mine),
unless, once again, your opponent has anticipated your
move by saying " du tien " (yours).
Finally, a series of special rules deserves mention, the
observance of which depends upon the particular town or
school in question. The first player who says " place-
pour-moi " (place for me) is not obliged to take up his
position at one of the corners of the square. Any player
who has succeeded in winning the equivalent of his
" pose " (i.e. two marbles if he has placed two in the
1 This is expressed by saying that the "revenette " does not count.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 13
square, and so on) can say " queue-de-pose " which will
allow him. to have the first shot from the coche in the
next game, and so on.
The game, regulated in this way by an indefinite
number of rules, is carried on until the square is empty.
The boy who has pocketed the largest number of marbles
has won,
2. THE INTERROGATORY AND ITS GENERAL RESULTS.
The rules that we have outlined above constitute a well-
marked social reality, " independent of individuals " (in
Durkheim's sense) and transmitted, like a language, from
one generation to another. This set of customs is obviously
more or less plastic. But individual innovations, just as
in the case of language, succeed only when they meet
a general need and when they are collectively sanctioned
as being in conformity with the " spirit of the game ".
But while fully recognizing the interest attaching to
this sociological aspect of the problem, it was from a
different standpoint that we raised the questions which
we are now going to study. We simply asked ourselves
(i) how the individuals adapt themselves to these rules,
i.e. how they observe rules at each age and level of
mental development ; (2) how far they become conscious
of rules, in other words, what types of obligation result
(always according to the children's ages) from the increasing
ascendancy exercised by rules.
The interrogatory is therefore easy to carry out. During
the first part, it is sufficient to ask the children (we
questioned about 20 boys ranging from 4 to 12-13) how
one plays marbles. The experimenter speaks more or
less as follows. " Here-are some marbles ". (The marbles
are placed on a large baize-covered table beside a piece
of chalk.) " You must show me how to play. When I
was little I used to play a lot, but now I've quite for-
gotten how to. I'd like to play again. Let's play together.
You'll teach me the rules and I'll play with you." The
child then draws a square, takes half the marbles, puts
14 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
down his " pose ", and the game begins. It is important
to bear in mind all possible contingencies of the game and
to ask the child about each. This means that you must
avoid making any sort of suggestions. All you need do
is to appear completely ignorant, and even to make
intentional mistakes so that the child may each time
point out clearly what the rule is. Naturally, you must
take the whole thing very seriously, all through the
game. Then you ask who has won and why, and if
everything is not quite clear, you begin a new set.
It is of paramount importance during this first half
of the interrogatory to play your part in a simple
spirit and to let the child feel a certain superiority
at the game (while not omitting to show by an occasional
good shot that you are not a complete duffer) . In this way
the child is put at his ease, and the information he gives as
to how he plays is all the more conclusive. Many of our
children became absorbed in the game to the extent of treat-
ing me completely as one of them. " You are dished 1 "
cries Ben (10 years) when my marble stops inside the square.
In the case of the little ones, who find difficulty in
formulating the rules which they observe in practice,
the best way is to make them play in pairs. You begin
by playing with one of them in the manner described
above, and ask him to tell you all the rules he knows.
Then you make the same request of the second boy
(the first being no longer present), and finally you bring
the two together and ask them to have a game. This
control experiment is not needed for older children, except
in doubtful cases.
Then comes the second part of the interrogatory, that,
namely, which bears upon the consciousness of rules.
You begin by asking the child if he could invent a new
rule. He generally does this easily enough, but it is
advisable to make sure that it really is a new rule and
not one of the many existing variants of which this
particular child may already have knowledge. " I want
a rule that is only by you, a rule that you've made up
THE RULES OF THE GAME 15
yourself and that no one else knows the rule of N
(the child's name)/' Once the new rule has been formu-
lated, you ask the child whether it could give rise to a
new game : " Would it be all right to play like that
with your pals ? Would they want to play that way ?
etc." The child either agrees to the suggestion or disputes
it. If he agrees, you immediately ask him whether the
new rule is a " fair " rule, a " real " rule, one " like the
others ", and try to get at the various motives that enter
into the answers. If, on the other hand, the child dis-
agrees with all this, you ask him whether the new rule,
could not by being generalized become a real rule. " When
you are a big boy, suppose you tell your new rule to a
lot of children, then perhaps they'll all play that way
and everyone will forget the old rules. Then which rule
will be fairest yours that everyone knows, or the old
one that everyone has forgotten ? " The formula can
naturally be altered in accordance with the turn which
the conversation is taking, but the main point is to find
out whether one may legitimately alter rules and whether
a rule is fair or just because it conforms to general usage
(even newly introduced), or because it is endowed with
an intrinsic and eternal value.
Having cleared up this point it will be easy enough
to ask the two following questions. (i) Have people
always played as they do to-day : " Did your daddy
play this way when he was little, and your grand-dad,
and children in the time of William Tell, Noah, and Adam
and Eve, etc., did they all play the way you showed me,
or differently ? " (2) What is the origin of rules : Are
they invented by children or laid down by parents and
grown-ups in general ?
Sometimes it is best to begin by these last two questions
before asking whether rules can be changed ; this avoids
perse ver at ion, or rather reverses its direction, and so
facilitates the interpretation of the answers. All this
part of the interrogatory, moreover, requires extremely
delicate handling ; suggestion is always ready to occur,
16 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
and the danger of romancing is ever present. But it
goes without saying that the main thing is simply to
grasp the child's mental orientation. Does he believe
in the mystical virtue of rules or in their finality ? Does
he subscribe to a heteronomy of divine law, or is he
conscious of his own autonomy ? This is the only question
that interests us. The child has naturally got no ready-
made beliefs on the origin and endurance of the rules of
his games ; the ideas which he invents then and there are
only indices of his fundamental attitude, and this must
be steadily borne in mind throughout the whole of the
interrogatory.
The results which we obtained from this double inter-
rogatory and which we shall examine in greater detail
later on, are roughly the following.
From the point of view of the practice or application
of rules four successive stages can be distinguished.
A first stage of a purely motor and individual character,
during which the child handles the marbles at the dictation
of his desires and motor habits. This leads to the for-
mation of more or less ritualized schemas, but since play
is still purely individual, one can only talk of motor
rules and not of truly collective rules.
The second may be called egocentric for the following
reasons. This stage begins at the moment when the
child receives from outside the example of codified rules,
that is to say, some time between the ages of two and
five. But though the child imitates this example, he
continues to play either by himself without bothering to
find play-fellows, or with others, but without trying to
win, and therefore without attempting to unify the
different ways of playing. In other words, children of
this stage, even when they are playing together, play
each one " on his own " (everyone can win at once)
and without regard for any codification of rules. This
dual character, combining imitation of others with a
purely individual use of the examples received, we have
designated by the term Egocentrism,
THE RULES OF THE GAME 17
A third stage appears between 7 and 8, which we
shall call the stage of incipient cooperation. Each player
now tries to win, and all, therefore, begin to concern
themselves with the question of mutual control and of
unification of the rules. But while a certain agreement
may be reached in the course of one game, ideas about
the rules in general are still rather vague. In other
words, children of 7-8, who belong to the same class
at school and are therefore constantly playing with each
other, give, when they are questioned separately, disparate
and often entirely contradictory accounts of the rules
observed in playing marbles.
Finally, between the years of n and 12, appears a
fourth stage, which is that of the codification of rules.
Not only is every detail of procedure in the game fixed,
but the actual code of rules to be observed is known to
the whole society. There is remarkable concordance in
the information given by children of 10-12 belonging to
the same class at school, when they are questioned on the
rules of the game and their possible variations.
These stages must of course be taken only for what
they are worth. It is convenient for the purposes of
exposition to divide the children up in age-classes or
stages, but the facts present themselves as a continuum
which cannot be cut up into sections. This continuum,
moreover, is not linear in character, and its general
direction can only be observed by schematizing the
material and ignoring the minor oscillations which render
it infinitely complicated in detail. So that ten children
chosen at random will perhaps not give the impression 1
of a steady advance which gradually emerges from the
interrogatory put to the hundred odd subjects examined
by us at Geneva and NeucMtel.
If, now, we turn to the consciousness of rules we shall
find a progression that is even more elusive in detail,
but no less clearly marked if taken on a big scale. We
may express this by saying that the progression runs
through three stages, of which the second begins during
i8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the egocentric stage and ends towards the middle of the
stage of cooperation (9-10), and of which the third covers
the remainder of this co-operating stage and the whole
of the stage marked by the codification of rules.
During the first stage rules are not yet coercive in
character, either because they are purely motor, or else
(at the beginning of the egocentric stage) because they
are received, as it were, unconsciously, and as interesting
examples rather than as obligatory realities.
During the second stage (apogee of egocentric and
first half of cooperating stage) rules are regarded as
sacred and untouchable, emanating from adults and
lasting forever. Every suggested alteration strikes the
child as a transgression.
Finally, during the third stage, a rule is looked upon
as a law due to mutual consent, which you must respect
if you want to be loyal but which it is permissible to
alter on the condition of enlisting general opinion on
your side.
The correlation between the three stages in the develop-
ment of the consciousness of rules and the four stages
relating to their practical observance is of course only a
statistical correlation and therefore very crude. But
broadly speaking the relation seems to us indisputable.
The collective rule is at first something external to the
individual and consequently sacred to him ; then, as he
gradually makes it his own, it comes to that extent to
be felt as the free product of mutual agreement and an
autonomous conscience. And with regard to practical
use, it is only natural that a mystical respect for laws
should be accompanied by a rudimentary knowledge and
application of their contents, while a rational and well-
founded respect is accompanied by an effective application
of each rule in detail
There would therefore seem to be two types of respect
for rules corresponding to two types of social behaviour.
This conclusion deserves to be closely examined, for if
it holds good, it should be of the greatest value to the
THE RULES OF THE GAME 19
analysis of child morality. One can see at once all that
it suggests in regard to the relation between child and
adult. Take the insubordination of the child towards
its parents and teachers, joined to its sincere respect for
the commands it receives and its extraordinary mental
docility. Could not this be due to that complex of
attitudes which we can observe during the egocentric
stage and which combines so paradoxically an unstable
practice of the law with a mystical attitude towards it ?
And will not cooperation between adult and child, in so
far as it can be realized and in so far as it is facilitated
by co-operation between children themselves, supply the
key to the interiorization of commands and to the auto-
nomy of, the moral consciousness ? Let us therefore not
be afraid of devoting a certain amount of time to the
patient analysis of the rules of a game, for we are here
in possession of a method infinitely more supple, and
consequently more sure, than that of merely questioning
children about little stories, a method which we shall be
obliged to adopt in the latter part of this book.
3. THE PRACTICE OF RULES. L THE FIRST TWO
STAGES. We need not dwell at any length upon the
first stage, as it is not directly connected with our subject.
At the same time, it is important that we should know
whether the rules which come into being previous to any
collaboration between children are of the same type as
collective rules.
Let us give a handful of ten marbles to a child of three
years and four months and take note of its reactions :
Jacqueline has the marbles in her hands and looks
at them with curiosity (it is the first time she has seen
any) ; then she lets them drop on to the carpet. After
this she puts them in the hollow of an arm-chair.
" Aren't they animals? Oh, no. Are they balk? Yes/'
She puts them back on the carpet and lets them drop
from a certain height. She sits on the carpet with her
legs apart and throws the marbles a few inches in front
20 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
of her. She then picks them up and puts them on the
arm-chair and in the same hole as before. (The arm-
chair is studded with buttons which create depressions
in the material.) Then she collects the lot and lets them
drop, first all together, then one by one. After this she
replaces them in the aim-chair, first in the same place
and then in the other holes. Then she piles them up
in a pyramid : " What are marbles ? What do you
think ?..." She puts them on the floor, then back
on to the arm-chair, in the same holes. We both go
out on to the balcony : she lets the marbles drop from a
height to make them bounce,
The following days, Jacqueline again places the marbles
on the chairs and arm-chairs, or puts them into her
little sauce-pan to cook dinner. Or else she simply repeats
the behaviour described above.
Three points should be noted with regard to facts
such as these. In the first place, the lack of continuity
and direction in the sequence of behaviour. The child
is undoubtedly trying first and foremost to understand
the nature of marbles and to adapt its motor schemas to
this novel reality. This is why it tries one experiment
after another : throwing them, heaping them into pyramids
or nests, letting them drop, making them bounce, etc.
But once it has got over the first moments of astonish-
ment, the game still remains incoherent, or rather still
subject to the whim of the moment. On days when the
child plays at cooking dinner, the marbles serve as food
to be stewed in a pot. On days when it is interested in
classifying and arranging, the marbles are put in heaps
in the holes of arm-chairs, and so on. In the general
manner in which the game is carried on there are
therefore no rules.
The second thing to note is that there are certain
regularities of detail, for it is remarkable how quickly
certain particular acts in the child's behaviour become
schematized and even ritualized. The act of collect-
ing the marbles in the hollow of an arm-chair is at
first simply an experiment, but it immediately becomes
a motor schema bound up with the perception of the
THE RULES OF THE GAME 21
marbles. After a few days it is merely a rite, still per-
formed with interest, but without any fresh effort of
adaptation.
In the third place, it is important to note the symbolism 1
that immediately becomes grafted upon the child's motor
schemas. These symbols are undoubtedly enacted in play
rather than thought out, but they imply a certain amount
of imagination : the marbles are food to be cooked, eggs
in a nest, etc.
This being so, the rules of games might be thought to
derive either from rites analogous to those we have just
examined or from a symbolism that has become collective.
Let us briefly examine the genesis and ultimate 'destiny
of these modes of behaviour.
Genetically speaking, the explanation both of rites and
of symbols would seem to lie in the conditions of pre-
verbal motor intelligence. When it is presented with
any new thing, a baby of 5 to 8 months will respond with
a dual reaction; it will accommodate itself to the new
object and it will assimilate the object to earlier motor
schemas. Give the baby a marble, and it will explore
its surface and consistency, but will at the same time
use it as something to grasp, to suck, to rub against the
sides of its cradle, and so on. This assimilation of every
fresh object to already existing motor schemas may be
conceived of as the starting point of ritual acts and
symbols, at any rate from the moment that assimilation
becomes stronger than actual accommodation itself. With
regard to ritual acts, indeed, one is struck by the fact
that from the age of about 8 to 10 months all the child's
motor schemas, apart from moments of adaptation in
the real sense, give rise to a sort of functioning in the
void, in which the child takes pleasure as in a game.
Thus, after having contracted the habit of pressing her face
1 We use the term " symbol " in the sense given to it in the linguistic
school of Saussure, as the contrary of sign. A sign is arbitrary, a
symbol is motivated. It is in this sense, too, that Freud speaks of
symbolic thought.
22 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
against her parents' cheeks, crumpling up her nose and
breathing deeply the while, Jacqueline began to perform
this rite as a joke, crumpling up her nose and breathing
deeply in advance, merely suggesting contact with another
person's face, but without, as before, expressing any
particular affection by the act. Thus from being actual,
and incorporated in an effective adaptation this schema
has become ritualized and serves only as a game. 1 Or
again, Jacqueline in her bath is engaged in rubbing her
hair ; she lets go of it to splash the water. Immediately,
she repeats the movement, touching her hair and the
water alternately, and during the next few days the
schema has become ritualized to such an extent that she
cannot strike the surface of the water without first out-
lining the movement of smoothing her hair. 2 In no way
automatic, this rite is a game that amuses her by its
very regularity. Anyone observing a baby of 10 to
12 months will notice a number of these rites which
undoubtedly anticipate the rules of future games.
As for symbols, they appear towards the end of the
first year and in consequence of the ritual acts. For the
habit of repeating a given gesture ritually, gradually leads
to the consciousness of " pretending ". The ritual of
going to bed, for instance (laying down one's head and
arranging the corner of the pillow with the hundred and
one complications which every baby invents), is sooner
or later utilized " in the void ", and the smile of the
child as it shuts its eyes in carrying out this rite is enough
to show that it is perfectly conscious of " pretending "
to go to sleep. Here already we have a symbol, but a
" played " symbol. Finally, when language and imagery
come to be added to motor intelligence, the symbol
becomes an object of thought. The child who pushes a
box along saying " tuff-tuff " is assimilating in imagination
the box's movement to that of a motor-car : the play
symbol has definitely come into being.
This being so, can one seek among rites and symbols
1 Age : 10 months. a Age : 12 months.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 23
for the origin of the actual rules of games ? Can the
game of marbles, with its infinite complexity both with
regard to the actual rules and to all that relates to the
verbo-motor system of signs in use can the game of
marbles, then, be conceived simply as the result of an
accumulation of individual rites and symbols ? We do
not think that it can. We believe that the individual
rite and the individual symbol constitute the substructure
for the development of rules and collective signs, its
necessary, but not its sufficient condition. There is
something more in the collective rule than in the motor
rule or the individual ritual, just as there is something
more in the sign than in the symbol.
With regard to motor or ritualistic rules, there can be
no doubt that they have something in common with
rules in the ordinary sense, namely the consciousness of
regularity. When we see the delight taken by a baby
of 10 to 12 months or a child of 2-3 in reproducing a
given behaviour in all its details, and the scrupulous
attention with which it observes the right order in these
operations, we cannot help recognizing the Regelbewusstsein
of which Biihler speaks. But we must distinguish care-
fully between the behaviour into which there enters only
the pleasure of regularity, and that into which there
enters an element of obligation. It is this consciousness
of obligation which seems to us, as to Durkheim 1 and
Bovet, 2 to distinguish a rule in the true sense from mere
regularity.
Now this element of obligation, or, to confine ourselves
to the question of the practice of rules, this element of
obedience intervenes as soon as there is a society, i.e. a
relation between at least two individuals. As soon as a
ritual is imposed upon a child by adults or seniors for whom
he has respect (Bovet), or as soon, we would add, as a
ritual comes into being as the result of the collaboration
1 L' Education Morale.
2 " Les Conditions de 1' Obligation de la Conscience *', Annie PsychoL
1912.
24 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
of two children, it acquires in the subject's mind a
new character which is precisely that of a rule. This
character may vary according to the type of respect
which predominates (respect for the senior or mutual
respect) but in all cases there enters an element of sub-
mission which was not contained in the rite pure and
simple.
In actual fact, of course, there is every degree of variety
between the simple regularity discovered by the individual
and the "rule to which a whole social group submits itself.
Thus during the egocentric stage we can observe a whole
series of cases in which the child will use a rule as a mere
rite, to be bent and modified at will, while at the same
time he already tries to submit to the common laws.
Just as the child very soon acquires the use of language
and of the abstract and general concepts while retaining
in his attitude to these much that still belongs to ego-
centric modes of thought and even to the methods
peculiar to symbolic and play thought, so, under the rules
that are imposed upon him, he will for a long time contrive
(in all good faith, needless to say) to maintain his own
phantasy in the matter of personal decisions. But this
factual continuity between ritual and rule does not exclude
a qualitative difference between the two types of behaviour.
Let us not, however, anticipate what will be said in
our analysis of the consciousness of rules, but return to
the matter of ritual. The individual rite develops quite
naturally, as we have just shown, into a more or less
complex symbolism. Can this symbolism be regarded as
the starting point of that system of obligatory verbo-
motor signs which are connected with the rules of every
collective game ? As with the previous problem, we
believe that the symbol is a necessary, but not a sufficient
condition of the appearance of signs. The sign is general
and abstract (arbitrary), the symbol is individual and
motivated. If the sign is to follow upon the symbol, a
group must therefore strip the individual's imagination
of all its personal fantasy and then elaborate a common
THE RULES OF THE GAME 25
and obligatory imagery which will go hand in hand with
the code of rules itself.
Here is an observation showing how far removed are
individual rites and symbols from rules and signs, though
moving towards these realities in so far as collaboration
between children becomes established.
Jacqueline (after the observations given above) is
playing with Jacques (2 years, n months and 15 days),
who sees marbles for the first time. I. Jacques takes the
marbles and lets them drop from a height one after
another. After which he picks them up and goes away,
II. Jacques arranges them on the ground, in a hollow
and says, " Tm making a little nest ". Jacqueline takes
one and sticks it in the ground in imitation. III. Jacques
also takes one, buries it and makes a mud-pie above it.
He digs it up and begins over again. Then he takes 2 at
a time which he buries. Then 3, 4, 5 and up to 6 at a
time, increasing the number of marbles systematically
each time by one. Jacqueline imitates him : she first
puts one marble down and makes a mud-pie over it,
then two or three at random and without adopting a
fixed system of progression. IV. Jacques puts all the
marbles on a pile, then he places an india-rubber ball
beside them and says : '* That's the Mummy ball and the
baby balls." V. He piles them together again and covers
them up with earth which he levels down. Jacqueline
imitates him but with only one marble which she covers
up without levelling the earth. She adds : " It's lost ",
then digs it up and begins over again.
This example shows very clearly how all the elements
of individual fantasy or symbolism remain uncom-
municated ; as soon as the game takes on an imaginative
turn each child evokes its favourite images without
paying any attention to anyone else's. It will also be
observed how totally devoid of any general direction are
the ritualized schemas successively tried. But as soon
as there is reciprocal imitation (end of II and whole
of III) we have the beginnings of a rule : each child
tries to bury the marbles in the same way as the other,
in a common order only more or less successfully adhered
to. In bringing out this aspect, the observation leads us
26 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
to the stage of egocentrism during which the child learns
other peoples' rules but practises them in accordance
with his own fantasy.
We shall conclude this analysis of the first stage by
repeating that before games are played in common, no
rules in the proper sense can come into existence.
Regularities and ritualized schemas are already there,
but these rites, being the work of the individual, cannot
call forth that submission to something superior to the
self which characterizes the appearance of any rule.
The second stage is the stage of egocentrism. In
studying the practice of rules we shall make use of a
notion which has served on earlier occasions in the
descriptions we have given of the child's intellectual
behaviour ; and, in both cases, indeed, the phenomenon is
of exactly the same order. Egocentrism appears to us as a
form of behaviour intermediate between purely individual
and socialized behaviour. Through imitation and language,
as also through the whole content of adult thought which
exercises pressure on the child's mind as soon as verbal
intercourse has become possible, the child begins, in a
sense, to be socialized from the end of its first year. But
the very nature of the relations which the child sustains
with the adults around him prevents this socialization
for the moment from reaching that state of equilibrium
which is propitious to the development of reason. We
mean, of course, the state of cooperation, in which the
individuals, regarding each other as equals, can exercise
a mutual control and thus attain to objectivity. In
other words, the very nature of the relation between
child and adult places the child apart, so that his thought
is isolated, and while he believes himself to be sharing
the point of view of the world at large he is really still
shut up in his own point of view. The social bond itself,
by which the child is held, close as it may seem when
viewed from outside, thus implies an unconscious in-
tellectual egocentrism which is further promoted by the
spontaneous egocentrism peculiar to all primitive mentality.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 27
Similarly, with regard to the rules of games, it is easy
to see, and greater authorities than ourselves 1 have
already pointed out that the beginnings of children's
games are characterized by long periods of egocentrisra.
The child is dominated on the one hand by a whole set
of rules and examples that are imposed upon him from
outside. But unable as he is, on the other hand, to place
himself on a level of equality with regard to his seniors,
he utilizes for his own ends, unaware even of his own
isolation, all that he has succeeded in grasping of the
social realities that surround him.
To confine ourselves to the game of marbles, the child
of 3 to 5 years old will discover, according to what other
children he may happen to come across, that in order to
play this game one must trace a square, put the marbles
inside it, try to expel the marbles from the square by
hitting them with another marble, start from a line
Jhat has been drawn beforehand, and so on. But though
he imitates what he observes, and believes in perfect
good faith that he is playing like the others, the child
thinks of nothing at first but of utilizing these new
acquisitions for himself. He plays in an individualistic
manner with material that is social. Such is egocentrism.
Let us analyse the facts of the case.
MAR (6) 2 seizes hold of the marbles we offer him, and
without bothering to make a square he heaps them up
together and begins to hit the pile. He removes the
marbles he has displaced and puts them aside or re-
places them immediately without any method. " Do you
always play like that ? In the street you make a square.
WeU, you do the same as they do in the street. I'm
waking a square, I am." (He ~draws the square, places
the marbles inside it and begins to play again.) I play
1 Stern in his Psychology of Early Childhood notes the identity of
the stages we have established in children's conversations with those
he has himself established with regard to play, pp. 177 and 332.
2 The numbers in brackets give the child's age. The words of the
child are in italics, those of the examiner in Roman lettering. Inverted
commas mark the beginning and end of a conversation reported
verbatim. All the subjects are boys unless the letter G. is added,
indicating that the subject is a girl.
28 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
with him, imitating each of his movements. " Who has
won? We've both won. But who has won most?. . . "
(Mar does not understand.)
BAUM (61) begins by making a square and puts down
three marbles, adding : " Sometimes you put 4, or 3, or 2.
Or 5 ? No, not 5, but sometimes 6 or 8. Who begins
when you play with the boys ISometimes me, sometimes
the other one. Isn't there a dodge for knowing who is
to begin? No. Do you know what a coche is?
Rather ! " But the sequel shows that he knows nothing
about the coche and thinks of this word as designating
another game. " And which of us will begin ? You.
Why ? / want to see how you do it." We play for a
while and I ask who has won : " The one who has hit a
mib? well, he has won.Wett ! who has won iI have,
and then you' 1 I then arrange things so as to take 4
while he takes 2 : " Who has won ? I have, and then
you." We begin again. He takes two, I none. " Who
has won ? I have. And I ? You've lost: 1
LOEFF (6) often pretends to be playing with Mae, of
whom we shall speak later. He knows neither how to
make a square nor to draw a coche. He immediately
begins to "fire" at the marbles assembled in a heap
and plays without either stopping or paying any attention
to us. "Have you won? I don't know. / think I
h avet wiry ? Yes t because I threw the mils. 1 And I ?
Yes, because you threw the mibs."
DESARZ (6) : " Do you play often ? Yes, rather !
With whom IAll by myself. Do you like playing alone
best ? You don't need two. You can play only one."
He gathers the marbles together without a square and
" fires " into the heap.
Let us now see how two children, who have grown
accustomed to playing together, set about it when they
are left alone. They are two boys of whom one (Mae)
is a very representative example of the present stage,
while the other (Wid) stands at the border line between
the present stage and the next. The analyses of these
cases will be all the more conclusive as the children in
question are no mere beginners at the game.
MAE (6) and WID (7) declare that they are always
playing together. Mae tells us that they both "played
1 English equivalent for " marbre ". [Trans.]
THE RULES OF THE GAME 29
again, yesterday ". I first examine Mae by himself.
He piles Ms marbles in a corner without counting them
and throws his shooter into the pile. He then places
4 marbles close together and puts a fifth on top (in a
pyramid). Mae denies that a square is ever drawn.
Then he corrects himself and affirms that he always does
so : " How do you and Wid know which is to begin ?
One of the two throws his shooter and the other tries to hit
it. If he hits it, he begins." Mae then shows us what
the game consists in : he throws his shooter without
taking into account the distances or the manner of playing
("piquette"), and when he succeeds in driving a marble
out of the square he immediately puts it back. Thus the
game has no end. " Does it go on Hke that all the time ?
You take one away to make a change (he takes a marble out
of the square, but not the one that he has touched). It'll
only "be finished when there's only one left (he ' fires * again
twice). One more shot, and then you take one away."
Then he affirms : " every third shot you take one away"
He does so. Mae removes a marble every third shot
independently of whether he has hit or missed, which is
completely irregular and corresponds to nothing in the
game as habitually played, or as we have seen it played
in Neuchatel or Geneva. It is therefore a rule which
he has invented then and there but which he has the
impression of remembering because it presents a vague
analogy with what really happens when the player removes
the marble he has just " hit " (touched) . This game of Mae's
is therefore a characteristic game of the second stage, an
egocentric game in which " to win " does not mean getting
the better of the others, but simply playing on one's own.
Wid, whom I now prepare to question and who
has not assisted at Mae's interrogatory, begins by making
a square. He places 4 marbles at the 4 corners and one
in the middle (the same disposition as Mae's, which was
probably a deformation of it). Wid does not know what
to do to decide which is to begin, and declares that he
understands nothing of the method which Mae had
shewn me as being familiar to both of them (trying to hit
one's partner's shooter). Wid then throws his shooter in
the direction of the square, knocking out one marble
which he puts in his pocket. Then I take my turn,
but fail to touch anything. He plays again and wins
all the marbles, one after the other, keeping them each
time. He also declares that when you have knocked a
30 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
marble out, you have the right to play another shot
straight away. After having taken everything he says :
" I've won. 39 Wid therefore belongs to the third stage
if this explanation is taken as a whole, but the sequel
will show that he takes no notice of Mae's doings when
they are playing together. Wid stands therefore at the
boundary line which separates the stage of egocentrism
from the stage of cooperation.
I then tell Mae to come into the room and the two
children begin to play with each other. Mae draws a
square and Wid disposes the marbles in accordance with
Ms habitual schema, Mae begins (he plays " Roulette "
whereas Wid most of the time plays " Piquette ") and
dislodges four marbles. " I can play four times, now ",
adds Mae. This is contrary to all the rules, but Wid
finds the statement quite natural. So one game succeeds
another. But the marbles are placed in the square by
one child or the other as the spirit moves them (according
to the rules each must put his " pose ") and the dis-
lodged marbles are sometimes put straight back into the
square, sometimes retained by the boy who has won
them. Each plays from whatever place he chooses,
unchecked by his partner, and each " fires " as many
times as he likes (it thus often happens that Mae and
Wid are playing at the same time).
I now send Wid out of the room and ask Mae to
explain the game to us for a last time. Mae places 16
marbles in the middle of the square. " Why so many
as that ? So as to win. How many do you put down
at home with Wid ? / put five, but when I'm alone, I
put lots." Mae then begins to play and dislodges a marble
which he puts on one side. I do the same. The game
continues in this way, each playing one shot at a time
without taking the dislodged marbles into account (which
is contrary to what Mae was doing a moment ago). Mae
then places five marbles in the square, like Wid. This
time I arrange the five marbles as Mae himself had
done at the beginning of the interrogatory (four close
together and one on top) but Mae seems to have forgotten
this way of doing things. In the end Mae plays by taking
away a marble every three shots, as before, and says to
us : " It's so that it should stop"
We have quoted the whole of this example in order
to show how little two children from the same class at
THE RULES OF THE GAME 31
school, living in the same house, and accustomed to
playing with each other, are able to understand each
other at this age. Not only do they tell us of totally
different rules (this still occurs throughout the third
stage), but when they play together they do not watch
each other and do not unify their respective rules even
for the duration of one game. The fact of the matter
is that neither is trying to get the better of the other :
each is merely having a game on Ms own, trying to hit
the marbles in the square, i.e. trying to " win " from his
own point of view.
This shows the characteristics of the stage. The child
plays for himself. His interest does not in any way
consist in competing with his companions and in binding
himself by common rules so as to see who will get the
better of the others. His aims are different. They are
indeed dual, and it is this mixed behaviour that really
defines egocentrism. On the one hand, the child feels
very strongly the desire to play like the other boys,
and especially like those older than himself; he longs,
that is to say, to feel himself a member of the very
honourable fraternity of those who know how to play
marbles correctly. But quickly persuading himself, on
the other hand, that his playing is " right " (he can
convince himself as easily on this point as in all his
attempts to imitate adult behaviour) the child thinks
only of utilizing these acquisitions for himself : Ms
pleasure still consists in the mere development of skill,
in carrying out the strokes he sets himself to play. It
is, as in the previous stage, essentially a motor pleasure,
not a social one. The true " socius " of the player who
has reached this stage is not the flesh and blood partner
but the ideal and abstract elder whom one inwardly
strives to imitate and who sums up all the examples one
has ever received.
It little matters, therefore, what one's companion is
doing, since one is not trying to contend against him.
It little matters what the details of the rules may be,
32 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
since there is no real contact between the players. This
is why the child, as soon as he can schematically copy
the big boys* game, believes himself to be in possession
of the whole truth. Each for himself, and all in com-
munion with the " Elder " : such might be the formula
of egocentric play.
It is striking to note the affinity between this attitude
of children of 4 to 6 in the game of marbles and the
attitude of those same children in their conversations
with each other. For alongside of the rare cases of true
conversation where there is a genuine interchange of
opinions or commands, one can observe in children
between 2 and 6 a characteristic type of pseudo-conver-
sation or " collective monologue ", during which the
children speak only for themselves, although they wish
to be in the presence of interlocutors who will serve as
a stimulus. Now here again, each feels himself to be in
communion with the group because he is inwardly address-
ing the Adult who knows and understands everything,
but here again, each is only concerned with himself, for
lack of having dissociated the "ego " from the " socius ".
These features of the egocentric stage will not, how-
ever, appear in their full light until we come to analyse
the consciousness of rules which accompanies this type
of conduct.
4. THE PRACTICE OF RULES. II. THIRD AND FOURTH
STAGES. Towards the age of 7-8 appears the desire for
mutual understanding in the sphere of play (as also,
indeed, in the conversations between children). This
felt need for understanding is what defines the third
stage. As a criterion of the appearance of this stage we
shall take the moment when by " winning " the child
refers to the fact of getting the better of the others,
therefore of gaining more marbles than the others, and
when he no longer says he has won when he has done no
more than to knock a marble out of the square, regardless
of what his partners have done. As a matter of fact,
THE RULES OF THE GAME 33
no child, even from among the older ones, ever attributes
very great importance to the fact of knocking out a few
more marbles than Ms opponents. Mere competition Is
therefore not what constitutes the affective motive-power
of the game. In seeking to win the child is trying
above all to contend with his partners while observing
common rules. The specific pleasure of the game thus
ceases to be muscular and egocentric, and becomes social.
Henceforth, a game of marbles constitutes the equivalent
in action of what takes place in discussion in words :
a mutual evaluation of the competing powers which
leads, thanks to the observation of common rules, to a
conclusion that is accepted by all.
As to the difference between the third and fourth
stages, it is only one of degree. The children of about
7* to 10 (third stage) do not yet know the rules in detail.
They try to learn them owing to their increasing interest
in the game played in common, but when different
children of the same class at school are questioned on the
subject the discrepancies are still considerable in the
information obtained. It is only when they are at play
that these same children succeed in understanding each
other, either by copying the boy who seems to know
most about it, or, more frequently, by "omitting any
usage that might be disputed. In this way they play
a sort of simplified game. Children of the fourth stage,
on the contrary, have thoroughly mastered their code
and even take pleasure in juridical discussions, whether
of principle or merely of procedure, which may at times
arise out of the points in dispute.
Let us examine some examples of the third stage, and,
in order to point more clearly to the differentiating
characters of this stage, let us begin by setting side by
side the answers of two little boys attending the same
class at school and accustomed to playing together.
(The children were naturally questioned separately in
order to avoid any suggestion between them, but we
afterwards compared their answers with one another.)
c
34 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
BEN (10) and Nus (n, backward, one year below the
school standard) are both in the fourth year of the lower
school and both play marbles a great deal. They agree
in regarding the square as necessary. Nus declares that
you always place 4 marbles in the "square, either at the
corners or else 3 in the centre with one on top (in a
pyramid). Ben, however, tells us that you place 2 to 10
marbles in the enclosure (not less than 2, not more than 10).
To know who is to begin you draw, according to Nus,
a line called the " coche " and everyone tries to get near
it : whoever gets nearest plays first, and whoever goes
beyond it plays last. Ben, however, knows nothing
about the coche : you begin " as you like. Isn't there a
dodge for knowing who is to play first ? No. Don't
you try with the coche ? Yes, sometimes. What is the
coche ? . . . (he cannot explain)/' On the other hand,
Ben affirms that you " fire " the first shot at a distance
of 2 to 3 steps from the square. A single step is not
enough, and "four isn't any good either ". Nus is ignorant
of this law and considers the distance to be a matter of
convention.
With regard to the manner of " firing ", Nus is equally
tolerant. According to him you can play " piquette "
or " roulette ", but " when you play piquette everyone
must play the same. When one boy says that you must
play roulette, everyone plays that way ". Nus prefers
roulette because " that is the best way 31 : piquette is
more difficult. Ben, however, regards piquette as
obligatory in all cases. He is ignorant, moreover, of the
term roulette and when we show him what it is he says :
" That is bowled piquette/ [Fr., Piquette roulee] That's
cheating I "
According to Nus everyone must play from the coche,
and aU through the game. When, after having shot at
the square you land anywhere, you must therefore come
back to the coche to " fire " the next shot. Ben, on
the contrary, who on this point represents the more
genera] usage, is of opinion that only the first shot should
be fired from the coche : after that " you must play from
where you are."
Nus and Ben thus agree in stating that the marbles
that have gone out of the square remain in the possession
of ^ the boy who dislodged them. This is the only point,
this and the actual drawing of the square, on which the
children give us results that are in agreement.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 35
When we begin to play, I arrange to stay in the square
(to leave my shooter inside the enclosure). " You are
dished (Fr. cuit), cries Ben,, delighted, you can't play
again until I get you out ! " Nus knows nothing of this
rule. Again, when I play carelessly and let the shooter
drop out of my hand, Ben exclaims " Fan-coup " to
prevent me from saying " coup-passe " and having another
shot. Nus is ignorant of this rule.
At one point Ben succeeds in hitting my shooter.
He concludes from this that he can have another shot,
just as though he had hit one of the marbles placed in
the square. Nus, in the same circumstances does not
draw the same conclusions (each must play in turn
according to him) but deduces that he wUl be able to
play the first shot in the next game.
In the same way, Ben thinks that everyone plays from
the place the last shot has led him to and knows the rule
that authorizes the player to change places, saying " du
mien " or " un empan ", whereas Nus, who has certainly
heard those words, does not know what they mean.
These two cases, chosen at random out of a class of
lo-year-old pupils, show straight away what are the two
differential features of the second stage. i There is
a general will to discover the rules that are fixed and
common to all players (cf. the way Nus explains to us
that if one of the partners plays piquette " everyone
must play the same "). 2 In spite of this there is con-
siderable discrepancy in the children's information, Lest
the reader should think the above examples exceptional
here are, on the same point, the answers of another child
from the same class :
Ross (n ; i) : " First, every one puts two marbles on
the square. You can make the square bigger when there
are more playing." Ross knows the method of the coche
for knowing who is to begin. Like Nus, he allows both
roulette and piquette. He also allows what is not only con-
trary to all established usages but also to the sense of the
words, a way of playing which he calls " femme-poussette "
which consists in carrying one's hand along with the
marble as one throws it (push stroke in billiards). Now
this is always forbidden, and the very word that Ross
36 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
has deformed says so " fan-poussette ". According to
Ross, you play from the place you have reached with the
last shot, and when you have won a marble you have the
right to another shot straight away. To change your place
you must say " du mien ". " // a stone gets in our way, you
say ' coup-pass i ' and have another shot. If it slips [if the
marble slips out of your hand] you say ' laehi* (Engl.
4 gone '). // you don't say that, you can't have another
turn. It's the rules ! " Ross here stands mid-way between
Nus and Ben. Finally, Ross knows of a rather ^ peculiar
custom which is unknown to Nus and Ben. " If you
stay in the square you can be hit and then he picks up the
marbles [ = If your shooter stays inside the square and
is touched by your opponent's shooter, he is entitled to
all the marbles in the square]. He (the opponent) can
have two shots [to try and hit the shooter in question]
and if he misses tfa first he can take [at the second shot]
the shooter from anywhere [though of course only from
the outside of the square] and make the marbles go out
[ = take them] ". This rule has generally only been des-
cribed to us by children of the fourth stage, but the rest
of Ross' interrogatory is typically third stage.
Such then is the third stage. The child's chief interest
is no longer psycho-motor, it is social. In other words,
to dislodge a marble from a square by manual dexterity
is no longer an aim in itself. The thing now is not only
to fight the other boys but also and primarily to regulate
the game with a whole set of systematic rules which will
ensure the most complete reciprocity in the methods used.
The game has therefore become social. We say " become "
because it is only after this stage that any real cooperation
exists between the players. Before this, each played for
himself. Each sought, it is true, to imitate the play of
older boys and of the initiated, but more for the satis-
faction, still purely personal, of feeling himself to be a
member of a mystical community whose sacred institutions
are handed down by the elders out of the remote past,
than from any real desire to cooperate with his playmates
or with anyone else. If cooperation be regarded as more
social than this mixture of egocentrism and respect for
one's seniors which characterizes the beginnings of
THE RULES OF THE GAME 37
collective life among children, then we may say that it
is from the third stage onwards that the game of marbles
begins to be a truly social game.
As yet, however, tMs cooperation exists to a great
extent only in intention. Being an honest man is not
enough to make one to know the law. It is not even
enough to enable us to solve all the problems that may
arise in our concrete "moral experience ". The child fares
in the same way during the present stage, and succeeds,
at best, in creating for himself a " provisional morality ",
putting off till a later date the task of setting up a code of
laws and a system of jurisprudence. Nor do boys of 7 to
10 ever succeed in agreeing amongst themselves for longer
than the duration of one and the same game ; they are
still incapable of legislating on all possible cases that
may arise, for each still has a purely personal opinion
about the rules of the game.
To use an apter comparison, we may say that the child
of 7 to 10 plays as he reasons. We have already L tried
to establish the fact that about the age of 7 or 8, precisely,
that is to say, at the moment when our third stage appears,
in the very poor districts where we conducted our work, 2
discussion and reflection gain an increasing ascendency
over unproved affirmation and intellectual egocentrism.
Now, these new habits of thought lead to genuine
deductions (as opposed to primitive " transductions ")
and to deductions in which the child grapples with a
given fact of experience, either present or past. But
something is still lacking if deduction is to be generalized
and made completely rational : the child must be able
to reason formally, i.e. he must have a conscious realization
of the rules of reasoning which will enable him to apply
them to any case whatsoever, including purely hypo-
* /.#., chap. IV.
* We take this opportunity of reminding the reader of what has not
been sufficiently emphasized in our earlier books, viz. that most of
our research has been carried out on children from the poorer parts
of Geneva. In different surroundings the age averages would certainly
have been different.
38 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
thetical cases (mere assumptions). In the same way, a
child who, with regard to the rules of games, has reached
the third stage, will achieve momentary coordinations
of a coEective order (a well ordered game may be com-
pared on this point to a good discussion), but feels no
interest as yet in the actual legislation of the game, in
the discussions of principle which alone will give him
complete mastery of the game in all its strictness. (From
this point of view the juridico-moral discussions of the
fourth stage may be compared to formal reasoning in
general.)
It is, on an average, towards the age of u or 12 that
these interests develop. In order to understand what is
the practice of rules among children of this fourth stage
let us question separately several children from the same
class at school, and we shall see how subtle are their
answers, and how well they agree with one another.
RIT (12), GROS (13) and VUA (13) often play marbles.
We questioned them each separately and took steps to
prevent them from communicating to each other during
our absence the contents of our interrogatory.
With regard to the square, the " pose ", the manner
of throwing, and generally speaking all the rules we
have already examined, these three children are naturally
in full agreement with each other. To know who is to
play first, Rit, who has lived in two neighbouring villages
before coming to town, tells us that various customs are
in usage. You draw a line, the coche, and whoever gets
nearest to it plays first. If you go beyond the line,
either, according to some, it does not matter, or else
" there is another game : when you go beyond the line, you
play last 3 '. Gros and Vua know only of this custom,
the only one that is really put into practice by the boys
of the neighbourhood.
But there are complications about which the younger
boys left us in the dark. " Whoever, according to Gros,
says ' queue ' plays second. It's easier because he doesn't
get^ ' hit ' [ = if a player's shooter lands near the square,
it is exposed to hits from the other players]." In the same
way, Vua tells us that " whoever says ' queue de deux '
plays last ' ' . And he adds the following rule, also recognized
THE RULES OF THE GAME 39
by Gros : * ' When you are all at the same distance from the
cache whoever cries ' egaux-queue ' plays second " (the
problem is therefore to play sufficiently soon still to
find marbles in the square, but not first, for fear of
being hit).
On the other hand, Gros tells us : " Whoever takes out
two [two of the marbles placed inside the square, i.e. the
equivalent of the player's ' pose '] can say ' queue-de-
pose '. In that way he can play second from the coche in
the next game." And Vua : " When there are two outside
[when two marbles have been knocked out of the square]
you can dare to say ' queue-de-pose ', and you can play
second from the coche again in the second game. 13 Rit
gives us the same information.
This is not all. According to Rit, " if you say f deux-
coups-de-coche ' you can have two shots from the line. If
you say ' deux-coups-d* empan ' you play the second shot
from where you are. You can only say that when the
other [ = the opponent] has made up his pose [ = has won
back as many marbles as he had originally deposited in
the square] ". This rule is observed in the same way by
the other two children.
In addition, there is a whole set of rules, unknown
to the younger boys, which bear upon the position of the
marbles in the square. According to Gros " the first boy
who says ' place-pour-moi * [Eng., place-for-me] does not
have to place himself at one of the corners of the square ",
and "the one who has said ' places-des-marbres* (Engl.,
place for the marbles) can put them down as he likes, in a
' troy at ' (all in a heap) or at the four corners ". Vua is
of the same opinion and adds : " If you say ' place-pour-
toi-pour-tout-le-jeu (Engl., your-place-for-the-whole-game)
the other chap [ = the opponent] must stay at the same
place" Rit, who knows both these rules, adds the further
detail that "you can't say 'place-pour-moi' if you have
already said ' place-pour-toi V This gives some idea of
the complications of procedure !
Our three legal experts also point the measures of
clemency in use for the protection of the weak. According
to Vua " if you knock out three at one shot and there s
only one left [one marble in the square] the other chap
[the opponent] has the right to play from half-way [half-
way between the coche and the square] because the first
boy has made more than his ' pose V Also : " the boy
who has been beaten is allowed to begin. 1 ' According to
40 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Gros, " if there is one marble left at the end, the boy who
has won, instead of taking it, can give to the other chap''
And again, ** When there's one boy who has won too much,
the others say ' coufac ', and he is bound to play another
game"
The number of shots at the disposal of each player also
gives rise to a whole series of regulations on which the
three boys lay stress, as before, in full agreement with
each other. For the sake of brevity we refer the reader
on this point to the general rules outlined in Section I.
There is only one point on which we saw our subjects
differ. Rit who, it will be remembered, has known the
game in three different districts, tells us that the boy
whose shooter stays inside the square may generally
come out of it. He added, it is true, that in some games
the player in such a plight is " dished " (Fr., bride), but
this rule does not seem to him obligatory. Vua and
Gros, on the contrary, are of opinion that in all cases
" when you stay inside the square you are dished ". We
think we may confuse Vua by saying : " Rit didn't say
that ! The fact is, answers Vua, that sometimes people
play differently. Then you ask each other what you want
to do. And 2 you can't agree ? We scrap for a bit and
then we fix things up."
These answers show what the fourth stage is. Interest
seems to have shifted its ground since the last stage.
Not only do these children seek to cooperate, to " fix
things up/' as Vua puts it, rather than to play for them-
selves alone, but also and this undoubtedly is something
new they seem to take a peculiar pleasure in anticipating
all possible cases and in codifying them. Considering
that the square game is only one of the five or ten
varieties of the game of marbles, it is almost alarming
in face of the complexity of rules and procedure in the
square game, to think of what a child of twelve has to
store away in his memory. These rules, with their over-
lapping and their exceptions, are at least as complex as
the current rules of spelling. It is somewhat humiliating,
in this connection, to see how heavily traditional education
sets about the task of making spelling enter into brains
that assimilate with such ease the mnemonic contents of
THE RULES OF THE GAME 41
the game of marbles. But then, memory is dependent
upon activity, and a real activity presupposes interest.
Throughout this fourth stage, then, the dominating
interest seems to be interest in the rules themselves. For
mere cooperation would not require such subtleties as
those attending the disposition of the marbles in the
square (" place-pour-moi ", " place-des-marbres ", " place-
pour-toi-pour-tout-le-jeu ", etc.). The fact that the child
enjoys complicating things at will proves that what he
is after is rules for their own sake. We have described
elsewhere l the extraordinary behaviour of eight boys of
10 to ii who, in order to throw snow-balls at each other,
began by wasting a good quarter-of-an-hour in electing
a president, fixing the rules of voting, then in dividing
themselves into two camps, in deciding upon the distances
of the shots/ and finally in foreseeing what would be the
sanctions to be applied in cases of infringement of these
laws. Many other facts analogous to this could be culled
from studies that have been made on children's societies.
In conclusion, the acquisition and practice of the rules
of a game follow very simple and very natural laws, the
stages of which may be defined as follows : i Simple
individual regularity. 2 Imitation of seniors with ego-
centrism. 3 Cooperation. 4 Interest in rules for their
own sake. Let us now see whether the consciousness of
rules describes in its evolution an equally uncomplicated
curve.
5. CONSCIOUSNESS OF RULES. I. THE FIRST TWO
STAGES. As all our results have shown, consciousness of
rules cannot be isolated from the moral life of the child
as a whole. We might, at the most, study the practical
applications of rules without bothering about obedience
in general, i.e. about the child's whole social and moral
behaviour. But as soon as we try, as in the present
case, to analyse a child's feelings and thoughts about
rules, we shall find that he assimilates them unconsciously
i /.*., p. 96.
42 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
along with the commands to which he is subjected taken
as a whole. This comes out particularly clearly in the
case of the little ones, for whom the constraint exercised
by older children evokes adult authority itself in an
attenuated form.
Thus the great difficulty here, even more than with
the practice of rules, is to establish the exact significance
of the primitive facts. Do the simple individual regu-
larities that precede the rules imposed by a group of
players give rise to the consciousness of rules, or do they
not ? And if they do, is this consciousness directly
influenced by the commands of adults ? This very
delicate point must be settled before we can embark
upon the analysis of the more transparent data furnished
by the interrogatory of older children. With regard to
consciousness of rules, we shall designate as the first
stage that which corresponds to the purely individualistic
stage studied above. During this stage the child, as we
noted, plays at marbles in its own way, seeking merely
to satisfy its motor interests or its symbolic fantasy.
Only, it very soon contracts habits which constitute
individual rules of a sort.. This phenomenon, far from
being unique, is the counterpart of that sort of ritualization
of behaviour which can be observed in any baby before
it can speak or have experienced any specifically moral
adult pressure. Not only does every act of adaptation
extend beyond its content of intellectual effort into a
ritual kept up for its own sake, but the baby will often
invent such rituals for its own pleasure ; hence the
primitive reactions of very young children in the presence
of marbles.
But in order to know to what consciousness of rules
these individual schemas correspond it should be re-
membered that from its tenderest years everything con-
spires to impress upon the baby the notion of regularity.
Certain physical events (alternation of day and night,
sameness of scenery during walks, etc.) are repeated with
sufficient accuracy to produce an awareness of "law",
THE RULES OF THE GAME 43
or at any rate to favour tie appearance of motor schemas
of prevision. The parents, moreover, impose upon the
baby a certain number of moral obligations, the source
of further regularities (meals, bed-time, cleanliness, etc.)
which are completely (and to the child indissociably)
connected with the external regularities. From its earliest
months the child is therefore bathed in an atmosphere
of rules, so that the task of discerning what comes from
itself in the rites that it respects and what results from
the ^ pressure of things or the constraint of the social
environment is one of extreme difficulty. In the content
of each ritual act it is certainly possible to know what
has been invented by the child, what discovered in nature,
and what imposed by the adult. But in the consciousness
of rules, taken as a formal structure, these differentiations
are non-existent from the point of view of the subject
himself. 1
An analysis of the rites practised by older children,
however, will allow us to introduce a fundamental dis-
tinction at this point. On the one hand, certain forms
of behaviour are, as it were, ritualized by the child himself
(e.g. not to walk on the lines that separate the paving
stones from the kerb of the pavement). Now, so long
as no other factor intervenes, these motor rules never
give rise to the feeling of obligation proper. (This is true
even of the example we selected intentionally just now
that of a simple game which only becomes obligatory
when it becomes connected later on with a pact, i.e. with
a social operation, for the pact with oneself is undoubtedly
a derivative of the pact with others.) On the other
hand, certain rules it matters not whether they were
previously invented by the child, imitated, or received
from outside are at a given moment sanctioned by the
1 e.g. Heat burns (physical law), it is forbidden to touch the fire
(moral law) and the child playing about in the kitchen will amuse
himself by touching every piece of furniture except the stove (individual
ritual). How can the subject's mind distinguish at first between these
three types of regularity ?
44 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
environment, i.e. approved of or enjoined. Only in such
a case as this are rules accompanied by a feeling of
obligation. Now, although it is always difficult to know
to what extent an obligatory rale covers up in the mind
of a child of one or two years a motor ritual, it is at any
rate obvious that the two things are psychologically dis-
tinct. And this distinction should be borne in mind when
we come to the study of the rules of the game.
The reader will recognize in the way in which we have
stated the problem the striking thesis of M. Bovet on
the genesis of the feeling of moral obligation in man's
conscience : the feeling of obligation only appears when
the child accepts a command emanating from someone
whom he respects. All the material analysed in the present
work, beginning with the facts relating to consciousness
of the rules of the game, confirm this thesis, which is
parallel rather than contradictory to Durkheim's doctrine
of the social genesis of respect and morality. The only
change we wish to effect in Bovet's theory is to extend it
and to introduce alongside of the unilateral respect of the
younger child for the grown-up, the mutual respect that
is entertained among equals. Consequently, a collective
rule will appear to us as much the product of the reciprocal
approbation of two individuals as of the authority of one
individual over another.
What then does consciousness of rules amount to during
our first stage ? In so far as the child has never seen
anyone else play, we can allow that it is engaged here
upon purely personal and individual ritual acts. The
child, enjoying as it does any form of repetition, gives
itself schemas of action, but there is nothing in this that
implies an obligatory rule. At the same time, and this is
where the analysis becomes so difficult, it is obvious that
by the time a child can speak, even if it has never
seen marbles before, it is already permeated with rules
and regulations due to the environment, and this in the
most varied spheres. It knows that some things are
allowed and others forbidden. Even in the most modern
THE RULES OF THE GAME 45
form of training one cannot avoid imposing certain
obligations with regard to sleeping, eating, and even in
connection with certain details of no apparent importance
(not to touch a pile of plates, daddy's desk, etc., etc.).
It is therefore quite possible that when the child comes
across marbles for the first time, it is already convinced
that certain rules apply to these new objects. And this
is why the origins of consciousness of rules even in so
restricted a field as that of the game of marbles are
conditioned by the child's moral life as a whole.
This becomes clear in the second stage, the most
interesting for our thesis. This second stage sets in from
the moment when the child, either through imitation or
as the result of verbal exchange, begins to want to play
in conformity with certain rules received from outside.
What idea does he form of these rules ? This is the point
that we must now try to establish.
We made use of three groups of questions for the
purpose of analysing the consciousness of rules in this
second stage. Can rules be changed ? Have rules always
been the same as they are to-day ? How did rules begin ?
Obviously the first of these questions is the best. It is
the least verbal of the three. Instead of making the
child think about a problem that has never occurred to
him (as do the other two), it confronts the subject with a
new fact, a rule invented by himself, and it is relatively
easy to note the child's resulting reactions, however
clumsy he may be in formulating them. The other
two questions, on the contrary, incur all the objections
that can be made against questioning pure and simple
the possibility of suggestion, of perseveration, etc. We
are of opinion, nevertheless, that these questions have
their use, if only as indices of the respect felt for rules
and as complementary to the first.
Now, as soon as the second stage begins, i.e. from the
moment that the child begins to imitate the rules of
others, no matter how egocentric in practice his play may
be, he regards the rules of the game as sacred and un-
46 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
touchable ; he refuses to alter these rules and claims that
any modification, even if accepted by general opinion,
would be wrong.
Actually, it is not until about the age of 6 that this
attitude appears quite clearly and explicitly. Children of
4-5 seem, therefore, to form an exception and to take
rules rather casually, a feature which, if judged purely
externally, recalls the liberalism of older children. In
reality, we believe that this analogy is superficial, and
that little children, even when they seem not to be so,
are always conservative in the matter of rules. If they
accept innovations that are proposed to them, it is
because they do not realize that there was any innovation.
Let us begin by one of the more difficult cases, the
difficulty being all the greater because the child is very
young and consequently very much inclined to romance.
FAL (5) is at the second stage with regard to the
practice of rules. " Long ago when people were beginning
to build the town of Neuchitel, did little children play
at marbles the way you showed me ? Yes. Always that
way ? Yes, How did you get to know the rules ?
When I was quite little my brother showed me. My Daddy
showed my brother. And how did your daddy know?
My Daddy just knew. No one told him. How did he
know ? No one showed him ! " " Am I older than your
Daddy ? No, you're young. My Daddy had been born
when we came to Neuchdtel. My Daddy was born before
me. Tell me some people older than your daddy. My
grand-dad. Did he play marbles ? Yes. Then he played
before your daddy ? Yes, but not with rules ! [said with
great conviction]. What do you mean by rules ? . . .
[Fal does not know this word, which he~ has just heard
from our lips for the first time. But he realizes that it
means an essential property of the game of marbles ;
that is why he asserts so emphatically that his grand-dad
did not play with rules so as to show how superior his
daddy is to everyone else in the world.] Was it a long
time ago when people played for the first time ? Oh,
yes. How did they find out how to play ? Well, they
took some marbles, and then they made a square, and then
they put the marbles inside it . . . etc. [he enumerates the
THE RULES OF THE GAME 47
rules that he knows]. Was it little children who found
out or grown-up gentlemen ? Grown-up gentlemen.
Tell me who was born first, your daddy or your grand-
dad ? My Daddy was born before my grand-dad. Who
invented the game of marbles ? My Daddy did. Who
is the oldest person in Neuchatel ? / dunno. Who do
you think ? God. Did people know how to play marbles
before your daddy ? Other gentlemen played [before ?
at the same time ?]. In the same way as your daddy ?
Yes. How did they know how to ? They made it up.
Where is God ? In the sky. Is he older than your daddy ?
Not so old." " Could one find a new way of playing ?
I can't play any other way. Try . . . [Fal does not
move]. Couldn't you put them like this [we place the
marbles in a circle without a square] ? Oh, yes. Would
it be fair ? Oh, yes. As fair as the square ? Yes.
Did your daddy use to play that way or not ? Oh, yes.
Could one play still other ways ? Oh, yes." We then
arrange the marbles in the shape of a T, we put them
on a matchbox, etc. Fal says he has never seen this
done before, but that it is all quite fair and that you can
change things as much as you like. Only his daddy
knows all this !
Fal is typical of the cases we were discussing above.
He is ready to change all the established rules. A circle,
a T., anything will do just as well as the square. It looks,
at first, as though Fal were near those older children
who, as we shall see, no longer believe in the sacred
character of rules and adopt any convention so long as
it is received by all. But in reality this is not the case.
However great a romancer Fal may be, the text of which
we have quoted the greater part seems to show that he
has a great respect for rules. He attributes them to his
father, which amounts to saying that he regards them
as endowed with divine right. Fal's curious ideas about
his father's age are worth noting in this connection ; his
daddy was born before his grand-dad, and is older than
God ! These remarks, which fully coincide with those
collected by M. Bovet, 1 would seem to indicate that in
attributing the rules to his father, Fal makes them more
1 P. Bovet, The Child's Religion, London, 1930.
48 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
or less contemporaneous with what is for him the beginning
of the world. Characteristic, too, is the manner in which
the child conceives this invention of rules on the part
of his father : this gentleman thought of them without
having been told or shown anything, but other gentlemen
may equally have thought of the same thing. This is
not, in our opinion, mere psittacism. One should be
careful, of course, not to read into these remarks more
logic than they contain : they simply mean that rules
are sacred and unchangeable because they partake of
paternal authority. But this affective postulate can be
translated into a sort of infantile theory of invention, and
of the eternity of essences. To the child who attaches no
precise meaning to the terms " before " and " after " and
who measures time in terms of his immediate or deeper
feelings, to invent means almost the same thing as to
discover an eternal and pre-existing reality in oneself. Or
to put it more simply, the child cannot differentiate as
we do between the activity which consists in inventing
something new and that which consists in remembering
the past. (Hence the mixture of romancing and exact
reproduction which characterizes his stories or his memory.)
For the child, as for Plato, intellectual creation merges
into reminiscence, 1 What, then, is the meaning of Fal's
tolerance with regard to the new laws we suggested to
him ? Simply this, that confident of the unlimited
wealth of rules in the game of marbles, he imagines, as
soon as he is in possession of a new rule, that he has
merely rediscovered a rule that was already in existence.
In order to understand the attitude of the children of
the early part of the second stage they all answer more
or less like Fal we must remember that up till the age
of 6-7 the child has great difficulty in knowing what
comes from himself and what from others in his own
fund of knowledge. This comes primarily from his
1 Cf. C.W., p. 52, the case of Kauf ( 8 ; 8) : this child believes that
the stones she tells were written in her brain by God. " Before I was
born, he put them there."
THE RULES OF THE GAME 49
'difficulty in retrospection (see /. R., Chap. IV, i), and
secondly from the lack of organization in memory itself.
In this way the child is led to think that he has always
known something which in fact he has only just learned.
We have often had the experience of telling a child
something which immediately afterwards he will imagine
himself to have known for months. This indifference to
distinctions of before and after, old and new, explains
the inability of which we spoke just now to differentiate
between invention and reminiscence. The child very often
feels that what he makes up, even on the spur of the
moment, expresses, in some way, an eternal truth. This
being so, one cannot say that very young children have
no respect for rules because they allow these to be changed ;
innovations are not real innovations to them.
Added to this there is a curious attitude which appears
throughout the whole of the egocentric stage, and which
may be compared to the mental states characteristic of
inspiration. The child more or less pleases himself in his
application of the rules. At the same time, Fal and others
like him will allow any sort of change in the established
usage. And yet they one and all insist upon the point
that rules have always been the same as they are at
present, and that they are due to adult authority,
particularly the authority of the father. Is this con-
tradictory ? It is so only in appearance. If we call to
mind the peculiar mentality of children of this age, for
whom society is not so much a successful cooperation
between equals as a feeling of continuous communion
between the ego and the Word of the Elder or Adult,
then the contradiction ceases. Just as the mystic can
no longer dissociate his own wishes from the will of his
God, so the little child cannot differentiate between the
impulses of his personal fancy and the rules imposed on
him from above.
Let us now pass on to the typical cases of this stage,
i.e. to children who out of respect to rules are hostile to
any innovation whatsoever.
50 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
We must begin by quoting a child of 5| years, LEH,
whose reaction was among the most spontaneous that
we had occasion to note. Leh was telling us about the
rules of the game before we had questioned him about
consciousness of rules. He had just begun to speak and
was showing us how to play from the coche (which was
about the only thing in the game that he knew) when
the following dualogue took place. We asked Leh quite
simply if everyone played from the coche or whether one
could not (as is actually done) put the older ones at the
coche and let the little ones play closer up. "No,
answered Leh, that wouldn't be fair. Why not ? Because
God would make the little boy's shot not reach the marbles
and the big boy's shot would reach them." In other words,
divine justice is opposed to any change in the rules of
marbles, and if one player, even a very young one were
favoured in any way, God Himself would prevent him
from reaching the square.
PHA (sJ) : " Do people always play like that ? Yes,
always like that. Why ? 'Cos you couldn't play any other
way ^ Couldn't you play like this [we arrange the marbles
in a circle, then in a triangle] ? Yes, but the others wouldn't
wan i 20. Why ? 'Cos squares is better. Why better ?
. . ." We are less successful, however, with regard
to the origins of the game : " Did your daddy play at
marbles before you were born ? No, never, because I
wasn't there yet! But he was a child like you before
you were born, / was there already when he was like
me. He was bigger." " When did people begin to play
marbles ? When the others began, I began too." It would
be impossible to outdo Pha in placing oneself at the
centre of the universe, in time as well as in space ! And
yet Pha feels very strongly that rules stand above him :
they cannot be changed.
GEO (6) tells us that the game of marbles began \yith
" people, with the Gentlemen of the Commune [the Town
Council whom he has probably heard mentioned in
connection with road-mending and the police]. How was
that ? It came into the gentlemen's heads and they made
some marbles. How did they know how to play ? In
their head. They taught people. Daddies show little boys
how to. Can one play differently from how you showed
me ? Can you change the game ? I think you can, but
I don't know how [Geo is alluding here to the variants
already in existence]. Anyhow ? No there are no games
THE RULES OF THE GAME 51
you play anyhow. Why ? Because God didn't leach
them [the Town Council]. Try and change the game.
[Geo then invents an arrangement which he regards as
quite new and which consists in making a big square
with three rows of three marbles each], Is that one
fair, like the other one ? No, becatise there are only three
lines of three. Could people always play that way and
stop playing the old way ? Yes, M'sieu. How did you
find this game ? In my head. -Can we say, then, that
the other games don't count and this is the one people
must take ? Yes, M'sieur. There's others too that the
Gentlemen of the Commune know. Do they know this
one that you have made up ? Yes [/]. But it was you
who found it out. Did you find that game in your
head ? Yes. How ? All of a sudden. God told it to
me. You know, I have spoken to the gentlemen of the
Commune, and I don't think they know your new game.
Oh ! [Geo is very much taken aback]. But I know some
children who don't know how to play yet. Which game
shall I teach them, yours, or the other one ? The one
of the Gentlemen of the Commune. Why ? Because it is
prettier." " Later on when you are a big man and have
got moustaches perhaps there won't be many children
left who play the game of the Gentlemen of the Commune.
But there may be lots of boys who play at your game.
Then which game will be fairest, yours, which will be
played most, or the game of the Gentlemen of the Com-
mune, which will be nearly forgotten ? The game of the
Gentlemen of the Commune"
The case of Geo comes as a beautiful confirmation
of what we said in connection with Fal, viz. that for
little children inventing a game comes to the same
thing as finding in one's head a game that has already
been anticipated and classified by the most competent
authorities. Geo attributes the game he has invented to
divine inspiration, and supposes it to be already known
to the "Gentlemen of the Commune." As soon as we
undeceive him he undervalues his own invention and
refuses to regard it as right even if ratified by general
usage.
MAR (6), whose behaviour in the practice of rules we
have already examined in 3, declares that in the time
52 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
of his daddy and of Jesus, people played as they do now.
He refuses to invent a new game. " I've never invented
games" We then suggest a new game which consists of
putting marbles on a box and making them fall off by
hitting the box : " Can one play like this IYes [He does
so, and seems to enjoy it]. Could this game ever become
a fair game ? No, because it's not the same. 1 ' Another
attempt calls forth the same reaction.
STOR (7) tells us that children played at marbles before
Noah's ark : " How did they play ? Like we played.
How did it begin ? They bought some marbles. But how
did they learn ? His daddy taught them" Stor invents
a new game in the shape of a triangle. He admits that
his friends would be glad to play at it, " but not all of them.
Not the big ones, the quite big ones. Why ? Because it
isn't a game for the big ones. Is it as fair a game as ^ the
one you showed me ? No. Why ? Because it isn't a
square. And if everyone played that way, even the big
ones, would it be fair ? No. Why not ? Because it isn't
a square"
With regard to the practical application of rules all
these children therefore belong to the stage of egocentrism.
The result is clearly paradoxical. Here are children
playing more or less as they choose ; they are influenced,
it is true, by a few examples that have been set before
them and observe roughly the general schema of the
game ; but they do so without troubling to obey in
detail the rules they know or could know with a little
attention, and without attributing the least importance
to the most serious infringements of which they may be
guilty. Besides all this, each child plays for himself, he
pays no attention to his neighbour, does not seek to
control him and is not controlled by him, does not even
try to beat him " to win " simply means to succeed in
hitting the marbles one has aimed at. And yet these
same children harbour an almost mystical respect for
rules : rules are eternal, due to the authority of parents,
of the Gentlemen of the Commune, and even of an
almighty God. It is forbidden to change them, and even
if the whole of general opinion supported such a change,
general opinion would be in the wrong : the unanimous
THE RULES OF THE GAME 53
consent of all the children wauld be powerless against
the truth of Tradition. As to any apparent changes,
these are only complementary additions to the initial
Revelation : thus Geo (the most primitive of the above
cases, and therefore nearest to those represented by Fal
and so confirming what we said about the latter) believes
the rule invented by Mm to be directly due to a divine
inspiration analogous to the inspiration of which the
Gentlemen of the Commune were the first recipients.
In reality, however, this paradox is general in child
behaviour and constitutes, as we shall show towards the
end of the book, the most significant feature of the
morality belonging to the egocentric stage. Childish
egocentrism, far from being asocial, always goes hand
in hand with adult constraint. It is presocial only in
relation to cooperation. In all spheres, two types of
social relations must be distinguished ; constraint and
cooperation. The first implies an element of unilateral
respect, of authority and prestige ; the second is simply
the intercourse between two individuals on an equal
footing. Now egocentrism is contradictory only to
cooperation, for the latter alone is really able to socialize
the individual. Constraint, on the other hand, is always
the ally of childish egocentrism. Indeed it is because
the child cannot establish a genuinely mutual contact
with the adult that he remains shut up in his own ego.
The child is, on the one hand, too apt to have the illusion
of agreement where actually he is only following his own
fantasy ; the adult, on the other, takes advantage of his
situation instead of seeking equality. With regard to
moral rules, the child submits more or less completely
in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these,
remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience,
do not really transform his conduct. This is why the
child looks upon rules as sacred though he does not really
put them into practice.
As far as the game of marbles is concerned, there is
therefore no contradiction between the egocentric practice
54 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
of games and the mystical respect entertained for rales.
This respect is the mark of a mentality fashioned, not by
free cooperation between equals, but by adult constraint.
When the child imitates the rules practised by his older
companions he feels that he is submitting to an unalterable
law, due, therefore, to his parents themselves. Thus
the pressure exercised by older on younger children is
assimilated here, as so often, to adult pressure. This
action of the older children is still constraint, for co-
operation can only arise between equals. Nor does the
submission of the younger children to the rules of the
older ones lead to any sort of cooperation in action ;
it simply produces a sort of mysticism, a diffused feeling
of collective participation, which, as in the case of many
mystics, fits in perfectly well with egocentrism. For
we shall see eventually that cooperation between equals
not only brings about a gradual change in the child's
practical attitude, but that it also does away with the
mystical feeling towards authority.
In the meantime let us examine the subjects of the
final period of the present stage. We found only three
stages with regard to consciousness of rules, whereas
there seemed to be four with regard to the practice of
the game. In other words, the cooperation that sets in
from the age of 7-8 is not sufficient at first to repress
the mystical attitude to authority, and the last part of
the present stage (in the consciousness of rules) really
coincides with the first half of the cooperative stage (in
the practice of the game).
BEN (10 yrs.), whose answers we have given with regard
to the practice of rules (third stage) is still at the second
stage from the point of view that is occupying us just
now : " Can one invent new rules ? Some boys do, so
as to win more marbles, but it doesn't always come off.
One chap [quite recently, in his class] thought of saymg
' Deux Empans ' (two spans) so as to get nearer [actually
this is a rule already known to the older boys]. It didn't
come off. And with the little ones ? Yes, it came off
all right with them. Invent a rule. / couldn't invent one
THE RULES OF THE GAME 55
straight away like that. Yes you could. I can see that
you are cleverer than you make yourself out to be.
Well, let's say that you're not caught when you are in the
square. Good. Would that come off with the others ?
Oh, yes, they'd like to do that. Then people could play
that way ? Oh, no, because it would be cheating. But
all your pals would like to, wouldn't they ? Yes, they
all would. Then why would it be cheating ? Because
I invented it : it isn't a rule ! It's a wrong rule because
it's outside of the rules. A fair rule is one that is in the
game. How does one know If it is fair ? The good players
know it. And suppose the good players wanted to play
with your rule ? It wouldn't work. Besides they would
say it was cheating. And if they all said that the rale
was right, would it work ? Oh, yes, it would. . . . But
it's a wrong rule ! But if they all said it was right how
would anyone know that it was wrong ? Because when
vou are in the square it's like a garden with a fence, you're
"shut in [so that if the shooter stays inside the square,
you are ' dished ']. And suppose we draw a square like
this [we draw a square with a break in one of the sides
like a fence broken by a door] ? Some boys do that. But
it isn't fair. It's just for fun for passing the time. Why ?
Because the square ought to be closed. But if some boys
do it, is it fair or not ? Ifs both fair and not fair. Why
is it fair ? It is fair for waiting [for fun]. And why is
it not fair ? Because the square ought to be closed.
When you are big, suppose everyone plays that way,
will it be right or not ? It will be right then because there
will be new children who will learn the rule. And for
y OU ? ft w m be wrong. And what will it be ' really
and truly ' ? It will really be wrong." Later on, however,
Ben admits that his father and grandfather played
differently from him, and that rules can therefore be
changed by children. But this does not prevent ^hira
from sticking to the view that rules contain an intrinsic
truth which is independent of usage.
Borderline cases like these are particularly interesting.
Ben stands midway between the second and third stages.
On the one hand, he has already learned, thanks to
cooperation, the existence of possible variations in the
use of rules, and he knows, therefore, that the actual
rules are recent and have been made by children. But
56 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
on the other hand, he believes in the absolute and intrinsic
truth- of rules. Does cooperation, then, impose upon
this child a mystical attitude to law similar to the respect
felt by little children for the commands given them by
adults ? Or is Ben's respect for the rales of the game
inherited from the constraint that has not yet been
eliminated by cooperation ? The sequel will show that
the latter interpretation is the right one. Older children
cease to believe in the intrinsic value of rules, and they
do so in the exact measure that they learn to put them
into practice. Ben's attitude should therefote be regarded
as a survival of the features due to constraint.
Generally speaking, it is a perfectly normal thing that
in its beginnings cooperation on the plane of action
should not immediately abolish the mental states created
on the plane of thought by the complexus : ego-
centricity and constraint. Thought always lags behind
action and cooperation has to be practised for a very
long time before its consequences can be brought fully
to light by reflective thought. This is a fresh example
of the law of prise de conscience or conscious realization
formulated by Clapar&de 1 and of the time-lag 2 or " shift-
ing " which we have observed in so many other spheres (see
J. R. t Chap. V, 2 and C.C., 2nd part) . A phenomenon such
as this is, moreover, well fitted to simplify the problem
of egocentrism in general since it explains why intellectual
egocentrism is so much more stubborn than egocentrism
in action.
6. CONSCIOUSNESS OF RULES. II. THIRD STAGE.
After the age of 10 on the average, i.e. from the second
half of the cooperative stage and during the whole of
1 This term (Claparede's prise de conscience) simply means "coming
into consciousness," and has nothing to do with intellectual formula-
tion. [Trans.].
2 This is the term that has been selected by the author ior the French
decalage, a somewhat more complex notion which in previous volumes,
cf. L.T., p. 208, ff., has been rendered as a process of "shifting,"
Trans.].
THE RULES OF THE GAME 57
the stage when the rules are codified, consciousness of
rules undergoes a complete transformation. Autonomy
follows upon heteronomy : the rule of a game appears
to the child no longer as an external law, sacred in so
far as it has been laid down by adults ; but as the
outcome of a free decision and worthy of respect in the
measure that it has enlisted mutual consent.
This change can be seen by three concordant symptoms.
In the first place, the child allows a change in the rules
so long as it enlists the votes of all. Anything is possible,
so long as, and to the extent that you undertake to
respect the new decisions. Thus democracy follows on
theocracy and gerontocracy : there are no more crimes
of opinion, but only breaches in procedure. All opinions
are tolerated so long as their protagonists urge their
acceptance by legal methods. Of course some opinions
are more reasonable than others. Among the new rules
that may be proposed, there are innovations worthy of
acceptance because they will add to the interest of the
game (pleasure in risks, art for art's sake, etc.). And
there are new rules that are worthless because they give
precedence to easy winning as against work and skill.
But the child counts on the agreement among the players
to eliminate these immoral innovations. He no longer
relies, as do the little ones, upon an all-wise tradition.
He no longer thinks that everything has been arranged
for the best in the past and that the only way of avoiding
trouble is by religiously respecting the established order.
He believes in the value of experiment in so far as it is
sanctioned by collective opinion.
In the second place, the child ceases ipso facto to look
upon rules as eternal and as having been handed down
unchanged from one generation to another. Thirdly and
finally, his ideas on the origin of the rules and of the
game do not differ from ours : originally, marbles must
simply have been rounded pebbles which children threw
about to amuse themselves, and rules, far from having
been imposed as such by adults, must have become
58 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
gradually fixed on the initiative of the children them-
selves.
Here are examples :
Ross (n) belongs to the third stage in regard to the
practice of rules. He claims that he often invents new
rales with Ms playmates : " We make them [up] some-
times We go up to 200. We play about and then hit each
other', and then he says to me : ' If you & up to 100 I'U
give you a marble.' Is this new rule fair like the old
ones or not ? Perhaps it isn't quite fair, because ^t ^snt
very ' hard to take four marbles that way f If everyone
does it will it be a real rule, or not IIf they do it often,
it will become a real rule. Did your father play the way
you showed me, or differently ? Oh, I don't know. It
may have been a different game. It changes. It still changes
quite often. Have people been playing for long ? A t
least fifty years. Did people play marbles in the days
of the 'Old Swiss ' IOh, I don't think so. Row did it
begin ? Some boys took some motor balls (ball bearings)
and then they played. And after that there were marbles
in shops. Why are there rules in the game of marbles ?
So as not to be always quarrelling you must have rules, and
then play properly How did these rules begin ISome
boys came to an agreement amongst themselves and made
them. Could you invent a new rule ? Perhaps ... [he
thinks] you put three marbles together and you drop another
from above on to the middle one. Could one play that way ?
Oh, yes. IB that a fair rule like the others IThe
chaps might say it wasn't very fair because it's luck. To
be a good rule, it has to be skill. But if everyone played
that way, would it be a fair rule or not ? Oh 9 yes, you
could play just as well with that rule as with the others"
MALE (12) belongs to the fourth stage in the practice
of rules : " Does everyone play the way you showed
me 7 Yes. And did they play like that long ago ?
N0. Why not ? They used different words. And how
about the rules ? They didn't use them either, because
my father told me he didn't play that way. But long ago
did people play with the same rules 7 Not quite the
same. How about the rule not hitting for one ? I think
that must have come later.Did they play marbles when
your grandfather was little ? Yes. Like they do now ?
Oh, no, different kinds of games. And at the time
of the battle of Morat ? No, I don't think they played
THE RULES OF THE 59
. How do you think the game of marbles began ?
At first, children looked for round pebbles. And the rules ?
/ expect they played from the cache. Later on, boys
wanted to play differently and they invented other rules.
And how did the coche begin ? I expect they had fun
hitting the pebbles. And then they invented the coche.
Could one change the rales IYes. Could you ? Yes t
I could make up another game. We were playing ^ at home
one evening and we found out a new one [he shows it to us].
Are these new rules as fair as the others ? Yes.
Which is the fairest, the game you showed me first or
the one you invented ? Both the same. If you show
this new game to the little ones what will they do ?
Perhaps they will play at it. And if they forget the
square game and only play this one, which will be the
true game, the new one that will be better known, or the
old one ? The best known one will be the fairest."
GROS (13 yrs. at the fourth stage in the practice of the
rules) has shown us the rules as we saw above. " Did
your father play that way when he was little ? No,
they had other rules. They didn't play with a square.
And did the other boys of your father's time play with
a square ? There must have been one who knew, since
we know it now. And how did that one know about
the square ? They thought they would see if it was nicer
than the other game. How old was the boy who invented
the square ? J expect thirteen [his own age]. Did the
children of the Swiss who lived at the time of the battle
of Morat play at marbles ? They may have played with
a hole, and then later on with a square. And in the time
of David de Purry [a periwigged gentleman whose
statue on one of the public squares of NeucMtel is known
to all] ? / expect they had a bit of a lark too ! Have
rules changed since the square was invented? There
may have been little changes. And do the rules still change ?
No. You always play the same way. Are you aEowed
to change the rules at all IOh, yes. Some want to, and
some don't. ' If the boys play that way (changing some-
thing) you have to play like they do. Do you think you
could invent a new rule ? Oh, yes . . . [he thinks] ;
you could play with your feet. Would it be fair? /
don't know. It's just my idea. And if you showed it to
the others would it work fIt would work all right. Some
-other boys would want to try. Some wouldn't, by Jove!
They would stick to the old rules. They'd think they'd have
60 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
less of a chance with this new game. And if everyone
played your way ? Then it would be a rule like the others.
Which is the fairest now, yours or the old one ? The
old one. Why ? Because they cant cheat. (Note this
excellent justification of rules : the old rule is better
than the innovation, not yet sanctioned by usage, because
only the old rule has the force of a law and can thus
prevent cheating.) And if nearly everyone played with
their feet, then which would be fairest ? // nearly
everyone played with their feet, then that would be the
fairest." Finally we ask Gros, " Suppose there are two
games, an easy one where you win often, and a difficult
one where you win seldom, which would you like best ?
The most difficult. You end by winning that way"
VUA (13), whose answers about the practice of rules
we have already examined (4th stage) tells us that his
father and his grandfather played differently from him.
" In the days of the ' Three Swiss ' did boys play at
marbles ? No. They had to work at home. They played
other games. Did they play marbles in the days of the
battle of Morat ? Perhaps, after the war. Who invented
this game ? Some kids. They saw their parents playing
at bowls, and they thought they might do the same thing.
Could other rules be invented ? Yes [he shows us one
he has invented and which he calls ' the line * because
the marbles are arranged in a row and not in a square].
Which is the real game, yours or the square ? The
square, because it is the one that is always used. Which
do you like best, an easy game or a difficult one ?
The more difficult, because it is more interesting. The
' Troyat ' (a game that consists in heaping the balls into
piles) is not quite the real game. Some boys invented it.
They wanted to win all the marbles." On this point Vua
seems to be answering like a child of the preceding stage
who will invoke the " real game " that conforms to
tradition as against contemporary innovations. But Vua
seems to us rather to be contrasting a demagogic pro-
cedure (the " Troyat/' which by allowing too great a part
to chance gives rise to illicit and immoral gains) with
practices that are in keeping with the spirit of the game,
whether they are ancient, like the square, or recent like
his own game. The proof of this would seem to lie in
the following remarks relating to his own playing : "Is
the game you invented as fair as the square, or less
fair ? It is just as fair because the marbles are far apart
THE RULES OF THE GAME 61
(therefore the game is difficult). If in a few years 1 time
everyone played your line game and only one or two
boys played the square game, which would be the fairest,
the line or the square ? The line would be fairest!'
BLAS (12, 4th stage in the practice of rules) thinks
that the game of marbles must have begun round about
1500 at the time of the Reformation. " Children invented
the game. They made little balls with earth and water and
then they amused themselves by rolling them about. They
found it was rather fun making them hit, and then they had
the idea of inventing a game, and they said that when you
hit anyone else's marble with your own you could have the
marble you hit. After that I expect they invented the square,
so that you should have to make the marbles go out of the
square. They invented the line, so that all the marbles
should be at the same distance. They only invented it later.
When cement was discovered, marbles were made like they
are to-day. The marbles of earth weren't strong enough, so
the children asked the manufacturers to make some in
cement." We ask Bias to make up a new rule, and this is
what he thinks of. First there must be a competition, and
whoever makes his marbles go furthest can play first. But
the rule seems " bad because you'd have to run too far back to
fetch the marbles." He then thinks of another which consists
in playing in two squares one inside the other. " Would
everyone want to play that way ? Those who invented it
would. Later on, if your game is played just as much as
the square, which will be the fairest ? Both the same"
The psychological and educational interest of all this
stands out very clearly. We are now definitely in the
presence of a social reality that has rational and moral
organization and is yet peculiar to childhood. Also we
can actually put our finger upon the conjunction of
cooperation and autonomy, which follows upon the
conjunction of egocentrism and constraint.
Up to the present, rules have been imposed upon the
younger children by the older ones. As such they had
been assimilated by the former to the commands given
by adults. They therefore appeared to the child as
sacred and untouchable, the guarantee of their truth
being precisely this immutability. Actually this con-
formity, like all conformity, remained external to the
62 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
individual. In appearance docile, in his own eyes sub-
missive and constantly imbued as it were with the spirit
of the Elders or the Gods, the child could in actual fact
achieve little more than a simulation of sociality, to say
nothing of morality. External constraint does not
destroy egocentrism. It covers and conceals when it
does not actually strengthen it.
But from henceforward a rule is conceived as the free
pronouncement of the actual individual minds them-
selves. It is no longer external and coercive : it can
be modified and adapted to the tendencies of the group.
It constitutes no revealed truth whose sacred character
derives from its divine origin and historical permanence ;
it is something that is built up progressively and auto-
nomously. But does this not make it cease to be a real
rule ? Is it perhaps not a mark of decadence rather
than of progress in relation to the earlier stage ? That
is the problem. The facts, however, seem definitely to
authorize the opposite conclusion : it is from the moment
that it replaces the rule of constraint that the rule of
cooperation becomes an effective moral law.
In the first place, one is struck by the synchronism
between the appearance of this new type of consciousness
of rules and a genuine observation of the rules. This
third stage of rule consciousness appears towards the age
of lo-n. And it is at this same age that the simple
cooperation characteristic of the third stage in the
practice of rules begins to be complicated by a desire
for codification and complete application of the law.
The two phenomena are therefore related to each other.
But is it the consciousness of autonomy that leads to the
practical respect for the law, or does this respect for the
law lead to the feeling of autonomy ? These are simply
two aspects of the same reality : when a rule ceases to
be external to children and depends only on their free
collective will, it becomes incorporated in the mind of
each, and individual obedience is henceforth purely
spontaneous. True, the difficulty reappears each time
THE RULES OF THE GAME 63
that the child, while still remaining faithful to a rule that
favours him, is tempted to slur over some article of the
law or some point of procedure that favours his opponent.
But the peculiar function of cooperation is to lead the
child to the practice of reciprocity, hence of moral univer-
sality and generosity in Ms relations with his playmates.
This last point introduces us to yet another sign of
the bond between autonomy and true respect for the
law. By modifying rules, i.e. by becoming a sovereign
and legislator in the democracy which towards the age
of lo-n follows upon the earlier gerontocracy, the child
takes cognizance of the raison d'etre of laws. A rule
becomes the necessary condition for agreement, " So as
not to be always quarrelling,'* says Ross, ''you must have
rules and then play properly [ = stick to them]/' The
fairest rule, Gros maintains, is that which unites the
opinion of the players, " because [then] they can't cheat. 1 '
Thirdly, what shows most clearly that the autonomy
achieved during this stage leads more surely to respect
for rules than the heteronomy of the preceding stage
is the truly political and democratic way in which children
of 12-13 distinguish lawless whims from constitutional
innovation. Everything is allowed, every individual
proposition is, by rights, worthy of attention. There are
no more breaches of opinion, in the sense that to desire
to change the laws is no longer to sin against them. Only
and each of our subjects was perfectly clear on this
point no one has the right to introduce an innovation
except by legal channels, i.e. by previously persuading
the other players and by submitting in advance to the
verdict of the majority. There may therefore be breaches
but they are of procedure only : procedure alone is
obligatory, opinions can always be subjected to discussion.
Thus Gros tells us that if a change is proposed " Some
want to and some don't. If boys play that way [allow an
alteration] you have to play like they do." As Vua said
in connection with the practice of rules (4) " sometimes
people play differently. Then you ask each other what you
64 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
want to do. . . . We scrap for a bit and then we fix things
In short, law now emanates from the sovereign people
and no longer from the tradition laid down by the Elders.
And correiatively with this change, the respective values
attaching to custom and the rights of reason come to be
practically reversed.
In the past, custom had always prevailed over rights.
Only, as in all cases where a human being is enslaved to
a custom that is not part of his inner life, the child
regarded this Custom imposed by his elders as a sort of
Decalogue revealed by divine beings (i.e. adults, including
God, who is, according to Fal, the oldest gentleman in
Neuchatel after his own father). With the result that,
in the eyes of a little child, no alteration of usage will
dispense the individual from remaining faithful to the
eternal law. Even if people forget the square game,
says Ben, and adopt another, this new game " will really
be wrong." The child therefore distinguishes between a
rule that is true in itself and mere custom, present or
future. And yet he is all the time enslaved to custom
and not to any juridico-raoral reason or reality distinct
from this custom and superior to it. Nor indeed is this
way of thinking very different from that of many con-
servative adults who delude themselves into thinking
that they are assisting the triumph of eternal reason
over present fashion, when they are really the slaves of
past custom at the expense of the permanent laws of
rational cooperation.
But from now on, by the mere fact of tying himself down
to certain rules of discussion and collaboration, and thus
cooperating with his neighbours in full reciprocity (without
any false respect for tradition nor for the will of any one
individual) the child will be enabled to dissociate custom
from the rational ideal. For it is of the essence of coopera-
tion as opposed to social constraint that, side by side with
the body of provisional opinion which exists in fact, it also
allows for an ideal of what is right functionally implied in the
THE RULES OF THE GAME 65
very mechanism of discussion and reciprocity. The
constraint of tradition imposes opinions or customs, and
there is an end of it. Cooperation imposes nothing
except the actual methods of intellectual or moral inter-
change (Baldwin's * synnomic as opposed to his syndoxic).
Consequently we must distinguish alongside of the actual
agreement that exists between minds, an ideal agreement
defined by the more and more intensive application of
the processes of mental interchange. 2 As far as our
children are concerned, this simply means that in addition
to the rules agreed upon in a given group and at a given
moment (constituted morality or rights in the sense in
which M. Lalande speaks of " raison constitute " 3 ) the
child has in mind a sort of ideal or spirit of the game
which cannot be formulated in terms of rules (constitutive
morality or rights in the sense of " raison constituante ").
For if there is to be any reciprocity between players in
the application of established rules or in the elaboration
of new rules, everything must be eliminated that would
compromise this reciprocity (inequalities due to chance,
excessive individual differences in skill or muscular
power, etc.). Thus usages are gradually purified in virtue
of an ideal that is superior to custom since it arises from
the very functioning of cooperation.
This is why, when innovations are proposed to the
child, he regards them as fair or unfair not only according
as they are likely or not to rally the majority of players
in their favour, but also according as they are in keeping
with that spirit of the game itself, which is nothing more
or less than the spirit of reciprocity. Ross tells us, for
instance, concerning his own proposition, " Perhaps it
isn't quite fair, because it isn't very hard to take four marbles
that way/' and again, " The chaps might say it wasn't
very fair because it's luck. To be a good rule, it has to be
1 J. M. Baldwin, Genetic Theory of Reality.
2 See our article, " Logique gene'tique et sociologie," Revue Philo-
sophique, 1928.
8 Lalande, A., " Raison constituante et raison constitute/' Revue
dfs Cours et des Conference.
E
66 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
skill." The Troyat, Vua informs us, is less fair than the
square (though equally widespread and equally well
known to former generations), because it was invented
" to win all the marbles." In this way, Vua draws a
distinction between demagogy and a sane democracy.
In the same way, Gros and Vua prefer difficult games
because they are more " interesting " : cleverness and
skill now matter more than winning. Art for art's sake
is far more disinterested than playing for gain.
In a word, as soon as we have cooperation, the rational
notions of the just and the unjust become regulative of
custom, because they are implied in the actual functioning
of social life among equals a point which will be developed
in the third chapter of this book. During the preceding
stages, on the contrary, custom overbore the issue of
right, precisely in so far as it was deified and remained
external to the minds of individuals.
Let us now see what sort of philosophy of history the
child will adopt in consequence of having discovered
democracy. It is very interesting, in this connection, to
note the following synchronism. The moment a child
decides that rules can be changed, he ceases to believe
in their endless past and in their adult origin. In other
words, he regards rules as having constantly changed
and as having been invented and modified by children
themselves. External events may of course play a certain
part in bringing this about. Sooner or later, for example,
the child may learn from his father that the game was
different for previous generations. But so unmistakable
is the correlation (on the average, of course) between the
appearance of this new type of consciousness of rules
and the disappearance of the belief in the adult origin of
the game that the connection must be founded on reality.
Is it, then, the loss of belief in the divine or adult origin
of rules that allows the child to think of innovations,
or is it the consciousness of autonomy that dispels the
myth of revelation ?
Only someone completely ignorant of the character
THE RULES OF THE GAME 67
of childish beliefs could imagine that a change in the
child's ideas about the origin of rules could be of a nature
to exercise so profound an influence on his social conduct.
On the contrary, here as in so many cases, belief merely
reflects behaviour. There can be no doubt that children
very rarely reflect upon the original institution of -the,
game of marbles. There are even very strong reasons
for assuming that as far as the children we examined
are concerned such a problem never even entered their
heads until the day when a psychologist had the ridiculous
idea of asking them how marbles were played in the days
of the Old Swiss and of the Old Testament. Even if the
question of the origin of rules did pass through the minds
of some of these children during the spontaneous inter-
rogatories that so often deal with rules in general (L. T.,
Chap. V, 5 and 10) the answer which the child would
give himself would probably be found without very much
reflection. In most cases the questions we asked were
entirely new to the subject, and the answers were dictated
by the feelings which the game had aroused in them in
varying intensity. Thus, when the little ones tell us that
rules have an adult origin and have never changed, one
should beware of taking this as the expression of a
systematic belief ; all they mean is that the laws of the
game must be left alone. And when, conversely, the
older ones tell us that rules have varied and were invented
by children, this belief is perhaps more thought out since
it is held by more developed subjects, but it is still
only valuable as an indication : the child simply means
that he is free to make the law.
We may well ask ourselves, then, whether it is legiti-
mate to question the child about such very verbal beliefs,
since these beliefs do not correspond to thought properly
so called, and since the child's true thought lies much
deeper, somewhere below the level of formulation. But
in our opinion these beliefs have their interest because the
same phenomena reappear in adult mental life and because
the psychological facts lead by a series of intermediate
68 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
steps to metaphysical systems themselves. What Pareto, 1
basing his relatively simple conclusions on such a wealth
of erudition, has called " derivations " are really present
in germ in our children's remarks about the origin of
games. These remarks have no intellectual value, but
they contain a very resistant, affective and social element
the "residuum" to quote Pareto again. To the
residuum peculiar to the conforming attitude of the
little ones correspond the derivations " divine or adult
origin " and " permanence in history ". To the residuum
peculiar to the more democratic attitude of- the older
children correspond the derivations " natural (childish)
origin " and " progress ".
One more fundamental question must still be discussed.
How is it that democratic practice is so developed in the
games of marbles played by boys of n to 13, whereas it
is still so unfamiliar to the adult in many spheres of life ?
Of course it is easier to agree upon some subjects than on
others, and feeling will not run so high on the subject
of the rales of the " Square " as in an argument about
the laws of property or the legitimacy of war. But
apart from these questions (and after all, is it so obvious
that social questions are -more important, to us than
are the rules of a game to the child of 12 j>) there are
others of greater psychological and sociological interest.
For it must not be forgotten that the game of
marbles is dropped towards the age of 14-15 at the
latest. With regard to this game, therefore, children
of 11-13 have no seniors. The following circumstance
is important. Since they no longer have to endure the
pressure of play-mates who impose their views by virtue
of their prestige, the children whose reactions we have
been studying are clearly able to become conscious of
their autonomy much sooner than if the game of
marbles lasted till the age of 18. In the same way,
most of the phenomena which characterize adult societies
would be quite other than they are if the average length
i Tvaitt de Sodologie gln&rale.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 69
of human life were appreciably different from what it
is. Sociologists have tended to overlook this fact,
though Auguste Comte pointed out that the pressure
of one generation upon the other was the most important
phenomenon of social life.
We shall have occasion to see, moreover, that towards
the age of n the consciousness of autonomy appears in
a large number of different spheres. Whether this is the
repercussion of collective games on the whole moral life
of the child is a question which will be taken up
later.
7, A GIRLS' GAME: "ILET CACHANT ". Before
drawing any general conclusion from the facts set out
above, it may be useful to see whether they are peculiar
to the game of marbles as played by boys or whether
similar examples cannot be found in different fields.
For this purpose we studied, with the same method, but
questioning only girls, a much simpler game than the
game of marbles.
The most superficial observation is sufficient to show
that in the main the legal sense is far less developed in
little girls than in boys. We did not succeed in finding
a single collective game played by girls in which there
were as many rules and, above all, as fine and consistent
an organization and codification of these rules as in the
game of marbles examined above. A significant example
in this connection is the game of " Marelle " (Engl.,
Hop-scotch) (also called "la Semaine " or " le del")
which consists in hopping on one leg and kicking a stone
through various sections drawn on the ground representing
the days of the week or anything else one likes. The
few rules embodied in this game (not to put the other
foot down, to make the pebble go into the right square
with one kick, not to let the pebble stop on a boundary
line, permission to rest in a special section called Heaven,
etc,) show well enough how possible it would have been
to complicate the game by constructing new rules on
70 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
these initial data. Instead of which girls, though they
are very fond of this game and play it much oftener than
boys, have applied all their ingenuity in inventing new
figures. For the game of Marelle exists in a multitude
of forms ; the sections drawn in chalk on the pavement
succeed one another in a straight line, in parallel lines,
in the shape of a spiral, a circle, an oval, of the pipe of
a stove, etc. But each game in itself is very simple and
never presents the splendid codification and complicated
jurisprudence of the game of marbles. As to the game
of marbles itself, the few little girls who take any interest
in it seem more concerned with achieving dexterity at
the game than with the legal structure of this social
institution.
As the extremely polymorphous nature of the game of
Marelle made any interrogatory on rale consciousness
difficult, we decided to study a very simple game con-
taining a minimum of rules and to try and find out up
to what point girls look upon rules as obligatory. In
this case, as in those already dealt with, what interests
us of course is to see what types of obligation appear at
different ages and whether the youngest children are
those who are most hostile to any alteration in the social
heritage. As the game is simple and only girls are
questioned, the conditions before us are as different as
possible from the boys' game of marbles. Such analogies
as do eventually appear will therefore be all the more
valuable.
The game of " ilet cachant " is one of the most primitive
forms of the game of hide-and-seek. The little girl who is
ilet (the derivation of the word seems to be " il est ",
as the expressions " ilet courant ", " ilet cachant ", etc.,
seem to suggest) remains at a spot called the " tauche "
( = the place one touches) while the others hide. Once
the signal has been given the girl who is " ilet " begins
to look for the others who try to reach the " tauche "
before being caught. Whoever is caught is " ilet " for
the next game. The first to play "ilet" is selected
THE RULES OF THE GAME 71
according to the well-known ritual formula, " Une boule
deux boules trois boules roulent ! " etc. The little
girls call this " plunging ". " The last to plunge is llet."
The game being so simple, we shall not waste time by
describing the stages during which it is learnt and the
rules are put into practice. It will be sufficient to dis-
tinguish two stages one before the age of 7 and one
which extends from 6-7 years to 11-12.
During the first of these stages, which here again we
can designate as the stage of egocentrism, the children
take great pleasure in imitating the ordered doings of
their elders, but in practice know nothing of their raison
d'etre ; each plays essentially for himself, just for the fun
of running about or hiding, and above all, so as to do the
same as the others.
JACQUELINE (5 ; 7) is initiated into the game of " ilet "
by an older friend (10 yrs.) who has immense prestige in
her eyes, and she plays with this friend and with a few
children of 8 to 12. As long as the game lasts (about
three-quarters of an hour) she runs and hides with
apparently the greatest enjoyment but without under-
standing the point of the " tauche ". As soon as one of
the children runs towards " home " crying " I've touched
it" Jacqueline also runs to touch it ritually but without
any relation to the other's conduct. She is quite happy
playing her own little game on the fringe of the real game.
The following days she behaves in the same way.
Several days later she plays for half an hour, alone with
the friend who has initiated her. This is what she does :
i she still does not understand why you touch or hit
the " tauche " but goes on touching it as soon as her
playmate does (which is quite senseless, since the other
child touches home to escape from her) ; 2 while she is
waiting for her playmate to hide, she cheats in all good
faith (she looks round on the sly, pretending to cover her
face with her hands, she asks me for information who
am simply an onlooker, etc.) ; 3 she enjoys losing quite
as much as winning, her sole aim being to do the same as
her older friend, though all the time she is running and
hiding and shouting entirely on her own.
The analogy strikes one at once between this and the
behaviour of contemporary marble players : imitation of
72 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
seniors mixed with egocentric play, no competition, no
mutual control in the matter of rules. The child knows
that there are rules and respects their external manifesta-
tion : thus Jacqueline insists upon touching the " home "
ritually, because she feels that this is an obligatory rite
in the serious performance of the game of " ilet ". But
this is far more participation in the life of the older
children than an effort to cooperate with them. As for
the application of rules, it allows for any amount of
individual caprice (there is not even any consciousness of
cheating) since the aim of the game is not yet social in
the sense of ordered competition.
But after the age of 6-7 in the average the child changes
in his attitude and begins to observe rules. What matters
to him now is not so much to do what the older ones
are doing, though still acting entirely for himself, as beat-
ing his partners by doing exactly the same thing as they.
Hence the appearance of mutual control in the application
of the law, together with an effective respect for obliga-
tions (not to cheat when one is " he ", etc.). We shall call
this the stage of cooperation.
The next point to settle is, what are the feelings which
the little girls entertain towards rules ? When we suggest
some modification in the accepted usages, shall we meet
with an opposition that increases as the child grows
older, or shall we find that girls, like boys, gradually
subordinate rules to mutual agreement and abandon the
absolutely binding element in tradition ?
The facts give unmistakable answer, though they point
to a slight difference from what we observed in boys.
Where the analogy is complete is that girls also begin
by regarding the law as untouchable and innovations as
illegitimate, and admit later on that rules become endowed
with the force of law in so far as they are ratified by the
collective will. On the other hand and this rather
complicated our interrogatory, in relation to what we
know about boys this change of orientation takes place
on the average towards the age of 8, that is to say, it
THE RULES OF THE GAME 73
almost completely coincides with the inception of the
cooperating stage. This early tolerance is clearly con-
nected with the somewhat loosely knit character of the
game of " tlet-cachant ".
Roughly speaking, we can distinguish three stages.
The first is contemporaneous with the beginnings of the
game itself, with the first half, that is, of the egocentric
stage. At this stage, the child seems ready to change
all the rules and to show no inner respect for tradition
and the example of its seniors. But, as we saw in the
case of the game of marbles, this is so only in appearance,
and the child accepts proposed modifications in so far
as it believes them to correspond with earlier decrees
Thus Jacqueline touches the " home " in so far as she
sees this rite practised by others, but if anyone neglects
to carry out this duty, she is in no way scandalized,
deeming that this too is among the things that " are
done ". There is no need to go over this period again,
which in any case is a short one and very difficult to
analyse for lack of any consistency in the children's
answers.
During a second stage, extending on the average up to
the end of the seventh year, the little girls we questioned
showed themselves to be firmly attached to the prevailing
usage. Also, like boys, they think that rules are of adult
and quasi-divine origin.
MOL (6J) : " Are there things you must do and things
you mustn't do in this game ? Yes. The things you must
do are the rules of the game. Could you invent a new
rule ? . . . Supposing you said that the third who
plunged was ' he ' ? Yes. Would it be all right to play
that way or not ? It'd be all right. Is it a fair rule like
the others ? Less fair. Why ? Because the last one has
to be ' he '. And if everyone played that way, would it
become a fair rule ? No. Why ? Because the game isn't
like that. How did the rules begin ? . . . How do
you know how to play ? / learn 'd the first time. I didn't
know how. We played with a little girl who told us.
And how did the little girl know ? She learn' d. And
did your Mummy play when she was little ? Yes. The
74 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
school-teacher taught her. -But how did it begin ? People
learn' d with the school-teacher, Who made up the rules,
grown-ups or children ? Grown-ups. And if a child
invents a new rule, is that all right ? No it isn't. Why
not ? Because they don't know how to."
AGE (7 yrs.) admits that the third child to be caught
could be regarded as '' he ", but she refuses to recognize
this new rule as fair. " Is it a real rule ? Yes. Is it
fair ? jYo. Became that is not the way you play." (The
conversation is resumed after break.) " Would that new
rule be all right ? No, because the first one who is caught
has to be { he '. Why ? Because otherwise it wouldn't be
fair. But if everyone played like that ? It wouldn't
do because the third mustn't le* he'! 9
BON (7 yrs.) admits that her companions would be
pleased with such an innovation, but this would be
" not fair. Why ? Because it upsets the whole game,
"because it's wrong/'
Ros (8J) invents a new rule : " You might say that
only one goes and hides and then the others would go and
look for her. Would that be all right for playing ? Yes.
Is this new way fairer than the other way or less fair ?
Less fair. Why ? Because you don't play with that
onCf But if everyone played that way ? Then it would
be just a little bit fair. Why a little bit ? Because^ after
all, it is a little the same way. But it isn't quite fair ?
jVo. Why? . . . And if everyone agreed to play
that way would it be the same, or would it not ? It
would be all right (reluctantly). Which is best, always to
play the same way or to change ? To change (still
reluctantly). Why ? Because that game is truer. Which
one ? Not the one I made up. Then is it best to change
it or to leave it as it is IBest to leave it." The game
of " llet cachant " has been invented by " a Gentleman ".
" Has it been changed since then, or is it the same as
when it was invented? Yes, it hasn't been changed.
But if people want to, they can change it ? Yes. Can
children? Yes. If they invent something will it be
more fair or less fair ? Less fair. Why ? Because it
isn't the real game. What is the real game ? The one
the gentleman invented. Why ? Because that is the one
you always play."
LIL (8 ; 10) : " How did the game begin the very first
time of all ? I think a lady invented it. Do yoii think
the ga$ie has changed since then ? People may have
THE RULES OF THE GAME 75
changed it. Who changed it, grown-ups or children ?
Grown-ups. But do you tMnk children can change it ?
Yes, they can. Could you & for instance, if you wanted
to ? Oh, if I wanted to, yes. Would it do or would it
not do ? It would do just as well. Would your friends
be pleased ? They'd be just as pleased. Would it be as
fair or less fair ? Less fair. Fair in what way ?
I think the lady who invented it invented it better. Why ?
Because grown-ups are cleverer, because they have been at
school longer than children."
These examples show that girls of this stage, while
perhaps not quite so keen on conformity as boys, show
a sufficient feeling for tradition to ensure respect for
rules. We even come across the divine right of mothers
to lay down the laws of " ttet cachant ". Buc tells us at
6 years old that " God taught them ?; .
But at the age of 8 a good half of the girls we questioned
have changed their attitude and declare that the new
rule is as good as the old, provided it is practicable and,
above all, provided it rallies all the votes. It is on this
point that the girls, more tolerant and more easily recon-
ciled to innovations, struck us as being slightly different
from the boys.
BAG (10 ; 4) is asked to judge a new rule suggested
by one of her companions and which consists in not
" struggling " when you are caught. " Is it just as fair
or less fair ? Just as fair. Is it a real rule or not ?
A real rule. What is a real rule? It's something you
play at really and truly. But no one has played yet with
the rule invented by your friend ; is it real all the same,
or not ? It is real. Would it work ? Yes. Would your
friends be pleased or not ? Not pleased, because they'd
never want to be 'he' (in that way). And if they agreed
about it, would it be fair or not ? Yes."
CHO (9 yrs.) : " Is this rule as real as the others ?
No. Why ? Because you never play that way. Would
it be all right to play that way? Yes. Would your
friends like it ? Yes. Is this new rule more fair or less
fair than the other ? Both the same. Which is the most
real? Both the same. How did rules begin? Some-
body invented them. Who ? A child . . . There were
76 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
some kids who were playing and the others did the same
iking. Were the rales those children made fair ? Yes.
When is a rule fair ? W hen it's all right for playing.
When is it real ? When it's all right for playing"
These reactions, which are characteristic of what we
found in girls, are thus both like and unlike those of boys.
They are alike in so far as cooperation between the
players brings about the gradual diminution of rule
mysticism : the rule is no longer an imperative coming
from an adult and accepted without discussion, it is a
means of agreement resulting from cooperation itself.
But girls are less explicit about this agreement and this is
our reason for suspecting them of being less concerned
with legal elaborations. A rule is good so long as the
game repays it.
Little girls are therefore extremely tolerant, and it
never occurs to them to introduce a distinguo and to
codify the possible cases or even the very conditions of
agreement.
Is this difference due to the somewhat loosely-knit
"character of the game of " ilet cachant " or to the actual
mentality of little girls ? Both these suppositions probably
amount to the same thing, since we noticed that all
girls' games are marked by this polymorphism and
tolerance. The question, moreover, does not interest us
here, and it is not this contrast which we propose to study.
All that needs to be emphasized from the point of view
of the psychology of rules is that, in spite of these
differences in the structure of the game -an^ apparently,
in the players' mentality, we find the sine process at
work as in the evolution of the game of marbles : first
a mystical respect for the law, which is conceived as
untouchable and of transcendental origin, then a co-
operation that liberates the individuals from their practical
egocentrism and introduces a new and more immanent
conception of rules.
8. CONCLUSIONS : I. MOTOR RULES AND THE TWO
KINDS OF RESPECT. In order to pursue our analysis
THE RULES OF THE GAME 77
with any profit we shall have to draw from the material
that has been presented above certain conclusions which
will serve as guiding hypotheses in the chapters that are
to follow. In other words, we shall try to find in the
various stages we have examined certain evolutionary
processes which are likely to reappear in our future
enquiries.
Two prefatory questions confront us. The first has
to do with differences of structure and differences of
degree. Rules evolve as the child grows older ; neither
the practice nor the consciousness of rules is the same
at six as it is at twelve. Is the difference one of nature
or of degree ? After having done our utmost to show
that child thought differs from adult thought not only in
degree but in its very nature, we confess that we no longer
know precisely what is meant by these terms. From the
methodological point of view their meaning is, of course,
perfectly clear ; they tell us to beware of facile analogies
and to look for the less obvious differences before pointing
to resemblances that will stand out of themselves. But
how does the matter stand from the theoretical point of
view ? Psychologically, as M. Bergson has well shown,
every difference of degree or quantity is also a difference
of quality. Conversely, it is difficult to think of a
difference in kind without the presence of at least some
functional continuity, so that between two successive
structures a succession of intermediate degrees could be
found. For instance, after having tried to describe the
child's mentality as distinct from the adult's we have
found ourselves obliged to include it in our descriptions
of the adult mind in so far as the adult still remains a
child. This happens particularly in the case of moral
psychology, since certain features of child morality always
appear to be closely connected with a situation that
from the first predominates in childhood (egocentrism,
resulting from the inequality between the child and the
adult surrounding which presses upon him) but which
may recur in adult life, especially in the strictly conformist
78 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
and gerontocratic societies designated as primitive. Con-
versely, in certain circumstances where he experiments in
new types of conduct by cooperating with Ms equals,
the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every
child and a child in every adult. The difference in nature
reduces itself to this. There exist in the child certain
attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will
more and more tend to eMminate : there are others
which will acquire more and more importance. The
latter are not simply derived from the former but are
partly antagonistic to them. The two sets of phenomena
are to be met both in the child and in the adult, but
one set predominates in the one, the other in the
other. It is, we may say, simply a question of the
proportions in which they are mixed ; so long as we
remember that every difference of proportion is also a
difference of general quality, for the spirit is one and
undivided.
Between the various types of rules which we shall give
there will therefore be at once continuity and qualitative
difference : continuity of function and difference of
structure. This renders arbitrary any attempt to cut
mental reality up into stages. The matter is further
complicated by the " Law of conscious realization "
and the resulting time-lag. The appearance of a new
type of rule on the practical plane does not necessarily
mean that this rule will come into the subject's con-
sciousness, for each mental operation has to be re-
learnt on the different planes of action and of thought.
There are therefore no inclusive stages which define the
whole of a subject's mental life at a given point of his
evolution ; the stages should be thought of as the
successive phases of regular processes recurring like a
rhythm on the superposed planes of behaviour and of
consciousness. A given individual may, for example,
have reached the stage of autonomy with regard to a
certain group of rules, while his consciousness of these
rules, together with the practice of certain more subtle
THE RULES OF THE GAME 79
rules, will still be coloured with heteronomy. 1 We cannot
therefore speak of global or inclusive stages characterized
as such by autonomy or heteronomy, but only of phases of
heteronomy or autonomy which define a process that is
repeated for each new set of rules or for each new plane of
thought or reflection.
A second prefatory question faces us : that of society
and the individual. We have sought to contrast the child
and the civilized adult on the ground of their respective
social attitudes. The baby (at the stage of motor intelli-
gence) is asocial, the egocentric child is subject to external
constraint but has little capacity for cooperation, the
civilized adult of to-day presents the essential character of
cooperation between differentiated personalities who regard
each other as equals. There are therefore three types of
behaviour : motor behaviour, egocentric behaviour (with
external constraint), and cooperation. And to these three
types of social behaviour there correspond three types of
rules : motor rules, rules due to unilateral respect, and rules
due to mutual respect. But here again, one must beware
of laying down the law : for things are motor, individual
and social all at once. As we shall have occasion to show,
rules of cooperation are in some respects the outcome of
the rules of coercion and of the motor rules. On the
other hand, coercion is applied during the first days of
an infant's life, and the earliest social relations contain
the germs of cooperation. Here again, it is not so much
a question of these successive features themselves as of
the proportions in which they are present. Moreover,
the way in which conscious realization and the time-lag
from one level to another come into play is a further bar
to our arranging these phenomena in a strict sequence,
as though they made a single appearance and then dis-
appeared from the scene once and for all.
1 A child of 10 will, for example, show signs of autonomy in his
application of the rules of the game of marbles, but will give proof of
heteronomy in the extent to which he is conscious of these rules and
in his application of rules relating to lying and justice.
8o THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
With these reservations in mind, let us then try to
outline the processes which govern the evolution of the
idea of rules. And if language and discursive thought
which, according to a famous metaphor, are necessarily
cinematographic in character, tend to lay too much
emphasis on discontinuity, let it be understood once and
for all, that any over-sharp discontinuities are analytical
devices and not objective results.
To continue, our enquiry into the nature of games
would seem to reveal the existence of three types of rules,
and the problem before us will be to determine the exact
relations between them. There is the motor rule, due to
preverbal motor intelligence and relatively independent
of any social contact ; the coercive rule due to unilateral
respect ; and the rational rule due to mutual respect.
Let us examine these three rules in succession.
The motor rule. In its beginnings the motor rule
merges into habit. During the first few months of an
infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying
its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into
imperative habits. This is why education must begin in
the cradle. To accustom the infant to get out of its own
difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the
foundations of a good or of a bad disposition. But not
every habit will give rise to the knowledge of a rule.
The habit must first be frustrated, and the ensuing con-
flict must lead to an active search for the habitual.
Above all, the particular succession must be perceived
as regular, i.e. there must be judgment or consciousness
of regularity (Regelbewusstseiri). The motor rule is there-
fore the result of a feeling of repetition which arises
out of the ritualization of schemas of motor adaptation.
The primitive rules of the game of marbles (throwing
the marbles, heaping them, burying them, etc.) which
we observed towards the age of 2-3 are nothing else.
The behaviour in question starts from a desire for a form
of exercise which takes account of the particular object
that is being handled. The child begins by incorporating
THE RULES OF THE GAME 81
the marbles Into one or other of the schemas of assimilation
already known to him, such as making a nest,, hiding
under earth, etc. Then he adapts these schemas to the
nature of the object by preventing the marbles from
rolling away by putting them In a hole, by throwing them,
etc. This mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and
adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is
what defines motor intelligence. But and this is where
rules come into existence as soon as a balance Is estab-
lished between adaptation and assimilation, the course
of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized.
New schemas are even established which th,e child looks
for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory
or charged with efficacy.
But is this early behaviour accompanied by conscious-
ness of obligation or by a feeling of the necessity of the
rule ? We do not think so. Without the feeling of
regularity which goes to the formation of any intelligence
and already so clearly characterizes motor intelligence,
the consciousness of obligation would no doubt never
make its appearance. But there is more in this conscious-
ness of obligation than a mere perception of regularity,
there is a feeling of respect and authority which, as
Durkheim and Bovet have clearly shown, could not come
from the individual alone. One might even be tempted
to say that rules only begin when this consciousness of
obligation, i.e. when the social element has made its
appearance. But the material we have collected all goes
to show that this obligatory and sacred character only
marks an episode in the evolution of rules. After being
unilateral, respect becomes mutual. In this way, the rule
becomes rational, i.e. it appears as the fruit of a mutual
engagement. And what is this rational rule but the
primitive motor rule freed from individual caprice and
submitted to the control of reciprocity ?
Let us therefore turn to the influence of inter-individual
relations in the constitution of rules. In the first place,
we repeat, the social element is to be found everywhere.
F
82 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
From the hour of its birth certain regularities of conduct
are imposed upon the infant by the adult, and, as we
have shown elsewhere (C.W. and C.C.), every regularity
observed in nature, every " law " appears to the child
for a long time as both physical and moral. Even in
connection with the preverbal stage, characterized as it
is by the motor rule in all its purity, people have spoken
of child "sociology''. Thus Mme Ch. Biihler, in her
interesting studies on the first year, has very accurately
noted how much more interested a baby is in people than
in things. Two considerations, however, forbid us to
regard these facts as playing a very important part in
the development of motor rules. In the first place, a
baby, as Mme Biihler has acutely noted, is more interested
in adults than in its contemporaries. Now, surely this
shows either that an interest in what is big, powerful,
and mysterious (to say nothing of the interest in food and
physical comfort bound up with the person of the parents)
still outweighs any social interest, or what perhaps
comes to the same thing that inter-individual relations
based on admiration and unilateral respect are stronger
than relations based on cooperation. In either case, a
baby of 10-12 months, which elaborates all sorts of
ritual acts connected with the objects it handles, may
be influenced indirectly by its feelings for the adult, but
neither the baby nor anyone observing it could distinguish
these influences from the rest of what constitutes its
universe. But the same child at about two, once he is
able to speak or to understand what is said to him, will
be acutely conscious of the rules that are imposed upon
him (sitting down to meals or going to bed when he
would like to go on playing) and will distinguish them
perfectly well from the motor rules or rituals which he has
himself established in the course of his games. It is the
increasing constraint exercised upon the child by those
around him that we regard as the intervention of the
social factor.
In the case of play rules, the discontinuity between
THE RULES OF THE GAME 83
this process and the purely motor processes Is obvious.
On a given occasion, the child meets with others, older
than himself, who play marbles according to a code.
Immediately he feels that he ought to play in the same way
himself ; immediately he assimilates the rules adopted in
this way to the totality of commands which control his
way of living. In other words, he immediately places the
example of children older than himself on the same
plane as the hundred and one other customs and obliga-
tions imposed by adults. This is not an explicit process
of reasoning. The child of three or four is saturated with
adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that
things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions
conform to laws that are both physical and moral, in a
word, that there is a Universal Order. The revelation
of the rales of the game, of " the real game " as played
by his seniors is immediately incorporated into this
universe. A rule imitated in this way is felt from the
first as something obligatory and sacred.
Only, the main result of our enquiry, and one which
will receive repeated confirmation in the latter part of
this book, is that the social factor is not just one thing.
If there is relative discontinuity between the early motor
activity and adult intervention, the discontinuity is no
less marked between the unilateral respect which accom-
panies this intervention and the mutual respect which
gradually comes into being later on. Once again, let
there be no misunderstanding : the qualities in question
are not more important than the proportions in which
they are mixed. Between the unilateral respect of the
little child who receives a command without even the
possibility of disagreement and the mutual respect of
two adolescents who exchange their points of view there
is room for any number of intermediate stages. Constraint
is never unadulterated, nor, therefore, is respect ever
purely unilateral : the most submissive child has the
feeling that he can, or could, argue that a mutual sympathy
surrounds relationships that are most heavily charged
84 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
with authority. And conversely, cooperation is never
absolutely pure : in any discussion between equals, one
of the disputants can always exert pressure on the other
by making overt or hidden appeals to custom and
authority. Cooperation, indeed, seems rather to be the
limiting term, the ideal equilibrium to which all relations
of constraint tend. As the child grows up, his relations
with adults approximate to equality, and as communities
develop, their group ideas leave more room for free
discussion between individuals. Nevertheless, every time
the proportion of constraint and cooperation is changed,
mental states and conduct are marked by a correspond-
ingly fresh quality, so that, however artificial the analysis
may seem, it is necessary to distinguish these two processes
as leading to different results.
Let us begin with unilateral respect and the coercive rule
to which it leads. The outstanding fact here, and what
differentiates this type of respect from its successor, is
the close connection which we have noted between respect
due to the constraint of older children or adults and the
egocentric behaviour of the child between 3 and 7. Let
us therefore examine this point afresh in order to establish
its general significance.
The facts are, it will be remembered, as follows. On
the one hand, the child knows that there are rules, the
"real rules", and that they must be obeyed because
they are obligatory and sacred ; but on the other hand,
although the child vaguely takes note of the general
scheme of these rules (making a square, aiming at the
square, etc.) he still plays more or less as he did during
the previous stage, i.e. he plays more or less for himself,
regardless of his partners, and takes more pleasure
in his own movements than in the observance of the
rules themselves, thus confusing his own wishes with
universality.
The right interpretation of these facts calls for very
close scrutiny, so easy is it to fall into mistakes in
dealing with the problem of the socialization of the child.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 85
In the first place, let us remind the reader that the behaviour
of children of 3 to 7 with regard to the game of marbles
is comparable on aH points to the behaviour of children
of the same age in regard to their conversations or to
their social and intellectual life in general But the
egocentrism common to all these types of behaviour
admits of at least two interpretations. Some people
think and in all our previous works we have claimed
to be of their number that egocentrism is presocial in
the sense that it marks a transition between the individual
and the social, between the motor and quasi-solipsistic
stage of the baby and the stage of cooperation proper.
However closely connected with unilateral respect ego-
centrism may be, this mixture of coercion and subjectivity
which characterizes the stage lasting from 2 to 7 years
does seem to us less social than cooperation (which is
the one determining factor in the formation of the rational
elements in ethics and in logic). Other thinkers, on the
contrary, consider egocentric behaviour to be in no way
presocial the social element remaining identical with
itself throughout all the various stages but take it to be,
as it were, parasocial behaviour, analogous to what occurs
in the adult when private feeling obscures his objectivity
or when he is left out of a conversation from which he is
precluded by his incompetence or stupidity. 1 Thinkers
belonging to this second group can see no essential
difference between cooperation and coercion ; hence their
view that the social factor is a permanent element through-
out the whole course of mental development.
The data with which the present discussion is concerned
would seem to be of a nature to remove these ambiguities.
Egocentrism is both presocial, in view of the eventual
cooperation, and parasocial, or simply social, in relation
to the constraint of which it constitutes the most direct
effect.
1 See Blondel, " Le Langage et la Pensde chez I'enfant d'aprfcs
un livre recent." Revue Hisi. Phil. Rel. (Strasburg), Vol. IV (1924),
p. 474 et seq.
86 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE
To understand this we need only analyse the relations
of the younger to the older children. Every observer
has noted that the younger the child, the less sense he
has of Ms own ego. From the intellectual point of view,
he does not distinguish between external and internal,
subjective and objective. From the point of view of
action, he yields to every suggestion, and if he does
oppose to other people's wills a certain negativism which
has been called " the spirit of contradiction " l this only
points to his real defencelessness against his surroundings.
A strong personality can maintain itself without the
help of this particular weapon. The adult and the
older child have complete power over him. They impose
their opinions and their wishes, and the child accepts
them without knowing that he does so. Only and this is
the other side of the picture as the child does not dis-
sociate his ego from the environment, whether physical
or social, he mixes into all his thoughts and all his actions,
ideas and practices that are due to the intervention of
his ego and which, just because he fails to recognize them
as subjective, exercise a check upon his complete socializa-
tion. From the intellectual point of view, he mingles his
own fantasies with accepted opinions, whence arise pseudo
lies (or sincere lies), syncretism, and all the features of
child thought. From the point of view of action, he
interprets in his own fashion the examples he has adopted,
whence the egocentric form of play we were examining
above. The only way of avoiding these individual re-
fractions would lie in true cooperation, such that both
child and senior would each make allowance for his own
individuality and for the realities that were held in common.
But this presupposes minds that know themselves and
can take up their positions in relation to each other. It
therefore presupposes intellectual equality and reciprocity,
both of them factors that are not brought about by
unilateral respect as such.
1 See Mme Reynier, " L'Esprit de contradiction chez Venfant,"
La Nouvelle Education, V. 1926, pp. 45^52-
RULES OF GAME 87
Egocentrism in so far as it means confusion of the ego
and the external world, and egocentrism in so far as it
means lack of cooperation, constitute one and the same
phenomenon. So long as the child does not dissociate
Ms ego from the suggestions coming from the physical
and from the social world, he cannot cooperate, for
in order to cooperate one must be conscious of one's
ego and situate it in relation to thought in general And
in order to become conscious of one's ego, it is necessary
to liberate oneself from the thought and will of others.
The coercion exercised by the adult or the older child
is therefore inseparable from the unconscious egocentrism
of the very young child.
If, now, we turn to children's societies below the age
of 8, we shall constantly meet with phenomena of this
order. No setting seems so favourable to the contagion
and even the constraint of the older ones than these
early societies ; not a gesture of the little ones but has
been, as it were, commanded or suggested to them.
We have not here any autonomous individuals, any con-
scious minds that impose themselves in virtue of an
inner law to which they themselves are subject. And
yet there is far less unity, far less real cooperation than
in a society of 12-year-olds. Egocentrism and imitation
are one, 1 and the same applies later on to autonomy and
cooperation. It is therefore no mere chance that nearly
all little children assimilate the rules learned in these
surroundings to the moral rules imposed by adults and
by the parents themselves.
It is perhaps possible to go further and to connect
egocentrism with the belief in the divine origin of institu-
tions. Childish egocentrism is in its essence an inability
to differentiate between the ego and the social environ-
ment. Now the result of this non-differentiation is that
the mind is unwittingly dominated by its own tendencies,
in so far as these are not diminished or rendered
i See L.T., p. 41.
88 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
conscious by cooperation. But at the same time, all
the opinions and commands that are adopted appear to
be endowed with a transcendental origin. We have
already ( 5) drawn attention to the very significant
difficulty experienced by very young children in dis-
tinguishing between what they have invented themselves
and what has been imposed upon them from outside.
The mind's content is felt both as very familiar and as
superpersonal, permanent and in a sense revealed. Nothing
is more characteristic of childhood memories than this com-
plex sensation of gaining access to one's most intimate
possessions and at the same time of being dominated by
something greater than oneself which seems like a source of
inspiration. There is little mysticism without an element
of transcendence, and, conversely, there is no transcendence
without a certain degree of egocentrism. It may be that the
genesis of these experiences is to be sought in the unique
situation of the very young child in relation to adults. The
theory of the filial origin of the religious sense seems to us
singularly convincing in this connection.
To return, however, to our analysis of the game of
marbles, it is a highly significant fact that it is the
younger and not the older children who believe in the
adult origin of rules, although they are incapable of
really putting them into practice. The belief here is
analogous to that prevalent in conformist communities,
whose laws and customs are always attributed to some
transcendental will. And the explanation is always the
same. So long as a practice is not submitted to conscious,
autonomous elaboration and remains, as it were, external
to the individual, this externality is symbolized as trans-
cendence. Now in the case of the child, exteriority and
egocentrism go hand in hand in so far as egocentrism is
preserved by the constraint exercised from outside. If,
therefore, the children of the earlier stages were those
who showed the maximum respect for rules together
with the most pronounced belief in their transcendental
origin, this was not due to any fortuitous resemblance.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 89
The two features coexisted In virtue of an inner logic
which is the logic of unilateral respect.
Let us now deal with mutual respect and rational rules.
There is, in our opinion, the same relation between mutual
respect and autonomy as between unilateral respect
and egocentrism, provided the essential qualification be
added, that mutual respect far more than unilateral
respect, joins forces with the rationality already incipient
in the motor stage, and therefore extends beyond the
phase that is marked by the intervention of constraint
and egocentrism.
We have, in connection with the actual facts examined,
pointed to the obvious correlation between cooperation
and the consciousness of autonomy. From the moment
that children really begin to submit to rules and to apply
them in a spirit of genuine cooperation, they acquire a
new conception of these rules. Rules become something
that can be changed if it is agreed that they should be,
for the truth of a rule does not rest on tradition but on
mutual agreement and reciprocity. How are these facts
to be interpreted ? In order to understand them, all we
have to do is to take as our starting-point the functional
equation uniting constraint and egocentrism and to take
the first term of the equation through the successive
values which link up constraint and cooperation. At the
outset of this genetic progression, the child has no idea of
his own ego ; external constraint works upon him and he
distorts its influence in terms of his subjectivity, but he
does not distinguish the part played by his subjectivity
from that played by the environmental pressure. Rules
therefore seem to him external and of transcendental
origin, although he actually fails to put them into practice.
Now, in so far as constraint is replaced by cooperation,
the child dissociates his ego from the thought of other
people. For as the child grows up, the prestige of older
children diminishes, he can discuss matters more and
more as an equal and has increasing opportunities (beyond
the scope of suggestion, obedience, or negativism) of freely
90 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
contrasting Ms point of view with that of others. Hence-
forward, he will not only discover the boundaries that
separate Ms self from the other person, but will learn to
understand the other person and be understood by him.
So that cooperation is really a factor in the creation of
personality, if by personality we mean, not the unconscious
self of childish egocentrism, nor the anarcMcal self of
egoism in general, but the self that takes up its stand on the
norms of reciprocity and objective discussion, and knows
how to submit to these in order to make itself respected.
Personality is thus the opposite of the ego 1 and this
explains why the mutual respect felt by two personalities
for each other is genuine respect and not to be confused
with the mutual consent of two individual " selves "
capable of joining forces for evil as well as for good.
Cooperation being the source of personality, rales cease, in
accordance with the same principle, to be external They
become both the constitutive factors of personality and its
fruit, in accordance with the circular process so frequently
*empMed in the course of mental development. In tMs way
autonomy succeeds heteronomy.
TMs analysis will have shown how new in quality are
the results of mutual respect as compared with those
that arose out of unilateral respect. And yet the former
is the outcome of the latter. Mutual respect is, in a
sense, the state of equilibrium towards which unilateral
respect is tending when differences between child and
adult, younger and older are becoming effaced ; just as
cooperation is the form of equilibrium to wMch con-
straint is tending in the same circumstances. In spite
of this continuity in the facts it is necessary, nevertheless,
to distinguish between the two kinds of respect, for their
products differ as greatly as do autonomy and ego-
centrism.
It can even be maintained that mutual respect and
cooperation are never completely realized. They are not
i See Ramon Fernandez, De la Personnalitt, Au Sans Pareil (Paris),
1928
THE RULES OF THE GAME 91
only limiting terms, but ideals of equilibrium. Every-
where and always the quota of generally accepted rules
and opinions weighs, however lightly, on the individual
spirit, and it is only in theory that the child of 12-14
can submit all rales to a critical examination. Even the
most rational of adults does not subject to Ms " moral
experience ?J more than an infinitesimal proportion of the
rules that hedge Mm round. Anxious though he was to
escape from Ms " provisional morality ", Descartes retained
it to the end of Ms days.
But we are not concerned with the question as to
whether cooperation is ever completely realized or whether
it remains only a theoretical ideal. Psychologically, the
same rale is a completely different reality for the child
of 7 who regards it as sacred and untouchable and for the
child of 12 who, without interfering with it, regards it
as valid only after it has been mutually agreed upon.
The great difference between constraint and cooperation
or between unilateral respect and mutual respect, is that
the first imposes beliefs or rules that are ready made and
to be accepted en bloc, while the second only suggests a
method a method of verification and reciprocal control
in the intellectual field, of justification and discussion in
the domain of morals. It matters little whether this
method be applied immediately to all the rules imposed
by the environment or only to one aspect of behaviour :
once it has come into existence it has the right to be
applied to everything.
TMs fundamental difference between constraint and
cooperation (the one laying down ready-made rules, the
other giving a method for the elaboration of rules) will
supply us straight away with an answer to an objection
wMch is bound to crop up in the course of our analysis of
the products of mutual respect. Supposing, it will be said,
that mutual respect does constitute the essential factor
in the behaviour of children of 12-13 and over, how can
we attribute to it a genuinely moral effect ? It is easy
enough to see that mutual consent is sufficient to explain
92 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the establishment of rules of the game, since the child is
urged to play both by interest and by pleasure. But
when we come to actual moral rules (not to lie, not to
steal, etc.), why is it that mutual respect does not make
the children come to some agreement on the subject of
what adults consider to be wrong ? Take a band of
young ruffians whose collective activity consists in thieving
and in playing practical jokes on honest folk ; is not the
mutual consent subsisting between its members com-
parable, psychologically, to the mutual respect that holds
between marble players ? Now, apart from the fact that
there is honour among thieves, this difficulty can easily
be disposed of. In the first place, a distinction should,
as we have seen, be drawn between mutual consent in
general and mutual respect. There may be mutual consent
in vice, since nothing will prevent the anarchical tendencies
of one individual from converging with those of another
individual. Whereas the word " respect " implies (at
least as regards mutual respect) admiration for a per-
sonality precisely in so far as this personality subjects
itself to rules. Mutual respect would therefore seem to
be possible only within what the individuals themselves
regard as morality.
Moreover, as soon as cooperation comes into being (in
the moral as well as in the intellectual field) "one must
distinguish between the method and its results, or, as a
contemporary logician has so cogently put it, between
" constitutive reason " (practical or theoretical) and
" constituted reason ". There are two kinds of rules,
""those that are constitutive and render possible the exercise
of cooperation, and those that are constituted and are
the result of this very exercise. We have already been
led to make this distinction in connection with the rules
of a game. The rules of the Square, of the Coche, etc.,
which are observed by children of 11-13 are " constituted "
rules, due to mutual consent and capable of being altered
by general opinion. The precedence given to justice as
opposed to chance, on the other hand, of effort over easy
RULES OF THE GAME 93
gain are " constitutive " rales, for without this " spirit
of the game " no cooperation would be possible. In the
same way, so-called moral rules can, generally speaking,
be divided into constituted rules dependent upon mutual
consent, and constitutive rules or functional principles
which render cooperation and reciprocity possible. But
how can these constitutive rules be regarded as them-
selves the outcome of mutual respect since they are
necessary to the latter's formation ? The difficulty here
is purely formal. Between mutual respect and the rules
which condition it there exists a circular relation analogous
to that which holds between organ and function. Since
cooperation is a method, it is hard to see how it could
come into being except by its own exercise. No amount
of constraint could determine its emergence. If mutual
respect does derive from unilateral respect, it does so by
opposition.
We are faced, then, with three types of rules : the
motor rule, the coercive rule founded on unilateral respect,
and the rational rule (constituted or constitutive) due to
mutual respect. We have outlined above the relation in
which the last two types stand to each other. We have
examined elsewhere how the first two succeed one another.
It remains for us to show what are the relations of the
rational rule to the motor rule.
Generally speaking, one can say that motor intelligence
contains the germs of completed reason. But it gives
promise of more than reason pure and simple. From the
moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is
born neither good nor bad, but master of his destiny. Now,
if there is intelligence in the schemas of motor adaptation,
there is also the element of play. The intentionality
peculiar to motor activity is not a search for truth but
the pursuit of a result, whether objective or subjective ;
and to succeed is not to discover a truth.
The motor rule is therefore a sort of experimental
legality or rational regularity, and at the same time a
play ritual. It will take one or other of these two forms
THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
according to circumstances. Now, at the moment when
language and imagination are added to movement, ego-
centrism directs the child's activity towards subjective
satisfaction, while, at the same time, adult pressure
imposes on Ms mind a system of realities which at first
remains opaque and external. Constraint and egocentrism
therefore interpose between motor intelligence and reason
a complexus of realities which seem to interrupt the
continuity of evolution. It is at this point that the
motor rule is followed by the coercive rule, a crystallized
social product which shows the sharpest contrast with the
fragile tentative products of the initial motor intelligence,
though, as we have seen, egocentric play continues in a
sense the early gropings of the motor stage.
But as the element of constraint is gradually eliminated
by cooperation, and the ego is dominated by the per-
sonality, the rational rule so constituted recaptures the
advantages of the motor rule. The play of n-year-old
children is in some ways closer to the motor accommodation
of the one-year-old child in all its richness and truly
experimental qualities than to the play of 7-year-olds.
The boy of eleven plans Ms strokes like a geometrician
and an artist in movement, just as the baby acts as a
mechanician in handling objects and as an experimenter
in inventing its rules. At the age of 6 or 7, on the contrary,
the child is apt to neglect this element of invention, and
to confine himself to imitation and the preservation of
rites. But the immense superiority of the eleven-year-old
player over the one-year-old, a superiority perhaps
acquired by passing through the intermediate stage, is
that Ms motor creations are no longer at the mercy of
individual fantasy. The eleven-year-old has re-discovered
the schema of experimental legality and rational regularity
practised by the baby. But the motor rule found by the
baby tends constantly to degenerate into play ritual,
whereas the eleven-year-old invents notMng without the
collaboration of his equals. He is free to create, but on
condition of submitting to the norms of reciprocity. The
RULES OF 95
motor being and the social being are one. Harmony is
achieved by the union of reason and nature, whereas
moral constraint and unilateral respect oppose super-
nature to nature and mysticism to rational experiment.
The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have
led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children
the history of the game of marbles has quite as much
"importance as the history of religion or of forms of
government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magni-
ficently spontaneous ; and it was therefore perhaps not
entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's
judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the
social behaviour of children amongst themselves.
9. CONCLUSIONS : II. RESPECT FOR THE GROUP OR
RESPECT FOR PERSONS. SEARCH FOR A GUIDING HYPO-
THESIS. Before pursuing our analysis any further, it
will be well to consider the results we have so far obtained
in the light of the two principal hypotheses that have
been brought forward concerning the psychological nature
of respect and moral laws. If we refuse to accept Kant's
view of respect as inexplicable from the point of view of
experience, 1 only two solutions remain. Either respect is
directed to the group and results from the pressure exercised
by the group upon the individual or else it is directed to
individuals and is the outcome of the relations of individuals
amongst themselves. The first of these theses is upheld by
Durkheim, the second by M. Bovet. The moment has not
yet come for us to discuss these doctrines for their own sake,
but at the same time we must, without anticipating our
final critical examination, develop a working hypothesis
that will take account of all possible points of view. This
is all the more indispensable since the discrepancy between
results obtained by these authors is chiefly due, as will
be shown later on, to differences of method. Now, a
method is just what we are looking for at present in
order to enable us to pass from the study of the rules of
1 Kant, Metaphysics of Ethics t pp. 9-10 and 104-113.
96 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
games to the analysis of moral realities imposed upon
the cMld by the adult. It is only from the point of view
of the right method to adopt that we shall here shortly
touch upon the vexed question of the individual -and
society.
One way of af tacking the problem is to analyse and
explain the rules objectively, taking account of their
connection with social groups defined by their morphology.
This is the method which Durkheim used, and no one
would think of denying his contribution to the subject
of the evolution of moral realities. The mere fact of
individuals living in groups is sufficient to give rise to
new features of obligation and regularity in their lives.
The pressure of the group upon the individual would
thus explain the appearance of this sui generis feeling
which we call respect and which is the source of all
religion and morality. For the group could not impose
itself upon the individual without surrounding itself with
a halo of sanctity and without arousing in the individual
the feeling of moral obligation. A rule is therefore nothing
but the condition for the existence of a social group ;
and if to the individual conscience rules seem to be
charged with obligation, this is because communal life
alters the very structure of consciousness by inculcating
into it the feeling of respect.
It is a striking fact, in this connection, that even such
ephemeral groupings as those formed by children's
societies or created primarily for the purpose of play
have their rules and that these rules command the respect
of individual minds. It is also curious to note how
stable these rules remain in their main features and in
their spirit throughout successive generations, and to
what degree of elaboration and stylizatioa' they attain.
But, as we have shown above, rules, although their
.content continues to be the same, do not remain identical
throughout the child's social development from the point
of view of the kind of respect connected with them.
For very young children, a rule is a sacred reality because
THE RULES OF THE GAME 97
it Is traditional ; for the older ones it depends upon mutual
agreement. Heteronomy and autonomy are the two
poles of this evolution. Does Durkheim's method enable
us to explain these facts ?
No one has felt more deeply than Durkheim nor sub-
mitted to a more searching analysis the development and
disappearance of obligatory conformity. In societies of
a segmented type conformity is at its maximum : each
social unit is a closed system, all the individuals are
identical with each other except in the matter of age,
and tradition leans with its full weight on the spirit
of each. But as a society increases in size and density
the barriers between its clans are broken down, local
conformities are wiped out as a result of this fusion, and
individuals can escape from their own people's super-
vision. 'And above all, the division of labour which
comes as the necessary result of this increasing density
differentiates the individuals from one another psycho-
logically and gives rise to individualism and to the
formation of personalities in the true sense. Individual
heteronomy and autonomy would thus seem to be in
direct correlation with the morphology and the functioning
of the group as a whole.
Now, does this analysis apply to our children's societies ?
In many respects, undoubtedly, it does. There is certainly
a resemblance between segmented or mechanical solidarity
and the societies formed by children of 5 to 8. As in the
organized clan so in these groups, temporarily formed
and isolated in relation to each other, the individual
does not count. Social life and individual life are one.
Suggestion and imitation are all-powerful. All individuals
are alike except for differences of prestige and age. The
traditional rule is coercive and conformity is demanded
of an.
As to the gradual disappearance of conformity as the
child grows older, this too we could explain by some of
the factors defined by Durkheim. To the increasing size
and density of social groups and to the ensuing liberation
G
98 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
of the Individual we can compare the fact that our
children, as they grow older, take part in an ever-increasing
number of local traditions. The marble player of 10 or 12
will discover, for example, that there are other usages in
existence besides those to which he is accustomed ; he
will make friends with children from other schools who
will free him from his narrow conformity, and in this
way a fusion wiH take place between clans which up till
then had been more or less isolated. At the same time,
the growing child detaches himself more and more from
his family circle, and since at first he assimilates games
to the duties laid down for him by adults, the more he
escapes from family conformity, the greater change will
his consciousness of rules undergo.
If, however, we are able to compare all these facts to
the growth of societies in size and density, we can do so
only from the point of view of the gradual diminution
of the supervision exercised over individuals. In other
words, the outstanding fact in the evolution of game
rules is that the child is less and less dominated by the
" older ones ". There is little or no progressive division
of labour among children ; such differentiations as arise
are psychological and not economic or political If,
therefore, children's societies do, in a sense, develop from
the segmented to the more highly organized type, and
if there is a correlative evolution from conformity to
individualistic cooperation, or from heteronoiny to auto-
nomy, this process, though we may describe it in the
objective terms of sociology, must be attributed first and
foremost to the morphology and activity of the various
age classes of the population.
In other words, the main factor in the obligatory
conformity of very young children is nothing but respect
for age respect for older children, and, above all, respect
for adults. And if, at a given moment, cooperation
takes the place of constraint, or autonomy that of con-
formity, it is because the child, as he grows older, becomes
progressively free from adult supervision. This came out
RULES OF THE GAME 99
very clearly In the game of marbles. Children of n to
13 have no others above them in this game, since it is
one that is only played in the lower school But apart
from this, the boy begins at this age to feel himself more
and more on the same level as adolescents and to free
himself inwardly from adult constraint. As a result, his
moral consciousness undergoes the alterations we have
outlined above. There can be no doubt that this pheno-
menon is peculiar to our civilization and therefore falls
under the Durkheimian scheme. In our societies the
child of 13 escapes from the family circle and comes in
contact with an ever-increasing number of social circles
which widen Ms mental outlook. Whereas in so-called
primitive communities, adolescence is the age of initiation,
therefore of the strongest moral constraint, and the
individual, as he grows older, becomes more and more
dependent. But keeping in mind only our societies of
children, we see that cooperation constitutes the most
deep-lying social phenomenon, and that which has the
surest psychological foundations. As soon as the individual
escapes from the domination of age, he tends towards
cooperation as the normal form of social equilibrium.
In short, if, putting other considerations aside for the
moment, we seek only to find a working hypothesis, the
methodological difficulty of Durkheimism seems to be the
following with regard to the different kinds of respect.
Durkheim argues as though differences from one age or
from one generation to another were of no account.
He assumes homogeneous individuals and tries to find
out what repercussion different modes of grouping would
have upon their minds. All that he gets at in this way is
profoundly true, but it is incomplete. We have only to
make the impossible supposition of a society where every-
one would be of the same age, of a society formed by a
single generation indefinitely prolonged, to realize the
immense significance attaching to age relations and
especially to the relations between adults and children.
Would such a society ever have known anything of
ioo THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
obligatory conformity ? Would It be acquainted with
religion or at any rate with the religions that taught
transcendence? Would unilateral respect with al its
repercussions upon the moral consciousness be observed
in such a group as this ? We only wish to ask these
questions. Whichever way they are answered, there can
be no doubt that cooperation and social constraint deserve
to be far more sharply contrasted than they usually are,
the latter being perhaps nothing more than the pressure
of one generation upon the other, whereas the former
constitutes the deepest and most important social relation
that can go to the development of the norms of reason.
This influence exercised by age brings us to the second
possible view of the psychology of rules, we mean that
held by M. Bovet Theoretically, and in his method,
M. Bovet recognizes only individuals. Only, instead of
becoming involved, as others have been in a barren
discussion on the limits of what is social and what is
individual, M. Bovet admits that respect, the feeling of
obligation, and the making of rules presuppose the inter-
action of at least two individuals. On this point his
method is parallel to Durkheim's and in no way opposed
to it. For the real conflict lies between those who want
to explain the moral consciousness by means of purely
individual processes (habit, biological adaptation, etc.)
and those who admit the necessity for an inter-individual
factor. Once grant that two individuals at least must
be taken into account if a moral reality is to develop,
then it matters not whether you describe the facts
objectively, as Durkheim did, or at least tried to do, or
whether you describe them in terms of consciousness, 1
How, asks M. Bovet, does the sense of duty appear?
Two conditions, he says, are necessary, and their con-
junction sufficient. i The individual must receive a
command from another individual ; the obligatory rule
1 See R. Lacombe's conclusive remarks, La Mtthode sociologique de
Durhheim. Also d'Essertier, Psychologie et Sociologist Paris, Alcan, and
many other contributions to the subject.
THE RULES OF THE GAME 101
is therefore psychologically different from the individual
habit or from what we have called the motor rule. 2 The
individual receiving the command must accept it, i.e.
must respect the person from whom it came. M. Bovet
differs on this point from Kant, since he regards respect
as a feeling directed to persons and not to the rule as
such. It is not the obligatory character of the rule laid
down by an individual that makes us respect this indivi-
dual, it is the respect we feel for the individual that
makes us regard as obligatory the rule that he lays down.
The appearance of the sense of duty in a child thus admits
of the simplest explanation, namely that he receives
commands from older children (in play) and from adults
(in life), and that he respects older children and parents.
It will be seen that our results completely confirm
this view of the matter. Before the intervention of
adults or of older children there are in the child's conduct
certain rules that we have called motor rules. But they
are not imperative, they do not constitute duties but
only spontaneous regularities of behaviour. From the
moment, however, that the child has received from his
parents a system of commands, rules and, in general,
the world order itself seem to him to be morally necessary-
In this way, as soon as the little child encounters the
example of older children at marbles, he accepts these
suggestions and regards the new rules discovered in this
way as sacred and obligatory.
But the problem which faces us and which M. Bovet
has himself clearly formulated and discussed is how this
"morality of duty will allow for the appearance of the
morality of goodness.
The problem is two-fold. In the first place, the primitive
"consciousness of duty is essentially heteronomous, since
duty is nothing more than the acceptance of commands
received from without. How then, asks M. Bovet, will
~the child come to distinguish a " good " from a " bad "
respect, and, after having accepted without distinction
everything that was laid down for him by his environment,
102 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
how will he leam to make Ms choice and to establish
a hierarchy of values ? In language which exactly recalls
that in which Durkheim describes the effect of increasing
social density on the minds of the individuals, M. Bovet
points here to the effect of conflicting influences and
even of contradictory commands : the child pulled in
several directions at once is forced to appeal to his reason
in order to bring unity into the moral material. Already
we have autonomy, but since reason does not create new
duties and can only choose from among the orders
received, this autonomy is still only relative. In the
second place, alongside of the sense of duty we must,
according to M. Bovet, distinguish a sense of goodness,
a consciousness of something attractive and not merely
obligatory, a consciousness that is fully autonomous. In
contrast to Durkheim who, while he fully recognized this
dualism of duty and good nevertheless tried to trace them
both to the same efficient cause, viz. pressure of the group,
M. Bovet leaves the question open, and does so in-
tentionally.
It is at this point, so- it seems to us, that the part
played by mutual respect comes in. Without going outside
M. Bovet's fertile hypothesis, according to which all the
moral sentiments are rooted in the respect felt by indivi-
duals for each other, we can, nevertheless, distinguish
different types of respect. It seems to us an undeniable
fact that in the course of the child's mental development,
unilateral respect or the respect felt by the small for the
great plays an essential part : it is what makes the child
accept ail the commands transmitted to him by his
parents and is thus the great factor of continuity between
different generations. But it seems to us no less undeniable,
both in view of the results we have so far obtained and
of the facts we shall examine in the rest of the book,
that as the child grows in years the nature of his respect
changes. In so far as individuals decide questions on an
equal footing no matter whether subjectively or ob-
jectively the pressure they exercise upon each other
THE RULES OF THE GAME 103
becomes collateral. And the interventions of reason, so
rightly noted by M. Bovet, for the purpose of explaining
the autonomy now acquired by morality, are precisely
the outcome of this progressive cooperation. Our earlier
studies led us to the conclusion that the norms of reason,
and in particular the important norm of reciprocity, the
source of the logic of relations, can only develop in and
through cooperation. Whether cooperation is an effect
or a cause of reason, or both, reason requires cooperation
in so far as being rational consists in " situating oneself "
so as to submit the individual to the universal. Mutual
respect therefore appears to us as the necessary condition
of autonomy under its double aspect, intellectual and
moral. From the intellectual point of view, it frees the
child from the opinions that have been imposed upon him
while it favours inner consistency and reciprocal control.
From the moral point of view, it replaces the norms of
authority by that norm immanent in action and in con-
sciousness themselves, the norm of reciprocity in sympathy .
In short, whether one takes up the point of view of
Durkheim or of M. Bovet, it is necessary, in order to
grasp the situation, to take account of two groups of
social and moral facts constraint and unilateral respect
on the one hand, cooperation and mutual respect on the
other. Such is the guiding hypothesis which will serve
us in the sequel and which will lead us in examining
the moral judgments of children to dissociate from one
another two systems of totally different origin. Whether
we describe the facts in the terms of social morphology
or from the point of view of consciousness (and the two
languages are, we repeat, parallel and not contradictory)
it is impossible to reduce the effects of cooperation to
those of constraint and unilateral respect.
CHAPTER II
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL
REALISM 1
WE have had occasion to see during our analysis of the
rales of a game that the child begins by regarding these
rules not only as obligatory, but also as inviolable and
requiring to be kept to literally. We also showed that
this attitude was the result of the constraint exercised
by the older children on the younger and of the pressure
of adults themselves, rules being thus identified with duties
properly so called.
It is this problem of unilateral or one-sided respect, or
of the effects of moral constraint, that we shall now
approach through a more direct study of the child's
conception of his duties and of moral values in general.
But the subject is vast ; and we shall try to limit the
range of enquiry as much as possible. We shall therefore
confine ourselves to an aspect of the question which has
perhaps received less attention than others the moral
judgment itself. We were able before to observe con-
cun"ently external and internal facts, to analyse both
practice and consciousness of rules. But now, in view
of the enormously greater technical difficulties which
attend the study of the relations between children and
adults, we shall have to limit ourselves to the consciousness
of rules, and even to the most crystallized and least living
part of this consciousness we mean what may be called
the theoretical moral judgment as opposed to that which
occurs in actual experience. But we are able. to confine
ourselves to this special problem because numerous works
1 In collaboration with M. N. Maso.
104
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 105
have already told us all about the child's practice of
moral rales and the conflicts that take place in Ms
mind. A particularly large amount of work has been
done, for example, on the subject of lying. Research of
this kind is therefore the equivalent to the descriptions
we have given of the practice of rules in the sphere of
play, and it is therefore quite natural that we should
confine ourselves to the study of children's judgments on
such matters, judgments about lying, about truthful-
ness, etc.
In thus comparing the moral judgments of the child
with what we know of his behaviour in the corresponding
spheres of action, we shall endeavour to show that, as
we were led to conclude in the case of game rales, the
earliest forms assumed by a child's sense of duty are
essentially heteronomous forms. We shall return, in this
connection, to our hypotheses concerning the relations of
heteronomy and egocentrism. Heteronomy, as we saw,
was in no way sufficient to produce a mental change,
and constraint and egocentrism were good bedfellows.
This is more or less the same result as we shall find in
studying the effects of adult constraint. Finally, we saw
that cooperation was necessary for the conquest of moral
autonomy. Now, such a hypothesis can be proved only by
a close analysis of the way in which moral rules are at a
given moment assimilated and freely adopted by the child.
In this chapter we shall study primarily the effects of
moral constraint, though we shall also establish some of
the landmarks for the outline of cooperation which will
be given later on. Now, moral constraint is closely
akin to intellectual constraint, and the strictly literal
character which the child tends to ascribe to rules received
from without bears, as we shall see, a close resemblance
to the attitudes he adopts with regard to language and
the intellectual realities imposed upon him by the adult.
We can make use of this analogy to fix our nomenclature
and shall speak of moral realism to designate on the plane
of judgments of value what corresponds to " nominal
106 THE JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
realism " and even verbalism or conceptual realism on
the plane of theoretical reasoning. Not only this, but
just as realism In general (in the sense in which we have
used the word in our previous books, see C.W., first part)
results both from a confusion between subjective and
objective (hence from egocentrism) and from the in-
tellectual constraint of the adult, so also does moral
realism result from the intersection of these two kinds
of causes.
We shall therefore call moral realism the tendency
which the child has to regard duty and the value attaching
to it as self-subsistent and independent of the mind, as
imposing itself regardless of the circumstances in which
the individual may find himself.
Moral realism thus possesses at least three features. In
the first place, duty, as viewed by moral realism, is essenti-
ally heteronomous. Any act that shows obedience to a rule
or even to an adult, regardless of what he may command,
is good ; any act that does not conform to rules is bad*
A rule is therefore not in any way something elaborated,
or even judged and interpreted by the mind; it is given as
such, ready made and external to the mind. It is also
conceived of as revealed by the adult and imposed by him.
The good, therefore, is rigidly defined by obedience.
In the second place, moral realism demands that the
letter rather than the spirit of the law shall be observed.
This feature derives from the first. Yet it would be possible
to imagine an ethic of heteronomy based on the spirit of
the rules and not on their most hard and fast contents.
Such an attitude would already have ceased to be realist ;
it would tend towards rationality and inwardness. But
at the very outset of the moral evolution of the child,
adult constraint produces, on the contrary, a sort of
literal realism of which we shall see many examples
later on.
In the third place, moral realism induces an objective
conception of responsibility. We can even use this as a
criterion of realism, for such an attitude towards re-
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL 107
spOBsIbMty is easier to detect than the two that precede
it. For since he takes rules literally and thinks of good
only in terms of obedience, the child will at first evaluate
acts not in accordance with the motive that has prompted
them but in terms of their exact conformity with established
rules. Hence this objective responsibility of which we shall
see the clearest manifestations in the moral judgment of
the child.
I. THE METHOD. Before proceeding to the analysis of
the facts, it will be as well to discuss in a few words the
method we propose to adopt. The only good method in
the study of moral facts is surely to observe as closely as
possible the greatest possible number of individuals.
Difficult children, whom parents and teachers send or
ought to send up for psycho-therapeutic treatment, supply
the richest material for analysis. In addition to this,
education in the home constantly gives rise to the most
perplexing problems. Now, the removal of these problems
cannot always, unfortunately for the children, depend solely
upon the " common sense " of the parents, and the educa-
tional technique necessary for their solution is, in some
respects, the best instrument of analysis at the disposal
of the psychologist. We shall therefore do our utmost
in the sequel to give as valid only such results as do
not contradict observation in family life.
Only, here again, as in the case of intellectual notions,
while pure observation is the only sure method, it allows
for the acquisition of no more than a small number of
fragmentary facts. And we therefore consider that it
must be completed by questioning children at school.
We shall speak of these interrogatories now, whilst we
may have to postpone until a later date the publication
of the observations we have been able to make on our
own children. If, however, questioning in the intellectual
field is relatively easy, in spite of the many difficulties
of method which it raises, in the moral sphere it can only
be, as it were, about reality once removed. You can
io8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
make a child reason about a problem of physics or logic.
That brings you into contact, not indeed with spontaneous
^ thought, but at least with thought in action. But you
cannot make a child act in a laboratory In order to dissect
Ms moral conduct. A moral problem presented to the
child is far further removed from Ms moral practice than
is an intellectual problem from his logical practice. It is
only in the domain of games if there that the methods
of the laboratory will enable us to analyse a reality in
the making. As to the moral rules which the child
receives from the adult, no direct investigation is to be
thought of by interrogation. Let us therefore make the
best of it and try to examine, not the act, but simply
the judgment of moral value. In other words, let us
analyse, not the child's actual decisions nor even his
memory of his actions, but the way he evaluates a given
piece of conduct.
Here, moreover, a fresh difficulty raises its head. We
shall not be able to make the child realize concretely the
types of behaviour that we submit to him for judgment,
as we could in handing him a game of marbles or a
mechanism of any sort. We shall only be able to describe
them by means of a story, obviously a very indirect
method. To ask a child to say what he thinks about
actions that are merely told to him can this have the
least connection with child morality ? On the one hand,
it may be that what the child thinks about morality has
no precise connection with what he does and feels in his
concrete experience. Thus the interrogatory of children
of 5 to 7 about marbles revealed the strangest discrepancy
between actual practice of the rules and reflection about
them. On the other hand, it may also be that what the
child actually understands of the stories suggested to him
bears no relation to what he would think if he were to
witness these scenes himself.
We must not attempt to solve these difficulties of
method by means of any a priori considerations. We
wish only to draw attention to them and to the theoretical
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 109
Interest of the problems which they raise. For we are
faced with purely general questions on the relations that
hold between verbal judgment and the practical applica-
tion of thought, whether intellectual or moral. It is
quite true that research on intelligence is easier than on
morality; but this holds only of the functioning of
thought, not of its content. When, in order to get at
this content, one is obliged, as we have been in the past,
to question the child about his own beliefs, the problem
is the same. The question may therefore be formulated
as follows. Does verbal thought, i.e. thought that works
jjpon ideas evoked by language and not upon objects
perceived in the course of action, does verbal thought
consist in the conscious realization 1 (allowing of course
for various systematic distortions) of truly spontaneous
thought, or does it sustain with the latter no relations
whatever ? Be the answer what it may, this question is
one of fundamental importance in human psychology.
Is man merely a maker of phrases that have no relation
to his real actions, or is the need to formulate part of his
very being ? The question strikes deep, and to solve it
we must, amongst other things, study it in the child.
In the child as in ourselves there is a layer of purely
.verbal thought superposed, as it were, over his active
thought. It is not only during the interrogatories that
he invents stories. He is telling them to himself all
the time, and it is relatively easy to prove that the
stories invented in psychological experiments are roughly
analogous to those that arise spontaneously. (We were
able to show, for example, that the results obtained by
questioning the child on the various aspects of Ms con-
ception of the world corresponded in the main with what
was revealed by direct observation and .by the analysis
of "whys" in particular.) But the problem remains.
In what relation does the verbal thought of the child
stand to Ms active and concrete thought ?
The problem is of special interest in the sphere of
1 See footnote on p. 56.
no THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
morality, and the difficulties of the method we are going
to use must be subjected to systematic scrutiny. The
object of this scrutiny will not be the justification or
condemnation of our method (any method that leads to
constant results is interesting, and only the meaning of
the results is a matter for discussion) but to help towards
a more definite statement of the problem of "moral
theories ".
To begin with the adult. There are, on the one hand,
authors who deem it indispensable for the mind to codify
its norms, or at any rate to reflect upon the nature of
moral action. Such people therefore accept, with or
without discussion, this postulate of an existing relation
between moral reflection and moral practice saying
either that the latter springs from the former, or that
reflection is the conscious realization of action or action
coming into consciousness. There are, on the other hand,
individuals whose personal conduct, incidentally, may be
beyond criticism, but who do not believe in " morality ".
Kant and Durkheim. are typical representatives of the
first tendency, Pareto is the most typical of living
authors of the second. 1 According to him, only actions
"exist, some of which are logical, others non-logical, i.e.
instinctive, or coloured with affectivity. Added to this
and on a completely different plane there is a sort of
rambling chatter, whose function is to reinforce action
but whose contents may be devoid of any intelligible
meaning. This chatter multiform and arbitrary " deri-
vktions " founded on the affective residues of non-logical
actions this chatter is what constitutes our ethical
theories !
The point, then, that we have to settle is whether the
things that children say to us constitute, as compared tp
their real conduct, a conscious realization or a " deriv'a-
tion ", reflection (in the etymological sense of the word) or
psittacism. . . . We do not claim to have solved the
problem completely. Only direct observation can settle it.
1 Tvaiti de Sociologie Ginirale, 2 Vol., Payot.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL in
But to enable us to give the casting vote to observation,
we shall first have to find out what are the child's verbal
ideas on morality. And this is why we consider our
researches to be useful, whatever may be their ultimate
result. Moreover, the study of rales which we undertook
in the last chapter has already suppled us with the most
precious indication. Broadly speaking, we found there
to be in this domain a certain correspondence (not simple
but yet quite definable) between children's judgments
about rules and their practice of these same rules. Let us
therefore carry our analysis of the problem a stage further.
What, in the first place, are the relations between
"judgment of value and the moral act itself? Here is
a child who declares it to be perfectly legitimate to
tell Ms father about Ms brother's misdeeds. Another
child answers that even if the father asks, it is " horrid " 1
(Fr., vilain) to tell tales : it is better to " spin a yam "
(Fr. dire des blagues) than to let a brother be punished.
The problem is to know whether in practice these two
children would really have considered valid the two
courses of action wMch they recommend verbally.
We must be on our guard here against a certain
ambiguity. Some experimenters have tried to measure
the moral value of a child by testing of Ms moral judg-
ment. Mile Descoeudres, for example, holds the view
that a child who pronounces correctly on the values of
actions he is told about, is, on the whole, better than one
whose moral judgment is less acute, 2 This may be, but it
is also conceivable that intelligence alone might suffice to
sharpen the child's evaluation of conduct without neces-
1 While in most of the interrogatories we have translated vilain by
" naughty *', the reader should note that the English word has an
."exclusively authoritative ring which the French has not. Children
can only be naughty in reference to grown-ups. Indeed, the word is
_so powerful a weapon in the hands of adult constraint in this country
that its use in any verbal experiments made on English children would
probably give appreciably different results from those based on the word
vilain, [Trans.]
f A. Descoeudres, "Sur le Jugement moral/' L' Jntermtdiaire des,
Educateurs, II, p. 54 (1914).
112 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
sarily induing Mm to do good actions. In this case an
intelligent scamp would perhaps give better answers than
a slow-witted but really good-hearted little boy. Besides,
how is the psychologist to classify the moral worth of
children even by the ordinary common-sense standards ?
Such a classification, possible in extreme cases, would run
the risk of inaccuracy in normal cases, which are precisely
those where we want to know whether testing moral
Judgment will help us to know the child.
But apart from this question, which does not really
interest us here, it may well be asked whether the judgment
of value given by the child during an interrogatory is the
sSkme as he would give in practice, independently of the
actual decision which he would take. A given child, for
example, will tell us during the interrogation that the lie
a is worse than the lie b. Now, whether he tells lies him-
self or not, whether, that is, he is or is not what he calls
" good ", we take the liberty to wonder whether, in
action, he will still consider lie a worse than lie b. What
we are after is not how the child puts his moral creed into
practice (we saw in connection with the game of marbles
that a mystical respect for rules can go hand in hand with
a purely egocentric application of them) but how he
judges of good and evil in the performance of his own
actions. It is from this point of view only that we set
ourselves the problem of discovering whether the judg-
ments of value given in the interrogatories do or do
not correspond to the genuine evaluations of moral
thought.
Now, it may be that there is correlation between verbal
or theoretical judgment and the concrete evaluations that
operate in action (independently of whether these evalua-
tions are followed up by real decisions). We have often
noted that in the intellectual field the child's verbal
thinking consists of a progressive coming into conscious-
ness, or conscious realization of schemas that have been
built up by action. In such cases verbal thought simply
lags behind concrete thought, since the former has to
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 113
reconstruct symbolically and on a new plane operations
that have already taken place on the preceding level.
Old difficulties, which have been overcome on the plane
of action will therefore reappear or merely survive on the
verbal plane. There is a time-lag between the concrete
phases and the verbal phases of one and the same process.
It may therefore very well be that in the moral sphere
there is simply a time-lag between the child's concrete
evaluations and his theoretical judgment of value, the
latter being an adequate and progressive conscious realiza-
tion of the former. We shall meet with children who,
for example, take no account of intentions in appraising
actions on the verbal plane (objective responsibility), but
who, when asked for personal experiences, show that they
.take full account of the intentions that come into play.
It may be that in such cases the theoretical simply lags
behind the practical moral judgment and shows in an
adequate manner a stage that has been superseded on the
plane of action.
But there may also be no connection whatever between
the two. On this view, the child's moral theories would
be mere .chatter, unrelated to his concrete evaluations.
Further and the eventuality is still more important in the
moral than in the intellectual sphere it may be for the
benefit of the adult rather than for his own use that the
child gives his answers. Let there be no mistake on this
point : it is quite certain that in the great majority of
cases the child is perfectly sincere during the experiment.
Only, he is quite likely to think that what is expected of
him is a moral lecture rather than an original reflection.
We have talked with children of 10, for example, who
defended the moral value of " telling tales ", but who
made a volte face as soon as they saw we were not con-
vinced. Thus their real thought was masked and hidden
even from their own eyes by the momentary desire to
pronounce moral precepts pleasing to the adult. True,
,'only the older ones reacted in this way. But does not this
show that the little ones do not dissociate their own
H
H4 THE MORAL OF THE
thought from what they hear constantly being said by
their parents and teachers ? Is it not the case that the
verbal thought of the child up to 10-11 is simply a
repetition or a distortion of adult thought, bearing no
relation to the real moral evaluations which the child
practises in Ms own life ?
To settle this point we can turn to what we learned in
our enquiry into the game of marbles. On the one hand,
we were able to see how the children put the rules into
practice and how they evaluated their duties as players
in the midst of the game itself. On the other hand, we
succeeded in collecting on the subject of these same rules
certain moral theories obviously made up on the spot and
therefore grounded on purely theoretical moral judgments.
Now there was, we repeat, between the action and the
theory of the child a correspondence that was, if not
simple, at least definable. To the egocentric practice of
rales which goes hand in hand with a feeling of respect
for elder or adult, there corresponds a theoretical judg-
ment which" turns a rule into something mystical and
transcendental. In this first case, theoretical judgment
does not correspond to action itself but to the judgments
that accompany action. But this is quite natural, since
egocentrism is unconscious, and only the respect to which
the child believes that he is submitting himself is con-
scious. To the rational practice of rules, which goes hand
in hand with mutual respect, there corresponds a theoreti-
cal judgment which attributes to rules a purely autonomous
character. Thus in the sphere of play at least, theoretical
judgment corresponds to practical judgment. This does
not mean that theoretical judgment interprets the child's
real action but that in the main it corresponds to the
judgments pronounced by the child in the course of his
action. We can at the most admit that verbal judgment
lags behind effective judgment : the idea of autonomy
appears in the child about a year later than cooperative
behaviour and the practical consciousness of autonomy.
With regard to the domains we are now approaching
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 115
(lying, justice, etc.) we may therefore advance the
hypothesis that the verbal and theoretical judgment of the
child corresponds, broadly speaking, with the concrete
and practical judgments which the child may have made on
the occasion of Ms own actions during the years preceding
the interrogatory. There can be no doubt that verbal
thought lags behind active thought, but it does not seem
to us to be unrelated to the past stages of active thought.
The future will show whether this hypothesis is too bold.
In any case, verbal thought, whether moral or intellectual,
deserves the closest study. Nor is it peculiar to the child.
In the adult, as the work of Pareto sufficiently shows, it
plays a considerable part in the mechanism of social life.
Finally, allowance must be made for the fact that the
verbal evaluations made by our children are not of actions
of which they have been authors or witnesses, but of
stories which are told to them. The child's evaluation
will therefore be, as it were, verbal to the second degree.
The psychologist Fernald * has tried to obviate this dis-
advantage by the following device. He tells the children
several stories and then simply asks them to classify them*
Mile Descoeudres, applying this method, submits, for
example, five lies to children, who are then required to
classify them in order of gravity. This, roughly, is also
the procedure that we shall follow, though we shall of
course not deny ourselves the right, once the classifica-
tion has been made, to converse freely with the children
so as to get at the reasons for their evaluations.
But the greatest caution must be exercised in order to
avoid needless complications. For instance, it does not
seem to us possible to tell the children more than two
stories at a time. If the subject is confronted with a
series, the classification will call for an intellectual effort
that has nothing to do with moral evaluation : he will
forget three stories out of five, and will compare any two
at random, which gives results of no particular interest.
Further, after using the usual stories, we soon realized that
1 Fernald, American Journal of Insanity* April 1912.
n6 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
their style placed them far beyond the child's complete
comprehension. In psychology one must speak to children
in their own language, otherwise the experiment resolves
itself into a trial of intelligence or of verbal understanding.
But even when we have taken all these precautions, one
problem still remains : if the child had witnessed the
scenes we describe to him, would he judge them in the
same manner ? We think not. In real life the child is in
the presence, not of isolated acts, but of personalities that
attract or repel him as a global whole. He grasps
people's intentions by direct intuition and cannot there-
fore abstract from them. He aEows, more or less justly, for
aggravating and attenuating circumstances. This is why
the stories told by the children themselves often give rise
to different evaluations from those suggested by the
experimenter's stories. Only, we repeat it, it may simply
be the case that the evaluations obtained from the stories
that were told to them lag .in time behind the direct
evaluations of daily life.
In conclusion, the results of our method do not seem to
us devoid of interest. For they are relatively constant
and, above all, they evolve with a certain regularity
according to age. All that we have said before about the
criteria of good clinical interrogatories (C.W., Introd.)
applies here. And, in addition, it is our belief that in
everyday life, as in the course of the interrogatory, the
child must often be faced not only with concrete actions
but also with accounts and verbal appraisals of actions.
It is therefore important to know what is his attitude in
such circumstances. In short, here as always, the way of
really tackling the problem is not to accept and record
the results of the experiment, but to know how to place
them in regard to the child's real life taken as a whole.
And this cannot be done at the outset of our enquiry into
this most difficult field of research.
2. OBJECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY. I. CLUMSINESS AND
STEALING. We noted, in connection with the rules of a
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 117
game, that the child seems to go through a stage when
rules constitute an obligatory and untouchable reality. We
must now see how far this moral realism goes; and in
particular whether adult constraint, which is probably its
cause, is sufficient to give rise to the phenomenon of objective
responsibility. For all that we have been saying about
the difficulties of interpretation in the study of the moral
judgments of children need not put a stop to our enquiry
in this matter. It is immaterial whether the objective
responsibility of which we are about to give examples is
connected with the whole of the child's life or only with
the most external and verbal aspects of his moral thought.
The problem still remains as to where this responsibility
comes from and why it develops.
The questions put to the children on this point are
those whose results we shall study first, but they were
actually the last that we thought of. We began, by way
of introduction, with the problem of judgments relating
to telling lies. In making this analysis, of which we shall
speak in the following sections, we immediately noticed that
the younger children often measured the gravity of a lie not
in terms of the motives which dictated it, but in terms of
the falseness of its statements. It was in order to verify the
existence and the generality of this tendency to objective
responsibility that we devised the following questions.
The first set of questions deals with the consequences
of clumsiness. Clumsiness plays, however unjustly, an
enormously important part in a child's life, as he comes
into conflict with his adult surrounding. At every
moment, the child arouses the anger of those around him
by breaking, soiling, or spoiling some object or other.
Most of the time such anger is unjustifiable, but the child
is naturally led to attach a meaning to it. On other
occasions, his clumsiness is more or less due to carelessness
or disobedience, and an idea of some mysterious and
immanent justice comes to be grafted on to the emotions
experienced at the time. We therefore tried to make the
children compare the stories of two kinds of clumsiness,
n8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE
one, entirely fortuitous or even the result of a well-in-
tentioned act, but involving considerable material damage,
the other, negligible as regards the damage done but
happening as the result of an ill-intentioned act.
Here are the stories :
I. A. A little boy who is called John is in his room.
He is called to dinner. He goes into the dining room.
But behind the door there was a chair, and on the chair
there was a tray with fifteen cups on it. John couldn't
have known that there was all this behind the door. He
foes in, the door knocks against the tray, bang go the
fteen cups and they all get broken 1
B. Once there was a little boy whose name was
Henry. One day when his mother was out he tried to get
some jam out of the cupboard. He climbed up on to a
chair and stretched out his arm. But the jam was too high
up and he couldn't reach it and have any. But while he
was trying to get it he knocked over a cup. The cup fell
down and broke.
II. A. There was a little boy called Julian. His father
had gone out and Julian thought it would be fun to play
with Ms father's ink-pot. First he played with the pen,
and then he made a little blot on the table cloth.
B. A little boy who was called Augustus once noticed
that his father's ink-pot was empty. One day that Ms
father was away he thought of filling the ink-pot so as to
help Ms father, and so that he should find it full when he
came home. But while he was opening the ink-bottle he
made a big blot on the table cloth. ^
III. A. There was once a little girl who was called
Marie. She wanted to give her mother a nice surprise,
and cut out a piece of sewing for her. But she ^didn't
know how to use the scissors properly and cut a big hole
in her dress.
B. A little girl called Margaret went and took her
mother's scissors one day that her mother was out. She
played with them for a bit. Then as she didn't know how
to use them properly she made a little hole in her dress.
When we have analysed the answers obtained by means
of these pairs of stories, we shall study two problems
relating to stealing. As our aim is for the moment to find
out whether the cMld pays more attention to motive or
to material results, we have confined ourselves to the
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 119
comparison of selfishly motivated acts of stealing with
those that are well-intentioned.
IV. A. Alfred meets a little friend of Ms who is very
poor. This friend tells Mm that he has had no dinner
that day because there was notMng to eat in Ms home.
Then Alfred goes into a baker's shop, and as he has no
money, he waits till the baker's back is turned and steals
a roll. Then he runs out and gives the roll to Ms friend.
B. Heniiette goes into a shop. She sees 4 pretty
piece of ribbon on a table and thinks to herself that it
would look very nice on her dress. So wMle the shop
lady's back is turned (while the shop lady is not looking),
she steals the ribbon and runs away at once.
V. A. Albertine had a little friend who kept a bird in a
cage. Albertine thought the bird was very unhappy, and
she was always asking her friend to let him out. But the
friend wouldn't. So one day when her friend wasn't
there, Albertine went and stole the bird. She let it fly
away and hid the cage in the attic so that the bird should
never be shut up in it again.
B. Juliet stole some sweeties from her mother one
day that her mother was not there, and she hid and ate
them up.
About each of these pairs of stories we ask two ques-
tions : i Are these children equally guilty (or as the
young Genevese say " la meme chose vilain " *) ? 2
WMch of the two is the naughtiest, and why ? It goes
without saying that each of these questions is the occasion
for a conversation more or less elaborate according to the
child's reaction. It is also as well to make the subjects
repeat the stories before questioning them. The way the
child reproduces the story is enough to show whether he
has understood it.
We obtained the following result. Up to the age of 10,
two types of answer exist side by side. In one type
actions are evaluated in terms of the material result and
independently of motives ; according to the other type of
answer motives alone are what counts. It may even
happen that one and the same child judges sometimes one
1 See foot-note, p in.
120 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
way, sometimes the other. Besides, some stories point
more definitely to objective responsibility than others.
In detail, therefore, the material cannot be said to embody
stages properly so called. Broadly speaking, however, it
cannot be denied that the notion of objective responsibility
diminishes as the child grows older. We did not come
across a single definite case of it after the age of 10. In
addition, by placing the answers obtained under 10 into two
groups defiiied respectively by objective and by subjective
responsibility (reckoning by answers given to each story
and not by children, since each child is apt to vary from
one story to another) we obtained 7 as the average age for
objective responsibility, and 9 as the average age for
subjective responsibility. Now, we were unable to ques-
tion children under 6 with any profit because of the
intellectual difficulties of comparison. The average of 7
years therefore represents the youngest of the children.
If the two attitudes simply represented individual types
or types of family education, the two age averages ought
to coincide. But since this is not so, there must be some
degree of development present. We can at least venture
to submit that even if the objective and the subjective
conceptions of responsibility are not, properly speaking,
features of two successive stages, they do at least define
two distinct processes, one of which on the average
precedes the other in the moral development of the child,
although the two partially synchronize.
Having made this point clear, let us now turn to the
facts, beginning with the stories about clumsiness. Here
are typical answers showing a purely objective notion of
responsibility.
is
I. STORIES OF THE BROKEN CUPS, GEO (6) : " Have
you understood these stories ? Yes. What did the first
boy do ? He broke eleven cups. And the second one ?
He broke a cup by moving roughly. Why did the first one
break the cups ? Because the door knocked them. And
the second ? He was clumsy. When he was getting the jam
the cup fell down. Is one of the boys naughtier than the
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 121
other ? The first is because he knocked over twelve cups.
If you were the daddy, which one would you punish
most ? The one who broke twelve cups. Why did he break
them ? The door shut too hard and knocked them. He
didn't do it on purpose. And why did the other boy break
a cup ? He wanted to get the jam. He moved too far. The
cup got broken. Why did he want to get the jam ?
Because he was all alone. Because Ms mother wasn't there.
Have you got a brother ? No, a little sister. Well, if it
was you who had broken the twelve cups when you went
into the room and your little sister who had broken one
cup while she was trying to get the jam, which of you
would be punished most severely ? Me, because I broke
more than one cup. 13
SCHMA (6) : " Have you understood the stories ? Let's
hear you tell them.- A little child was called in to dinner.
There were fifteen plates on a tray. He didn't know. He
opens the door and he breaks the fifteen plates. That's very
good. And now the second story ? There was a child.
And then this child wanted to go and get some jam. He gets
on to a chair, his arm catches on to a cup, and it gets broken.
Are those children both naughty, or is one not so
naughty as the other ? Both just as naughty. Would you
punish them the same ? No. The one who broke fifteen
plates. And would you punish the other one more, or
less ? The first broke lots of things, the other one fewer.
How would you punish them ? The one who broke the
fifteen cups : two slaps. The other one, one slap."
CONST (7) G. : " Tell me those two stories. There was
a chair in the dining room with cups on it. A boy opens the
door, and all the cups are broken, And now the other
story ? A little boy wants to take some jam. He tried to
take hold of a cup and it broke. II you were their mother,
which one would you punish most severely ? The one who
broke the cups. Is he the naughtiest ? Yes. Why did he
break them ? Because he wanted to get into the room.
And the other ? Because he wanted to take the jam.
Let's pretend that you are the mummy. You have two
little girls. One of them breaks fifteen cups as she is
coming into the dining room, the other breaks one cup as
she is trying to get some jam while you are not there.
Which of them would you punish most severely ? The
one who broke the fifteen cups. 1 ' But Const who is so
decided about our stories goes on to tell us some personal
reminiscences in which it is obviously subjective responsi-
122 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
bility that is at work. " Have you ever broken anytMng ?
A cup. How ? / wanted to wipe it, and I let it drop.
What else have you broken ? Another time, "*a plate.
How ? I took it to play with. Which was the naughtiest
thing to do ? The plate, because I oughtn't to have taken it.
And how about the cup ? That was less naughty
because I wanted to wipe it. Which were you punished
most for, for the cup or for the plate ? For the plate.
Listen, I-am-goixig to tell you two more stories. A little
girl was wiping the cups. She was putting them away,
wiping them with the cloth, and she broke five cups.
Another little girl is playing with some plates. She
breaks a plate. Which of them is the naughtiest ? The
one who broke the five cups." This shows that in the case
of her own personal recollections (where, incidentally, the
number of objects broken does not come in) subjective
responsibility alone is taken into account. As soon as we
go back to the stories, even basing them on the child's
recollections, objective responsibility reappears in all its
purity !
II. THE STORIES OF THE INK-STAINS. CONST (7) G.,
whose answers we have just been examining repeats
correctly the story of the blot of ink : " A little boy sees
that his father's ink-pot is empty. He takes the ink-bottle,
but he is clumsy and makes a big blot. And the other one ?
There was a boy who was always touching things. He
takes the ink and makes a little blot. Are they both equally
naughty or not ? No. Which is the most naughty ?
The one who made the big blot. Why ? Because it was
big. Why did he make a big blot ? To be helpful. And
why did the other one make a little blot ? Because he
was always touching things. He made a little blot. Then
which of them is the naughtiest ? The one who made a
big blot: 3
GEO (6) also understands the stories and knows that the
two children's intentions were quite different. But he
regards as the naughtiest " the one who made the big blot.
Why ? Becaiise that blot is bigger than the other one."
III. THE STORY OF THE HOLES. GEO (6) is equally
successful in understanding these two stories. " The first
panted to help her mother and she made a big hole in her
frock. The other one was playing and made a little hole.
Is one of these little girls naughtier than the others ?
The one who wanted to help her mother a little is the
naughtiest because she made a big hole. She got scolded"
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 123
CONST (7) G. repeats the stories as follows : " A
girl wanted to make a handkerchief for her mother. She was
clumsy, and made a big hole in her frock. And the other
one ? There was a little girl who was always touching
things. She took some scissors to play and made a little hole
in her frock. Which of them is naughtiest IThe one who
made the big hole. Why did she make this hole ? She
wanted to give her mother a surprise. That's right. And
the other one ? She took the scissors because she ^ was
always touching things and made a little hole. That's right.
Then which of the little girls was nicest ? , . . (hesita-
tion). Say what you think. The one who made the little
hole is the nicest. If you were the mother you would have
seen everything they did. Which would you have punished
most ? The one who made a big hole. And which one
would you have punished least ? The one who made the
little hole. And what would the one who made the big
hole say when you punished her most ? She would say, I
wanted to give a surprise. And the other one ? She was
playing. Which one ought to be punished most ? The
one who made the big hole. Let's pretend that it was you
who made the big hole so as to give your mother a surprise.
Your sister is playing and makes the little hole. Which
ought to be punished most ? Me. Are you quite sure,
or not quite sure? Quite sure. Have you ^ ever made
holes ? Never. Is what I am asking you quite easy ?
Yes. Are you quite sure you meant what you said ?
Yes."
These answers reveal the strength of the resistance
offered to the counter-suggestions we attempted to make,
and they also show what store the children set by material
results, in spite of the fact that they have perfectly well
understood the story and consequently the intentions of
its characters, and what little account they take of the
intentions which have indirectly caused these material
happenings.
Such facts as these taken by themselves of course prove
nothing. Before speaking about objective responsibility,
we must ask ourselves whether the child does not draw a
distinction analogous to that which the adult makes in the
case of ethics and of certain legal punishments. One can
without any loss of honour be run in for having broken
124 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
police regulations. One can be the object of a legal
sentence devoid of any penal element (cf. Durkheim's
restitutive and retributive punishment). In the same
way, then, when a child pronounces a little girl to be
" naughty " because she has made a big hole in her dress,
although he knows that her intentions were not only
innocent but admirable, does he not simply mean that she
has damaged her parents materially and therefore deserves
a purely legal punishment devoid of any moral signifi-
cance ?
The question arises in the same form in connection with
stealing, as we shall see presently. But with regard to
lying, since all question of material damage can be dis-
regarded, we shall endeavour to prove that the child's
judgments really do imply objective responsibility. An
analogous conclusion may therefore be formulated con-
cerning the present examples. Here preoccupation about
material damage certainly outweighs any question of
obedience or disobedience to rules. But this is a form of
objective responsibility only in so far as the child fails to
distinguish the element of civic responsibility, as it were,
from the penal element. Now, on the verbal plane where
we have taken up our stand it seems to us that this
differentiation is one that hardly enters into the subject's
mind. Responsibility is thus still held to be objective,
even from the moral point of view.
Before carrying our analysis any further and in order
to place the previous attitudes in their true perspective,
let us examine the answers that contradict those which
we have just dealt with and which relate to the same
pairs of stories :
I. STORY OF THE BROKEN CUPS. Here, to begin with, is
a rather exceptional case of a 6-year-old child. (Most of
the children of 6 gave us answers which corresponded to
the type of objective responsibility.) SCHMA (6J, G.,
forward intellectually and looking more like a girl of 8)
begins by telling us that the two boys of the story are
" equally naughty" and that they must be punished " Both
just the same. 1 ' " Well, I think one of them is naughtier
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 125
than the other. Which one do you think ? Both the same.
Have you never broken anything ? No, I never ham.
My brother has. What did he break ? A cup and a pail.
How ? He wanted to fish. He broke half my pail, and
then afterwards he broke it again on purpose to annoy me.
Did he also break a cup ? He had wiped it and was putting
it on the edge of the table and it fell. What day was he
naughtiest, the day he broke the pail or the day he broke
the cup ? The paiLWhy ?He broke my pail on pur-
pose. And the cup ? He didn't do that on purpose. He
put it right on the edge and it broke. And in the stories I
told you, which boy is naughtiest, the one who broke the
fifteen cups or the one who broke one cup ? The one who
wanted to take the jam because he wanted to eat it." Thus
ky appealing to her personal memories one sees that
Schma can be led to judge according to subjective
responsibility.
MOL (7) : " Which is naughtiest ? The second, the one
who wanted to take the jam-pot, because he wanted to take
something without asking. Did he catch it ? No. Was
he the naughtiest all the same ? Yes. And the first ?
It wasn't his fault. He didn't do it on purpose."
CORM (9) : " Well, the one who broke them as he was
coming isn't naughty, 'cos he didn't know there was any cups.
The other one wanted to take the jam and caught his arm on
a cup. Which one is the naughtiest? The one who
wanted to take the jam. How many cups did he break ?
One. And the other boy ? Fifteen. Which one would
you punish most ? The boy who wanted to take the jam.
He knew, he did it on purpose.' 9
GROS (9) : " What did the first one do IHe broke
fifteen cups as he was opening a door. And the second
one ? He broke one cup as he was taking some jam.
Which of these two silly things was naughtiest, do you
think ? The one where 'he tried to take hold of a cup was
[the silliest] because the other boy didn't see [that there were
some cups behind the door]. He saw what he was doing.
How many did he break ? One cup. And the other one ?
Fifteen. Then which one would you punish most ?
The one who broke one cup. Why ? He did it on purpose.
If he hadn't taken the jam, it wouldn't have happened."
Nuss (10) : The naughtiest is " the one who wanted to
take the jam. Does it make any difference the other one
having broken more cups ? No, because the one who broke
fifteen cups didn't do it on purpose"
126 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
II. STORY OF THE INK-STAINS. Sci (6) : " What did
the first one do ? He wanted to please his daddy. He saw
that the ink-pot was empty and thought he would Jill it. He
made a big spot on his suit. And the second one ? He
wanted to play with his daddy's ink, and he made a little
spot. Which is the naughtiest ? The one who played with
the ink pot. He was playing with it. The other one wanted
to be kind. Did the one who wanted to be kind make a
big spot or a little one ? He made a big spot, the other boy
made a little one. Does it not matter the first one having
made a big spot ? All the same, the other wanted more to
do something wrong. The one who made a little spot wanted
to do something more wrong than the other. 1 '
GROS (9) : " The one who wanted to be helpful, even if the
stain is bigger, mustn't be punished."
Nuss (10). The naughtiest is "the one who made the
little stain, because the other one wanted to help."
IIL THE STORY OF THE HOLES. Sci (6) repeats the
stories as follows : ft The first one wanted to give her mother
a surprise. She pricked herself and made a big hole in her
frock. The second one liked touching everything. She took
the scissors and made a little hole in her dress. Which one
is naughtiest ? The one who wanted to take the scissors.
She made a little hole in her frock. She is the naughtiest.
Which one would you punish most, the one who made a
little hole, or the other one ? Not the one who made a big
hole ; she wanted to give her mother a surprise. 1 '
CORK (9). The naughtiest is " the second. She oughtn't
to have taken the scissors to play with. The first one didn't
do it on purpose. You cant say that she was naughty."
These answers show what fine shades even some of the
youngest children we questioned could distinguish and how
well able they were to take intentions into account. The
hypothesis may therefore be advanced that evaluations
based on material damage alone are the result of adult con-
straint refracted through childish respect far rather than
a spontaneous manifestation of the child mind, Generally
speaking, adults deal very harshly with clumsiness. In so
far as parents fail to grasp the situation and lose then-
tempers in proportion to the amount of damage done, in
so far will the child begin by adopting this way of looking
at things and apply literally the rules thus imposed,
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 127
even if they were only implicit. And in so far as the
parents are just, and, above all, in so far as the growing child
sets up Ms own feelings as against the adult's reactions,
objective responsibility will diminish in importance.
With regard to stealing we also found two groups of
answers, and here again, while both objective and sub-
jective responsibility are to be found at all ages between
6 and 10, it is the latter that predominates as the child
develops.
Here are examples of objective responsibility :
IV. THE STORY OF THE ROLL AND OF THE RIBBON.
Sci (6) who showed signs of a subjective conception of
responsibility in regard to clumsiness, changes his attitude
here. He repeats the stories as follows : " A boy was with
his friend. He stole a roll and gave it to his friend. A little
girl wanted a ribbon, and put it round her frock to look
pretty. Is one of them naughtier than the other ? Yes.
. . . No. They're just the same. Why did the first one
steal the roll ? Because his friend liked it. Why did the
little girl steal the ribbon ? Because she was longing for it.
Which one would you punish most ? The boy who stole
the roll and gave it to his brother instead of keeping it for
himself Was it naughty to give it ? No. He was kind.
He gave it to his brother. Must one of them be punished
more than the other ? Yes. The little boy stole the roll to
give to his brother. He must be punished more. Rolls cost
more."
SCHMA (6) repeats the stories as follows : " There was a
boy. As his friend had had no dinner, he took a roll and
put in his pocket and gave it to his friend. A little girl went
into a shop. She saw a ribbon. She says, it would be nice
to put on my dress, she says. She took it. Is one of these
children naughtier than the other ? The boy is, because
he took a roll. It's bigger. Ought they to be punished ?
Yes. Four slaps for the first. And the girl ? Two slaps.
Why did he take the roll ? Because his friend had had
no dinner. And the other child ? To make herself
pretty"
GEO (6) : " Which of them is the naughtiest ? The one
with the roll, because the roll is bigger than the ribbon/'
And yet Geo is like the other children perfectly well aware
of the motives involved.
128 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
V. THE STORY OF THE CAGE AND OF THE SWEETS. DESA
(6) : " The little girl had a friend who had a cage and a bird.
She thought this was too unkind. So she took the cage and
Id the bird out. And the other one ? A little girl stoh a
sweet and ate it. Are they both equally naughty or Is one
of them naughtier than the other ? The one who stole the
cage is naughtiest. Why ? Because she stole the cage.
And the other one ? She stole a sweet. Is that one more
or less naughty than the first ? Less. The sweet is
smaller than the cage. If you were the daddy, which one
would you punish most ? The one who stole the cage.
Why did she steal it ? Because the bird was unhappy.
And why did the other one steal the sweet ? To eat it"
These cases of objective responsibility are thus all three
of 6-year-olds. We found none above 7 years in the case
of this kind of story. Here are some definite cases of sub-
jective responsibility found in connection with the same
stories. They are nearly all children of 9 and 10. The
types are therefore better dissociated with regard to age
than in the case of the stories about clumsiness.
IV. STORY OF THE ROLL AND THE RIBBON. CORM (9)
tells the two stories correctly. "What do you think
about it ? Well, the little boy oughtn't to have stolen. He
oughtn't to have stolen it, but to have paid for it. And the
other one, she oughtn't to have stolen the ribbon either.
Which of them is the naughtiest ? The little girl took the
ribbon for herself. The little boy took the roll too, but to give
it to his friend who had had no dinner. If you were the
school teacher, which one would you punish most ? The
little girl."
Nuss (10) : " Which one is the naughtiest ? The little
girl is became she took it for herself''
V. STORY OF THE CAGE AND THE SWEETS. Sci (6) :
" Which one is naughtiest ? The one who steals the sweet.
The first one took the cage so as to set the little bird free."
CORM (9), G. : " It was good of the little girl who wanted
to set the little bird free. The other one oughtn't to have eaten
the sweet"
GROS (9) : " The one who stole the sweet, that was
naughtier. Why ? Because the other let the little bird go
free again."
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 129
Thus these answers present us with two distinct moral
attitudes one that judges actions according to their
material consequences, and one that only takes intentions
into account. These two attitudes may co-exist at the
same age and even in the same child, but broadly speak-
ing, they do not synchronize. Objective responsibility
diminishes on the average as the child grows older, and
subjective responsibility gains correlatively in importance.
We have therefore two processes partially overlapping,
but of which the second gradually succeeds in dominating
the first.
What explanation can we give of these facts ? The
objective conception of responsibility arises, without any
doubt, as a result of the constraint exercised by the adult.
But the exact meaning of this constraint has still to be
established, because in cases of theft and clumsiness it is
exercised in a rather different form from what appears
in cases of lying. For in some of the cases we have been
examining it is quite certain that adults, or some adults,
apply their own sanctions, whether " diffused " (blame)
or " organized " (punishment), in conformity with the
rules of objective responsibility. The average housewife
(most of the children we examined came from very poor
districts) will be more angry over fifteen cups than over
one, and independently, up to a point, of the offender's
intentions. Broadly speaking, then, one may say that it
is not only the externality of the adult command in
relation to the child's mind that produces the effects we
are discussing, it is the example of the adult himself. In
cases of lying, on the other hand, we shall find that it is
almost entirely in spite of the adult's intention that
objective responsibility imposes itself upon the child's
mind.
Restricted though the question under discussion may
appear, it has a very distinct interest. When the adult
allows himself to evaluate acts of clumsiness and pilfer-
ing in terms of their material result, there can be no
doubt that in most people's eyes he is unjust. On the
i
130 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
other hand, those parents who try to give their children a
moral education based* on intention, achieve very early
results as is shown by current observation and the few
examples of subjective responsibility we were able to note
at 6 or 7. How is it, then, that in most of the cases under
9-10 years the child accepts so completely the criterion of
objective responsibility and even outdoes the average
adult on this point ? The child is much more of an
objectivist, so to speak, than the least intelligent parent.
Also, most parents draw a distinction which the children
precisely neglect to make : they scold, that is, according
to the extent of the material damage caused by the
chimsy act, but they do not regard the act itself exactly
as a moral fault. The child on the contrary seems, as we
have noted before, not to differentiate the legal or, as it
were, the purely police aspect from the moral aspect of
the question. It is " naughtier " to make a big spot on
your coat than a small one, and this in spite of the fact
that the child knows perfectly well that the intentions
involved may have been good. To commit certain acts
is therefore, in a sense, wrong in itself, independently of
the psychological context. With regard to stealing, which
is unanimously held up to children as a grave moral
offence, this phenomenon appears even more clearly.
Nearly all the children under 9-10, while paying full
tribute to the thief's intentions, consider the theft of the
roll and the cage a more culpable act both from a police
and from a moral point of view than that of the ribbon or
the sweet. Now, we can understand anyone condemning a
theft regardless of the object pursued, but it is rather
curious to see little children adopting an exclusively
material criterion when they are asked to compare two
such dissimilar acts as are described in our stories.
The problem involved in all this is the following.
What is the origin of this initial predominance of judg-
ments of objective responsibility, surpassing in scope and
intensity what may have been done or said to the children
by adults ? Only one answer seems to us to be possible.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 131
The rules imposed by the adult, whether verbally (not to
steal, not to handle breakable objects carelessly 3 etc.) or
materially (anger, punishments) constitute categorical
obligations for the child* before his mind has properly
assimilated them, and no matter whether he puts them
into practice or not. They thus acquire the value of
ritual necessities, and the forbidden things take on the
significance of taboos. Moral realism would thus seem to
be the fruit of constraint and of the primitive forms of
unilateral respect. Is this an inevitable product or an
accidental result ? This is the point we shall try to settle
in connection with lying.
But before going too far in our generalizations, let us
remember that the child's answers are given in answer to
stories that are told to him and do not arise out of really
experienced facts. As in the case of method we may
therefore ask ourselves whether these verbal evaluations
do or do not correspond with the child's real thoughts.
These evaluations certainly change as the child grows
older, and they also seem to be the result of some syste-
matic influence. But are they a mere derivative, a verbal
and therefore ineffectual deduction from the words spoken
by adults, or do they correspond with a genuine attitude,
moulded by unilateral respect and conditioning the child's
behaviour before they inspire his sayings ?
As we noticed in certain cases, the child pays far more
attention to intentions where his own memories are con-
cerned than when he is being questioned about one or
other of our little stories. Such a fact as this surely shows
us that if the child's objectivist attitude (unmistakable
enough in his theoretical thought) corresponds to any-
thing in his concrete and active thought, there 'must
have been a time-lag taking place between one of
these manifestations and the other, for the theoretical
attitude is certainly a late-comer as compared to the
practical. But the problem goes deeper than this, and
the question may be raised whether at any moment in the
immediate experiences of his moral life, or at any rate in
132 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
those connected with clumsiness and lying, the child has
ever been dominated by the notion of objective responsi-
bility.
Immediate observation the only judge in the matter
is sufficiently explicit on this point. It is very easy to
notice especially in very young children, under 6-y years
of age how frequently the sense of guilt on the occasion
of clumsiness is proportional to the extent of the material
disaster instead of remaining subordinate to the intentions
in question. I have often noticed in the case of my own
children, who have never been blamed for involuntary
clumsiness, how difficult it was to take away from them
all sense of responsibility when they chanced to break an
article or soil some linen. Which of us cannot recall the
accusing character which such a minor accident would take
on as soon as it had happened, rising, with all the sudden-
ness of a shock and overwhelming us with a sense of guilt
that was the more burning, the more unexpected and the
more irreparable the disaster. To be sure, all sorts of
factors come into play (the sense of " immanent " justice,
affective associations with previous carelessness, fear of
punishment, etc.). But how could the material damage
be felt as a fault if the child were not applying in a literal
and realistic manner a whole set of rules, implicit and
explicit, for which he feels respect ?
We can therefore put forward the hypothesis that
judgments of objective responsibility occurring in the
course of our interrogatory were based upon a residue left
by experiences that had really been lived through. Al-
though new material may since have enriched the child's
moral consciousness and enabled him to discern the
nature of subjective responsibility, these earlier experi-
ences are sufficient, it would seem, to constitute a per-
manent foundation of moral realism which reappears on
each fresh occasion. Now, since thought in the child
always lags behind action, it is quite natural that the
solution of theoretical problems such as we made use of
should be formed by means of the older and more habitual
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 133
schemas rather than the more subtle and less robust
schemas that are in process of formation. Thus an adult
who may be in the midst of reviewing aH Ms values and
experiencing feelings of which the novelty surprises Mm,
will, if he is suddenly faced with the necessity of solving
someone else's problems, very probably appeal to moral
principles wMch he has discarded for himself. For
example, he will, if he is not given time to reflect, judge
his neighbour's actions with a severity wMch would be
incomprehensible in view of Ms present deeper tendencies,
but wMch effectively corresponds to Ms previous system
of values. In the same way, our children may perfectly
well take account of intentions in appraising their own
conduct, and yet confine themselves to considerations of
the material consequences of actions in the case of the
characters involved in our stories, who are indifferent to
them.
How, then, does subjective responsibility appear and
develop witMn the limited domain we are analysing at
present ? There is no doubt that by adopting a certain
technique with their children, parents can succeed in making
them attach more importance to intentions than to rules
conceived as a system of ritual interdictions. Only the
question is, whether tMs technique does not involve perpetu-
ally taking care not to impose on their children any duties
properly so called, and placing mutual sympathy above
everything else ? It is when the child is accustomed to act
from the point of view of those around Mm, when he tries
to please rather than to obey, that he will judge in terms
of intentions. So that taking intentions into account
presupposes cooperation and mutual respect. Only those
who have children of their own know how difficult it is to
put this into practice. Such is the prestige of parents in
the eyes of the very young child, that even if they lay
down notMng in the form of general duties, their wishes
act as law and thus give rise automatically to moral
realism (independently, of course, of the manner in which
the child eventually carries out these desires). In order
134 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
to remove all traces of moral realism, one must place
oneself on the child's own level, and give Mm a feeling of
equality by laying stress on one's own obligations and
one's own deficiencies. In the sphere of clumsiness and of
untidiness in general (putting away toys, personal cleanli-
ness, etc.), in short in all the multifarious obligations that
are so secondary for moral theory but so all-important in
daily life (perhaps nine-tenths of the commands given to
children relate to these material questions) it is quite easy
to draw attention to one's own needs, one's own diffi-
culties, even one's own blunders, and to point out then-
consequences, thus creating an atmosphere of mutual help
and understanding. In this way the child will find himself
in the presence, not of a system of commands requiring
ritualistic and external obedience, but of a system of
social relations such that everyone does his best to obey
the same obligations, and does so out of mutual respect.
The passage from obedience to cooperation thus marks a
progress analogous to that of which we saw the effects in
the evolution of the game of marbles : only in the final
stage does the morality of intention triumph over the
morality of objective responsibility.
When parents do not trouble about such considerations
as these, when they issue contradictory commands and are
inconsistent in the punishments they inflict, then, obvi-
ously, it is not because of moral constraint but in spite of
and as a reaction against it that the concern with intentions
develops in the child. Here is a child, who, in his desire
to please, happens to break something and is snubbed for
his pains, or who in general sees his actions judged other-
wise than he judges them himself. It is obvious that
after more or less brief periods of submission, during which
he accepts every verdict, even those that are wrong, he
will begin to feel the injustice of it all. Such situations
can lead to revolt. But if, on the contrary, the child finds
in his brothers and sisters or in his playmates a form of
society which develops his desire for cooperation and
mutual sympathy, then a new type of morality will be
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 135
created in him, a morality of reciprocity and not of
obedience. This is the true morality of intention and of
subjective responsibility.
In short, whether parents succeed in embodying it in
family life or whether it takes root in spite of and in
opposition to them, it is always cooperation that gives
intention precedence over literalism, just as it was uni-
lateral respect that inevitably provoked moral realism.
Actually, of course, there are innumerable intermediate
stages between these two attitudes of obedience and
collaboration, but it is useful for the purposes of analysis
to emphasize the real opposition that exists between them.
3. OBJECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY. II. LYING. In deal-
ing with the judgments children make about lies we are
penetrating a step further into the secret of childish
evaluations. For there can be no doubt that lies present
to the child's mind a far graver and more pressing
problem than do clumsiness or even such exceptional
actions as stealing. This is due to the fact that the
tendency to tell lies is a natural tendency, so spontaneous
and universal that we can take it as an essential part
of the child's egocentric thought. In the child, therefore,
the problem of lies is the clash of the egocentric attitude
with the moral constraint of the adult. And this circum-
stance will enable us to pursue on this point the analysis
we outlined in connection with the early stages of the
practice and the consciousness of rules in a game.
The nature and diversity of childish lies are well known,
thanks chiefly to the fine work done by W. Stern x and to
the many other books which it inspired. Nor do we
intend to pursue this line of enquiry. Our aim will be
to undertake the analysis of the child's consciousness of
lies, or, more precisely, of the manner in which the child
judges and evaluates lying. We know why children lie.
We know the educational difficulties which the question
raises. The case is therefore exceptionally favourable to
1 W. and C. Stem, Erinnerung, Aussage und Luge, 3rd. ed., 1922.
136 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the study of moral judgment In the child. If we can see
in the course of an interrogatory how children think
about lies and how they evaluate them, it will be relatively
easy for us to decide whether the answers they give
correspond with what we know from other sources of the
practice of lying and truthfulness.
From the first, childish evaluations appeared to us to
be dominated by the notions of intentionality and ob-
jective responsibility, and it is around this problem that
we have grouped our examinations. Our interrogatory
bore mainly upon the three following points : definition
of a He, responsibility as a function of the lie's content,
responsibility as a function of its material consequences.
In addition to this we made a study of two points which
will be dealt with in Section 4 : may children lie to one
another ? and, why should one not lie ?
The first question (definition of a lie) connects quite
naturally with the problem of objective responsibility and
moral realism. For what we have to find out is whether
the child has understood that to tell a lie is wittingly and
intentionally to betray the truth. Now even this prelim-
inary question provoked the most suggestive answers and
revealed the strength of realistic tendencies in the child.
The most primitive and, at the same time, from our
present point of view, the most characteristic definition
we were able to find was a purely realistic one : a He is
" a naughty word ". Thus the child, while perfectly well
acquainted with a lie when he meets one, identifies it
completely with the oaths or indecent expressions which
one is forbidden to use. Here are examples :
WEB (6) : " What is a lie ? It's when you say naughty
things you oughtn't to say. What does ' naughty things '
mean ? Saying naughty words. Tell me a naughty word.
Do you know any ? Charogne (Engl. lit., carrion). [This
word is often used in Switzerland as an oath or a term of
abuse and many people do not know its real meaning.]
Is that a lie ? Yes. Why is it a lie ? Because it is a
naughty word. When I say ' Fool ! ' is that a \tej- Yes.
A boy once broke a cup, but he said he didn't do it.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 137
Was this a lie ? Yes. Why ? Because he had done it.
You see this gentleman ? [a student], I say he is thirty-
nine. Are you thirty-nine ? [The student answers, * No,
only thirty-six.'] [To Web] Is it a lie to say he is thirty-
nine when he is only thirty-six ? Yes, ifs a lie. Why ?
Because he's thirty-six. Is it a naughty lie, or not ?
Not naughty. Why ? Because it is not a naughty word.
Is saying that 2 + 2 = 5 a lie, or not ? Yes. Naughty,
or not naughty ? Not naughty. Why ? Because it is not
a naughty word."
LUD (6) : " Do you know what a lie is ? Ifs when you
say naughty words. Tell me a naughty word that is a
lie. . . . [Lud hesitates] Fire away. M . . . (Cam-
bronne's word). Is it a lie ? Yes. Why ? Because it is
a naughty word. I'm going to tell you a story. A boy
once broke a cup, and then he said he hadn't done it.
Was that a lie ? Yes. Why ? Because he said he hadn't
done it. Is it a naughty word ? Yes. Why ? Because
it was he had broken the cup'"
Nus (6) : " What is a lie ? Ifs when you say naughty
words. Do you know any naughty words ? Yes. Tell
me one. Charogne. Is it a lie ? Yes. Why ? Because
you mustn't say naughty words. When I say ' Fool ! ' is
it a lie ? Yes" Nus also allows that the story of the
broken cup involves a lie.
RAD (6) : " A lie is words you mustn't say, naughty
words."
TUL (6). Same answers. " If I say 'fool' to someone,
is it a lie ? Yes. Why ? Because it is a naughty word.
And if he really is a fool is it a lie, or not ? Yes. Why ?
Because it is a naughty word."
Here finally is a child who hesitates between this
definition and the right one.
RIB (7) : " Do you know what a lie is ? Ifs when you
H e ^ What is lying ? Ifs saying naughty words, When
do people tell lies ? When you say something that isn't
true. Is a lie the same thing as a naughty word ? No,
ifs not the same thing. Why not ? They're not like each
other- -Why did you tell me that a lie is a naughty word ?
/ thought it was the same thing."
This definition of a lie, of which we found many
examples among the younger children, though it is by no
138 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
means general and does not characterize a definite stage,
is of great interest in fixing the children's initial attitude to
lies. For nothing, after all, is more completely external
to the moral consciousness, nothing is more like an tin-
motivated taboo than an interdiction with regard to
language. Why is one word perfectly proper, while
another arouses everyone's indignation ? The child doesn't
know in the least. He submits to the linguistic constraint
and accepts this mystery without question. But this
surely is the very type of those obligations which remain
foreign to his practical understanding. How then does he
come to identify lies with " naughty words " ?
It should be noted in the first place that no mere verbal
confusion is here at work. The child who defines a lie as
being a " naughty word " knows perfectly well that lying
consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore,
mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying
them one with another by what seems to us a quaint
extension of the word " lie ". Moreover, the relative
frequency of this definition and the fact that this part of
the interrogatory always came before the others would
seem to indicate that this is no case of verbal suggestion
due to the child's environment or to the interrogatory
itself. There seems therefore to be only one explanation :
to tell a lie is to commit a moral fault by means of
language. And using naughty words also constitutes a
fault committed by means of language. So that for the
little child, who really feels no inner obstacle to the
practice of lying, and who at six years old still lies more
or less as he romances or as he plays, the two types of
conduct are on the same plane. When he pronounces
certain sentences that do not conform with the truth (and
which his parents regard as genuine lies) he is astonished
to find that they provoke the indignation of those around
him and that he is reproached with them as with a fault.
When he brings in certain expressive words from the
street, the same thing happens. He concludes that there
are things one may say and things one may not say, and
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 139
he calls the latter "lies" whether they are Indecent
words or statements that do not conform with fact.
TMs identification of oaths and lies seems therefore to
show how completely external to the child's own mind the
interdiction of lying still remains in the early stages.
This hypothesis agrees, moreover, with all that we know
about the mind of the child under 7-8. Thus it will help
us to see how perfectly natural are the <l objectivistic " or
realistic evaluations which we shall find the younger
children giving later about the stories they are asked to
compare.
A more advanced definition of lies which remains the
usual one until fairly late (between 6 and 10 on the
average) consists simply in saying, " A lie is something that
isn't true." But the mere words here must not deceive
us, and we must get at the implicit notions which they
conceal. We have seen elsewhere (J. R.) how difficult it is
for the child to give an adequate definition of the notions
he uses owing to his inability to realize them consciously.
In order, therefore, to know the meaning of the definition
we have just given we must ascertain whether the child
confuses lying with every kind of inaccuracy (especi-
ally with mistakes), or whether he implicitly considers a
lie to have been told only when someone intentionally
betrays the truth. In order to settle this point it will be
sufficient to present to the child a certain number of
stories, asking him each time whether a lie has been told or
not (and why), whether there has been a mistake or not
(and why), and whether there may not have been simul-
taneously a lie and a mistake.
The interrogatory shows that children of 5 to 7, while
perfectly aware of the shade of difference between an
intentional act arid an involuntary mistake, do not tend
to stress this distinction at all, and often, on the contrary,
group both facts under the same name of " a lie ".
Here are examples of this type of definition, which
therefore constitutes the second type, if we regard as a
first type that which identifies lies and naughty words :
140 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
CLAI (6) : " Do you know what a lie is ? If s when you
say what isn't true. Is ' 2 -f 2 - 5 ' a lie ? Yes, it's a tie.
Why ? Because it isn't right. Did the boy who said
that ' 2 + 2 5 * know it wasn't right or did he make a
mistake ?He made a mistake. Then if he made a mistake,
did he tell a lie or not ? Yes, he told a lie. A naughty one ?
Not very. You see this gentleman [a student] ? Yes.
How old do you think he is ? Thirty. I would say 28.
[The student then says he is 36.] Have we both told a
lie ? Yes, both lies. Naughty ones ? Not so very naughty.
Which is the naughtiest, yours or mine, or are they both
the same ? Yours is the naughtiest, because the difference is
biggest. [Cf. moral realism.] Is it a Me, or did we just
make a mistake ? We made a mistake. Is it a lie all the
same, or not ? Yes, it's a lie"
WEB (6) already examined in connection with " naughty
words " answers towards the end of the interrogatory like
the last child : " Is making mistakes the same thing as
telling lies ? Not the same thing I'm going to tell you a
story. Once there was a boy who didn't know where the
Rue des Acacias was (the street where Web lives). A
gentleman asked him where it was. The boy answered
' I think it's over there, but I'm not sure/ And it wasn't
over there ! Did he make a mistake, or did he tell a lie ?
ft was a lie. Did he make a mistake or not make a
mistake ? He made a mistake. Then it wasn't a lie ?
He made a mistake and it was a lie. 3 ' This last answer
should be especially noted for it shows how for some
children the two notions overlap.
MAS (6) : " What is a lie ? When you talk nonsense.
You tell me about something that is a lie. A boy^ once
said he was a little angel, and it wasn't true. Why did he
say that ? For a joke. Are we allowed to tell lies ?
j\fo Why not ? Becaiise it's a sin and God doesn't want
us to sin. A boy told me that 2 + 2=5. Is it true ?
No, it makes 4. Was it a lie or did he make a mistake ?
He made a mistake. Is making a mistake the same as
telling a lie or different ? The same. Look at me. I'm
30. A boy told me I was 60. Was it a lie or did he make
a mistake ? It was a lie. Why ? Because what he said
was a sin." " Which is naughtiest, to make a mistake or
to tell a lie ? Both the same.''
CHAP (7) : " What is a lie ? What isn't true, what they
say that they haven't done. Guess how old I am. Twenty.
No, I'm thirty. Was it a lie what you told me ? /
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 141
didn't do it on purpose. I know. But is It a He all the
same, or not ? Yes, it is all the same, because I didn't say
how old you really it-ere. Is it a He ? Yes, because I didn't
speak the truth. Ought you to be punished ? No. Was
It naughty or not naughty ? Not so very naughty, Why ?
Because I spoke the truth afterwards I **
These observations yield two conclusions. The first is
that in practice the children can more or less distinguish
between an intentional act and an involuntary error. The
idea of intention (not just the intentional act but the idea
of the intentional act, which is not the same thing) appears
roughly at the same time as the first " whys ", that is, at
about the age of three. Nevertheless, during the next few
years the child does not distinguish between intentional
actions and others as clearly as we do. The proof of this
is that his thinking is finalistic, animistic and artificialistic
to a degree that the average adult does not suspect, and
this is so precisely because he fails to dissociate involun-
tary, unconscious and mechanical movements from con-
scious psychological action (see C. IF.) . There was therefore
some reason to doubt whether a child of 6-7 could really
distinguish an involuntary error from an intentional lie.
The answers we have just recorded seem to show that the
distinction is, at the best, in process of formation.
Only and this is our second conclusion these two
realities are still not dissociated on the plane of moral
reflection. Mistakes, although they are distinguished from
lies proper, are still conceived as constituting lies. More
precisely, a lie is defined in a purely objective manner, as
an affirmation that does not conform with fact, and even
if the child can recognize two types of statement those
which are, and those which are not intentionally false, he
subsumes them both kinds under the category of " lies ".
TMs identification is analogous to that examined above
between lies and " naughty words ". But in this par-
ticular case the identification is probably helped by the
child's lingering inability to dissociate between the ideas
of an intentional act and of an involuntary act. For it
142 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
may very well be that these ideas remain undififerentiated
on the plane of reflection longer than they do on the
plane of practice. This would supply us with one more
example of that time-lag between action and thought of
which we have already spoken. In support of this view
it should be noted that the identification of mistakes and
lies disappears towards the age of 8, i.e. at the same time
as the bulk of the phenomena of animism, artificialism,
etc., i.e. at the same time as the other signs of inability to
dissociate the idea of the intentional from the idea of the
involuntary.
Whether these interpretations are right or not, it is
obvious that both the answers we have been discussing and
the first type of definitions reveal in the child a tendency
to consider lies in a purely realistic manner and inde-
pendently of the intentions involved. This will be amply
confirmed by the remainder of our analysis.
Let us now turn to the third type of definitions, or
correct definitions of lies : any statement that is in-
tentionally false is a lie. Not till about the age of 10-11
do we find this definition in an explicit form. But among
the children who begin by saying "A lie is something
that isn't true " the majority are actually thinking of
deceit, that is to say of the intentional deed. Here are
examples, beginning with such cases of implicitly correct
definitions.
ZER (6), G. : " What is a lie ? . . .Do you know
this word ? Yes. What does a lie mean ? . . . A boy
knocked over a chair and then he said he hadn't done it.
Was it a lie ? Yes. Why ? Because he had done it. I
say you are called Helen, is it true ? No, I'm called
Madeleine. Is it a lie ? No. Why ? . . . A little boy
told me that 2 + 2=5, Is it a lie, or did he make a
mistake. He made a mistake. Is it a lie all the same ?
No, he made a mistake."
GAR (6) : " What is a lie ? It's disobeying. If you
don't go into the garden when you've been asked to go, is
it a lie ? No, M'sieu. Then what is a lie ? When you do
something wrong and then you don't tell. If a boy breaks a
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 143
cup and then says it was the cat, is it a lie ? Yes, M'sieu.
A boy told me that 24-2 = 5. Is that a lie ? It's not a
lie. Then what did he do ? He wasn't paying attention"
EEC (7) : " What is a lie ? When you say something
and then afterwards it isn't true. A child doesn't know the
names of the streets (in Geneva). A gentleman asks Mm
where the Rue de Carouge is, and the child tells Mm
wrong. Is that a lie, or has he made a mistake ? He
didn't tell a lie. Why not ? Became he -made a mistake
[Cf. the * because ']. Why did he make a mistake ?
Because when you make a mistake it's that you don't know,
but a lie you know, but you say it isn't true [ = you don't
say what you know]/'
KE (7) : " What is a lie ? When you don't say things
right. Is 24-2=5 a lie ? No, that's not one. Why did
the boy who said it was tell me so ? Perhaps he made a
mistake. What is making a mistake ? When you don't
say things right. Is making a mistake the same tMng as
telling a lie ? No. What is the difference ? Making a
mistake is when you don't say things right ; a lie is true,
only you don't say it [ = you know the truth but do not
say it]. And a joke (Fr. une blague) ? It's when you say
something for a lark."
PUT (8). A lie is " when you say what is not true. But
when Pui guesses our age wrong he says it is not a lie.
Why ? Because I didn't know. 33
Here are some good explicit explanations.
LAU (8) : " A boy who tells a lie knows what he is doing,
but he doesn't want to say it. The other one [who makes a
mistake] does not know"
ARL (10) : " When you lie you're doing it on purpose,
when you make a mistake, you don't know!'
KEI (10) : " A lie is when you deceive someone else. To
make a mistake is when you make a mistake [deceive
yourself] (Fr. quand on se trompe)."
This preliminary analysis of the definitions brings out
the initial difficulty experienced by the child under 8 in
understanding the true nature of a lie. Naturally inclined
as he is to think about himself rather than about others,
the child does not see the full significance of deceit. He
lies as he romances, so that the obligation not to lie,
imposed upon him by adult constraint, appears from th
144 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
first in its most external form : a He is what does not
agree with the truth independently of the subject's in-
tentions.
Let us now turn to the second and third parts of our
interrogatory, that is, to the evaluation of the stories in
terms of the content and of the consequences of the lies.
In order to solve these questions we made use as before of
stories to be compared, and before examining the answers
we obtained, we must begin by discussing the significance
of these stories.
The question of the evaluation of lies from the point of
view of their content is the problem of responsibility.
Responsibility is here evaluated either as a function of
the aim of the lie (subjective) or as a function of its
degree of falseness (objective). The difficulty is therefore
to find stories in which the lie leads to no material result
and is not accompanied by any material circumstance
whatsoever. For experience showed us that any lie told
in connection with an act of clumsiness or of something
analogous (breaking a cup and saying it was the cat,
losing the scissors and denying having done so, etc.) is
invariably considered worse than a lie that is not con-
comitant with action of this sort. The child cannot, in
such cases, dissociate the lie from the accompanying act
and therefore judges it in terms of the consequences
of the act. These features will reappear later and will
confirm what we hinted at in the last section. But for
the moment they do not concern us. It is the lie itself in
its actual content that we want the child to evaluate.
After much groping and hesitation we selected the three
following pairs of stories. Each pair contains a lie or
mere inaccuracy devoid of any evil intention but marking
a glaring departure from fact, and a lie of quite probable
content, but told with the manifest intention to deceive.
I. A. 1 " A little boy [or a little girl] goes for a walk in
the street and meets a big dog who frightens him very
1 Mile Descoeudres (loc. cit.) is responsible for this story.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 145
much. So then he goes home and tells Ms mother he has
seen a dog that was as big as a cow."
B. " A child comes home from school and tells Ms
mother that the teacher had given Mm good marks, but it
was not true ; the teacher had given him no marks at all,
either good or bad. 1 Then his mother was very pleased
and rewarded him."
II. A. "A boy was playing in Ms room. His mother
came and asked him to run a message for her. But he
didn't feel like going out so he told his mother Ms feet
were hurting. But it wasn't true ; his feet were not
hurting him in the least."
B. "A boy wanted very much to go for a ride in a
car, but no one ever asked him. One day he saw a lovely
motor car in the street and would have loved to be inside
it. So when he got home he told them that the gentleman
in the car had stopped and had taken him for a little
drive. But it was not true ; he had made it all up."
III. A. "A boy couldn't draw very well but he would
have liked very much to be able to draw. One day he
was looking at a lovely drawing that another boy had
done, and said : ' I did that drawing V
B. " A boy was playing with the scissors one day
when Ms mother was out and he lost them. When Ms
mother came in he said that he hadn't seen them and
hadn't touched them/'
Here, finally, are the stories we used for the analysis of
the children's evaluation in terms of the material results
of the lies.
IV. A. " A child who didn't know the names of streets
very well was not quite sure where the Rue de Carouge
was [a street near the school where we were working].
One day a gentleman stopped him in the street and asked
him where the Rue de Carouge was. So the boy an-
swered, ' I think it is there.' But it was not there. The
gentleman completely lost Ms way and could not find the
house he was looking for."
B. " A boy knows the names of the streets quite well.
One day a gentleman asks Mm where the Rue de Carouge
is. But the boy wanted to play him a trick and said, it
1 The child must not be said to have had a bad mark, otherwise
the subject will regard him as ipso facto " naughtier " independently
of the superimposed lie.
K
146 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
is there, and showed him the wrong street. But the
gentleman didn't get lost, and managed to find his way
again."
V. We also made use of several stories in which the lie
is accompanied by clumsiness (breakages, stains, etc.).
We tell the children the stories, two at a time. Before
questioning the subject it is best to make him tell the
stories from memory so as to make sure that he has
understood them and especiaEy that he has grasped
the intentions that come into play. This is done by
asking the child after each story : " Why did the boy say
that ? " In general our subjects understood at once that
story LA involved a simple exaggeration due to fear,
stories II. B and III. A mere inventions due to desire,
etc., whereas stories I. B and III. B related to genuine
acts of deceit due to the desire for sweets, to laziness or
the fear of a deserved punishment. Then having made
sure that the child has understood, you ask him to com-
pare the two stories and to say which of the two lies or of
the two boys in question was " the naughtiest " and why.
The results obtained by means of this technique were
definite and suggestive. In the matter of clumsiness and
theft the child, it will be remembered, seemed to judge
of actions from their most external aspect (their results)
before taking any account of the intentions in play. The
analysis of the evaluations relating to lies not only con-
firms this conclusion but allows us to go beyond it and
to say that even apart from all consideration of the
material consequences of actions the child's mind remains
set in the direction of objective responsibility.
For our stories I to III reduce the part played by
material circumstances to the minimum ; so that when
the child answers he will not be thinking of the actions
about which the lie was told, but of the lie itself and
of the liar's intentions. Now, what struck us was the
fact that a large number of the younger children whom
we questioned evaluated the lies, not according to the
intentions of the liar, but according to the greater or
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 147
lesser likelihood of the lying statement. In point of fact,
judging by the first two types of definition which we have
just been studying, we had every reason to expect that the
more a statement departed from truth, the more it would
seem to the child to be a lie. And this in fact is what we
now see to be the case. But the extraordinary thing is
that the judgment of value itself, i.e. the fact of evaluating
the lies or liars as ll naughty " or " not naughty " should
obey the same principle.
And yet this is what happens on the verbal and abstract
plane on which our interrogatories are unfortunately
placed.
Here are examples concerning our first three pairs of
stories.
I. STORY OF THE DOG AND THE cow AND OF THE CHILD
WHO PRETENDED TO HAVE GOOD MARKS. PEL (6) repeats
the two stories correctly : " Which of these two children
is naughtiest ? The little girl who said she saw a dog as
big as a cow. Why is she the naughtiest ? Because it
could never happen. Did her mother believe her ? No
because they never are [dogs as big as cows], Why did she
say that ? To exaggerate. And why did the other one
tell a lie ? Because she wanted to make people believe that
she had a good report. Did her mother believe her ?
Yes. Which would you punish most if you were the
mother ? The one with the dog because she told the worst
lies and was the naughtiest.' 1
BUG (6) : " Which is naughtiest ? The one with the
cow. Why is he the naughtiest ? Because it isn't true.
And the one of the good marks ? He is less naughty.
Why ? Because his mother would have believed, because she
believed the lie. [This is not a slip. We have met with
many cases of children of 6-7 who, like Fel and Bug,
measure the naughtiness of a lie by the degree of its
incredibility to adults. Consequently the lie about the
good marks is not so bad because the mother will be
easily taken in by it !] And why did the other child tell
the lie about the cow ? Because he was telling his mother a
lie. Which would you punish most ? The one who said
he saw a dog as big as a cow"
MAE (6) : " Which of the two is the worst lie ? The
dog who was as big as a cow. And if you had to punish
148 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
those children, which would you punish most ? The one
who said he saw a dog as big as a cow. Why did the other
one say that the teacher had given him good marks ?
Because he had been naughty and didn't dare say so."
JLE (7) : " Which was the worst lie ? The one who said
he saw a dog as big as a cow. Why is it the worst ?
Because there's no such thing (Fr. Parce que fa riexiste pas).
[Note this formula which expresses very well the point of
view of objective responsibility in the case of lies.]
Which of the two children should be punished most ?
The one who saw a dog as big as a cow. Why ? Because
it isn't true. It's not nice. Why is it not nice ? Because
it isn't true. Why did the other one say that his teacher
had given him good marks ? So that his mother should
buy him something. Why did the other one say he had
seen a dog as big as a cow ? Just like that. Because he
wanted to say something like that [to boast of having seen
something wonderful]. Why did he say something like
that ? Because he saw a cow, perhaps. He didn't see
properly.'' Ke therefore understands the two children's
respective intentions perfectly well ; but he sticks none
the less to his objective evaluation of their responsibility.
Roc (7) : " What do you think of these two lies ?
Are they just the same, or is one worse than the other ?
One is worse than the other. Which ? The one who saw a
dog as big as a cow. Why ? No one ever saw dogs as big
as cows. If you were the mother, which would you
punish most ? The one who told the lie about the cow."
BURD (7) : " The naughtiest " is the one who saw a dog
as big as a cow. It is naughtier because his mother knew
[that it was false or impossible], whereas the other one, the
mother didn't know. If you say something that mother
doesn't know, it is less naughty because his mother might
believe. If the mother knows it isn't true, then it's a bigger
lie." It would be impossible to express more clearly the
idea that the moral gravity of a lie is to be measured
solely by the improbability of the lying statement : what
mother believes is not naughty whereas the immediately
obvious lie is naughty !
DRIV (7) : " Which of these two boys is the naughtiest ?
The one who said he saw a dog as big as a cow. Is that
naughtier ? He is the naughtiest because he told the biggest
lie. Why is it the biggest lie ? Because he said a much
bigger one than in the other story. Why? Because it
couldn't have happened."
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 149
SAY (7) says that the naughtiest Is the lie about the
dog " because it couldn't be. And the one about the
teacher ? Yes, that could be, but it's not true. Which of
these two children would you punish most ? The one of
the dog. Why ? Because it couldn't happen. Did the
mother believe the lie about the dog ? JVo. And would
the mother have believed the lie about the teacher ?
Perhaps. When is it naughtiest, when the mother be-
lieves the lie, or when she can't believe it ? When you
can't believe it.* 3
TROT (7) : " Which one should be punished most ?
The one who saw a dog as big as a cow. Why is he the
naughtiest ? Because a dog is never as big as a cow. Did
the mother believe it ? No, she didn't believe it. And did
the mother believe the lie about the teacher ? Yes,
sometimes you are good, sometimes you are not. WMch of
the two children would you punish most ? The one with
the dog. Why ? Because it doesn't exist [a dog as big as
a cow] and because at school sometimes you get punished,
sometimes you don't. 9 ' [The second lie is therefore more
plausible and consequently less naughty.]
BOH (9) : " Which is the naughtiest ? Both the same.
If you were the father, which would you punish most ?
The one who said he saw a dog as big as a cow. Why ?
Because it couldn't be."
II. LIES OF THE CHILD WHO COMPLAINS OF HIS FEET
SO AS NOT TO GO A MESSAGE AND OF THE CHILD WHO
BOASTS OF HAVING BEEN IN A MOTOR CAR. WlD (6) :
" WMch is the naughtiest ? The one of the car. Why ?
IPs a bigger lie than the other. Why ? He tells more of
a lie than the other." Note this quantitative expression
[meaning that what he says is falser than] which brings
out the point of view of objective responsibility.
Roc (7) : " Which is naughtiest ? The one of the car.
? Because you can't take little girls for drives in cars."
PIE (7). The story of the sore feet " is a lie. Why ?
Because he wanted to stay in. And the story of the motor
car ? That's a lie too. Why ? Because he wanted to say
that. Why did he want to say that ? Because he wanted
to take them in (Fr. faire le malin). Which was the
naughtiest ? The one of the car. Why ? Because it was
a bigger lie. Why ? Because it was a longer sentence. It
is bigger. It's naughtier. Why ? Because he told his
mother lots of things. Not just one sentence, but a long one
[ - a complicated story], If you had to punish them
150 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
which would you punish most ? The one of the car."
This shows Pie's purely quantitative conception of the
* matter : the longer the story, the worse the lie !
BURD (7 ; 10) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one
with the car. Why ? Because the mother knew he couldn't
have gone in such a short time [ go for a drive during his
short absence]."
DRIV (7 ; 6) : " Which of the two boys was the
naughtiest ? The one who said he went in the car.
Why ? It was the biggest lie. Why do you think it was
the biggest lie ? Because he said he "had been in a car and
it was not true. And the other one who said his feet hurt,
was that just as naughty or less naughty ? Less naughty.
Why ? Because he said his feet hurt him. And was it
true ? No, M'sieu. Then why do you think it was a less
naughty lie ? ... Why did he go and say his feet hurt
him ? So as not to go [the messages]. And why did the
other one go and say he had been for a drive ? To make
his mother believe he had. Which is the naughtiest ?
The one who said he had been in a car"
III. .STORIES OF THE DRAWING AND OF THE SCISSORS.
DEPR (8) : " Which was the naughtiest ? The one who
said he done the drawing. Why is he the naughtiest ?
Because everyone thought it wasn't him, and he said it was
him. Why did he say that ? So that everyone should
think it was him. And the boy with the scissors, why did
he tell a lie ? So that his mother should not punish him.
If you had to punish these children, which would you
punish most ? The one who said he had done the drawings.
Why would you punish him most ? Because he told a
worse lie"
GREM (8 ; 10) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one
who said he had done the drawing. Why ? Because he
couldn't draw, and he said it was him. Why did he tell
this lie ? To boast. And why did the other one lie ?
He thought he would rather play than go and fetch the
scissors. Which one would you punish most ? The one
who said he had done the drawing"
PIT (9) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one with the
drawing because he didn't know how to draw and he said he
had done it. Why did he say that ? Because he wanted
to say it was him, just as though the others didn't know that
he couldn't draw. And why did the other one tell a lie ?
He wanted to put the blame on someone else. Then which
one would you punish most ? The one with the drawing."
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND REALISM 151
The general principle underlying these answers is clear.
The more unlikely the lie, the more its contents mark a
departure from reality, the worse it is. The lie about the
dog that was as big as a cow is particularly naughty
(Main x ) " Because it never could be *\ li Because there's
no such thing", because " No one ever saw dogs as big
as cows", because "It's a bigger lie". And, above all,
the essential point is that it is a lie because te you can't
believe it ". Mother will see straight away that it is false
and the lie will be exposed in the presence of all. But
there is nothing unusual about having good marks at
school. It is quite likely to happen, and parents will
readily believe it. It is therefore only a little lie, all the
more innocent because a mother is taken in by it. In the
same way, the lie about the motor car is bad because
" you can't take little girls for drives in cars " and
" because it is a longer sentence ", therefore a story of
some importance ; whereas to complain falsely of sore feet
so as not to have to run messages is " almost nothing for
the mother " in so far as she is taken in by it. Finally,
to boast of being able to draw a picture when you can't
draw at all is all the worse because of the fact that every
one is able to verify the unlikelihood of the statement.
We are therefore in the presence of judgments of ob-
jective responsibility in an unadulterated state, or at any
rate in a much simpler form than those whose contents
we analysed in connection with clumsiness and stealing.
In those cases it was always a question whether the child
was not fascinated by the material aspect of the action,
by the purely physical damage done to the adults ;
whereas in the present cases the material element is
reduced to its minimum. We have on the one hand lies
whose intention is manifestly interested, lies that really
" deceive ", as the child himself admits. On the other
hand we have simply romancing, jokes (" blagues ") or
exaggeration, as the child himself realizes. And yet the
1 The term vilain is that used more particularly by Genevan children
to mean " wicked " or " immoral ".
152 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
subjects we have quoted ignore the liars' intention, and,
basing themselves only on the degree of likelihood of the
lie, judge it from the most external and objectivistic
standpoint.
There can therefore be no question of explaining these
facts by any inability on the children's part to understand
the stories. As can be quite clearly recognized, all the
subjects whose answers we have quoted understood the
intentions that entered into the matter. It is not from
lack of psychological penetration that they evaluated lies
according to the criterion of objective responsibility ; it is
because intention does not seem to them to count from
the point of view of morality itself.
But we must hasten to add that even on the plane of
verbal reflection, where our interrogatories take place, the
notion of objective responsibility is not held in all its
purity by any one child. It is always mixed with sub-
jective responsibility. A given child, who pays no
attention to the intentions involved in the story of the
dog, will, on the contrary, judge the stories of the drawing
and the scissors in accordance with the psychological
context, and so on. There can therefore be no question
of two real stages. All we can say is that objective
responsibility is a phenomenon frequently to be found
among the younger children but subsequently diminishing
in importance.
Psychological statistics are notoriously open to sus-
picion, but the following little calculation may be of value
in this connection as showing how objective responsi-
bility changes with age. Taking as our unit not each
separate child since one and the same child may give
answers according to both types of responsibility taking
as our unit, then, the answer given by each child in
connection with each story, and dividing those units
according to the two types of responsibility, objective and
subjective, we find that the average age for the objective
type is 7 while for the subjective it is 10. As these
statistics deal only with children from 6 to 12 it will be
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 153
seen that, broadly speaking, objective responsibility dis-
appears in favour of subjective responsibility as the child
advances in age.
And now, in order to get at the real significance of the
preceding answers, let us by means of the same pairs of
stories examine the reactions of children whose minds are
directed towards the idea of subjective responsibility.
I. STORIES OF THE DOG AND OFTHE GOOD MARKS. DUR (7):
" Which is the naughtiest ? Both ike same, Exactly the
same ? One is a little naughtier. Which ? The one who
said the teacher had said he -was very good. Why did he say
that ? So that they should give him something. And the
other one ? . . . . If yon were the father, which would
you punish most ? The one of the teacher. Why ?
Because he is the naughtiest."
LOUR (8) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one who
told about the teacher. Why is he the naughtiest ?
Because a dog like that doesn't exist and because it is
naughtier to tell a lie. [Thus Lour reverses the argumenta-
tion used by the previous subjects, and from the fact that
a dog is never as big as a cow he concludes that to ex-
aggerate in this way is not to lie.] Why did the one with
the teacher tell a lie ? So that Ms mother should- reward
him. And the other one ? For a joke (Fr. blague).
Which would you punish most ? The one who said what
the teacher hadn't said."
CHRA (8) : The one who said he had seen a dog as big
as a cow is less naughty " because it was as a joke. The
one of the teach&r is naughtier because he had said it so that
his mother should not scold him."
DEP (8 ; 9) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The lie about
the teacher. Why ? Because the story about the dog is
nothing, but the story about the teacher made the mother
angry. Why did the first boy say he had seen a dog as
big as a cow ? Just for swank (Fr. Pour faire le petit
crdneur). And the other one ? So that his mother should
not punish him. Which of these two children would you
punish most ? The one with the teacher. Why ? Because
absolutely the opposite [of the truth]. The one about the
dog the little boy told his mother and father for a lark (Fr. tine
farce). Why did he tell it ? Perhaps because it was a little
calf. 9 '
PIT (9 ; 3) : The naughtiest is the one of the teacher
154 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
" because he said he had been very good so that his mother
should give him some pennies or some chocolate. -And why
did the other one say he had seen a dog as big as a cow ?
Because he thought a cow was a dog and because his brain
wasn't working properly.' 3
DELE (9) : " The naughtiest is the one of the teacher.
Why is he naughtier than the other ? Because the other
one, it wasn't possible. Why did he say it was ? Because
the dog was very big. And why did the other one say that
the teacher had given him a good mark ? So that his
mother should pel him. 31
ARL (10) : The naughtiest is the one " who deceived his
mother by saying that the teacher was pleased. Why is he
the naughtiest ? Because the mother knows quite well that
there aren't any dogs as big as cows. But she believed the
child who said the teacher was pleased. Why did the child
say the dog was as big as the cow ? To make them
believe it: As a joke. And why did the other one say that
the teacher was pleased* ? Because he had done his work
badly. Was that a joke ? No, it is a lie. Is a lie the
same thing as a joke ? A lie is worse because it is bigger."
KEI (10) : " Which is the naughtier ? The lie about the
teacher. Why ? Because he deceived his mother. But so
did the other. But he [the one of the teacher] had said
something the teacher hadn't said. The other one too had
said something that wasn't true. [Our counter-sug-
gestions, no matter how insistent, are ineffectual.] He
had told a great big lie. The teacher hadn't said he was good.
Why is it naughtier than the lie about the dog?
Because you can see better that it [the lie about the dog] is
not true. You can't tell with the lie about the teacher. Why
did he say he had seen a dog as big as a cow ? To make
them believe he had seen something marvellous."
Ros (n) : The lie about the teacher " is a bigger lie
because it was a bad thing to do. 1 '
II. STORIES OF THE MOTOR AND THE SORE FEET.
SAV (7!) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one with
the sore feet, I think. Why did he say that ? So as
not to go out. And the other one ? To take them in
[as a joke]/'
FER (8) : The naughtiest is the one who pretends his
feet hurt " because he didn't want to go out and because he
disobeyed his mother."
LOURD (8) begins by saying that the naughtiest is the
one of the car. Then he adds spontaneously : " I'm
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 155
wrong. I would punish the one wouldnt ^o out. And
what did the other one do ? That was for a joke "
Sci (9 ; 7) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one with
the feet that hurt. Why ? Because it wasn't true. Why
did he say that ? So as not to go out, And the other
one ? Xo make them believe he had been in a car once.
Which is the naughtiest ? The one with the bad feet."
III. STORIES OF THE DRAWING AND OF THE SCISSORS.
FER (8) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The first [drawing].
He said it to swank. And the second one [scissors] so as not
to be scolded. Quite right. Which is the naughtiest ?
The second."
LOURD (8) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one of the
scissors, because he said that so as to keep them. And the
other ? He said it so thai people should praise Mm.
Which would you punish most ? The one of the scissors.
Why not the other one ? Because the boys in Ms class
know quite well how he draws." Lourd therefore thinks
that the more obvious a lie is, the less it matters the
converse of what was maintained by the votaries of
objective responsibility.
DELA (9) : The naughtiest is the one of the scissors.
" Why did he say that ? So that his mother shouldn't
scold him. And why did the other boy say that he had
done the drawing ? To make the bdys think that he could
draw well."
What strikes one about these answers is that the very
arguments used by the partisans of objective responsi-
bility reappear but in support of the opposite thesis. The
previous set of subjects regarded the lie about the dog
and the cow as serious because it was unlikely, and the
proof brought forward by the child was that the mother
" didn't believe it " and " saw at once that it was a lie "
The present subjects, on the contrary, regard the same
circumstances as indicating that the lie is not serious : if
you see straight away that a statement is false, it means
that the person who makes it is not trying to deceive you
but is exaggerating or making a mistake. Thus Arl does
not consider that the story about the dog is a lie, since the
mother knows that there are no dogs as big as cows. The
less a lie appears to be one, the worse it is, which is the
direct opposite of the view held by the younger children.
156 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Let us now turn to the last point which we have to
examine, namely objective responsibility as a function of
the material consequences of the lie. In using stories
invented for the preceding experiments we found that the
child more or less consistently regarded a lie as all the
more serious if it accompanied actions that had re-
grettable (material) results. Thus consequences outweigh
intentions, as was the case in connection with clumsiness
and stealing. For example :
QUEL (7) : "A little boy upset an ink-pot on the table.
When his father came back the boy told him it wasn't he
who knocked over the ink-pot. He told him it was the
cat ! Was it a lie ? Yes. Naughty or not naughty ?
Naughty. Why ? Because it made a big stain.' 3
DUB" (8) : "Two children bought some eggs for their
mother. But they played on their way home and broke
the eggs. The first child broke twelve eggs, the other
child, one. When they got home they told their mother
that a big dog had jumped at them and broken the eggs.
Was that telling lies ? Yes. Were both the lies equally
naughty ? No. One was worse than the other. Which ?
The first, beca^tse he broke more. But I am not talking
about the first child, I mean the first lie. What was the
first lie ? He said it was the dog. And the second. He
also said it was the dog. Then are both these lies equally
naughty ? No, the first is because the boy broke most eggs"
In other words, when a material action is too closely
attached to the lie, the child has a certain difficulty in
dissociating the lie in so far as it is psychological action
from the actual results of the concomitant external act.
The only interest of these examples is that they bring out
this lack of dissociation. It would be very difficult to
carry the analysis of children's evaluations any further by
means of stories of this kind because the data in question
are not two, but three in number : the lie, the concomitant
act and the results of the act. We therefore abandoned
this type of question.
Instead, we tried to solve the problem systematically by
presenting to the children a pair of stories, one of which
contained a clearly intentional piece of deceit having no
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 157
appreciable physical consequences, the other a simple
mistake, but leading to harmful results. These are stories
IVA and IVs given at the beginning of this section : i A
boy purposely shows a gentleman the wrong way, but the
gentleman does not get lost. 2 C A boy shows a gentleman
the wrong way by mistake and the gentleman gets lost.
The result of the interrogatory is that here, as in the case
of clumsiness and stealing, some children think about the
material consequences and evaluate the lie from this point
of view only ; others think only of the intention. The
average age of the first is 7, that of the second is 9. Thus
we have here two distinct attitudes, one of which seems
to be more evolved than the other, but examples of both
are to be met with at any age between 6 and 12.
Here are examples of objective responsibility.
THE (6) : " Which of the two is the naughtiest ? The
one who didn't know where the Rue de Carouge was. Why
is he the naughtiest ? The gentleman got lost. Did the
other one know where it was ? Yes. Why didn't he
say ? For a lark (Fr. pour rigoler)."
VAL (7) repeats the stories quite correctly. " Which is
the naughtiest ? The one who got lost [who made the
gentleman lose his way], Did he know the way, this boy,
or did he not know it well ? Not well. Which is the
naughtiest, the one who didn't know the way and the
gentleman got lost, or the one who knew, but didn't tell
the gentleman, and the gentleman didn't get lost after all ?
The one who got lost."
FER (8) : " Which is the naughtiest 1 The first, because
he made the gentleman lose his way. With the second boy
the gentleman didn't get lost."
CAR (8) : The naughtiest is " the one who made the
gentleman lose his way, and the less naughty boy is the one
who didn't make the gentleman lose his way. If you had to
punish them, which would you punish most ? The one
who didn't know where it was. He made a mistake. But
didn't the other one deceive the gentleman ? Yes, but
the gentleman didn't get lost. And if the gentleman ^had
got lost ? They -would have both been equally naughty.''
Here are examples of the other attitude beginning with
an intermediate case.
158 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
CHAP (y|) ; " Is one of the boys naughtier than the
other ? No, they're both the same. Will the gentlemen be
angry ? Yes, one more than the other. Which ? The one
who didn't find his way. And if the gentlemen were to
find the two boys again, what would happen ? One of the
gentlemen would scold the boy [more than the other].
Which gentleman ? The one who didn't find his way,
Would he be right ? No, he wouldn't be right, because the
boy didn't know the way."
DUR (7) : " Are they both the same, or is one naughtier
than the other ? One is naughtier than the other. Which ?
The one who did it for a lark. Did the gentleman get
lost, or not IHe didn't get lost. And the other one, when
the boy made a mistake ? $Ie did get lost. Which boy
would you punish most ? The one who did it for a lark."
CLAI (7) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one who
knew where the street was [therefore who practised deceit]
and afterwards the gentleman didn't get lost/'
QUEM (8|) : " Which is the naughtiest ? The one who
knew but didn't say where it was. Did the gentleman lose
his way ? No, the gentleman didn't lose his way because he
asked another gentleman. And what did the gentleman in
the other story do ? He lost his way"
LOURD (8 ; 3) : The naughtiest " was the lie of the boy
who knew it wasn't there. The other boy spoke without
knowing what he was saying. Should they be punished ?
The boy who said it wrong was tfie one who ought to have said
it when he knew."
KEI (10) : The naughtiest is the one " who did it on pur-
pose. The first one deceived somebody, but he didn't know it."
These answers confirm our findings in connection with
clumsiness and stealing. The younger children are inclined
to ignore the intention and to think only of the actual
result of the action. The older ones, on the contrary, pay
much more attention to motives. Very interesting in this
connection is the answer given by Chap (7! yrs.), who
knows that grown-ups too are apt to fix on the mere
consequences of the act, but who thinks, nevertheless, that
the grown-up is wrong and that the intention counts for
more than the material deed.
All these data would therefore seem to converge on one
point. The problem we must now discuss is how the child
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL 159
ever gets beyond this moral realism and comes to judge of
conduct by intentions. At this point a more profound
analysis of the previous results and a few additional
questions on the reasons adduced for not lying will put us
on the right lines.
4. LYING AND THE TWO KINDS OF RESPECT. Why is
it that during these early years lies seem to give rise to so
paradoxical a realism in morality, a realism testifying to so
faint a conception of what constitutes the real gravity of
deceit ? How, starting from objective responsibility, will
the child ever attain to a psychological evaluation of lying ?
These two questions are closely bound up with each other.
The matter can be explained quite simply if we com-
pare our present data with the far more certain results
obtained by observing the development of the rules of
games. For on this last point we were able to establish
the existence of two distinct processes in the evolution of
children's moral judgments. On the one hand, there was
the constraint of the adult or older child which, far from
putting an end to egocentric thought or behaviour, easily
combined with it and led to a purely external and realistic
conception of rules without effective influence on the
practice of these rules. On the other hand, there was co-
operation, which appeared to us to dislodge both egocentric
practice and the mystical attitude to constraint, and led
both to a successful application of rules and to a wider
and more interiorized understanding of what they meant.
The following reflections therefore suggest themselves in
connection with lies. In the first place, moral realism is
the result of the meeting of egocentrism and constraint.
The child, owing to his unconscious egocentrism, tends
spontaneously to alter the truth in accordance with his
desires and to neglect the value of veracity. The rule that
one must not lie, imposed by adult authority, will there-
fore seem all the more sacred in his eyes and will demand
all the more " objective " an interpretation just because it
does not in fact correspond with any felt inner need on his
160 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
part. Hence, moral realism and objective responsibility,
which stand for an inadequate practical application of the
rule. In the second place, in so far as habits of coopera-
tion will have convinced the child of the necessity of
not lying, rules will become comprehensible, will become
interiorized, and will no longer give rise to any judgments
but those of subjective responsibility.
We shall examine these two points in succession. In
the case of the first we shall simply point to the conse-
quences of our preceding remarks, while in that of the
second we shall analyse certain fresh material contained
in the reasons given by children for and against lying.
Everyone knows, thanks to the fine work done by Stem
and his followers, that until the age of 7-8 the child finds
systematic difficulty in sticking to the truth. Without
actually lying for the sake of lying, i.e. without attempting
to deceive anyone, and without even being definitely
conscious of what he is doing, he distorts reality in
accordance with his desires and his romancing. To him a
proposition has value less as a statement than as a wish,
and the stories, testimony and explanations given by a
child should be regarded as the expression of his feelings
rather than of beliefs that may be true or false. As Stern
has said, there are such things as apparent or pseudo-lies
(" Pseudo - oder Scheinliige "). Since then, children's lies
have been studied from every point of view, and every-
where the spontaneity of pseudo-lies before the age of 7-8
has found confirmation.
What has perhaps been less generally understood is that
this feature of child psychology is of an intellectual as well
as of a moral order, and that it is connected with the laws
of child-thought in general and with the phenomenon of
intellectual egocentrism in particular. For the need to
speak the truth and even to seek it for oneself is only
conceivable in so far as the individual thinks and acts as
one of a society, and not of any society (for it is just the
constraining relations between superior and inferior that
often drive the latter to prevarication) but of a society
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL 161
founded on reciprocity and mutual respect, and therefore
on cooperation.
For what, after all, is the spontaneous mental attitude
of the individual ? Even before the appearance of lan-
guage, on the motor plane which we mentioned in con-
nection with game rules, we find that although the child's
activity is constantly being conditioned by an ever closer
adaptation to the things around Mm, it tends nevertheless
to utilize these things for the sake of exercising some
organic faculty or for the satisfaction of some psycho-
biological tendency. In this way things, external objects,
are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas,
and this continuous assimilation of objects the child's
own activity Is the starting point of play. Not only
this, but when to pure movement are added language
and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and
wherever the mind feels no actual need for accom-
modating Itself to reality, its natural tendency will be
to distort the objects that surround it In accordance
with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its
satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that
characterizes the earliest forms of child-thought.
It is to these circumstances that we must ascribe that
striking feature of the child's first beliefs of being im-
mediate and not controlled (of being, as Pierre Janet says,
merely assertive and not "reflective"). Every thought
that enters the head of a child of 2-3 does so from the first
in the form of a belief and not in the form of a hypothesis
to be verified. Hence the very young child's almost
systematic romancing as a sort of game which the
child plays with himself as well as with others and to
which one cannot yet give the name of pseudo-lie, so close
is the connection between primitive romancing and
assertive belief. Hence, finally, the pseudo-lie which is a
sort of romancing used for other people, and serving to
pull the child out of any strait due to circumstances,
from which he deems it perfectly natural to extricate
himself by inventing a story. Just as, from the intellectual
162 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
point of view the child will elude a difficult question by
means of an improvised myth to which he will give
momentary credence, so from the moral point of view, an
embarrassing situation will give rise to a pseudo-lie. Nor
does this involve anything more than an application of
the general laws of primitive child thought, which is
always directed towards its own satisfaction rather than
to objective truth. It is as his own mind comes into
contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value
in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral
demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child
remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him
and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance
with his desires.
Thus we see that the child is almost led to tell lies or
what seem to us as lies from our point of view by the
very structure of his spontaneous thought. Given this
situation, what will be the result of the laws laid down by
adults about truthfulness ? On the occasion of the first
very obvious lies, or of those connected with some offence
or other and told therefore with the object of averting
punishment or scolding, the parents point out to the child
that he has just done something very wrong and thus
inculcate in him the respect for truth. We agreed with
M. Bovet in allowing that commands of this kind, laid
down for the child by persons for whom he feels respect
and often on the occasion of particularly strong affective
situations, are sufficient to arouse in the child's mind
obligations of conscience, i.e. the feeling of certain definite
duties such as that of not telling lies again. Moreover, as
we saw in the game of marbles, a rule may be felt as
sacred and obligatory without, for that matter, being
properly applied. One may even say that in certain cases
the more defective the application of a rule the more the
rule will be felt as obligatory, given the continual conflicts
(and consequently the feelings of guilt) which these
infractions of the rule must lead to. Be that as it may, we
can say that up till the age of 7-8, the child tends spon-
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 163
taneousiy to alter the truth, that this seems to him
perfectly natural and completely harmless, but that he
considers It a duty towards the adult not to lie, and
recognizes that a lie is a " naughty " action. Moral
realism and objective responsibility are the inevitable
outcome of so paradoxical a situation.
Two groups of causes conspire, it is true, to bring about
this result. The first group is of a general order and will
be dealt with at the conclusion of this chapter : the child
is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore
natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress
on the external, tangible element than on the hidden
motive. The second group of causes is peculiar to the
situation we have been describing. It is obvious that if
the desire for truthfulness does not correspond to some-
thing very fundamental in the child's nature, the adult's
command, in spite of the nimbus that surrounds it, will
always remain external, " stuck on " as it were, to a
mind whose structure is of a different order. For the
spirit of such a command could only be understood by
experience. One must have felt a real desire to exchange
thoughts with others in order to discover all that a lie can
involve. And this interchange of thoughts is from the
first not possible between adults and children, because the
initial inequality is too great and the child tries to imitate
the adult and at the same time to protect himself against
Mm rather than really to exchange thoughts with him.
The situation we have described is thus almost the neces-
sary outcome of unilateral respect. The spirit of the
command having failed to be assimilated, the letter alone
remains. Hence the phenomena we have been observing.
The child thinks of a lie as " what isn't true ", inde-
pendently of the subject's intentions. He even goes so far
as to compare lies to those linguistic taboos, " naughty
words ". As for the judgment of responsibility, the
further a lie is removed from reality, the more serious is
the offence. Objective responsibility is thus the inevitable
result of unilateral respect in its earliest stage.
164 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Let us now turn to the second problem we set ourselves
and let us ask how the child is going to acquire a real
understanding of lying and become capable of judging of
subjective responsibility. It follows quite naturally from
what we have said that the passage from unilateral
respect to mutual respect is what liberates the child from
his moral realism. But before carrying the discussion any
further, let us pause to examine certain facts that are very
interesting in this connection.
For if what we have said is true, then two questions are
forced upon us. The first is : what are the child's ideas
about the moral utility of not lying ? The next is : from
what moment and in what conditions does the child
consider it a moral fault to lie to his equals ? And we
shall see that the answers given to these two kinds of
question go to show that in mutual respect and coopera-
tion is to be found the real factor that brings about a
progressive understanding of the law of truthfulness.
Let us first try to see why people should not tell lies.
The reason most universally invoked and that which
comes first chronologically is that you mustn't tell lies
because " you get punished ". Here are some examples :
ZAMB (6) : " Why must we not tell lies ? Because God
punishes them. And if God didn't punish them ? Then
we could tell them."
Roc (7) : " What happens when you tell lies ? You get
punished. And if you didn't get punished, would it be
naughty to tell them ? No. I'm going to tell you two
stories. There were two kiddies and they broke a cup
each. The first one says it wasn't him. His mother
believes him and doesn't punish him. The second one also
says that it wasn't him. But his mother doesn't believe
him and punishes him. Are both lies that they told
equally naughty ? No. Which is the naughtiest ? The
one who was punished."
BURD (7) tells- us, in connection with the stories of the
dog and the school teacher, as we saw in the preceding
paragraph, that the lie of which the mother knows that it
is untrue is the worst. Then he adds spontaneously the
following curious explanation : " What she knows is the
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL 165
worst. Why ? Because she she can scold
at once. When she doesn't she can't scold at once.
The child doesn't he is being scolded. He doesn't
remember any more. But when is a child naughtiest, when
he is scolded at once or when he is not scolded at once ?
He is naughtier when he is scolded at once""
DELE (9) : st Why is it naughty ? -Because you gd
punished. If telling lies wasn't punished would it be
naughty ? Oh, no 1 "
The following observation recently made at the Maison
des Petite by Mile Lafendel is worth recording : A little
girl of 6 had just told a lie. Mile L. asked her if that was
right. The answer was : " It doesn't matter, my mummy
can't see ! 9>
Note how closely observed is the situation as described
by Burd. But what an extraordinary morality ordinary
education produces the child is all the naughtier for
being scolded straight away ! These children, in short,
look upon lying as naughty because it is punished, and if
it were not punished no guilt would attach to it. This is
objective responsibility in its purest form. These facts,
moreover, should not be interpreted as even a relative
amorality. The child does not mean that it is enough to
escape censure to be innocent. What these subjects think
is simply that the punishment is the criterion of the
gravity of the lie. Lies are forbidden, though one does
not quite know why. The proof is that you get punished
for it. If it were not punished, it would not be " naughty ".
What these answers mean, then, is that a lie is a fault in
so far as it is forbidden by God or adults. This is heter-
onomy in its most naive form and it confirms our interpre-
tation of realism in its beginnings.
Here are some slightly more advanced answers. A lie
is a fault in itself, and would remain so even if it were not
punished.
DUR (7) : " Are we allowed to tell lies ? No. It's
naughty. Why ? Because we get punished. If we could
tell them without being punished, would it be naughty or
not naughty ? Naughty. Supposing it was in a country
where there were only children and where no one would
166 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
know If we told lies, would it still be naughty to tell them
or not ? It would be naughty."
GIR (9) : " Why is it naughty ? Because we get pun-
ished. If you didn't know you had told a lie, would it be
naughty too ? It would be naughty, but less naughty [we
have here an interesting residue of the last type of answer].
Why would it be naughty ? Because it is a lie all the
same"
AUF (9) : " If lies were not punished, would they still be
wrong ? They would still be wrong for the boy who said
them"
ARL (10) : " If lies were not punished, would they be
naughty or not ? Of course they would be naughty"
At a certain stage, then, rules become obligatory inde-
pendently of punishments, that is to say, independently of
the controlling power whence they emanate. This is the
phenomenon to which P. Bovet has drawn attention.
Commands, which are at first closely bound up with the
person who imposes them, are later on elaborated by the
child's reason and through this become universal. It is a
process of the same order as that described by P. Janet
in connection with his " rational " stage. The laws of
conduct, like those of reflective thought, end by being
placed above the actual context in which they are ex-
perienced, and thus become universal and absolute.
But even though they are generalized in this way, rules
are none the less heteronomous. The child, it is true,
takes the particular command that has been given him
and raises it to the level of a universal law. This rational
process of extension is probably already due to coopera-
tion. But the rule may nevertheless persist in the form of
an imperative that is external to the child's own con-
science. We shall now see how this state of things is left
behind at a given moment, thanks to the growing under-
standing of the child himself.
In point of fact, the older children of 10-12 generally
invoke against lying reasons which amount to this : that
truthfulness is necessary to reciprocity and mutual agree-
ment. Among the alleged motives there will be found, it
is true, a whole set of phrases inspired by adult talk :
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL REALISM 167
" We mustn't tell lies because It's of no use Sl (Arl, 10).
" We must speak the truth . . . our conscience tells us
to" (Hoff, ii). But along with these commendable
but too often meaningless formulae we can observe a
reaction which seems to be, if not altogether spontaneous,
at any rate founded on experience. The reaction in
question implies that truthfulness is necessary because
deceiving others destroys mutual trust. One is struck by
the fact, in this connection, that while the younger chil-
dren had regarded a lie as all the worse for being un-
believable, the older ones, on the contrary, condemn a lie
in so far as it succeeds.
Here are some fresh examples of the attitude of the
younger children on this point, which, incidentally, we had
occasion to notice more than once during the preceding
paragraph.
BUG (6) : The lie about the dog is worse than the one
about the good marks " because his mother would have
believed " the latter.
Roc (7) : Lies are " not nice. Why not ? Because
sometimes you believe them and sometimes you don't.
Which are worse, those you believe or those you don't
believe ? Those you don't believe, Two children both say
they have sore feet so that they won't be sent messages.
One is believed, the other not. Which one is naughtiest ?
The one you didn't believe. Why ? Because you can
make a mistake by looking [ = because in the case of the
child who was believed, appearances might have let you
think that he had a sore foot : the lie was probable and
therefore less bad than that which had appearances too
much against it]."
SAV (7) : " When is a lie worse, when people believe it or
when they don't believe it ? When you can't believe in it."
The older children, on the contrary, hold that a lie is
"bad precisely in so far as it achieves its aim and succeeds
in deceiving the other person. Those, therefore, who have
really grasped the anti-social character of lying no longer
say that we mustn't lie " because we get punished ", but
because to do so is contrary to reciprocity and to mutual
respect.
168 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
DIN (8, forward) : " Why must we not lie ? -Became if
everyone lied no one would know where they were!'
AUF (9) : " Why is it naughty to tell a lie ? Became
mother believes it!" Exactly the opposite criterion from
that used by the little ones.
Loc (10) : " Why is it naughty to tell a Me ? Because
you can't trust people any more."
KEI (10) : The lie about the school teacher is worse
than the lie about the dog, because "the^one about the
teacher you couldn't know [that it was a lie]."
It would seem, then, that the evolution of the answers with
age marks a definite progress in the direction of reciprocity.
Unilateral respect, the source of the absolute command,
taken literally, yields the place to mutual respect, the source
of moral understanding. We can, indeed, distinguish three
stages in this progress. In the first stage, a lie is wrong
because it is an object of punishment ; if the punishment
were removed, it would be allowed. Then a lie becomes
something that is wrong in itself and would remain so even
if the punishment were removed. Finally, a lie is wrong
because it is in conflict with mutual trust and affection.
Thus the consciousness of lying gradually becomes interior-
ized and the hypothesis may be hazarded that it does so
under the influence of cooperation. If we attribute the
advance to the child's intelligence alone, which is constantly
improving his understanding of what he originally took
in a purely realistic sense, we are only shifting the
question. For how does psychological intelligence advance
with age if not by means of increased cooperation ?
Cooperation, of course, presupposes intelligence, but this
circular relation is perfectly natural : Intelligence animates
cooperation and yet needs this social instrument for its
own formation.
If our hypothesis is correct, then we ought now to find
and this is the second question we have to examine
that lies between children, which are at first held to be
legitimate, 6nd by being proscribed from among the
relations they hold with each other. And this indeed does
prove to be the case.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL 169
Here, to begin with, are some answers given by the
younger children, who that lies between children are
allowed,
PEL (6) : " Is It just the same to tell lies to grown-ups
and to children ? A T o. Which is naughtiest ? To grown-
ups. Why ? Because they know it isn't true. [Note the
spontaneous reappearance of the realistic criterion: the
more a lie shows, the worse it is,] And how about
children ? It's allowed because they are smaller.'*
BLI (6) ; * f To a grown-up it's not ike same thing as to
children. Which is naughtiest ? To grown-ups.'*
IRI (7) : " And may you tell lies to other kiddies or
not ? Yes, M'sieu. Is it naughty or not ? It's a little
bit naughty too. Is it worse to grown-ups, or to other
kiddies, or are they both the same ? It's not so naughty
to children. Why ? Because they are not big.' 3
DRUS (7) : " It's naughtier to a grown-up. They are
bigger than children, and little children can say naughty
words to each other [cf. the definition of a lie !]."
CARN (8) : You can tell lies to children but not to
grown-ups " because a gentleman is worth more than a child."
EM (8 ;. 5) : "A child doesn't know if it is true. A
grown-up knows, so it's naughtier ! " Cf. the realistic
criterion rising spontaneously in a child who has never
been questioned by us before.
Pi (9 ; 3) : " It's naughtier to a grown-up because they
are older/'
ER (9 ; 8) : " It doesn't matter to a child. You can tell
him lies. But you mustn't to a grown-up."
Almost all the older children, on the contrary, though
they maintain that it is wrong to deceive adults, think
that it is as bad or even worse to deceive one's comrades.
You can say things for a joke, but a serious lie is as
reprehensible between children as towards an adult.
Here are examples.
BOH (7 \ 10) : " Can one tell children lies, or is that just
as bad as telling them to grown-ups ? They are both the
same thing.*'
Di (8 ; 6) : " It's just as bad to a child, because a child
can't tell if you're lying or not, and he's not pleased." The
argument is exactly the opposite of Em's.
AUD (9!) : " It is worse to a child, because a child is
smaller."
170 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
DEN (n yrs.) : " It's worse to a child because he'll
believe it"
COTT (12 ; 8) : " You get into more of a row with a
grown-up, but they're just as bad as each other."
CAL (12 yrs.) : " Sometimes you almost have to tell lies to
a grown-up, but it's rotten to do it to another fellow."
These answers I show how much the progress of soli-
darity between the children helps them to understand the
true nature of lies. Compare, for example, Em's answers
with those given by Di. To Em, who is dominated by
authority, a lie is wrong in so far as it show r s, but to Di,
who has learned comradeship, a lie is wrong in so far as it
deceives.
In conclusion, we can solve as follows the two questions
we set ourselves above. If the younger children present
all the features of an almost systematic moral realism,
leading in certain cases to the predominance of objective
over subjective responsibility, this is because of the sui
generis relations holding between adult constraint and
childish egocentrism. The child's unilateral respect for
the adult obliges him to accept the latter 's commands,
even when these are not such as can be put immediately
into practice. Hence the externality of rules and the
literal character of the moral judgments to which they
give rise. If, conversely, the child's development is such
as to interiorize these commands and to make his own the
notion of subjective responsibility, this is because coopera-
tion and mutual respect are giving him an increasingly
vivid understanding of psychological and moral realities.
Thus truthfulness gradually ceases to be a duty imposed
by heteronomy and becomes an object envisaged as good
by an autonomous personal conscience.
In short, the study of rules imposed upon the child by
the adult broadly confirms what we learnt from the study
of rules which younger children receive from older ones.
However closely connected mutual and unilateral respect
may be in the general continuity of mental phenomena,
1 See statistics, p. 308.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 171
the two processes lead nevertheless to consequences that
are qualitatively different.
5. CONCLUSION. MORAL REALISM. We must now try
to find what place our results occupy in the moral life of
the child taken as a whole by restoring things to the right
perspective which has inevitably suffered distortion
through the method of interrogation.
Two distinct levels of activity are to be distinguished
in moral thought. First, there is effective moral
thought, t moral experience " which is built up gradu-
ally in action as the subject comes in contact with
reality and meets with shocks and opposition. It is that
which leads him to form such moral judgments as will
guide him in each particular case as it comes Ms way and
enable him to evaluate other people's actions when these
concern him more or less directly. And there is also
theoretical or verbal moral thought, bound to the former
by all kinds of links, but as far removed from it as is
reflective thought from immediate action. This verbal
morality appears whenever the child is called upon to
judge other people's actions that do not interest Mm
directly or to give voice to general principles regarding his
own conduct independently of his actual deeds.
The analysis we were able to make of the judgments on
responsibility deals only with the cMld's theoretical moral
thought, and is in no way concerned with Ms practical
and concrete moral thought (differing in this from our
enquiry on the rules of a game where we were able to
keep both aspects of the question simultaneously in view).
Now with regard to this verbal plane our results were
fairly consistent. Though we could not point to any
stages properly so called, wMch followed one another
in a necessary order, we were able to define processes
whose final terms were quite distinct from one another.
These processes might mingle and overlap more or less in
the life of each child, but they marked nevertheless the
broad divisions of moral development. We saw, for
172 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
example, that the child's theoretical morality could be
_ subject either to the principles arising from unilateral
respect (morality of heteronomy and objective responsi-
bility) or to those based on mutual respect (morality of
inwardness and subjective responsibility).
But the problem before us now and already touched
upon in the methodological remarks at the opening of the
present chapter is this. What do these results correspond
to in the child's effective thought on morality ? Two
solutions are possible. It may be that verbal thought is a
progressive conscious realization of concrete thought. In
that case the moral realism we met with and studied
would correspond to a moral realism effectively at work in
action, a realism that would no doubt already have been
left behind by the time the children talked about it
theoretically, but a realism which would none the less give
rise to spontaneous reactions expressed in concrete acts.
But it may also be that this verbal morality, whose
manifestations we have observed, corresponds to nothing
at all in the child's effective thought. The children would
therefore never have manifested any moral realism in
their concrete decisions and judgments. Meeting in their
lives with lies analogous to those of the dog as big as the
cow or of the boy who pretended to have had good marks
in order to be rewarded, they would never have hesitated
to regard the second as worse than the first. And, in this
case, verbal reflection alone would be sufficient to engender
a form of pure psittacism bearing no relation to past or
present action.
First let us remove a possible ambiguity. This second
solution is not equivalent to saying that the interrogatory
is the cause of the whole trouble. In life, the child is
constantly finding himself in situations analogous to those
described in the interrogatory. He hears his friends'
misdeeds discussed, he has the chance of judging them
from hearsay, and phenomena similar to those we have
observed may very well occur in a perfectly spontaneous
manner. In the same way, the results concerning animism
ADULT CONSTRAINT 173
or artificialism which we obtained earlier (see C.W,)
correspond to remarks that can frequently be heard
from the lips of children. But this is only shifting the
problem a stage further off, and we still have to ask
concerning these spontaneous verbal reflections : do they
or do they not constitute the comiBg into consciousness
of some effective form of thinking ?
As a matter of fact, it is our belief that even for the
child, theoretic moral reflection does constitute a pro-
gressive conscious realization of moral activity properly so-
called. Consequently, we think that the results set out above
correspond in a certain measure to real moral facts. But
the relations between thought and action are very far from
being as simple as is commonly supposed, and it will there-
fore be necessary to stress somewhat the point under discus-
sion in order to grasp our results in their true perspective.
In the first place, as Claparede has shown so well, ideas
or notions enter into consciousness in inverse order to
that in which they actually arise : what comes first in the
order of action comes last in the order of conscious realiza-
tion (prise de conscience). So that if on the verbal plane
moral realism seems to be a primitive fact, it does not follow
that it is such on the plane of action itself. The notion
of good which, generally speaking, appears later than
the notion of pure duty, particularly in the case of
the child, is perhaps the final conscious realization of
something that is the primary condition of the moral
life the need for reciprocal affection. And since moral
realism is, on the contrary, the result of constraint
exercised by the adult on the child, it may perhaps be a
secondary growth in comparison to the simple aspiration
after good, while still remaining the first notion to be
consciously realized when the child begins to reflect upon
morality and to attempt formulation.
In the second place, to realize consciously is not simply
to throw into light ideas that have already been fully
worked out. Conscious realization is a reconstruction and
consequently a new and original construction superimposed
174 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
upon the constructions already formed by action. As
such, therefore, it comes on the scene later than action
proper. Hence the time-lag noted by Stem, and which
we have found in every sphere of child thought l . If,
then, the moral realism we have noted between 6 and 8
on the average (we could not detect it under 6 because
the youngest children could not sufficiently understand the
stories used), if, then, this moral realism corresponds to
something present in the moral activity itself, it is not
during those years that we must seek for this something,
but at a very much earlier period. For objective responsi-
bility can perfectly well have been discarded long ago on
the level of action and yet subsist on the level of theo-
retical thought. Besides, we saw examples of children
who judged the stories we told them in accordance with
the principles of objective responsibility, but who at the
same time gave us personal reminiscences evaluated in com-
plete conformity with the criterion of subjective responsi-
bility. This being so, can we find during the first years
of moral development instances of realism and objective
responsibility that correspond to the phenomena which
we observed on the verbal plane ? We believe that we can.
In the first place it should be noted that, however
averse one may be in education to the use of any con-
straint, even moral, it is not possible completely to avoid
giving the child commands that are incomprehensible to
it. In such cases which are almost the rule in the
traditional form of education based on authority the
mere fact of accepting the cotnmand almost invari-
ably provokes the appearance of moral realism. Here
are a few examples observed on one of the author's own
children, on a child, therefore, whose parents have done all
they could to avoid objective responsibility. The following
observations will thus hold a fortiori for children in whose
immediate entourage no special attention is devoted to
this complex problem of moral autonomy and heteronomy.
1 See Bull. Soc. Franpaise et Philos., 1928, pp. 97 ei seq. t especially
p- 105.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND MORAL 175
Jacqueline has never been punished in the strict sense
of the term. At the worst, when she makes a scene, we
leave her alone for a little while and tel her we shall come
back when she can talk quietly again. She has never
been given duties as such, nor have we ever demanded
from her that sort of passive obedience without discussion
which in the eyes of so many parents constitutes the
highest virtue. We have always tried to make her under-
stand the ** why " of orders instead of laying down
" categorical " rules. Above all, we have always put things
to her in the light of cooperation : " to help mummy ",
to " please " her parents, to ee show her sister ", etc. are
for her reasons for carrying out orders that cannot be
understood in themselves. As to rules that are unin-
telligible to very little children, such as the rale of
truthfulness, she has never even heard mention of them.
But in ordinary life it is impossible to avoid certain
injunctions of which the purport does not immediately
seem to have any sense from the child's point of view.
Such are going to bed and haying meals at given hours,
not spoiling things, not touching the things on daddy's
table, etc. Now, these commandments, received and
applied before being really understood, naturally give rise
to a whole ethic of heteronomy with a feeling of pure
obligation, with remorse in case of violation of the law, etc.
For example, one evening I find Jacqueline, aged 2 ; 6
(15) a , in bed, spoiling a towel by pulling out the threads
one by one. Her mother has already often told her that
it is a pity to do that, that it makes holes, that you can't
mend the holes, etc. So I say to J. : " Oh, but mummy
will be sad/' J. answers calmly and even with an ill-
concealed smile : " Yes. It makes holes. You can't
mend "... etc. I continue my lecture, but she obvi-
ously is not going to take me seriously. Still hiding her
amusement with difficulty, she suddenly says to me
" Laugh ! " in so comic a tone, that in order to keep a
straight face I quickly change the subject. J., very
conscious of her powers of seduction, then says to me " My
little darling Daddy ", and the incident ends. The next
morning, however, J. wakes up full of it. Her first words
refer to what had happened the night before. She thinks
about the towel and asks her mother whether she isn't sad.
So in spite of the first reaction showing such charming
1 2; 6 (15) =2 years, 6 months and 15 days.
176 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
disrespect, my words had told and the command had
brought about the usual consequences.
The evening of the same day, J. begins to puU the
threads out of the towel again. Her mother repeats that
it is a pity. ]. listens attentively but says nothing. A
moment later she is calling out and cries till someone
comes to her : she simply wanted to see her parents again
and make sure that they bore her no grudge.
We have here an example of a command bringing about,
with or without apparent respect, a well-marked feeling of
duty and of wrong. Now it seems obvious to us that
such feelings are set up before the child has any clear
consciousness of moral intention, or at any rate before it
can distinguish between what is " done on purpose " (an
action carried out knowingly and in voluntary defiance of
the command) and what is " not done on purpose ". A
child of two and a half spoiling a bath towel has obviously
no intention of doing harm. It is simply making an
experiment in physics. Even if you ask it to stop, it may
forget the command and begin again, or remember the
rule too late to resist the first impulse. We would there-
fore not class J/s conduct as described above among the
acts of disobedience (which are by definition conscious)
nor a fortiori among those committed with the intention
of doing harm. And yet the sense of guilt is clearly
present. It was not till after she was three years old that
we noted in J. any reactions implying the notion that
something " not done on purpose " could not be reckoned
a fault. For instance, I say to her : " You know
you're disturbing me just a little." Answer : " J didn't
think " (in other words, " I didn't do it on purpose ") *.
After the age of 4 months J., it is true, uses expressions
like " but it's your fault ". But these apply only to the
material results and not to the intention. And it is just
1 It is interesting to note that the moment when the idea of intention
appears in the moral language of 'the child coincides more or less with
the age of the first " whys ". Indeed, as we have tried to show else-
where (L.T,, chap. V), that the first " whys " correspond precisely to a
need for motivation which results from the conscious realization of
the intentionality of actions.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 177
at this age, from the time when speech begins up to about
three, that It is easiest to observe moral realism and
objective responsibility in their pure and spontaneous
state.
Let us turn, therefore, to obvious cases of objective
responsibility. In the earliest stages of life cleanliness is a
constant occasion for judgments of responsibility. Now it
goes without saying that in such a domain the element of
intentionality is almost entirely absent from the children's
actions. Even the most orthodox Freudians cannot deny
"that in the vast majority of cases the child of one or two
that cannot control its bodily functions when it is asleep
or at play has simply not acquired the necessary physical
control. Cases of intentional or even " unconscious "
resistance to the rules of cleanliness are very rare at this
age. Now, in spite of the purely automatic character of
the reactions in question, parents are bound to ask their
children to be careful. When accidents occur it is only
natural that they should express their disappointment.
In short, however delicately one may put the matter,
there have to be commands and therefore duties. Now
the curious thing is that the sense of guilt is proportional,
not to the incidental negligence (as when the child forgets
to " ask ", etc.), but to the physical acts themselves.
For example, J. at I ; n (28) has been put to bed and
given medicine of whose effects she has been informed.
In spite of her mother's precautions, specially designed to
avoid any reaction of shame or guilt, J. is greatly upset
when the medicine works. Her face assumes an expression
of distress, her eyes fill with tears, her mouth droops, and
she is obviously experiencing the same feelings as if the
thing had happened in normal circumstances through her
own negligence.
But it must not be thought that this special domain is
the only one propitious to the spontaneous development
of objective responsibility. Any rule involving a material
application admits of the same deviations. Another good
example is that concerning food and the rules connected
with it.
M
178 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
For some time J, has had a very small appetite, with
the result that during this period of her life the essential
rules of her universe were those appertaining to food.
The World-Order decreed that one should take a cup of
cocoa at four o'clock, a good bowlful of vegetables in the
middle of the day, a few little drops (of hydrochloric
acid) in water just before lunch, etc. Now once these
orders had been accepted, right and wrong were defined
by the conformity or non-conformity of actions in ^ re-
lation to them, and this independently of all possible
intentions or circumstances. For example, one day J. at
2 ; 10 (7) is not very well and her mother feels that
probably the usual plate of vegetables will be too much
for her. Sure enough, after one or two mouthfuls^ J.
shows signs of weariness. But she insists upon finishing
her helping, because it is the rule. It is no good letting
her off, she perseveres in her view, though she is not
enjoying her food. Every time she is given a spoonful she
cannot swallow it, but when the bowl is taken away she
asks for it back, as though it were a sin not to empty it.
Finally it is taken away and we try to reassure her by
telling her that it is not her fault, that some days people
are less hungry than others, etc. In spite of aU these
precautions taken by her mother, J. then begins to cry.
Even when she has been comforted she still shows signs of
remorse, promises to go to sleep, etc.
Another example. At the age of 2 ; 10 (23). J. is taking
her hydrochloric acid as usual. But too many drops have
been put in the glass, and J. is told that she need not
drink it all. Sure enough, after taking a draught or two
she complains that it prickles ; she looks disgusted and
even feels sick. AU the same she wants to drink it all up.
Her mother repeats that it is not necessary and lifts her
down from her chair. J. bursts into tears as though she
had done wrong. She comes back to the glass and insists
upon drinking it up.
These last two examples seem to demonstrate how
strong and spontaneous is the child's evaluation of ob-
jective responsibility. It is even staggering to find that in
a little girl who has never known what authority is and
whose parents make a point of cultivating autonomy of
conscience in their children, the orders received should
lead to so stubborn a moral realism. A rale emanating
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND REALISM 179
from the parents brings about a sense of duty against which
the later attenuations of the parents themselves are for the
moment powerless. It Is true that in the three cases we have
just quoted (cleanliness and rules about food) pride may
play a certain part. The child will not admit defeat. But
this very pride presupposes a realistic consciousness of rules.
If the child did not consider it a sort of moral lapse in
itself not to finish up her glass of medicine, her bowl of
vegetables, or her cup of cocoa, she would not feel humili-
ated at being let off these obligations 1 .
A third group of examples relating to clumsiness must
also be given. This will bring us back to the facts we have
studied in the course of this chapter, since what we sought
to analyse was precisely how the child evaluates the acts
of clumsiness that he hears about in the set stories. Now,
during the early years, a child will often regard Ms own
clumsiness from a purely objective point of view, even to
his own detriment.
J., at about 2 years old, is playing with a shell I have
lent her. The shell is very fragile and breaks the first
time it is dropped. J. is dismayed, and I have the
greatest difficulty in persuading her that it is not her
fault.
We need not dwell upon this example. It is a common-
place among children, and everyone will have had occasion
to observe something like it. On this point too it is not
until later that the child will differentiate involuntary
clumsiness (pure accident) from clumsiness due to negli-
gence or carelessness. In the early stages, it is only the
result that counts.
In short, it is our belief that during the first years, the
inevitable constraint of the adult even if, as in the case
of J., it is reduced to the minimum necessarily brings
about a certain moral realism which will be more or less
marked according to the nature of the home and to the
1 We may add, In order to reassure the reader, that Jacqueline is
by no means continually haunted by the commands which she respects .
i8o THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
combined characters of parents and child. The moral
realism which later on we observe on the verbal plane
would thus be the indirect result of these early phenomena.
But between the spontaneous moral realism of the early
years and the theoretical moral realism which we analysed
before, there is an intermediate link that must not be
disregarded we mean the judgment made by the child*
not about his own actions, but about the conduct of his
equals. As far as he himself is concerned he succeeds
fairly soon (at about 3-4, when the first " whys " and the
interest in motivation begin) in differentiating intentional
faults from involuntary breaches of the moral code. And
soon after this he learns to excuse himself by the plea pf
" not on purpose ". But when it comes to the deeds of
those around him, things appear in a very different light.
Generally speaking, it is not going too far to say that the
child like ourselves is more severe with others than
with himself. The reason for this is quite simple. The
conduct of other people appears in its outward shape long
before we can understand the intentions behind it ; so that
we are apt immediately to compare this outward shape
with the established rule and to judge, the action by this
essentially objective criterion. It is only by a continuous
effort of generosity and sympathy that we can resist such
a tendency and try to understand other people's reactions
in terms of their intentions. It is obvious that the child
is capable very early of such intropathy. But it is also
obvious that during this phase where respect for rules still
outweighs cooperation (the stage we have called " ego-
centric " in the game of marbles and in which rules are at
once mystically accepted and egocentrically practised) it
is also obvious, we repeat, that to judge psychologically
will require a greater effort in the case of other people's
actions than in that of our own. To put it differently,
moral realism will last longer with regard to the evalua-
tion of other people's conduct than with regard to that of
one's own. And the facts, indeed, seem to bear this out.
Here from amongst many others is an observation
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 181
which one of our students, Mme Weissfdler, has been
kind enough to communicate to us. Parallels to it could
be found in any child.
L MAD (4 yrs.) says to her mother : " Yon Mummy,
I've wiped the dishes" Ja (2| yrs.) adds ; " Me too.'*
Mad : *' No, that's not true. Yes. No, you didn't wipe
the dishes. So it*s naughty to say that." Mother : " Per-
haps Ja is making a mistake and thinks she has wiped
them/' Mad : " No, no, she didn't them. It's net
nice of her to say thai. It was only me.**
II. Ja : et You're all over spots, you are. Mad : No.
Ifs not true, it's not true, It is true. Mad (furiously) :
It's not true. That's nonsense. . . . Mummy, Ja is talking
nonsense ! "
III. Ja, without meaning to, hurts Mad. Mad cries :
" Mummy, Ja is horrid. She hit me. But she didn't do it on
purpose, she didn't want to hurt you, Yes she did, she did
it on purpose. She hit me very hard. She hurt me very much.'*
In dealing with the evaluation of the conduct of others we
have approached the slightly artificial situation in which the
child considers actions that are not directly observed but
are described by means of a story. If moral realism lasts
. longer with regard to judgments made about others than
in the purely individual domain, it goes without saying
that its reign will be even further prolonged when it
comes to the purely verbal examples contained in our
stories. But here a third phenomenon comes in to compli-
cate matters.
For the child's moral realism is certainly far more
systematic on the plane of theory than on that of action,
so that we would seem to be dealing here with something
in the nature of a new and different phenomenon. The
fact is that the conscious realization implied in all theo-
retical reflection does not merely repeat after a greater or
lesser interval, what has effectively taken place in practical
actions. There are, over and above the delays, distortions
inherent in the very mechanism of reflection. For as soon
as on immediate action there follows, or is superposed, a
thought that is detached from reality and set free by the
power of words or imagination, the mind is thrown out of
i8a THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
focus, a whole set of illusions of perspective prevails, and
especially the unconscious illusion of egocentrism. Thus it
is that in the inteliectnal sphere, the child who tries to
reason will be up against a series of difficulties which were
conquered long ago by practical intelligence. Similarly, in
the moral sphere when he simply has stories told to him,
he will be led to make judgments devoid of pity and lacking
in psychological insight, testifying therefore to a more or
less systematic moral realism, whereas in real life he would
undoubtedly sympathize with those whom from afar he
regards as the greatest sinners.
We see, therefore, how the spontaneous moral realism of
the early years, while it dwindles progressively with regard
to the subject's own conduct, may very well develop
elsewhere, first in the evaluation of other people's actions,
and finally in reflection concerning purely theoretical cases
involved in stories, in histories, and in social myths in
general. If we were dealing with so-called primitive
societies, we should have to add that these final products
of moral realism, once they are consolidated by the social
constraint of the group as a whole (in contrast to the
elementary constraint of adults over children) are capable
of reacting upon the actual minds of individuals by a reper-
cussion that will be readily understood. But as we are
speaking only of the child we may confine ourselves to the
conclusion that moral realism does correspond to some-
thing effective and spontaneous in child thought. This
result, moreover, is in complete agreement with what we
found in the case of the game of marbles. Every rule,
whether it be imposed upon the younger by the older
child, or upon the child by the adult, begins by remaining
external to the mind before it comes to be really interiorized.
During this purely external phase, the most rigorous
moral realism may very well go hand in hand with what
seems to be the laxest and most egocentric practice.
Having cleared up this point let us now try to solve the
problem of the nature of moral realism taken dynamically
and reduced to the true proportions indicated by the
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 183
preceding discussion. In other words, let us not any
longer regard the results of our interrogatories as self-
contained, but rather as the and indirect outcome
of a primitive and far more tendency. It is this
spontaneous moral realism of which the children's theo-
retical talk is only the reflection which we must now
examine so as to establish its origin and conditions.
Moral realism seems to us to be due to the conjunction
of two series of causes those peculiar to the spontaneous
thought of the child (childish "realism 1 '), and those
belonging to the constraint exercised by the adult. But
this conjunction, far from being accidental, seems to us to
be characteristic of the most general processes of cMld
psychology as they occur in the intellectual as well as in
the moral domain. For the fundamental fact of human
psychology is that society, instead of remaining almost
entirely inside the individual organism as in the case of
animals prompted by their instincts, becomes crystallized
almost entirely outside the individuals. In other words,
social rules, as Durkheim has so powerfully shown,
whether they be linguistic, moral, religious, or legal, etc.,
cannot be constituted, transmitted, or preserved by means
of an internal biological heredity, but only through the
external pressure exercised by individuals upon each other.
To put it in yet another way. As Bovet has demonstrated
in the field of morals, rules do not appear in the mind of the
child as innate facts, but as facts that are transmitted to him
by his seniors, and to which from his tenderest years he has
to conform by means of a sui generis form of adaptation.
This, of course, does not prevent some rules from containing
more than others an element of rationality, thus corre-
sponding to the deepest functional constants of human
nature. But whether they be rational or simply a matter
of usage and consensus of opinion, rules imposed on the
childish mind by adult constraint do begin by presenting
a more or less uniform character of exteriority and sheer
authority. So that instead of passing smoothly from an
early individualism (the "social" element of the first
184 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
months is only biologically social, so to speak, inside the
individual, and therefore individualistic) to a state of
progressive cooperation, the child is from his first year
onwards in the grip of a coercive education which goes
straight on and ends by producing what Claparede l has
so happily called a veritable " short-circuit ".
As a result of this we have three processes to consider :
the spontaneous and unconscious egocentrism belonging
to the individual as such, adult constraint, and coopera-
tion. But and this .is the essential point the spon-
taneous egocentrism of the child, and the constraint of the
adult, far from being each other's antitheses on all points,
so far agree in certain domains as to give rise to para-
doxical and singularly stable compromises. For coopera-
tion alone can shake the child out of its initial state of
unconscious egocentrism;* whereas constraint acts quite
differently and strengthens egocentric features (at any
rate on certain points) until such time as coopera-
tion delivers the child both from egocentrism and from
the results of this constraint. We shall attempt to verify
these statements with regard to moral realism, after which
we shall compare this phenomenon with the precisely
parallel processes that present themselves in the domain
of child intelligence.
The first group of factors that tend to explain moral
realism is therefore based on one of the most spontaneous
features of child thought realism in general. For the
child is a realist, and this means that in almost every
domain he tends to consider as external, to " reify *' as
Sully put it, the contents of his mind. And he has a
systematic propensity for the reification of the contents of
consciousness that are shared by all minds, whence his
tendency to materialize and project into the universe the
realities of social life.
Without going as far back as Baldwin's " projective "
stage which is defined precisely by complete realism or the
indissociation between what is subjective and what is
1 ClaparMef Experimental Education and Child Psychology.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND REALISM 185
objective, we could cite in support of our contention a
large number of phenomena contemporary with moral
realism Itself.
It is particularly necessary to remember at this point
the definite attitude taken up by children with regard to
the products or the instruments of thought (see C.W.,
Sect. I.). Dreams, for example, even when the child
already knows that they are deceptive as to their contents,
are, till about 7-8, systematically considered as an ob-
jective reality, as a sort of ethereal, rarefied picture
floating in the air and fixed before our eyes. Names
(comparable to moral rules in that they are transmitted
and imposed by the adult surrounding) constitute an
aspect of the objects themselves : each object has a name,
co-substantial with its own nature, having always existed
and been localized in the object. Finally, thought itself,
instead of consisting in an internal activity, is conceived
as a sort of material power in direct communication with
,,the external universe.
In the domain of drawing, M. Luquet has given an
admirable analysis of the phenomenon known as " intel-
lectual realism *\ The child draws things as he knows
them to be, not as he sees them. Of course such a habit
is primarily a proof of the existence and extent of that
rationalism that belongs to aU thought and which alone
can adequately account for the nature of perception. To
perceive is to construct intellectually, and if the child
draws things as he conceives them, it is certainly because
he cannot perceive them without conceiving them. But
to give up gradually the spurious absolutes situated away
and apart from the context of relations that has been
built up during experience itself is the work of a superior
kind of rationality. When the child comes to draw things
as he sees them, it will be precisely because he has given
up taking isolated objects in and for themselves and
has begun to construct real systems of relations which
take account of the true perspective in which things are
connected. Thus " intellectual realism ", though it is
i86 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the forerunner of authentic rationalism, also imples a devia-
tion which consists in isolating too soon and therefore in
" reifying " the early products of rational construction.
It is therefore still " realism " in our sense of the term,
that is to say, it is an illegitimate exteriorization of
intellectual processes, an illegitimate fixation of each
moment of the constructive movement.
Being therefore a realist in every domain, it is not
surprising that the child should from the first " realize "
and even " reify " the moral laws which he obeys. It is
forbidden to lie, to steal, to spoil things, etc. all, so many
laws which will be conceived as existing in themselves,
independently of the mind, and in consequence inde-
pendently of individual circumstances and of intentions.
For this is the place to recall the fundamental fact that,
just because of the general realism of his spontaneous
thought, the child, up to the age of about 7-8, always
regards the notion of law as simultaneously moral and
physical. Indeed, we "have tried to show (C.W. and C.C.)
that until the age of 7-8 there does not exist for the child
a single purely mechanical law of nature. If clouds move
swiftly when the wind is blowing, this is not only because
of a necessary connection between the movement of the
wind and that of the clouds ; it is also and primarily
because the clouds " must " hurry along to bring us rain,
or night, etc. If the moon shines only by night and the
sun only by day, it is not merely because of the material
arrangements ensuring this regularity ; it is primarily
because the sun " is not allowed " to walk about at night,
because the heavenly bodies are not masters of their
destiny but are subject like all living beings to rules
binding upon their wills. If boats remain afloat on the
water while stones sink to the bottom, this does not
happen merely for reasons relating to their weight ; it is
because things have to be so in virtue of the World-
Order. In short, the universe is permeated with moral
rales ; physical regularity is not dissociated from moral
obligation and social rule. Not that the last two are to
ADULT CONSTRAINT MORAL 187
be deemed more important than the first. Far from it.
There is simply non-differentiation between the two Ideas,
The idea of physical regularity is as primitive as that of
psychical or moral regularity, but neither is conceived
independently of the other. It is only natural, therefore,
that the moral rule should retain something physical
about it. Like names, it is a part of things, a character-
istic feature, and even a necessary condition of the
universe. What, then, do intentions matter? The
problem of responsibility is simply to know whether a law
has been respected or violated. Just as if we trip, inde-
pendently of any carelessness, we fall on to the ground in
virtue of the law of gravity, so tampering with the truth,
even unwittingly, will be caled a lie and incur punishment.
If the fault remains unnoticed, things themselves will take
charge of punishing us (see following Chapter, 3).
In short, moral realism seems to us from this point of
view to be a natural and spontaneous product of child
thought. For it is not nearly so natural as one would
think for primitive thought to take intentions into
account. The child is far more interested in the result
than in the motivation of Ms own actions. It is coopera-
tion which leads to the primacy of intentionality, by
forcing the individual to be constantly occupied with the
point of view of other people so as to compare it with Ms
own. Indeed, one is struck to see how unconscious of it-
self and how little inclined to introspection is the egocentric
thought of very young children (J.I?., Chap. IV., i
and 2). It may be objected to this that primitive thought
seems, on the contrary, to be directed to a sort of universal
intentionalism : cMldish animism consists in attributing
intentions to all things, so also do the " whys ", arti-
ficialism leads to the notion that nothing exists without a
motive, etc. But this does not in any way contradict our
thesis. For to attribute stereotyped intentions to every
event is one thing, and to subordinate actions to the
intentions that inspired them is another. The intention-
alism that characterizes animism, artificialism, and the
188 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
" whys " before 6-7 comes from a confusion between the
psychical and the physical, whereas the priority of in-
tentions over external rules implies an increasingly delicate
differentiation between what is spiritual and what is
material.
But these considerations are not sufficient to account
for the phenomena we have observed, and we must now
turn our attention to the second aspect of moral realism.
For moral realism is also the product of adult constraint.
Nor is there, as we have already pointed out, anything
mysterious in this double origin. The adult is part of the
child's universe, and the conduct and commands of the
adult thus constitute the most important element in this
World-Order which is the source of childish realism.
But there is more to it than this. It looks as though,
in many ways, the adult did everything in his power to
encourage the child to persevere in its specific tendencies,
and to do so precisely in so far as these tendencies stand
in the way of social development. Whereas, given suffi-
cient liberty of action, the child will spontaneously emerge
from his egocentrisin and tend with his whole being
towards cooperation, the adult most of the time acts in
such a way as to strengthen egocentrism in its double
aspect, intellectual and moral. Two things must be
distinguished here, differing considerably in theoretical
importance but of equal moment practically the exter-
nality of adult commands and the lack of psychological
insight in the average adult.
In the first place, moral commands almost inevitably
remain external to the child at any rate during the first
years. Most parents burden their children with a number
of duties of which the reason must long remain incompre-
hensible, such as not to tell lies of any kind, etc. Even in
the most modern education, the -child is forced to adopt a
whole set of habits relative to food and cleanliness of
which he cannot immediately grasp the why and the
wherefore. All these rules are naturally placed by the
child on the same plane as actual physical phenomena.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 189
One must eat after going for a go to bed at night,
iiave a bath before to bed, etc., exactly as the
shines by day and the moon by night, or as pebbles sink
while boats remain afloat. All these things are and must
be so ; they are as the World-Order decrees that they
should be, and there must be a reason for it all. But
none of it is felt from within as an impulse of sympathy or
of pity is felt. So that from the first we have a morality
of external rules and a morality of reciprocity or rather
of the elements which mill later on be utilized by moral
reciprocity and so long as these two moralities do not
unite, the first will almost inevitably lead to a certain
amount of realism.
But in the second place, and this unfortunately is no
less important a consideration, the majority of parents are
poor psychologists and give their children the most
questionable of moral trainings. It is perhaps in this
domain that one realizes most keenly how immoral it can be
to believe too much in morality, and how much more pre-
cious is a little humanity than al the rules in the world.
Thus the adult leads the child to the notion of objective
responsibility, and consolidates in consequence a tendency
that is already natural to the spontaneous mentality of
little children.
It would be difficult, to be sure, to embark upon an
objective enquiry in such matters. But if systematic
investigation is lacking we have some precious sources of
information which often enable us to plumb greater
depths than are ever revealed by a mere accumulation of
incomplete observations. Literature is at hand, moreover,
to supplement scientific psychology. Edmund Gosse's auto-
biographic study, Father and Son, not to mention the many
novels that revive almost unaltered the memories of child-
hood, tells us more than many a learned treatise on the
subject. The individual examination of youthful delinquents
or of " difficult " children is equally illuminating. Finally,
it is impossible to psycho-analyse an adolescent or an adult
without discovering that the subject's spontaneous anam-
190 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
nesia (always so full of interest) is crowded with the most
definite memories relating to the mistakes which Ms
parents made in bringing him up.
But although such methods alone will put exceptionally
illuminating cases within our reach, it might perhaps be
possible to set afoot an enquiry into the mentality of the
" average parent " and to accumulate observations made in
certain homogeneous and comparable situations, such for
example as those in trains, especially on Sunday evenings
after a day's outing. How can one fail to be struck on such
occasions by the psychological inanity of what goes on :
the efforts which the parents make to catch their children in
wrong-doing instead of anticipating catastrophes and pre-
venting the child by some little artifice or other from taking
up a line of conduct which his pride is sure to make him
stick to ; the multiplicity of orders that are given (the
" average parent " is like an unintelligent government
that is content to accumulate laws in spite of the contra-
dictions and the ever-increasing mental confusion which
this accumulation leads to) ; the pleasure taken in inflict-
ing punishments ; the pleasure taken in using authority,
and the sort of sadism which one sees so often in perfectly
respectable folk, whose motto is that "the child's will
must be broken ", or that he must be " made to feel a
stronger will than his ".
Such a form of education leads to that perpetual state
of tension which is the appanage of so many families, and
which the parents responsible for it attribute, needless to
say, to the inborn wickedness of the child and to original
sin. But frequent and legitimate in many respects as is
the child's revolt against such methods, he is nevertheless
inwardly defeated in the majority of cases. Unable to
distinguish precisely between what is good in his parents
and what is open to criticism, incapable, owing to the
" ambivalence " of his feelings towards them, of criticizing
his parents objectively, the child ends in moments of
attachment by inwardly admitting their right to the
authority they wield over him. Even when grown up, he
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 191
be unable, except in very rare to break
from the affective acquired in this way, will
be as stupid with Ms own as Ms were with
Mm.
It is clearly by this constraint exercised by one genera-
tion upon the other that we must seek to explain the rise
and persistence of moral realism. Moral realism, rooted
as it is in the whole of the child's spontaneous realism, is
thus consolidated and stylized in a hundred ways by
adult constraint. Such a meeting of the products of
adult pressure with those of child mentality is no accident ;
it is not the exception but the rule in child psychology.
And this can be only too easily explained, since It is
through the age-long action, groping its way down the
centuries, of the generations one upon the other that the
essential elements of common morality and pedagogy
have been formed by a mutual adaptation of the two
mentalities thus confronted.
In order to show how natural is this double aspect of
moral realism, let us compare it to a phenomenon which
is its exact counterpart from the intellectual point of view
verbal realism, or verbalism, which results from the
union between the spontaneous linguistic syncretism of
the child and the verbal constraint of the adult.
One of the most striking features of the egocentric
mentality from the intellectual point of view is syn-
cretism, that is to say, perception, conception and reason-
ing by general (" global ") l and unanalysed schemas. This
phenomenon has been described by Decroly and by
Claparede in the domain of perception, and it reappears
in every aspect of child thought explanation, under-
standing, reasoning, etc. (see L.T., Chap. IX.). We found
it to be particularly prevalent in the domain of verbal
understanding. A sentence, a story, a proverb will give
1 In L.T. (ist Ed.) we translated the word global by " general " as
the use of " global fl had not yet been incorporated into current psycho-
logical terminology. It means* of course, the opposite of " analysed/'
[Trans.]
192 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the child the impression that he has completely under-
stood it as soon as he has succeeded in constructing out of
it a sort of general inclusive schema, or " global " meaning,
even when individual words or groups of words are still
quite incomprehensible to Mm. Such an attitude is
closely bound up with egocentrism. For it is discussion
and mutual criticism that urge us to analyse things ; left
to ourselves we are quickly satisfied with a " global ", and
consequently, a subjective explanation. Now " global "
syncretism quite naturally leads the child to verbalism.
Since every word obtains its meaning as a function of these
syncretic schemas, words end by acquiring a substance of
their own independently of reality. What, now, are the
effects of adult constraint with regard to this verbalism ?
Does it progressively diminish this product of egocentrism
or does it consolidate it ? In so far as the adult can
cooperate with the child, that is to say, can discuss things
on an equal footing and collaborate with him in finding
things out, it goes without saying that his influence will
lead to analysis. But in so far as his words are spoken
with authority, in so far, especially, as verbal instruction
outweighs experiment in common, it is obvious that the
adult will consolidate childish verbalism. Unfortunately
it is the second alternative that is most often realized in
the teaching given in schools and even in the home. The
prestige of the spoken word triumphs over any amount of
active experiment and free discussion. Schools have been
held responsible for the verbalism of children. This is not
quite correct, as verbalism arises out of certain spon-
taneous tendencies in the child. But the school, instead
of creating an atmosphere favourable to the diminution of
these tendencies, does base its teaching upon them and
consolidate them by making use of them.
All this will have served to show the parallelism between
moral and intellectual facts in the domain of realism.
Moral realism and verbalism are therefore the two clearest
manifestations of the way in which adult constraint com-
bines with childish egocentrism.
ADULT CONSTRAINT AND 193
GENERAL CONCLUSION. The obtained in the
course of our study of moral realism confirm those of our
analysis of the game of marbles. There to exist in
the child two separate moralities, of which, incidentally*
the consequences can also be discerned in adult morality.
These two moralities are due to formative processes which,
broadly speaking, follow on one another without, however,
constituting definite stages. It is possible, moreover, to
note the existence of an intermediate phase. The first of
these processes is the moral constraint of the adult, a
constraint which leads to heteronomy and consequently
to moral realism, The second is cooperation which leads
to autonomy. Between the two can be discerned a phase
during which roles and commands are interiorized and
generalized.
Moral constraint is characterized "by unilateral respect.
Now, as M. Bovet has clearly shown, this respect is the
source of moral obligation and of the sense of duty : every
command coining from a respected person is the starting-
point of an obligatory rule. This has been abundantly
confirmed by our enquiry. The obligation to speak the
truth, not to steal, etc., are all so many duties which the
child feels very deeply, although they do not emanate
from his own mind. They are commands coming
from the adult and accepted by the child. Originally,
therefore, this morality of duty is essentially heterono-
mous. Right is to obey the will of the adult. Wrong is
to have a will of one's own. There is no room in such an
ethic for what moralists have called et the good J> in
contrast to " the right " or pure duty, since the good is a
more spontaneous ideal and one that attracts rather than
coerces mind. The relations between parents and children
are certainly not only those of constraint. There is a
spontaneous mutual affection, which from the first prompts
the child to acts of generosity and even of self-sacrifice, to
very touching demonstrations which are in no way pre-
scribed. And here no doubt is the starting point for that
morality of good which we shall see developing alongside
N
194 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
of the morality of right or duty, and which in some
persons completely replaces it. The good is a product of
cooperation. But the relation of moral constraint which
begets duty can of itself lead to nothing but heteronomy.
In its extreme forms it leads to moral realism.
Then comes an intermediate stage, which M. Bovet has
noted with great subtlety I ; the child no longer merely
obeys the commands given him by the adult but obeys the
rule itself, generalized and applied in an original way. We
have observed this phenomenon in connection with lying.
At a given moment the child thinks that lies are bad in
themselves and that even if they were not punished, one
ought not to lie. Here, undoubtedly, is a manifestation of
intelligence working on moral rules as on all other data
by generalizing them and differentiating between them.
But the autonomy towards which we are moving is still
only half present : there is always a rule that is imposed
from outside and does not appear as the necessary product
of the mind itself.
How does the child ever attain to autonomy proper ?
We see the first signs of it when he discovers that
truthfulness is necessary to the relations of sympathy and
mutual respect. Reciprocity seems in this connection to
be the determining factor of autonomy. For moral
autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an
ideal that is independent of all external pressure. Now,
apart from our relations to other people, there can be no
moral necessity. The individual as such knows only
anomy and not autonomy. Conversely, any relation with
other persons, in which unilateral respect takes place,
leads to heteronomy. Autonomy therefore appears only
with reciprocity, when mutual respect is strong enough to
make the individual feel from within the desire to treat
others as he himself would wish to be treated.
And this is the subject we shall try to analyse in the
course of the next chapter.
1 See also Baldwin's Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental
Development.
Ill
COOPERATION AND DEVELOP-
MENT OF OF JUSTICE 1
OUR study of the rules of a game led us to the conclusion
that there exist two types of respect, and consequently
two moralities a morality of constraint or of heteronomy,
and a morality of cooperation or of autonomy. We
became familiar in the course of the last chapter with
certain aspects of the first. The second, which will
occupy us now, is unfortunately much more difficult to
study ; for while the first can "be formulated in rules and
thus lends itself to interrogation, the second must be sought
chiefly among the more intimate impulses of the mind or in
social attitudes that do not easily admit of definition in
conversations held with the children. We have established
its juridical aspect, so to speak, in studying the social play
of children between 10 and 12. We must now go further,
and penetrate into the child's actual consciousness. And
this is where things begin to be complicated.
But if the affective aspect of cooperation and reciprocity
eludes interrogation, there is one notion, probably the most
rational of all moral notions, which seems to be the direct
result of cooperation and of which the analysis can be
attempted without encountering too much difficulty we
mean the notion of justice. It will therefore be on this
point that most of our efforts wiE be directed.
The conclusion which we shall finally reach is that the
sense of justice, though naturally' capable of being rein-
forced by the precepts and the practical example of the
adult, is largely independent of these influences, and
1 With the collaboration of Mies M. Ramberfc, N. Baechler, and
A. M. Feldweg,
Z95
196 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
requires nothing more for its development than the
mutual respect and solidarity which holds among children
themselves. It is often at the expense of the adult and
not because of Mm that the notions of just and unjust
find their way into the youthful mind. In contrast to a
given rule, which from the first has been imposed upon the
child from outside and which for many years he has failed
to understand, such as the rule of not telling lies, the rule
of justice is a sort of immanent condition of social relation-
ships or a law governing their equilibrium. And as the
solidarity between children grows we shall find this notion of
justice gradually emerging in almost complete autonomy.
It was these considerations which prompted us to
introduce into this chapter the study of a question which
is not directly connected with the notion of justice that
of the solidarity between children and the conflicts into
which this solidarity enters with adult authority in cases
of " tale-telling ". This analysis will enable us to deter-
mine at what age solidarity begins to be efficacious. And
we shall find that it is precisely after this age that the
equaKtarian notion of justice begins to assert itself with
sufficient strength to overcome the authority of the adult.
Finally, to this study of the notion of justice must be
joined, needless to say, at least a summary analysis of
children's ideas about punishments. Distributive justice,
which is defined by equality, has always been connected
in the general mind with retributive justice, which is
defined by due proportion between acts and punishments.
Although the second aspect of the notion of justice is less
closely connected with the problem of cooperation it must
also, of course, be submitted to examination. Indeed, we
shall deal with it first so as to leave our subsequent
analysis untrammelled by considerations of this particular
aspect of the question.
The plan we shall follow is then as follows. We shall
begin by studying the problem of punishments, then that
of collective responsibility and of so-called " immanent "
justice (in which the punishment is supposed to emanate
AND THE OF 197
from things themselves). After which, by way of transition,
we shall examine the conflict between retributive justice
and distributive Justice* Having reached point, we
shall proceed to the analysis of the relations between
distributive Justice and authority between childish
solidarity and authority), then to the study of justice
between children, and we shall wind up with a general
discussion of the relations between justice and cooperation.
I. THE PROBLEM OF PUNISHMENTS AND RETRIBUTIVE
JUSTICE. There are in existence two distinct ideas of
justice. We say that an award is unjust when it penalizes
the innocent, rewards the guilty, or when, in general, it
fails to be meted out in exact proportion to the merit or
guilt in question. On the other hand, we say that a
division is unjust when it favours some at the expense of
others. In this second acceptation of the term, the idea
of justice implies only the idea of equality. In the first
acceptation of the term, the notion of justice is inseparable
from that of reward and punishment, and is defined by
the correlation between acts and their retribution.
It seems to us more profitable to begin with the first of
these two ways of thinking because it is the one we can
relate most directly to adult constraint and to the problems
examined in the last chapter. It is also very probably the
more primitive of the two conceptions of justice, if by
primitive is meant, not so much what is early in point of
time but what is most overlaid with elements that will be
eliminated in the course of mental development. For there
exists in certain notions about retribution a factor of
transcendence and obedience which a more autonomous
form of morality tends to eliminate. In any case, the
problem is to determine whether these two notions develop
pari passu or whether the second does not tend to pre-
dominate over the first.
But in any interrogation of children on punishments we
are, of course, up against considerable technical difficulties,
because on such a subject the child is far more likely to
198 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
offer the questioner the usual little family lecture than to
show him Ms real feelings on the question feelings which
he but rarely has occasion to put into words, and which,
perhaps, do not altogether admit of formulation. We
therefore adopted a more oblique method of approach.
In order to find out up to what point children regarded
punishments as just, we decided to split up the diffi-
culty. In the first place, one can, without throwing any
doubt upon the notion of retribution itself, suggest dif-
ferent types of punishment to the child and then ask him
which is the most fair. In this way it is possible to
contrast with expiatory punishment the only true punish-
ment in the eyes of those who believe in the primacy of
retributive justice 1 a punishment by reciprocity which is
simply derived from the idea of equality. It goes without
saying that the child's reaction to such problems as these
will be highly instructive from the point of view of the
evolution of the retributive idea. In the second place,
and once this point has been gained, it will be possible to
try and find out whether the child regards punishment as
just and as efficacious by making him compare (in pairs)
stories where the children are punished and stories where
the parents are content to reproach their children and
explain to them the consequences of their actions. The
subject is then asked to say which of these children will
be most likely to commit the forbidden deed again, those
who have or those who have not been the object of
punishment.
Once these points have been cleared up but not till
then it will be possible, in talking to the child, to enlarge
a little upon the subject and thus lead him on to general
questions such as what punishments are for, whether there
is any reason for retribution, and so on. This discussion,
which would be purely verbal if it came at the beginning,
can be maintained on the concrete plane in so far as it
1 See now Durkheim (Education Morale, pp. 188192) revives and
rejuvenates tbe doctrine of expiation in support of his doctrine of
penality.
AND THE OF JUSTICE 199
draws upon the judgments which the child has Just
pronounced concerning the stories he told.
Very briefly, the result we shall be led to is the follow-
ing. Two types of reaction are to be found with regard
to punishment. Some think that punishment is just and
necessary ; the sterner it is, the juster, and it is effi-
cacious in the sense that the child who has been duly
chastized will in the future do his duty better than others.
Others do not regard expiation as a moral necessity ;
among possible punishments those only are just that
entail putting things right, a restoration of the stains
quo ante, or which make the guilty one endure the
consequences of his deed ; or again, those which con-
sist in a purely reciprocal treatment. Indeed, apart from
such non-expiatory penalties, punishment, as such, is
regarded as useless, reproach and explanation being
deemed more profitable than chastizement. On the
average, this second mode of reaction is found more
frequently among the older children, while the first is
oftener to be found among the little ones. But the first,
favoured as it is by certain types of family life and social
relationships, survives at all ages and is even to be found
in many adults.
Here are the questions we used concerning the various
types of punishment. We begin by saying to the sub-
ject, " Are the punishments given to children always very
fair, or are some fairer than others ? " The child generally
takes the latter view, but whatever he may answer, we
proceed : " You know, it isn't at all easy to know how to
punish children so as to be quite fair. Lots of fathers and
teachers don't know how to. So I thought I would ask
the children themselves, you and your friends. I shall tell
you all sorts of silly things that little children have done,
and you'll tell me how you think they ought to be pun-
ished/' Then we tell the first part of the story (the
account of the misdeed committed). The child invents a
punishment, which we take note of, and we go on to
say, " Yes, that might do. But the father didn't think of
200 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
that. He thought of three punishments, and he wondered
which would be most fair. Ill tell you what they were,
and you will choose which it is to be. 1 ' Care must be
taken, once the child has' chosen the best punishment,
to ask him why it is the fairest. Then we ask in the
child's own terminology which is the most severe (or
the " stiffest " or the most " boring ", etc.) and de-
termine whether the child evaluates the punishment in
terms of its severity or in accordance with some other
criterion of retribution.
Here are the stories :
Story I. A little boy is playing in his room. His mother
asks him to go and fetch some bread for dinner because
there is none left in the house. But instead of going
immediately the boy says that he can't be bothered, that
he'll go in a minute, etc. An hour later he still has not
gone. Finally, dinner time conies, and there is no bread
on the table. The father is not pleased and he wonders
which would be the fairest way of punishing the boy. He
thinks of three punishments. The first would be to forbid
the boy to go on the roundabouts the next day. There
happened to be a fair the next day, and the little boy
was to go and have a good time on the roundabouts.
Well, as he wouldn't go and fetch the bread, he shan't go
to the fair. The second punishment the father thought of
was not to let the boy have any bread to eat. There was
a little of yesterday's bread left in the cupboard and the
parents are going to eat that, but as the little boy didn't
go and fetch a fresh loaf, there will not be enough to go
round. So the boy gets hardly any dinner to eat. The
third punishment the father thinks of is to do to the boy
the same thing as he had done. The father would say to
him, " You wouldn't help your mother. Well I am not
going to punish you, but the next time you ask me to do
anything for you, I shall not do it, and you will see how
annoying it is when people do not help each other." The
little boy thinks that will be aU right, but a few days later
he wants a toy that is right at the top of the cupboard.
He tries to reach it, but he is too small ; he gets a chair,
but it is still too high. So he finds his father and asks for
his help. Then the father says, " Now, you remember
what I said to you, old man. You wouldn't help your
AND THE OF 201
mother, so 1 don't feel inclined to you either. When
you make yourself useful 1 shall too, but not before."
Which of three punishments was the fairest ?
Story II. A boy has not his sums for school. The
next day he tels the teacher that lie couldn't do his sums
because he was ill. But as he rosy cheeks the
teacher thought that he was making it up, so she went
and told Ms father and mother. The father wants to
punish the little boy, but he can't decide between three
punishments. First punishment : to copy out a poem
fifty times. Second punishment : the father will say to
the boy, " You say you are ill. Very well then, we shall
take care of you. You shall go to bed for a whole day and
take a dose of medicine to make you better/ 1 Third
punishment : " You have told a lie. Now I shall not be
able to believe you any longer, and even if you tell the
truth I shall not be sure." The next day the boy gets ^a
good mark at school. Whenever he gets a good mark his
father gives Mm a penny to put in Ms money box. But
this time when the boy comes home and says he has had a
good mark the father says, " That may be true, old man,
but as you told a lie yesterday I can't believe you any
longer. I won't give you a penny to-day because I don't
know whether what you are telling me is the truth. If
you go several days without telling any lies then I shall
believe you again and everything will be all right."
Which is the fairest of these three punishments ?
Story III. One afternoon a little boy was playing in Ms
room. His father had only asked Mm not to play ball for
fear of breaking the windows. His father had hardly gone
when the boy got Ms ball out of the cupboard and began
to play with it. And bang goes the ball against a window
pane and smashes it ! When the father comes home and
sees what has happened he thinks of three punishments :
i To leave the window unmended for several days^ (and
then, as it is winter, the boy will not be able to play in Ms
room). 2 Make the boy pay for having broken the
window. 3 Not to let him have Ms toys for a whole week.
Story IV. A boy has broken a toy belonging to Ms little
brother. What should be done ? Should he i give the
little fellow one of Ms own toys ? 2 pay for having it
mended ? 3 not be allowed to play with any of his own
toys for a whole week ?
Story V. Playing ball in a passage (it was forbidden) a
boy knocked over a pot of flowers and broke it. What
202 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
should be Ms punishment ? i To go into the wood and
get a new plant and plant it himself ? 2 To be smacked ?
3 To have all his toys broken on purpose ?
Story VI. A child Is looking at a picture book belonging
to his father. Instead of being careful, he makes spots on
several of the pages. What shall the father do ? i The
child will not go to the cinema that evening. 2 The
"father will not lend him the book any more. 3 The child
often lends Ms stamp-album to his father, the father will
not take care of it as he has always done up till then.
Story VII. The leader of a band of robbers has died.
Two candidates, Charles and Leon, stand for election to
the leadership. Charles is elected leader. Leon is furious
and denounces Charles to the police by means of an
anonymous letter in wMch he accuses him of a robbery in
which the whole band were involved. He tells the police
where and how Charles is to be found. Charles is arrested.
The robbers decide to punish Leon. What should they
do ? i Not give him any money for a month ? 2 Turn
Mm out of the band ? 3 Accuse him too of being an
accomplice by means of an anonymous letter ?
Obviously the child is not asked all these questions at
once, but only those that interest him. Equally obvious
is the fact that these stories are extremely naive, and that
in real life many of the punishments suggested here
would be applied according to a very different measure.
But the essential thing to aim at in these interrogatories
is to get the stories schematized, even if at times tMs
means rather forcing the note, and presenting to the child
types of punishment based on principles that are clearly
distinct from each other. For it is with the principle that
the conversation with the subject must concern itself and
not with the detailed mode of its application.
Now it appears to us that the punishments described in
tMs chapter, as likewise punishments in general, can be
classed according to two distinct principles. Every action
that is judged to be guilty by a given social group consists
in the violation of the rules of the group and therefore in
a sort of breach of the social bond itself. Punishment, as
Durkheim has shown, therefore consists in restitution, in
" putting things right ", in a reinstatement of the social
THE OF JUSTICE 203
bond and of the authority of rales. But as we have
recognized the existence of two types of rules correspond-
ing with two types of relationship, so
we must expect to meet in the domain of retributive
Justice with two modes of reaction and two types of
punishment.
There are, in the first place, what we call expiatory
punishments, which seem to us to go hand in hand with
constraint and the rales of authority. Take any given
rule imposed upon the individual's mind from without,
and suppose the individual to have transgressed this rule.
Independently even of the indignation and anger that will
occur in the group or among those in authority, and which
will inevitably be visited upon the transgressor, the only
way of putting things right is to bring the individual back
to his duty by means of a sufficiently powerful method of
coercion and to bring home Ms guilt to Mm by means of a
painful punishment. Thus expiatory punishment has an
arbitrary character, arbitrary in the sense that, in lingu-
istics, the choice of a sign is arbitrary in relation to the
thing signified, that is to say, there is no relation between
the content of the guilty act and the nature of its punish-
ment. It is all one when a lie has been told whether you
inflict corporal punishment on the transgressor, or take
Ms toys away from him or condemn Mm to some school
task : all that matters is that a due proportion should be
kept between the suffering inflicted and the gravity of the
misdeed.
And there are, in the second place, what we shall call
punishments by reciprocity in so far as they go hand in hand
with cooperation and rules of equality. Take any rule
that the child accepts from within, that is to say of wMch
he knows that it binds Mm to his equals by the bond of
reciprocity (e.g. not to lie, because lying does away with
mutual trust, etc.). If this rule is violated, there is no
need, in order to put things right again, for a painful
coercion wMch will impose respect for the law from
without ; it will be enough for the breach of the social
204 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
bond incurred by the transgressor to make its effects felt,
in other words, it win be enough if the principle of reci-
procity be brought into play. Since the rale is no longer, as
before, something imposed from without, something which
the individual could dispense with, but on the contrary
constitutes a necessary relation between the individual
and those around Mm, it suffices to make plain the conse-
quences following upon the violation of this law in order to
make the individual feel isolated and to make him long for
a return to normal relations. Censure no longer needs to be
emphasized by means of painful punishment : it acts with
full force in so far as the measures taken by way of recipro-
city make the transgressor realize the significance of his
misdeeds. 1 In contrast, then, to expiatory punishment,
punishment by reciprocity is, to use the terminology of
linguistics again, necessarily " motivated " ; misdeed and
punishment, that is to say, are related both in content and
nature, not to speak of the proportion kept between the
gravity of the one and the rigour of the other. And so it
follows that, various kinds of misdeeds being possible, we
can distinguish in punishment by reciprocity a number of
different varieties which will be more or less suitable and
just according to the nature of the reprehensible act.
In order to classify these varieties let us return to our
stories. To begin with, it is easy to see which are the
punishments we regard as expiatory : not being allowed
to go to the fair or the cinema (I and VI), copying a poem
out fifty times (II), having one's toys taken away (III
and IV), being smacked (V) or fined (VII). But of course
any punishment, even some of the others suggested in
these examples, can take on an expiatory character
according to the spirit in which it is applied. A child will
often explain that he has selected a given punishment
1 It is clear that measures of reciprocity also contain an element of
suffering. But the pain is not inflicted for its own sake nor is it destined
to instil respect for the law in the subject's mind. Such suffering as
does occur (accompanied at times by material disadvantages) is simply
an inevitable result of the breach of the bond of solidarity.
AND THE OF 205
because It the most severe, actually Ms
to be on quite different principles. In such
the punishment in question Is clearly still of the
expiatory order. As to by reciprocity, they
can be classed as follows, going, roughly, from the more
to the less severe.
First there is exclusion momentary or permanent
from the social group itself (story VII). This is the
punishment that is often resorted to by children amongst
themselves, as when, for example, they refuse to go on
playing with an impenitent cheat. It is the punishment
which one uses in ordinary life when one refuses to play a
game with a child or take Mm a walk when experience
has shown that he cannot behave on such occasions. The
social bond is temporarily broken.
A second group can be formed by al those punishments
that appeal only to the immediate and material conse-
quences of the act : having no bread for dinner when you
have refused to go and fetch some when there wasn't
enough in the house (story I), being put to bed when you
have pretended to be ill (II), having a cold room when
you have broken the window pane (III). It is of punish-
ments like this that Rousseau, Spencer and many others
were thinking when they claimed that the child should be
educated by natural experience alone. It is true that, as
Durkheim has shown, the " natural " consequence of a
misdeed is necessarily a social consequence, viz. the
censure it provokes. Only Durkheim seems to think that
censure, in order to be efficacious, should be accompanied
by an expiatory punishment, when actually the direct and
material consequences of the deed are often amply suffi-
cient to fulfil this office. All that matters is that the
transgressor should realize that this consequence, however
natural it may be, is approved by the social group. This
is why we have classed this kind of punishment among
the punishments by reciprocity. When the child in story I
has no bread for dinner, and the one in story III is left
with a room minus a window pane, since the first had
206 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
neglected to get the bread and the second had broken
the window, what really happens is that the parents
themselves refuse to put things right ; they respond to
their children's negligence by refusing to come to their aid.
The punishment is still, therefore, one of reciprocity,
Similarly, when the father in story II pretends to believe
his son when he is lying and sends him to bed since he
says he is ill, or again refuses henceforth to believe him
even when he is speaking the truth (punishment III), he is
really acting on reciprocity. True, the punishment is a
** natural consequence " of the act, since the consequence
of lying is either that the liar is taken at his word, or that
he is no longer believed at all, but added to this is the
fact that the father deliberately simulates credulity or
suspicion in order to show the child that the bond of
mutual trust is broken. So here again, the principle of
reciprocity is at work. It is our belief, therefore, that all
cases of so-called natural punishments imply reciprocity,
because in all of them the group or the educator wishes
to make the transgressor feel that the bond of solidarity
is broken.
In the third place, there is the kind of punishment that
consists in depriving the transgressor of the thing he has
misused. For example, not to lend a child a book that he
has made spots on (story VI). We' have here a mixture
of elements analogous to those which characterized the last
two varieties : a sort of termination of contract owing to
the conditions ,of the contract not having been observed.
Fourthly, we can group under the name of simple
reciprocity, or reciprocity proper, those punishments that
consist in doing to the child exactly what he has done
himself. For example, not to help him (story I), to break
his toys (story V), not to take care of his stamp album
(story VI), to tell on him, if he has told on you (story
VII). It need hardly be pointed out that this kind of
punishment, while it is perfectly legitimate when we want
"to make the child understand the results of his actions,
becomes irritating and absurd when it only means giving
IDEA OF JUSTICE 207
back evil for evil, and capping one Irreparable destruction
with another (stories I and VI).
Fifthly, there is purely " restitutive " punishment
paying for or replacing a broken or object, etc.
Durkheim was right in contrasting restitutive and retribu-
tive punishments. But if we divide the latter themselves
into two types according as they are expiatory or due
merely to reciprocity, restitutive punishment may be
taken as the limiting case of punishment by reciprocity.
For here ceaisure no longer plays any part and justice is
satisfied with a simple putting right of the material
damage. Restitutive punishments, it should however, be
noted, are often impure, and may retain an element of
retribution. This^is why we have classed them in the
present division*
Finally, a sixth category might be distinguished which
would consist of censure only, without punishment, not
imposed by authority, but concerned only to make the
transgressor realize how he has broken the bond of soli-
darity. But we must not complicate matters unneces-
sarily, and the question will be reserved for discussion
later on.
The conclusion of this analysis is therefore that there
are two types of punishment or retributive justice:
-expiatory punishment inherent in the relations of con-
straint, and punishment by reciprocity. Let us turn to
the experimental data, and see whether the child tends
towards one or other of these according to the level of his
development.
Mile Baechler undertook to question 65 children between
6 and 12 years of age on these points, and I interviewed
some thirty myself. The following statistics therefore
deal with about a hundred children. But as each child
may give answers that differ according to the story and
will thus oscillate between expiatory punishment and
punishment by reciprocity, we calculated by stories and
not by children, taking as our unit each separate answer
given by each separate child. As children can hardly be
208 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
questioned on more than four stories at a time, this gives
us a total of about 400 units.
It is obvious that in such a field as this, evolution does
not proceed in exact step with age : there are too many
interfering factors at work. But taking things broadly,
we were surprised at the clearness which marked the
evolution. We divided the children into three groups,
aged respectively 6-7, 8-10, and 11-12 years (the last
group including two backward subjects of 13), and we
found the percentage of punishments by reciprocity out of
the totality of answers to be as follows :
6-7 yrs. 8~io yrs- 11-12715.
Children interviewed by Mile B. 30% 44% 78%
TOTAL. . . . 28% 49% 82%
These figures, it need hardly be pointed out, cannot be
regarded as of great importance. To begin with, they relate
only to the children belonging to a certain ethnical group
and a certain social stratum (the poorer parts of Geneva
and a few children from an elementary school at NeucMtel) .
Again, it cannot be denied that, however careful one may
be (see C.W., Introduction), the manner of asking the
questions plays a very important part. Indeed, it is
rather disturbing to find that the children one interviews
oneself answer more often in conformity with one's own
theory than do the children interviewed by other people !
The personal factor here cannot be disregarded, and it
renders all such statistics more or less open to suspicion.
All we shall take from these figures is the fact that,
roughly speaking, judgments of retributive justice seem to
undergo a certain evolution as the child grows older : the
younger children favour expiatory punishment, while the
older ones tend more towards punishment by reciprocity.
Two important reservations must, however, be made.
The first is that alongside of the problem of stages, there
is the problem of types. Some minds are irrevocably
attached to the idea of expiation (Joseph de Maistre as
compared to Guyau . . .). They are, of course, the
AND THE OF 209
product of a certain of upbringing, of a certain Mud
of social and reHgions education. their deepest
features subsist independently of age. We would therefore
not be at all surprised if in the
of the interrogatory turned out to be quite different.
In the second place, when the children have to think of
a punishment themselves, instead of choosing from among
the various punishments proposed, they nearly always
turn to expiatory punishment, and their choice is often
astonishingly severe l . But this does not really contradict
our present results. Of course, if the child's attention is
not drawn to the different possible types of punishment
without even defining them, simply by presenting them to
Mm as we do here the subject will do no more than think
of the punishments to which he is accustomed, namely those
that are " arbitrary " and expiatory.
Let us now turn to the analysis of the cases. Here, to
begin with, are examples of children who think arbitrary
punishments are the most " fair ".
ANG (6) repeats story I correctly : " How should he be
punished ? Shut him up in a room. What will that do
to him tHe*d cry. Would that be fair ? Yes." He
is then told of the three possible punishments : " Which
is the fairest ? I'd have not given him his toy. Why ?
He'd been naughty. Is that the -best of the three punish-
ments ? Yes. Why ? Because he was very fond of his
toy. Is that the fairest ? Yes.' 7 Thus it is not the
principle of reciprocity that carries the day, it is the idea
of the severest punishment.
FIL (6), Story I : " My daddy is bad to us. He puts us
in a dark cupboard, he does. Well, if I had a dark cupboard
I'd put him in there till the evening and I'd give him a damn
good box on the ear. And if I had a strap, I'd do nothing
but beat him." He chooses the third of the three punish-
ments " because he'd like to go to the fair, -so it'll annoy
him " (Fr. fa I'&nerve alors).
ZIM (6), Story I : Zim does not think much of the last
two punishments. The third " is not hard. Why ?
On the little boy. Why is it not hard on him ? It isn't
1 See, in this connection, the enquiries made by Knapp in V Inter-
m&diaire des Educaieurs.
O
210 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
much." The second is also " not much ". The fairest is
therefore the first " because Ms not on the Roundabouts ".
MORD (7), Story VI : The fairest punishment is to stop
him going to the cinema. " Why ? It suits Mm better
than the other two. It's worse. It's lovely going to the
Pictures. But it's not lovely not giving him the album back.
Why ? Going to the Pictures is lovely. But when he's
had his book five or six times he'tt say, l I've had enough of
looking at it, I don't care if he doesn't knd it to me any
more *."
SYL (7|), Story II : " The fairest ? To make her do
fifty lines. That's the worst punishment, because she isn't
allowed out''
MAY (7!), Story I : The fairest punishment is " not to
five him any bread. That'll punish him most. That'll make
im go and fetch some other time. 39 Story VI : "I wouldn't
take her to the Pictures, because that is what she would like
lest, the Pictures. What is the second punishment ? I
wouldn't take care of her album. She likes collecting stamps.
Would that do ? It wouldn't punish her enough. It
wouldn't make her [become] good enough. Which is the
worst punishment ? Not taking her to the Pictures!'
Au (7|), Story II : " I'd make him write out fifty lines
in his copy book. That would be a punishment, then he
wouldn't do it again because he'd have to write them out
again. l s that the fairest ? It serves the little boy right.
He didn't need to tell lies. [It is the fairest] because it is a
strict punishment. Which is the fakest? Writing out
fifty lines because it's a bore. He can't have any fun."
BLA (7!), Story I : " 7 wouldn't have let him go on the
Roundabouts. Why ? Because it's lovely on the Rounda-
bouts ! "
PEL (7i), G., Story I: "Which do you think the
fairest ? Not to go on the Roundabouts. Why ? Because
he didn't help his mother. Which is the ' stiff est ' of the
three? Not to go on the Roundabouts/ 9 Story II: ''Which
is the fairest of the three punishments ? Copying out the
poem fifty times. Why is that the fairest ? Because it is
the strictest"
JEAN (8), Story I : " Which of the three punishments
was the fairest ? Not to go on the Roundabouts. Why was
that the fairest ? Because the child wants to go [on the
Roundabouts] and he's not allowed to. Which of the three
punishments does he hate most ? Not going on the
Roundabouts"
AND OF JUSTICE 211
Sur (8), same reaction to the first story. Story II :
" Which Is the fairest of those three ?
When he to copy out ike times. Why
was that the fairest ? he to his
sums, he didn't. Which Is the worst bore of the
three ? Copying out the fifty times Story IV :
" Which of these ponishments do you think is the fairest ?
The third [taking Ms toys away]. Why Is that the
fairest ? he shouldn't Ms brother's
toy. And are the other two fair too ? Yes, M'sicu. Let
us take the second and third. Which is fairest, to make
him pay for the toy he broke or to take all his toys away
from Mm ? To take all his toys away. Why Is that
fairer ? . , . What does he hate most ? Having his
toys taken away." Story V : " Which Is the fairest ?
Having a toy broken. Why is that the fairest ? . . .
Which would have made him most angry of these three
punishments ? To have one of his toys broken. 93 Thus
what counts Is not reciprocity, even In this last case ; It is
the idea that the severity of a punishment determines its
justice,
KEC (8), Story I : " Which is the fairest ? Not to go on
the Roundabouts. Is that the fairest ? Yes. Why ?
Because he likes going on the Roundabouts." As to the
other two, the fairest would be not to let him have any
bread. " If he likes bread, then he mustn*t be given any"
BAD (9), Story I : " I like the one about the Cinema 'best.
Because that is the fairest, because he will have been stopped
doing something he likes.' 1
BAU (10), Story I : " The Roundabouts is the best.
Why ? Because he liked that. . He ought to be stopped doing
what he liked doing best."
The general meaning of these answers is not hard to
perceive. In these children's eyes, punishment consists,
as a matter of course, in inflicting upon the guilty a pain
that will smart enough to make them realize the gravity
of their misdeed. Naturally, the fairest punishment will
be the most severe. Each of the subjects questioned
marks in his own way this linkage of the idea of
retributive justice to the severity of the punishment, but
the most characteristic expressions are, " It is worse *'
(Mord, Syl, etc.), " That will punish him most " (May),
" A strict punishment " (Ali).
212 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
It is quite clear that none of these children mean the
punishment to mark a break in the bond of solidarity nor
to drive home the need for reciprocity : there is a pre-
dominance of expiatory punishment. True, there exists
a certain ambiguity on this point. Many educational-
ists look upon punishment, even when it consists in
inflicting " arbitrary " suffering, only as a preventive
measure, aimed at avoiding repetitions of the fault. Only
a minority regard punishment as strictly expiatory, i.e.
as serving to wipe out either by compensation or by the
efficacy of suffering the actual fault that had been com-
mitted. How does the matter stand with children ? The
remarks made on punishment in general by the subjects
questioned in the preceding interrogatory seem to confirm
us in believing that the two attitudes coexist in each child,
but in a confused and undifferentiated manner. For the
child will at one time emphasize the vindictive aspect of
punishment as of sheer chastisement inflicted by a higher
power (see Fil, for example), at others he comes of himself
to the theory of preventive punishment. Thus, according
to May, a given punishment is not sufficient because " it
wouldn't make her [become] good enough ". But even
here there is in the child's mind the idea of a necessary
compensation, and it would be contrary to justice in his
view not to punish the transgressor at all. And as the
punishments in question are chosen as a function of the
painful element they contain, this necessary compensation
is thus equivalent to the notion of expiation.
Let us now turn to the children who regard punishment
by reciprocity as more just :
GEO (7), Story I : " Which of the three punishments is
the fairest ? Not to help Aim. Why IHe hadn't helped
at home, so it is almost the same thing. And if his father
hadn't thought of that punishment, which would be the
fairest ? Not to go on the Roundabouts . . . Oh, no !
That he should have no supper. Because he wouldn't help
his mother, so he mustn't have any supper. -Which of the
three punishments is the least fair ? The one of the
AND THE OF 213
Why ? A0 to
Story III : " Which Is the ? To ^zy >r
& pane. Why Is it the fairest ? it
be as if he for it [ = it would be
patting right'.' And otherwise, would be the
fairest ? To the Thd
him not to break Which is the
least fair ? To take his away for days. Which
is the worst bore ? Not to play"
DESAR (7$), Story I : " Which of punishments is
the fakest ? That any bread.
Why is that the fairest ? Because he didn't go to fetch any.
Which is the * stiffest ' of these three punishments, the
one he would like to have least ? Not to go to the Round-
abouts. Then, which is the fairest ? Not to give him any
bread. Why do you think that the fairest ? Because he
didn't go awl fetch the bread." Desar is fully aware of the
relation of cause to effect that enters into this punishment,
but he does not succeed in making it explicit. Story II :
The fairest would be not to believe him any more.
" Why ? Because not to believe him any longer would be
quite true, because he told his school teacher a lie." Story
III : " Which do you think would have been fairest ?
To pay for the window pane. Why ? Because it wouldn't
be fair for the mother and father to pay. What was the
punishment that the little boy hated most, to pay for the
window pane, or to be in a cold room ? To have a broken
pane [to be cold]/ 1 Story V : " Which is the fairest ?
To break one of his toys. Why is that the fairest ? To
break one of his toys because he broke the pot. Which of the
three would he have hated most ? To go and get a plant
in the forest. And which was the fairest ? To have one of
his toys broken.' 9 Desar, it will be seen, leans towards
reciprocity throughout, even in the paradoxical case of
story V.
BERG (8), Story I : "He ought not to have been sent to
the Roundabouts. Would that be the fakest punishment ?
No, that's not fair. It ought to have been the toy he was
stopped from [reaching in the cupboard that should not have
been given to him], because he didn't help he oughtn't to be
helped either. Is that the best punishment? Yes. He
didn't help so they oughtn't to give him any help either.
BAUM (9), Story I : " The last is the best. Since the boy
won't help, well his mother won't help him either. And
which is the fairest of the other two punishments ? Not
214 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
to give him any bread, then hed have nothing to eat at supper,
because he wouldn't help his mother. And the first ? Thai
was the one he deserved least. He wouldn't have minded.
He'd still have been able to play with his toys [ = lie would
still have been helped by having Ms toy fetched for Mm]
and he would have had bread in the evening." Story VI :
" / would dirty his album for him, because that would be the
fairest punishment. It would be doing the same to him as he
did f And of the other two, wMch is the fairest ? I
wouldn't have lent him the book again because he would have
made spots on it again. And how about the first punish-
ment * to stop him going to the Cinema ' ? That one is
the least fair. It does nothing to the album. It doesn't
change the album, the book. It has nothing to do with the
look."
DEC (gj), Story I : The fairest is the one of the toy.
" Why ? He didn't help his mother, so why should his
mother help him.'*
RID (10), Story I : The best is " the one of the toy,
because it is to show him how one likes it when people
don't give help. Which is the fairest ? The one of the toy,
because his mother does the same thing to him as he had done
to her." Story II : " WMch is the fairest ? The one when
he was ill [ = when he was put to bed], because as he said
so [that he was ill] you had to believe it. And of the two
others, which is the fairest ? The one about the twopence,
because since he liked having his twopence and had told a lie,
then you oughtn't to believe him any longer. And the first
(copying fifty times) ? That's a bit thick. . . . Which of
the three is the fairest ? There are two more or less fair.
The one of pretending fye is ill and the one of not believing
him" Story VI : " Which is the fairest INot the one of
the Cinema, because that's rather too strict for having made
spots. And wMch of the other two ? The one of making
spots on his album . . . it was right to do to him what he
had done. 3 '
Nus (n), Story I : " I'd have given him a smacking."
The father thought of three punishments. (I tell them to
him.) " Which do you think is the fairest ? Not to give
him any help. Do you think that is fairer than smacking
4 him? Fairer. Why? (He hesitates) . . . Because it's
doing about the same thing to him as he had done. And of
the other two, wMch is the fairest ? Not to let him have
any bread. Why ? Because he didn't fetch any."
ROY (n), Story I : " WMch punishment do you think
AND THE OF 215
the ? Xoi
Why Is it ? If s the thing. 11 11 :
The fairest is " not to the he
He a lie them.*"
Story VI : " Not to cf Ms the boy
care" Story VII : " I'd have a
he a- too."
BUH (12 J), Story I : " punishment is the
fairest ? The one of not his supper.
Why ? Because he go gel Which is the
punishment he will hate the most ? Not going on the
Roundabouts. And the fairest ? Not any bread,
Is not to go to the Roundabouts as f ak as the other pun-
ishment or less fair ? Less fair. Why ? You
give him help. [The Roundabouts punishment is less
fair] because there is no ih& bread and
Roundabouts." Story II : " WMch do you think is the
fairest ? To make him go to bed. Why ? Because he
tried to make them believe he ill. And which of the
other two is the fairest ? Not to believe him any longer.
Why ? Because he told a lie. WMch is the punishment
that has no connection ? Copying out a problem Jifty
times. And which has most connection ? Putting him to
bed. And what about a fourth which would be not to
punish Mm at al, would that do ? He ought to be punished
att the same! 9 Story IV : The fairest punishment is " that
he should give one of his toys to the little boy. Did you
choose that one just because it came into your head, or
because it seems to you more just ? He took a toy away
from the little boy, so it is right that he should give one back
to Mm."
It will be seen how different these cMldren's reactions
are from those of the preceding group. The value of a
punishment is no longer measured by its severity. The
essential point is to do to the transgressor something
analogous to what he has done himself, so that he should
realize the results of Ms actions ; or again to punish,
where it is possible, by the direct material consequences
of Ms misdeed. Sheer reciprocity stands so Mgh in the
eyes of the child that he wiU apply it even where to us it
seems to border on crude vengeance, as in breaking a toy
(Story V), etc. The reason for this is, as we shall see later
216 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
on, that between 7 and 10 sheer equality in al its bru-
tality still outweighs equity.
A problem of interpretation arises nevertheless : have
the answers quoted above really any moral significance, or
was the child's intelligence alone concerned ? For the
supposition might be made that the child regards the
question put to him simply as a test of his intelligence
and seeks among the suggested punishments those that
have some connection with the act, precisely because he
has been asked to make a choice. In other words, he
thinks more or less as follows : " They're suggesting three
punishments to me, so there's a catch in this somewhere.
Now some of them are connected with the action and some
are not. Let's choose the one that is most like the mis-
deed, and then see whether that is the answer they want/'
Thus the choice would be dictated by the intelligence
alone and not by a sense of justice.
But though the intervention of this factor could not, of
course, be excluded from the interrogatory, we believe the
tone of the answers to be primarily moral. When Geo
(Story I) compares punishments by reciprocity and expi-
atory punishment, he emphasizes very clearly that the
first are just, whereas the last is cruel. Note also Dec's
little argument founded on the principle of sufficient
reason ! For the rest, not only will the sequel convince us
of the growing importance of the ideas of reciprocity and
equality in children between 7 and 12, but educational
experience is there to tell us how the child reacts in every-
day life. Now, without wishing to impose one system of
moral education rather than another we are speaking as
psychologists and not as educationalists it does seem to
us to have been demonstrated that those teachers whose
ideal it is to set cooperation above constraint succeed in
accomplishing their aim without the use of expiatory
punishments, and thus prove that children fully grasp
the meaning of punishment by reciprocity. Even if
among the very little ones censure and preventive
measures (taking away from the child an object that
AND THE OF 217
he Is to break, etc.) are Interpreted
as expiatory punishments, the more the develops,
better able he becomes to value of measures
of reciprocity. And we believe, without to
the point, that the answers obtained in the course of our
interrogatory correspond to sentiments that have been
really experienced by the child, either through Ms having
In the past proved for himself the soundness of certain
punishments by reciprocity, or by Ms having felt the
doubtful character of many expiatory punishments and
thus being more inclined to approve of the punishments
by reciprocity proposed in our stories.
This leads us back to the second point touched upon at the
beginning of this section, we mean the efficacy of expiatory
punishments. It Is a striking fact that in the early part
of the Interrogatory the children are almost unanimous In
defending severe punishments both as legitimate and as
educationally useful. They are sincere and eager votaries
of the current morality. But considering how clearly,
later on, many of them choose reciprocal as opposed to
" arbitrary " punishment, may we not go a step further
and ask whether the child Is really convinced of the utility
of punishment ? Does he not often feel that a timely
appeal to his generosity would lead to better results ?
Let us try to penetrate Into Ms judgment on this point
with the following experiment. Let us first tell him the
story of some misdeed chosen from among the usual
childish faults. Then let us describe the two alternatives :
on the one hand, a severe expiatory punishment, on the
other, simple explanation with an appeal made to the
principle of reciprocity, but not accompanied by any
punishment whatsoever. And let us then ask the subject
in which of these two cases a relapse is most likely to
occur.
Here are the stories used to this end :
Story I, A. " A boy was playing in his room, while his
daddy was working in town. After a little while the boy
thought he would like to draw. But he had no paper.
218 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Then lie remembered that there were some lovely white
sheets of paper in one of the drawers of his father's desk.
So he went quite quietly to look for them. He found
them and took them away. When the father came home
he found that his desk was untidy and finally discovered
that someone had stolen Ms paper. He went straight into
the boy's room, and there he saw the floor covered with
sheets of paper that were all scribbled over with coloured
chalk. Then the father was very angry and gave Ms boy
a good whipping/'
B. " Now I shall tell you a story that is nearly the
same, but not quite (the story is repeated shortly, except for
the last sentence) . Only it ends up differently. The father
did not" punish him. He just explained to Mm that it
wasn't right of him. He said, ' When you're not at home,
when you've gone to school, if I were to go and take your
toys, you wouldn't like it. So when I'm not there, you
mustn't go and take my paper either. It is not nice for
me. It isn't right to do that/
" Now a few days later these two boys were each of them
playing in their garden. The boy who had been punished was
in his garden, and the one who had not been punished was
playing in his garden. And then each of them found a
pencil. It was their fathers' pencil. Then each of them
remembered that his father had said that he had lost his
pencil in the street and that it was a pity because he
wouldn't be able to find it again. So then they thought
that if they were to steal the pencil, no one would ever
know, and there would be no punishment.
" Well now, one of the boys kept the pencil for himself,
and the other took it back to Ms father. Guess which one
took it back the one who had been well punished for
having taken the paper or the one who was only talked
to?"
Story II. A. " Once there was a little boy who was
playing in the kitchen while his mother was out. He
broke a cup. When Ms mother came home, he said, ' It
wasn't me, it was the cat. It jumped up there/ The
mother saw quite well that this was a lie. She was very
angry and punished the boy. How did she punish him ? "
(You leave it to the child to decide upon the punishment.)
B. Idem. tl But this time the mother didn't
punish him. She just explained that it wasn't very nice to
tell lies. ' You wouldn't like it if I were to tell you lies.
Suppose you were to ask me for some of the cake that's in
AND THE OF 219
me/
" A few days later, the two little boys
in their kitchen. And they are with the
matches. When their mother in, one of
a lie again, says he was not with the matches.
The other one owns up at once. Which one it who
told the lie again, the one who for
breaking the cup, or the one who only talked
to?"
The stories are, of course, extremely naive. But they
suffice, in our opinion, to bring out the child's mental orien-
tation. If he really believes in punishments, he will show
it. If he simply wants to please us rather than give his
own thoughts, he will also answer in support of punish-
ments (since in his eyes there is every chance that a
gentleman who questions schoolboys will believe in punish-
ment !). If the child replies in favour of simple explana-
tion, it is, so it seems to us, because there is something in
Mm that makes him look upon reciprocal generosity as
superior to any form of punishment.
Now, out of the thirty children who were questioned on
this point alone (not counting the supplementary questions
put to the hundred children spoken of before) those of 7
and under declared themselves almost unanimously in
favour of punishment, whereas more than half the cases
between 8 and 12 answered in the opposite sense.
Here are examples of the first type :
QUIN (6). Repeats Story I correctly: "Which one
brought the pencil ? The one who was punished. Then
what happened, did he do it again or not ? Not again.
And the one his father didn't punish ? He stole again.
If you had been the daddy, when they stole the paper,
would you have punished them or explained ? Punished.
Which is fairest? To punish. Which is the nicest
daddy, the one who punishes or the one who explains ? The
one who explains. Which one is fairest, the one who etc. ?
The one who punishes. li you had been the boy, which
220 OF THE
would you have thought fairest, to be or to
have to you ?
it had to you, would you have done it
again ? No. And if you punished ? No, I
Which of the two boys didn't do it
again ? The one punished. What is the good of
punishing ? Because you're a bad boy. 93
KAL (6), Story II : " WMch one told the lie about the
matches ? The one the mother punished properly, [Kal
chooses the dark cupboard as a punishment !] he told the
truth. And the one who had not been punished ? He
a lie again. Why ? Because he hadn't been punished.
Why did the other one not tell a lie ? Because he ha$
been properly punished. 39
SCHMEI (7), Story I : " Guess what the boy who had
been punished by Ms father did. He gam it back, because
he afraid his father would scold him again. And the
other one ? He kept it, he knew his father [thought he]
had lost it md of doors. Which of the two fathers was the
most fair ? The one who punished him properly. Which
of the two fathers was the most of a sport ? The one who
didn't scold, the one who explained. Which of the two boys
loved Ms father best ? The one when the father was a
sport, Which boy was nicest to Ms father ? The one who
gam the pencil back to his father. Was that the one who
had been punished, or not punished ? Punished."
Box. (8), Story I : " WMch one gave it back, the one
who was punished, or the one who was not ? The one who
was punished. What did he tMnk ? He thought, 1 1
don't want to be punished again '. And what did the
other one think ? He thought, ' As I wasn't punished
before, I won't be punished this time '. Which of the two
fathers was the most fair ? The one who punished. If
you had been the father would you have punished him ?
/ would have. Would you have whipped him ? I would
have put him to bed. Which of the two fathers was the
most of a sport ? The one who didn't punish. Which of
the two boys was the nicest ? The one who was punished.
Which one was the nicest, the one whose father was fair,
or the one whose father was a sport ? The one whose
father was fair. Supposing you had stolen something,
would you rather they punished you or explained things
to you ? Punish me. Should one be punished ? Yes.
Then the more one is punished the better it is. It makes
you better."
OF 221
Here, finally, is an intermediate is
as a of the
FAR (8} $ Story I : " Which one it back ? rfo one
punished.' Why ? he got And
the other ? He it, he
Which of the two fathers is the most fair ? The one
punished. Which one was most of a sport ? The one
Why is he more of a sport ? Because he
explained. Which of the two boys was the nicest ? The
one punished, Which of the two fathers was
right ? The one who didn't beat him. Which of the two
fathers would you have given the pencil back to ? To the
father didn't punish. Why ? Because he the
nicest. If you had been the father, what would you have
done ? 7 wouldn't have him, I ex-
plained. Why ? So that he shouldn't steal again. Which
of the fathers was the most fair ? The one who punished.
I've told you a story, now you tell me one, one that
really happened, when you were punished. Yes. I ran
into the field. Where ? Into our field, in the grass. They
kit me. And then ? I didn't do it again. And if they
hadn't beaten you ? / would have done it again. Should
people always be punished ? Always when you've been a
bad boy: 9
It will be seen how closely all these children cling to the
traditional view of punishment as morally necessary qua
expiation and educationally useful to prevent a relapse
into evil. The last cases quoted, it is true, consider it
more " sporting " only to explain* without chastising, but
this is neither just nor wise. Only Far hesitates for a
moment towards the middle of the interrogatory, but the
tradition of his fathers is too strong for him, and he
reverts to the customary morality.
Here, on the contrary, is a different set of opinions,
which may be considered characteristic of a second type
of moral attitude, and, up to a certain point, of a second
stage in the social development of the child.
BRIC (8), Story I : " What did they do ? One of them
gave it back, the other one kept it. Which one gave it back ?
The one who was not punished. What did he say to
222 OF
? TTwrf he to give it back, he
the other one IThat he io
#. Why ? Ad raws punished" The beH
rings. Brie out for a quarter of an hour's break.
We " What were we doing before break ?
a Do you remember what it was ? Yes,
who had Then afterwards they found
a pencil, one of it back not the other.
Which one gave it back ? The one who had not
punished. What did he say to himself ? That he to
it back because his father would be pleased. And the
other one ? He kept it. Why ? Because he didn't
to "his father. Which of the two fathers would you
like to be ? The one who explains. And which of the two
children ? The one who was not punished. Why ?
he'll that he mustn't steal [since ^ it is
explained to Mm]. And if he is punished, what will he
do ? Perhaps he'll try again and then not be punished.**
SCHU (8), Story I : The boy who gives back the pencil
is the one who has not been punished. " Why did he give
it back ? Because they explained to him [about the first
theft]. Why ? Because it's a better way to make him good.
Which of the two fathers is most of a sport ? The one
who explained. And which is fairest, explaining or punish-
ing ? Explaining. Why did the one who was punished
begin again ? . . . And if they had explained to him,
would he have begun again ? No. Why ? Because he
would ham understood. And wouldn't he have understood
that you mustn't steal if he had been punished ? He
wouldn't have understood so well. Now listen to me care-
fully, I am going to change the story round a little. Let
us say that things have been properly explained to both
the boys. But one of them was also punished, and the
other one was only talked to without being punished.
WMch of the two -gave back the pencil later on ? The one
who was not punished. Why ? -Because he had under-
stood things better than the other one. Why did the other
one do it again ? Because he hadn't understood things quite
so well, Why not ? Because he was scolded and explained
to at the same time. Does your father not punish you ?
He more often explains. Do you think it fair that you
should be punished ? No, not fair. Why ? Because I
can understand much better when people explain things to me.
Tell me about once when you were punished. Once I
was staying with my Granny. Fm never punished at home.
OF 223
l Granny's I What you ?
I had a How you IThey
my And your father not your ?
Hardly ever" Story II : Same answers. "Which
didn't do it ? lib one ike to.
the other one, did it did he say to
himself inside ? will me but he won't do
ril tell a lie.* Which of the two
fathers was a sport ? The one explained, And which
was the most fair ? The one explained."
CLA (9), Story I : " Which one gave it back ? The one
his to, And what did the other say
to himself ? / may as it. Daddy it'on't see,"
" Which of the two fathers was the fairest ? The one
didn't punish. Which is fairest, to punish or not to
punish ? Not to punish.* 9 " If you had been the boy,
what would you have done ? I'd given it back. And
if you had been punished ? Td given it back all the
mine [!]." " Which boy was nicest to his father ? The
one who gave back the pencil. But ordinarily, everyday,
which one is nicest to his father, the one who is punished
often, or the one who is not ? The one that you explain
things to. Why ? Because v^u don't do it again. Which
is best, to explain and then punish, or to explain and then
forgive ? To explain and then forgive.**
It will appear immediately how different is these chil-
dren's attitude from that shown by the others. Nor is
this new reaction merely verbal. Of course the wild
generalizations to which the interrogatory leads are apt to
give the impression that the subjects are indulging their
imaginations in the sugary form of morality current in
some paradise of good children. But side by side with
these cases, what psychological penetration some of the
remarks reveal ! When Schii, for example, seeks to show
that the child who is punished is more likely than the
other to begin again, he is obviously thinking of those
all too frequent cases where the accumulation of punish-
ments makes the offender insensitive and coldly calculat-
ing. " Daddy will punish me, but he won't do anything
to me afterwards ! " How often, indeed, one sees children
stoically bearing their punishment because they have
224 THE OF THE
decided beforehand to endure it rather than give in to the
superior will ! And again when the same Sehil compares
the punishment meted out to Mm at Ms grandmother's
with the ordinary reactions of his own father, it is hard
not to recall the comparisons we have all made in our own
childhood between the understanding attitude of one
relative and the unpsychological severity of another.
It is our belief, therefore, that the answers examined
above correspond, up to a given point , with the experi-
ences of real life ; and this would mark the existence of a
certain evolution with increase of age in the judgments
made by children on the subject of punishments. On the
other hand, the interrogatory dealing with the more
general and abstract question as to the use of punishments
(and whether they are just, etc.) did not yield anytMng
of very great interest, for at all ages the answers reflect
the ideas of the child's surroundings rather than his
personal feeling on the subject. A difference of attitude
should, however, be noted between the younger and the
older children with regard to the justification of punish-
ment. For the little ones, the idea of expiation is neces-
sarily bound up with the idea of preventing a relapse.
TRAP (6) : " Should children be punished ? Y^s,
when they're naughty, you punish children. What does
* naughty ' mean ?? It means naughty, when children are
naughty, when you punish them. Is it fak to punish ?
Yes 3 because if you've done nothing then it isn't fair, but
when you have done something [it is fair]. Is it a useful
thing to punish ? What is it for ? Yes, because they'd
only got to not disobey, because they were naughty. "
ZIM (6) ; " Is it fair to punish ? Yes, it's all fair. Is
it useful to punish ? What is it for ? Yes, it's- a good thing
to punish them when they're silly ; it's always a good thing.*'
MAIL (6) : " Is punishing fair ? Yes, because it's always
fair. Is it useful ? Yes, because it's for when you are
naughty. What does it do [Fr.fait ?] ? It makes [Fr.fait]
a punishment [== it chastises]/*
The older ones, on the contrary, concentrate above all
and almost exclusively on the preventive utility with very
definite diminution of the idea of expiation.
AND THE OF 225
(u) : " Is It fair ? Yes,
A itof 10 a Is it ?
i>$, i/ >*OM Ae tfo #
DUP (n) : " Is It fair ? Yes. Is it ? Yes,
J/0M to &! YOU fj
aren't bs
GUI (12) : " Is it fair? Ys, ij you've
; are not fair ; to be
in to the fault. Is It ? OA y^s, so s nrt
fo again,"
Let us now try to formulate our conclusions. Difficult
as is the interrogatory on such delicate points, and
deeply tinged with the phraseology of adult morality as
are the answers, taking things broadly, the results we
have obtained do nevertheless seein to us to converge.
They seem to point to the existence of a sort of law
of evolution in the moral development of the child. It
would seem that we have to distinguish in the domain
of justice between two types of reaction, one founded
on the notion of expiation, the other on that of reciprocity,
And though representatives of both types are to be foond
at all ages, it would seem nevertheless that the second
tended to predominate over the first.
The choice of punishments is the first thing that brings
this out. The little ones prefer the most severe so as to
emphasize the necessity of the punishment itself; the
other children are more In favour of the measures of
reciprocity which simply serve to make the transgressor
feel that the bond of solidarity has been broken and that
things must be put right again. It is also brought out by
the reactions of the subjects whom we questioned on the
subject of relapses. The little ones think that a well-
punished child cannot repeat its offence because it has
realized the external and coercive authority of the rule in
question, whereas many of the older ones hold that a child
to whom, even without punishment, the consequences of
Ms actions have been thoroughly explained is less likely
to begin again than if he had been punished and nothing
p
226 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
more. The same thing, finally, would seem to be con-
firmed by the short interrogatory on the utility and
soundness of punishments in general: the little ones
introduce an expiatory element into all their* answers,
whereas the older children are content to justify punish-
ments by their preventive value. On this point, indeed,
these older children take up an attitude that definitely
contradicts that which they had been observed to hold in
the last interrogatory. This is because here they feel con-
cerned to defend in their own way the views that are
generally held by those around them, whereas in the
stories about relapsing the answers are more personal and
more spontaneous.
These two types of attitude, which we believe we have
been able to dissociate from one another, are naturally, in
so far as they correspond to real facts, connected with the
two moralities which we have so far traced in the behaviour
and judgment of the child. The notion of expiation
corresponds, of course, to the morality of heteronomy and
-duty pure and simple. For one whose moral law consists
solely of rules imposed by the superior will of adults and
older children, it follows that the disobedience of small
children will naturally entail the anger of their elders and
this anger will take the concrete form of some kind of
" arbitrary " suffering inflicted upon the offender. This
reaction on the part of the adult is legitimate in the eyes
of the child in so far as the relation of obedience has been
broken and in so far as the suffering imposed is in pro-
portion to the fault that has been committed. In the
ethics of authority any other punishment is incompre-
hensible. And since there is no reciprocity between
commander and commanded, what happens is that even
if the former inflicts upon the latter only a " motivated "
punishment (simple reciprocity, consequences of the act,
etc.) the child will see nothing in it but an expiatory
chastisement *. Punishment by reciprocity, on the other
i We have to thank the head mistresses of the Maison des Petits
for the following clear confirmation of our statements. They tell us
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 227
hand, corresponds with cooperation and an autonomous
ethic. Indeed it is impossible to see how the relation of
mutual respect, which is the foundation of all cooperation,
could possibly give rise to the idea of expiation or render
it legitimate. It is, on the contrary, easy to see how
censure (which is at the origin of any punishment whatso-
ever) can, in the case of cooperation, be accompanied by
definite measures which have been taken in order to mark
the break in the bond of reciprocity or to make the
offender understand the consequences of his acts.
If, then, we admit this kinship between the two types
of attitude relating to retributive justice and the two
moralities which we have distinguished up to the present,
what explanation are we to give of the genesis and destiny
of each one of these attitudes ?
With regard to the first type, we believe that though
partly rooted in the child's instinctive reactions, it is
fashioned primarily by adult constraint. We shall have to
analyse very closely this super-position of social influences
on the spontaneous attitude of the individual if we wish to
gain a more exact understanding of the idea of expiation.
Among the instinctive tendencies must above all be
mentioned the vindictive tendencies and compassion.
For both develop independently of adult pressure. De-
fensive and aggressive reactions are sufficient to explain
how the individual, from at first inflicting pain upon
his adversary in self-defence comes to make him suffer
in response to all offences. Vengeance is thus con-
temporary with the earliest defensive manifestations. It
is very difficult to say, for example, whether the fit of
rage of a baby of a few months old merely expresses the
need to resist unwelcome treatment, or whether it already
contains an element of revenge. At any rate, as soon as
blows appear (and they do so at an extraordinarily early
date, independently of any adult influence) it would be
that the youngest pupils (4-6) can see nothing but expiatory punish-
ment in the measures of reciprocity. The latter are not understood
until about 7-8 on the average.
228 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
hard to say where fighting ended and revenge began.
Now, as Mme Antipoff in a short study on compassion l
has very well shown, vindictive tendencies admit of being
" polarized " very soon, under the influence of sympathy.
Owing to its astonishing faculty for introjection and affec-
tive identification the child suffers with him who suffers, he
feels that he must avenge the unfortunate as well as himself,
and experiences " vindictive joy " at seeing any sort of
pain inflicted upon the author of other people's sufferings.
But it is going a little too far simply to base the sense of
justice on such reactions and to speak, as does Mme Anti-
poff, of " an innate and instinctive moral manifestation
which, in order to develop, really requires neither pre-
liminary experience nor socialization amongst other chil-
dren ". In order to prove her thesis, Mme Antipoff lays
stress upon the fact that the vindictive tendencies become
directly polarized upon the transgressor. " We have here,"
she concludes, " an inclusive affective perception, an
elementary moral ' structure ' which the child seems to
possess very early and which enables him to grasp simul-
taneously evil and its cause, innocence and guilt. We
may say that what we have here is an affective perception
of justice" We may mention at once that nothing in the
very interesting observations quoted by Mme Antipoff
goes to show this innateness. She deals with observations
on the behaviour of children between 3 and 9, and it is
obvious that at the age of three, a child has already come
under all sorts of adult influences such as can account for
the fact that its polarization is now only in terms of good
and evil. The proof of this is that the child speaks ; it
says " serves him right " and " naughty boy ", etc. How
could it have learned these words without coming under
the moral influence of the person who taught them to it,
and without accepting at the same time a whole set of
explicit or implicit commandments? In a general way, the
problem may be stated as follows. How can the vin-
1 H. Antipoff, " Observations sur la compassion et le sens de la
justice chez 1'enfant ", Arch, de Psychol., t. XXI, p. 208 (1928),
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 229
dictive tendencies, even If they are polarized under the
influence of compassion, give birth to the need for rewards
and punishments and to retributive justice, unless the
relations between individuals intervene to " regulate >J
tins polarization, diminishing what is arbitrary and indi-
vidual in the name of a normative element of eittier
authority or reciprocity ?
To our mind, when a child merely avenges some un-
fortunate for whom he feels immediate compassion, neither
the sense of justice nor the idea of punishment is yet at
work. All we have is an extension of the vindictive
tendency. But even if this sort of disinterested vengeance
is a necessary, it is not a sufficient condition for the
development of justice, disinterested vengeance will only
become a " just " punishment when rules come in and
make precise the distinction between what is right and
what is wrong. So long as there are no rules, revenge,
even disinterested revenge, will rest only upon individual
sympathy of antipathy and will thus remain arbitrary :
the child will not have the feeling of punishing the guilty
and defending the innocent, but simply of fighting an
enemy and defending a friend. But as soon, on the
contrary, as there are rules (and they appear very early
the boy of 3 observed by Mme. Antipoff is already satur-
ated with them), as soon as we have rules, we get judg-
ments of guilt and innocence and we get the moral
" structure " of retributive justice. Where, then, do these
rules come from ?
Even if adults never interfered, the social relations
subsisting between children would perhaps be sufficient
to create them. The play of sympathy and antipathy is a
sufficient cause for practical reason to become conscious
of reciprocity. And the fact that the law of reciprocity
leads to a certain type of punishment has, we believe,
been sufficiently established in the preceding analyses.
But in that case, the idea of expiation would never
arise : mere vengeance would remain a private affair until
such time as it would be considered immoral, and
230 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
punishment by reciprocity would alone be held to be
just.
But the adult intervenes. He imposes commands which
give rise to rules that are regarded as sacred. Disinter-
ested vengeance, once it has been " polarized " by these
rules, becomes expiatory punishment, and the first type
of retributive justice is constituted in this way. When
the adult is angry because the laws he has laid down are
not observed, this anger is held to be just, because of the
unilateral respect of which older people are the object and
because of the sacred character of the law laid down.
When adult anger finds vent in chastisement, this ven-
geance from above appears as a legitimate punishment,
and the resultant suffering as a " just " expiation. The
idea of expiatory punishment is thus, taken as a whole,
due to the conjunction of two influences : the individual
influence, which is the desire for vengeance, including
derivative and disinterested vengeance, and the social
factor, which is adult authority imposing respect for given
orders and respect for vengeance in cases where these
orders are disobeyed. In a word, expiatory punishment
is, from the child's point of view, revenge that may be
likened to disinterested revenge (because it avenges the
law itself) and that emanates from the authors of the law.
How, then, are we to explain the passage from the first
to the second type of retributive justice ? If the above
remarks are correct, this evolution is nothing but a special
case of the general evolution from unilateral to mutual
respect. Since in every domain we have studied up till
now, respect for the adult or at any rate a certain way
of respecting the adult diminishes in favour of the
relations of equality and reciprocity between children (and
so far as is possible, between children and adults), it is
perfectly normal that in the domain of retribution the
effects of unilateral respect should tend to diminish with age.
That is why the idea of expiation loses more and more of
its power, and it is why punishments tend more and more
to be ruled by the law of reciprocity alone. So that what
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 231
remains of the idea of retribution is the notion, not that
one must compensate for the offence by a proportionate
suffering, but that one must make the offender realize, by
means of measures appropriate to the fault itself, in what
way he has broken the bond of solidarity. The situation
can be expressed by saying that distributive justice (the
idea of equality) definitely takes precedence over retribu-
tive justice, whereas in the beginning the converse was the
case. We shall come to the same conclusion in paragraph
4 of this chapter. Let us add, finally, that the idea of
reciprocity, often taken at first as a sort of legalized
vengeance or law of retaliation expressed in quasi-
mathematical form, tends of itself towards a morality of
forgiveness and understanding. As we shall see later on,
the time comes when the child realizes that there can be
reciprocity only in well-doing. We have here a sort of
repercussion of the form of the moral law on its content.
The law of reciprocity implies certain positive obligations
in virtue of its very form. And this is why the child,
once he has admitted the principle of punishment by
reciprocity in the sphere of justice, often comes to feel
that any material punitive element is unnecessary, even
if it is " motivated ", the essential thing being to make
the offender realize that his action was wrong, in so far as
it was contrary to the rules of cooperation.
2. COLLECTIVE AND COMMUNICABLE RESPONSIBILITY.
We have neglected, so as to deal with it separately, a question
which it may be useful to discuss in connection with
retributive justice. Do children consider it just, in general
or in cases where the offender is unknown, to punish the
whole group to which he belongs ? The question has a
double interest, educational and psycho-sociological.
Educational, because collective punishment has long
been resorted to in the class-room, and, in spite of the
many protests that have been raised against this practice,
it is still more widely used than is generally thought. A
certain importance therefore attaches to the way in which
232 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
this custom reacts upon the child's mind. And the matter
interests us psychologically as well. The history of penal
codes teaches us that responsibility was long considered to
be collective and communicable. The date is compara-
tively recent when responsibility became individualized,
and the more primitive conception survives to this day
in many religious beliefs. M. Fauconnet, in the excellent
book of which we have spoken, and which will occupy us
again, has shown how the notion of communicable re-
sponsibility is connected with that of objective responsi-
bility. Now, as we claim to have shown above, the child
believes in objective responsibility. Is there, then, a
parallel and complementary tendency to conceive of
responsibility as communicable ?
In order to solve this problem, we gave the children a
certain number of stories which lent themselves to conver-
sation and which reproduced situations in which the
question of collective responsibility usually arises. These
situations seemed to us to be three in number : i The
adult does not attempt to analyse individual guilt and
punishes the whole group for the offence committed by
one or two of its members. 2 The adult wants to dis-
cover the transgressor, but the latter does not own up and
the group refuses to denounce him. 3 The adult wants to
discover the transgressor but the latter does not own up
and the group is ignorant of his identity. In each of
these three cases you ask the child whether it is fair to
punish the whole group, and why. We examined about
sixty subjects between 6 and 14, which was a sufficient
number, considering the relative uniformity in the answers
obtained. The children questioned are not the same as
those with whom we were concerned in the last section.
It should be noticed straight away that of the three
situations contemplated, only the first is comparable to the
situations that generate collective responsibility in primi-
tive societies. But of course it is important to analyse the
other two by way of corroborative proof.
Here are the stories of which we made use :
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 233
Story I. A mother tells her three boys that they mustn't
play with the scissors while she is out. But, as soon as
she is gone the first one says, " Let's play with the
scissors ". Then the second boy goes to get some news-
papers to cut out. The third one says, " No, Mother said
we mustn't. I shan't touch the scissors." When the
mother comes home, she sees all the bits of cut-up news-
paper on the floor. So she sees that someone has been
touching her scissors, and she punishes all three boys.
Was that fair ?
Story II. A lot of boys, as they were coining out of
school, went to play in the street, and started throwing
snowballs at each other. One of the boys throws his ball
too far and breaks a window-pane. A gentleman comes
out of the house and asks who did It. As no one answers
he goes and complains to the school master. Next day
the master asks the class who broke the window. But
again, no one speaks. The boy who had done it says it
wasn't he, and the others won't tell on him. What should
the master do ? (If the child does not answer or misses
the point, you can add details to make things clearer.)
Ought he to punish no one, or the whole class ?
Story III. Some boys are throwing snowballs against a
wall. They were allowed to do this, but on condition they
did not throw them too high, because right high up there
was a window, and the window-panes might get broken.
The boys had a lovely time, all except one who was rather
clumsy and who was not very good at throwing snowballs.
Then, when no one was looking he picked up a pebble
and put snow all round it so as to make a good hard ball.
Then he threw it, and it went so high that it struck the
window, broke the window-pane, and fell into the room.
When the father came home he saw what had happened.
He even found the pebble with some melted snow on the
floor. Then he was angry and asked who had done this.
But the boy who had done it said it wasn't he, and so did
the others. They did not know that he had put a pebble
in his snowball What should the father have done,
punished everyone, or no one ?
Story IV. During a school outing, the teacher allowed
the children to play in a barn, on condition that they put
everything back as they found it before going away. One
of them took a rake, another a spade, and they all went
off in different directions. One of the boys took a wheel-
barrow and went and played by himself, until he went
234 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
and broke it. Then he came back when no one was
looking and hid the barrow in the barn. In the evening
when the teacher looked to see if everything was tidy he
found the broken barrow and asked who had done it.
But the boy who had done it said nothing, and the others
didn't know who it was. What should have been done ?
(Should the whole class be punished or no one ?)
Guided by the requirements of the experiment, we
invented other stories on the same themes, but there is no
need to report them here as the results obtained were poor.
It will be noticed that stories I and II correspond re-
spectively to the first two situations we distinguished a
moment ago, and stories III and IV to the third.
With regard to the first of these situations we were
unable in spite of our desire to do so l to discover in our
children the least trace of collective responsibility. Little
and big alike consider the mother of Story I to be unjust.
You should punish each individual according to what he
has done and not the group according to the misdeeds of
one of its members. Here are some examples.
RED (6) : " What do you think of that IThe one who
hadn't touched them, he ought to have told. Was it fair or
not fair to punish them all three ? No. Why ? Because
there was one who hadn't done anything. How many
should have been punished ? Two."
STAN (6) repeats the story as follows : " Once there was
a lady who was going shopping, and one of the boys took the
scissors. The other one cut the paper, and the other one, he
didn't do anything. In the evening she came back and she
punished them all three. Is that fair ? She should have
scolded two of them and not scolded the third."
BOL (7) : " Once there was a mother who had three chil-
dren. Then she went out to do some shopping, and then she
told them not to touch the scissors. And then they did touch
1 We have often been told that by questioning children with a little
diplomacy you can make them say anything you like. Here is an
example to the contrary. We hoped very much because we had
counted upon it theoretically that the little ones at least would
answer in conformity with the notion of collective responsibility. This
hypothesis proved to be false and our desire was not sufficient to suggest
it to the subjects who were questioned.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 235
them. Yes, who did ? The first and the second, but not
the third. Yes, and then ? And then when the mother
came home she saw that they had been touching the scissors,
and then she punished them. Yes, how ? She sent them to
led without any supper. That's right. Now, what do you
think of this story ? It's pretty. Was it fair or not to
punish all three ? No. Only the first two. Why not all
three ? Because the third one hadn't disobeyed. And the
other two ? Yes, they had disobeyed. And then ? They
went to bed without any supper. Was it fair? Yes.
They were three brothers. So two of them were punished.
The third one didn't need to be punished ? No."
SCRIB (9) : " The children oughtn't to have touched the
scissors. She was quite right to punish them. Did she try
to find out which one it was ? She punished all three of
them. She ought to have asked who had taken the scissors.
She says, ' Since no one will own up, I shall punish all the
children '. // no one had owned up she ought to have
punished them all three, but otherwise it wouldn't have been
fair, and she ought to have punished only two of them since
they'd have owned up."
All the answers obtained are of this type. They show
how utterly foreign to these judgments is the idea of the
solidarity of the group as regards responsibility. This
result is all the more remarkable when we consider that
most children under 7, as we shall see later on, look upon
everything that the adult does as " fair ". It is therefore
in opposition to this tendency to justify the adult in all
things that these children, in the particular case of our
interrogatory, reject the idea of collective responsibility.
It is true that the child is quicker to discover adult
mistakes in the sphere of retributive than in that of
distributive justice : a wrongly applied punishment seems
to them more unjust than inequality of treatment.
Scrib's spontaneous reflections on the expediency of
punishing all the three children together if the first two
had not owned up introduce us to situation II. Should
the whole group be punished when the offender does not
own up and when the innocent refuse to denounce him ?
We are here in the presence of a problem which differs
very widely from the classical question of collective re-
236 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
sponsibility in the evolution of social groups, but yet
throws a certain light upon it. For the mere fact of the
offender refusing to own up and his comrades refusing to
give him away establishes within the group a solidarity
greatly superior to that which existed in it before. To the
naturally given solidarity is added a solidarity that is
willed and accepted by all. Are these conditions in which
the child will admit the principle of collective responsi-
bility ?
If we base our statistics upon age we get only a very
indeterminate result. At every age there are children who
in Story II and similar tales consider that the whole group
should be punished, and there are children who think that
it would be more just to punish no one. Thus both types
of answer were found to be characterized by the same
average age (about 9, as we questioned subjects between
6 and 12). But under this apparent homogeneity it is in
fact possible to discern types of reaction that are quite
distinct. According to children of one type generally the
youngest everyone should be punished ; not because the
solidarity of the group renders the responsibility collective,
but because each is individually guilty, seeing that no one
will show up the author of the offence and that it would
be a duty towards the master to do so. According to
children of a second type generally the older ones
everyone should be punished, not because it is wrong not
to " tell ", but because by the mere fact of having decided
not to denounce the offender the class recognizes its
solidarity. This is collective responsibility of a kind, but
is willed by the individuals and not in itself compulsory.
And finally there is a third type roughly speaking of an
intermediate age according to whom no one should be
punished; partly because it is right not to "tell", and
partly because the guilty one is not known. It should be
added that children of the first type, in addition to the
argument reported above, think that everyone should
be punished because a misdeed necessarily involves a
punishment. By punishing everyone, justice is satisfied.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 237
Whereas children of the other two types regard the
punishment of the innocent as more unjust than the
impunity of the guilty. But these considerations appear
far more clearly in connection with situation III, and we
shall therefore not dwell upon them for the moment.
Here are examples of the first type,
RED (6), Story II : " And what did the master do ?
He punished them all. Why all of them ? Because he
didn't know who it was had broken the window-pane."
" What did the one who broke the pane do ? He said
they weren't to tell. And what did the others think about
it ? That they oughtn't to tell. And did the others think
that was fair ? Yes. What was ? Not to tell [This in
Red's opinion is where the fault lies, that.no one should
have denounced the offender. Hence the collective pun-
ishment.] But was it fair that they should all be pun-
ished, or not fair ? It was fair. Why ? It wasn't known
who did it. Have you ever been punished all together at
home or at school ? No. We are asked [who is the offender]
and then we say."
BOL (7), story analogous to Story II : " What was he
going to do ? Punish them. Who ? All four of them.
Why ? The mother didn't know who had done it, so they all
four had to be punished. Why ? Only one of them had
thrown the snowball. Did the other three have to be
punished too ? Yes. Why ? Because they wouldn't tell.
And did the others think it was fair ? No. Why not ?
Well, perhaps they did. Why ? Because they wouldn't
tell. So they all four had to be punished.''
SCRIB (9), Story II : " What ought the master to have
done ? He ought to find out. He did ask the others but
they wouldn't tell him anything. They ought to have told.
What would you have done ? I'd have told . . . because
it's something wrong [to break a window-pane] that you
mustn't do. . . . It would.be better to tell,, because anyone
who breaks a window ought to be punisiied. But these
children didn't tell. What ought the master to do ? He
must punish the whole class because no one has told. Which
is fairest, to punish everyone or to punish no one ?
Which is fairest ? To punish the whole class because no one
would tell. They ought to be punished. Listen. That day
one of the boys was absent because he was at home, ill.
It was the day he wasn't there that the master said he
238 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
would punish the whole class and keep everyone back for
an hour on Thursday 2 . Now when Thursday came, the
boy was well again. Should he have been punished like
the others, or not ? He ought to be kept back ; everyone
must go together. [It is true that] the whole class was not
there when the window was broken [but] he must be punished
too, as the whole class is being punished." This is about the
most definite of the statements made by the children
whom we questioned on the subject of collective responsi-
bility.
HER (9), Story II : " What should be done ? Punish
the whole lot of them. Would that be fair ? No, because
the one who had done it said nothing, and he was the only one
who ought to be punished. And should the others have
told, or not ? Yes, they ought to have told, If you had
been one of the others, would you have told or not ? I
should have told the master. Would the others have
thought that very nice of you ? No. And if the master
had punished everyone, would that have been fair ? No.
And what about punishing nobody ? Not that either.
What should have been done ? Keep the whole class in for
an hour. And would you have thought that fair ? I'd
rather be punished even if they hadn't found the one who was
guilty. Even if it wasn't you ? Yes"
The two dominating ideas in these answers stand out
clearly. On the one hand, there must be punishment,
even if the innocent suffer ; on the other hand, no one is
completely innocent since the whole class refuses to
denounce the offender. Worth noting is Scrib's idea of
the solidarity of the class which is such that even an
absent pupil should be punished along with the others
when he comes back. This is the dawn of collective
responsibility properly so called.
Here are examples of the second type : everyone should
be punished because the class decides to stand together.
SCHU (13) : " The whole class should be punished.
Why p Because if no one owned up, someone would have
to be punished. Why must someone be punished ? So
that the one who broke the window should not have the whole
1 Thursday Is the weekly whole holiday in French and Swiss schools.
[Trans.]
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 239
punishment. [Note the freely accepted solidarity.] Why ?
Would you have thought it right to punish the whole
class ? Because they ought not to have left only one to be
punished ; it would have been mean to let him be punished.
[Note this forceful formula.] And was it right of him not
to own up ? No, it wasn't right of him. What would you
have done ? I would have owned up. And the others ?
They might have told on him. Why didn't they ? Because
they get a thin time of it afterwards. [Their friends take
them to task.] Why ? Because there are fellows who are
pals. They don't say anything. Why ? So that he
shouldn't be punished. Then what should be done ? The
master should make the whole class pay for the broken window.
And supposing the gentleman says, * I don't mind about
having the window paid for ; all I want is that the boy
who broke it should be punished ' ? Then they must try
and find him or else punish the whole class. And if one of
the boys was absent on that day, should he be punished
along with the others when he comes back ? No, he
mustn't. Why ? Because he was not one of the gang."
SCHMO (n) thinks that " decent chaps " do not tell on
a friend if he is likely to be punished. But it is up to the
master to punish the whole class, since the guilty one does
not reveal himself. " If you had been at that school
would yon have thought it fair ? No, not quite, but if I
had been the master it is what I would have done."
This type clearly differs from the first. It is right not
to tell (and it is not the refusal to denounce the offender
which should be aimed at in punishing the whole class),
but since the class by keeping silence joins forces with the
offender, by doing so it declares war on the master who
henceforth has the right to act with severity. From the
master's point of view, then, the collective punishment is
admissible though in itself it is neither obligatory nor even
just.
Here are examples of the third type of answer : the
whole class should not be punished.
HOT (7!) : " Which is the most fair, to punish everyone
or no one ? To punish the one who did it. But they don't
know who it was. Then it is most fair not to punish any-
one, since they don't know who did it." " And supposing
240 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the master simply says that everyone must stay on after
school until the one who did it owns up, would that be
fair ? Yes, he is quite right then. That is different from
before. And if everyone was kept on for two hours, would
that be fair ? No."
NIK (10) : " Some people have told me that the whole
class ought to be punished, some that no one should be.
What do you think IPunish no one. Why ? Because
you don't know who it is. Is that quite fair or not ? I
don't know. Is it the fairest thing that could be done or
no t ? Yes, it is. Why ? Because it would mean punish-
ing all the other children. To punish the whole class would
be altogether unfair, would it ? No. Why not ? Be-
cause then the one who did it would be punished too"
For these children, clearly, individual responsibility
alone comes into play: the essential thing is that the
innocent should not be hit. It is more just, therefore,
to punish no one. As for collective punishment, it is
legitimate only in so far as it succeeds in reaching the
offender himself.
Of these few facts noted in connection with situation II
we can therefore say that only those of the second type
resemble collective responsibility. For the children of the
first type do not think of the fault as in any way com-
municable : if everyone is to be punished, it is because
everyone is guilty, since the spectators of the misdeed
refuse to denounce its author. The responsibility is
therefore general and not collective. Only Scrib, in his
desire to punish the absent pupil, marks a momentary
exception to this rule, and anticipates the second type of
answer. As to children of the third type, they are
definitely hostile to ideas of communicable responsibility.
So that only the second type remains, consisting curiously
enough of the oldest children. But if in their view the
group is responsible, it is because it wishes to be so and
decides through solidarity to share the offender's punish-
ment. Is this attitude comparable in any way to that of
" primitive peoples " who consider the group to be con-
taminated by the misdeed of one of its members ? Before
deciding this point let us turn to situation III.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 241
The stories III and IV are those which enabled us to
analyse the children's reactions in regard to these situa-
tions. An individual misdeed has been committed, but
the group does not know who is guilty : should it be
punished as a whole or should no one be punished ? On
this point the children's reactions were perfectly definite.
According to the little ones, everyone should be punished,
not because the group is responsible but because there
must be a punishment at all costs, even if it strikes the
innocent as well as the guilty. According to the older
ones, on the contrary, no one should be punished because
the penalty inflicted upon the innocent is more unjust
than the impunity of the guilty. The older children are
unanimous, at any rate from the age of 8-9, in saying that
collective punishment is less just in the present situation
than in the case of situation II.
Here are examples of the reactions shown by the
youngest children.
MAR (6), Story IV : " What should have been done ?
Punish the little boy. Did they know who it was ? No.
Well then ? Take a boy and punish him. Any boy ?
No, you would change [taking them in turn]."
FRIG (6), Story IV : " What should be done ? Punish.
Punish how ? In a dark room. Who ? The one who
broke the cart. Did they know who it was ? No. Then
what could they do ? Put them all in a dark room. What
did the others say ? That it wasn't me who did it. What
did they think then ? That they shouldn't be put [in the
dark room]. If you were the teacher what would you
do ? Put them all in a dark room. 1 '
VEL (6), Story IV : Everyone is to be punished. " Is
it fair to punish everyone ? Yes, because he broke the little
cart. Who do you mean by ' he ' ? The boy. Then is it
fair to punish everyone ? Yes. They should all be kept in
after school."
Sxo (7), Story IV : " Then, should everyone be pun-
ished, or no one ? / would punish half the class. And
supposing you were in that half of the class, what would
you say at being punished with the others ? / would
think that it was fair."
GRIB (9), Story III : " Everyone should give a little
242 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
towards paying for the window-pane. Which would be
fairest, that everyone should pay a little or that no one
should pay anything ? Since it is someone in the class,
everyone should give a penny." Story IV : " Since no one
can say who it was, the whole class must be punished. The
one who had broken it wouldn't say, so he [the master] said
that everyone should be punished. 3 '
HER (9), Story IV : " If he [the master] couldn't find the
one who broke it, he'd be better to punish the whole lot. But
had the others seen him ? No Do you think it is fairer
here in this story or in the first [Story II] ? It is fairer in
the second story because no one saw who it was. Why did
they not tell in the first story ? Because they didn't want
to tell on him. There ought to be more punishing in the
second one because no one knew who it was. Then why
must you punish more if no one knows who it is ?
Because [in Story IV] the others couldn't tell on him since
titey didn't know. Were they right not to tell in the first
story, or not ? They were right not to tell. [Her has
therefore changed his mind since the first interrogatory.]
Shouldn't they have told ?No."
The children's reaction is unmistakable. They accept
collective punishment, "but they do so, not because the
group is responsible as a whole for the faults of one of its
members, but simply because the guilty one is unknown,
and that there must be a punishment at aU costs. The
fundamental fact in these cases is not the feeling of soli-
darity in the group, but of the necessity of punishment.
Hence the curious answer given by Her, who deems it
more just to punish everybody in this case than in situa-
tion II. For in the last case the children act quite rightly
in not denouncing the offender, and it would not be very
fair to punish them, whereas if the offender remains
unknown, there is nothing left to do but to chastise the
whole group.
We shall now give examples of the older children who
regard collective punishment as unjust.
DELLEN (9), Story IV : " What should be done ? Ask
them who did & Punish them ? Yes. How ? Ask who
took the cart. But he won't own up. Must one be taken
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 243
at random and punished ? No. They don't know which
one it- is who broke Ike cart. Should no one be punished ?
Yes. . . . No, that still would not be fair because the one
who broke it would not be punished. Punish everyone ?
No. Only the boy who broke the cart. It would not be fair
to punish everyone because the others didn't break it.
Punish two or three of them ? No. No one at all ?
Yes, that would be fairest. But you told me that the one
who broke the cart would not be punished then. . . .
Should everyone be punished ? No, because the others did
nothing."
NIK (10), Story III : " Some say that the whole class
should be punished, some that no one should. TeE me
what you think. No one should be punished. Why ?
Because you don't know who it was. Do you think that is
what would be fairest ? Yes. Why ? Because otherwise
it would mean all the other children being punished.''
Story IV : "If you were the master what would you
think was the fairest thing to do ? Not to punish anyone.
When would you think it fairest to punish them all, in
the story where they all saw the boy break the window-
pane, or in this one ? In the first story. Why ? Because
they know and they won't say. 13
Even those among the older children who are attracted
by the idea of collective punishment answer like Nik on
the last point namely that collective punishment is less
just where the offender is unknown to the group. For
where everybody knows the author of the misdeed and
refuses to denounce him, there is voluntary solidarity, as
we saw in the case of situation IL But here there is
complete independence between the individuals. The
great majority of the older children therefore consider
general punishment as a greater injustice than the im-
punity of the guilty.
It should be noted, however, that in some cases the
child comes somewhat nearer to the notion of collective
responsibility. This happens when the punishment chosen
lends itself to this extension of the idea and seems to
strike, not only at the offender, but at the child in general
in its carelessness and its inferiority. For after all it
seems hardly fair to keep everyone in for an hour when
244 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
this might be done to the offender alone. But if the whole
class is punished by being forbidden to borrow tools in
future, this seems more reasonable. Such a measure
strikes no longer at the innocent individual but at the
child as such, the genus child like the genus humanum of
the theologians. For since one member of the group has
proved himself too clumsy to be allowed the use of a
wheel-barrow, it is only normal that the group as a whole
should be suspected of carelessness and that the responsi-
bility should thus be extended to others.
Nuss (7), Story IV : " What should be done to them ?
They should have been told not to break the wheel-barrow.
And did the master punish them or not ? Yes. How ?
He told them not to touch things. Yes, but did he punish
them ? Yes. He said they must never touch tools again.
Did the children think it was fair ? Yes. Even those
who hadn't done anything wrong ? Yes. 33
These cases, along with that of Scrib (who wanted to
have even the absent pupil punished), are those which
come nearest to the classical idea of collective responsi-
bility. And, as a matter of fact, even adults allow that a
group may be penalized as when, for example, motorists or
pedestrians are forbidden to go along a road where un-
scrupulous individuals have been guilty of reckless be-
haviour. But in this case, as in that of Nuss, the
punishment is not expiatory ; it is a precautionary measure
directed against individuals in general rather than against
the whole group as such.
On this point Mile A. M. Feldweg has been kind
enough to supply us with a valuable complement to
our enquiry. She questioned some forty children between
5 and 13 by means of stories relating to situation I but
which introduced into collective punishment the feature of
being a general precautionary measure rather than an
expiation properly so called. Here are two of these stories.
Story V. There was a school with only two classes a
class of big ones and a class of little ones. On Saturday
afternoon, when no one was working very hard, the little
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 245
ones asked the big ones to lend them one of their lovely
animal books. The big ones lent it, telling them to take
great care of it. But once, two of the little ones both
wanted to turn over the pages at the same time. They
quarreled and some of the pages of the book got torn.
When the older ones saw that the book was torn they
declared that they would never lend it to the little ones
again. Were they right or not ?
Story VI. A mother gave her three little boys a lovely
box of coloured crayons and told them to be very careful
not to drop them in case the leads got broken. But one
of them who drew badly saw that his brothers drew
better than he did, and out of spite (or " because this made
him angry ") he threw all the crayons on the floor. When
the mother saw this, she took the crayons away and never
gave them back to the children again. Was she right to do
this or not ?
In contrast to Stories I and IV, these stories produced
reactions that were apparently far more favourable to
collective responsibility. For about half the children
approved of the punishment in Story V and about one-
fifth of that in Story VI. But if we try to find out the
why of these judgments, we shall see immediately how
totally foreign they are to truly collective responsibility.
It is significant, to begin with, that the general punish-
ment should receive a far greater measure of approval
(about half) in the case of Story V than in that of Story VI
(about one-fifth). For the punishment described in Story
V consists far more of a preventive or protective measure
than of a genuine punishment. The punishment in Story
VI, on the contrary, contains an element of repression
which renders it quasi-expiatory ; for the chalks in
question were meant for the children from whom they
were afterwards taken away, whereas in the first case we
have to do with a book that had been lent and will now
simply no longer be lent.
On the other hand, the hesitation and even change of
opinion shown by the subjects favourable to collective
punishment are sufficient to show that their minds are not
made up, and, above all, that the problem is new to them
246 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
and does not correspond to an acquired or already ac-
cepted idea. Finally, those answers that are definite
hardly invoke anything more than the very idea of a
preventive measure which we were emphasizing a moment
ago. Here is an example of this type of answer.
ROL (7 ; 6), Story V : " Were the older ones right or
not ? They are right. Why ? They [the little ones] will
tear it again, It was only one or two of them who tore it.
Yes, but the others may tear it too. Could the book be
given to the ones who had done nothing, or not ? Yes.
Which would be fairest, to give it to them or not to ?
Not to give it them, because they don't listen to what the big
ones say to them. Suppose you were in the little ones'
class, and had done nothing, would you think that fair,
or not ? Yes, Why ? Because it was quite right. There's
no need to go and tear a book that cost a lot! 1
It is true that in certain rare cases an additional appeal
seems to be made to the solidarity of the group as such.
Here again, as in the case of Scrib (p. 237-8), one gets the
impression that the child comes very near to collective
responsibility. 'Here is one of these cases.
HOCH (9), Story VI : " Was the mother right ? Yes.
Why ? Because she's afraid they will throw them on the
ground. Who do you mean by ' they ' ? Perhaps the
others too. Suppose you have two brothers, and one of
them throws the crayons on the floor ; is it fair or not that
you and your other brother should not be able to draw
any more ? Yes. But they have got no colours left becaitse
of the brother. The other two ought to be allowed to draw.
Will the third brother think that fair, or not ? No,
because in the family they always lend each other the pencils.
Then, what should be done ? Take the pencils away from
all of them.
Here, it will be seen, it is the unity of the group, felt as
such, that impels towards collective punishment. But
Hoch is obviously very undecided in his opinion. Besides,
as we have said before, such views only appear in about
one subject out of ten at the most.
As to the other children, they are opposed to the idea
of collective punishment even in regard to Stories V and
VI. Here is the most interesting of the results obtained.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 247
HUF (13 ; 6), Story V : " It isn't right of them, Why ?
They should take the book away [only] from those who tore
it. If it was you who had torn it, would you think it
fair that it should be given back to the others and not to
you ? Yes, fair. Why not take it away from everyone ?
The others might say it was not fair. 39
Story VI : " Was the mother right ? No. What would
you have done ? I'd have taken them away from the one
who got angry. For always, or not ? For a certain time.
And if it was you who had broken them, and no one was
allowed to use the box, would you think that fair or not ?
/ should think it was unfair. I should know that it was
just to afflict [inflict] a punishment upon me. You wouldn't
have thought it fairer that no one should be allowed to
use the chalks ? Yes, while I was still in a temper, but not
afterwards. I should know that I was the [only] one who
deserved to have the box of chalks taken away from
me."
In short, Stories V and VI, like the others, are insuffi-
cient to prove the existence of a spontaneous feeling for
collective responsibility in the child. At the best, only in
cases of very closely united groups, such as the family,
does the child's judgment (as with Hoch) bear the fleeting
impress of this collectivity. Broadly speaking, however,
only such collective punishments are held to be just as
can be regarded as preventive measures.
Such, then, are the results of our enquiry. The sum
total shows that in none of the three situations imagined
is any judgment to be found comparable to the classical
notion of collective responsibility. There are, at the most,
little indications here and there, to which we shall return
in a moment. In situations II and III, on the other hand,
we can observe two consistent reactions, each of which,
taken by itself, may be regarded as bearing upon com-
municable responsibility.
The first of these reactions is the belief in the absolute
necessity for punishment. This belief can be observed in
the younger children, and even leads them to demand the
punishment of all rather than let the guilty one escape.
Such an attitude is obviously necessary for the develop-
248 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
merit of judgments of collective responsibility : before a
whole group can be regarded as sharing the offender's
guilt, the necessity of expiatory punishments must first be
allowed. Fauconnet's contention seems to us irrefutable
on this point. The emotion aroused by the crime is, he
says, the source both of the collective reaction in which
the punishment consists, and of the transference by
contiguity and resemblance of the responsibility itself.
In a sense, then, we may say with Fauconnet that re-
sponsibility is born of punishment. But in the child this
belief in the absolute necessity for expiatory punishment
is not sufficient to liberate the judgment of collective
responsibility. This is shown by our analysis of situation
III it is the unknown offender and not the group as
such that is aimed at by the collective punishment con-
templated by the child.
In the second place, we observed in situation II a sort
of collective responsibility, but one that was voluntary
and freely accepted : rather than denounce the offender,
Ms comrades will declare their solidarity with him. Here
again we come very near collective responsibility, but what
this attitude lacks in order to be identified with the
classical attitude is that the children should regard this
solidarity as simply given and unavoidable.
The problem may be stated as follows. Is the classical
idea of collective responsibility, i.e. the necessity for the
whole group to expiate the faults of one of its members
more akin to the first or to the second of these reactions,
to the absolute necessity for punishment or to the volun-
tary solidarity of the group? The question is an im-
portant one. As the first of these two attitudes is that of
the younger children, whose morality is one of constraint
(objective responsibility, expiatory punishment, etc.), and
as the second is that of the older children, whose morality is
one of cooperation (subjective responsibility, punishment
by reciprocity, etc.), it is essential that we should de-
termine whether a moral belief, which in the eyes of many
passes as " primitive ", has taken its rise from one or
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 249
other of these two ethics. Now, the results which we are
trying to analyse here are doubly paradoxical. On the
one hand, the only collective responsibility in which our
children believe (the responsibility accepted by the group
which wants to declare its solidarity) occurs among the
older and not among the younger ones. On the other
hand, the belief in obligatory expiation is strongest among
the little ones and disappears precisely at the moment
when this voluntary solidarity begins to develop.
But everything becomes clear when we grasp the fact
that collective responsibility in primitive societies pre-
supposes the union of two conditions which in the child
are always dissociated viz. a mystical belief in the ne-
cessity for punishment and the feeling of unity and soli-
darity within the group. The " primitive " is an adult
living in organized societies. He may, under the influence
of a gerontocracy, retain the essentials of a morality of
constraint including the strictest ideas on the subject of
retributive justice ; but in spite of this and simply owing
to the fact of the powerful structure of the group to which
he belongs, his feeling of the individual's participation in
the collectivity is extremely strong. Responsibility is
therefore collective at the same time as it is objective and
as punishment is expiatory. In the child, on the contrary,
we have to consider two phases. During the first, adult
constraint develops the notions of objective responsibility,
expiatory punishment, etc. The first condition for the
existence of collective responsibility is therefore present.
But the second condition is still lacking. For during this
stage the child is essentially egocentric, and if he does
have a feeling of close communion with the group (ego-
centrism being by definition the confusion of the self with
the not-self) it is primarily in connection with the adult
or with the older child that this participation comes into
play. There can therefore be no question of collective
responsibility. During the second stage, on the contrary,
the child enters more and more into the society of his equals,
groups of which become organized in and out of school.
250 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Here, therefore, there is some possibility of collective
responsibility, and the group does in point of fact declare
its solidarity with the offender in cases where the latter
enters into conflict with adult authority. But at the
same^ stroke the first condition has ceased to be fulfilled ;
the morality of cooperation has succeeded that of con-
straint, and neither objective responsibility nor the belief in
the necessity for expiatory punishment is any longer present.
Hence we cannot speak of collective responsibility in the
true sense. In our societies the child, as he grows up ?
frees himself more and more from adult authority ;
whereas in the lower grades of civilization puberty marks
the beginning of an increasingly marked subjection of the
individual to the elders and to the traditions of his tribe.
And this is why collective responsibility seems to us to be
missing from the moral make-up of the child, whereas it is
a notion that is fundamental in the code of primitive ethics.
3. " IMMANENT JUSTICE." A problem connected with
that of punishment and one which we shall have to
examine before passing on to the study of distributive
justice is that of so-called immanent justice. If our
hypotheses are correct, then the younger the child (not
counting the first two years, of course) the stronger will be
its belief in the soundness and universality of expiatory
punishment, and this belief will give way before other
values in so far as the morality of cooperation predomin-
ates over that of constraint. During the early years of
his life, the child must therefore affirm the existence of
automatic punishments which emanate from things them-
selves, while later, under the influence of circumstances
which affect his moral growth, he probably abandons this
belief. This is what we shall now endeavour to show.
We told the children three stories in this connection.
Story I. Once there were two children who were steal-
ing apples in an orchard. Suddenly a policeman comes
ilong and the two children run away. One of them is
:aught. The other one, going home by a roundabout way,
COOPERATION AND IDEA OF JUSTICE 251
crosses a river on a rotten bridge and falls into the water.
Now what do you think ? If he had not stolen the apples
and had crossed the river on that rotten bridge all the
same, would he also have fallen into the water ?
Story II. In a class of very little children the teacher
had forbidden them to. sharpen their pencils themselves.
Once, when the teacher had her back turned, a little boy
took the knife and was going to sharpen Ms pencil. But
he cut his finger. If the teacher had allowed Mm to
sharpen Ms pencil, would he have cut himself just the same?
Story III. There was a little boy who disobeyed Ms
mother. He took the scissors one day when he had been
told not to. But he put them back in their place before
Ms mother came home, and she never noticed anytMng.
The next day he went for a walk and crossed a stream on
a little bridge. But the plank was rotten. It gave way,
and in he falls with a splash. Why did he fall into the
water ? (And if he had not disobeyed would he have
fallen in just the same ?)
The first two questions were put by Mile Rambert to
167 children from Geneva and the Vaudois Jura. (The
same cMldren with whom we shall concern ourselves in
the sequel on the subject of distributive justice ; these
subjects have therefore not been questioned about punish-
ments or communicable responsibility). We ourselves put
question III and other analogous questions to children
from NeucMtel. With regard to the first two, Mile Ram-
bert was able to obtain statistics showing very clearly the
influence of the child's mental age. Leaving aside the
uncertain reactions wMch constitute about -Jth of the total,
the answers affirming the existence of immanent justice,
those, that is to say, where the subject maintained that if
the child had not stolen or disobeyed he would not have
fallen into the water or would not have cut himself,
revealed the following percentages :
AG 6 AGE 7-8 AGE 9-10 AGE 11-12
86% 73% 54% 34%
In addition to this it should be noted that in a class of
backward children of 13-14 the proportion of answers of
the same type was found to be 57%, which shows again
that these answers are in inverse proportion to the mental
252 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
age. Here are examples of this belief in the immanent
justice of things.
DEP (6), Story I : " What do you think of this story ?
It serves him right. He shouldn't have stolen. It serves
him right. If he had not stolen the apples, would he have
fallen into the water ? No."
CHR (6), Story III : " Why did he fall in ? God made
him, because he had touched the scissors. And if he hadn't
done what was wrong ? Then the board would have held
out. Why ? Because he didn't -touch [would not have -
touched] the scissors."
SA (6), Story I : " What do you think of that ? The
one who got caught was sent to prison, the other was drowned.
Was that fair ? Yes. Why ? Because he had been
disobedient. If he hadn't been disobedient would he have
fallen into the water ? No, because he hadn't [ = would
not have] been disobedient."
JEAN (6), Story II : He cut himself " because it was
forbidden to touch the knife. And if it had not been for-
bidden, would he also have cut himself ? No, because the
mistress would have allowed it."
GRA (6) : Same answers for Story I. " What hap-
pened ? The bridge cracked. Why ? Because he had
eaten the apples. If he had not eaten the apples, would
he have fallen into the water ? No. Why ? Because the
bridge would not have cracked."
PAIL (7), Story I : " What do you think of that ? It's
fair. It serves him right. Why ? Because he should not
have stolen. If he had not stolen, would he have fallen
into the water ? No. Why ? Because he would not have
done wrong. Why did he fall in ? To punish him."
SCA (7) : " What do you think about it IOh yes, I
know. If we do anything, God punishes us. Who told you
that ? Some children. I don't know if it's true." Story
II : " It serves him right. You ought to obey teacher. And
if the teacher had allowed it, would he have cut himself
sharpening a pencil ? No. He wouldn't have cut himself if
the teacher had allowed it."
BOE (8), Story III : " What do you think ? It serves
him right. You shouldn't disobey. And if ... etc. ?
No, he wouldn't have fallen in, because he wouldn't have done
anything. 9 '
PRES (9), Story I : " What do you think IHe was
punished as much as the other one, and even more. And if
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 253
he had not stolen the apples, would he have fallen Into
the water as he was crossing the river ? No, because he
would not have needed to be punished."
THIS (10), Story I : " He was punished. Neither of them
ought to have stolen. If he hadn't fallen into the water he
would have been caught. And If he hadn't been caught ?
He'd have fallen into the water. Otherwise he'd have gone
on stealing"
Dis (n), Story I. : "He had his punishment too.
Was it fair ? Yes. And if he hadn't stolen the apples
would he have fallen into the water ? No, because [in
that case] he didn't have to be punished.' 1
Here are some examples of children who no longer believe
in immanent justice, at least not in the stories we told
them. But this does not prevent this belief from attaching
itself to other objects, by becoming displaced and gradually
spiritualized.
GROS (9), Story III : " Why did he fall in ? Because
the plank was worn out. Was it because he had disobeyed ?
No. If he had not disobeyed would he also have fallen
in ? Yes. He'd have fallen in just the same. The plank
was worn out. 1 '
FLEU (12), Story I : " And if he hadn't stolen the
apples, would he have fallen in too ? (He laughs.) The
bridge isn't supposed to know whether he has stolen the apples. 9 '
BAR (13) : " It was perhaps a coincidence. But the
punishment was what he deserved"
FRAN (13), Story I : "And if he had not stolen the
apples, would he have fallen into the water ? Yes. If
the bridge was going to give way, it would have given way
just the same, since it was in bad repair"
But between two groups of clear cases, we find a series
of intermediate examples, which are very interesting from
the point of view of child logic, and whose original feature
consists in saying that the event mentioned in our stories
is certainly a punishment, but that it would have happened
in any case, eveiLif there had been no previous offence.
SCHMA (61), Story III : " Why did he faU into the
water ? Because he told a lie. And if he hadn't done
that, would he have fallen in ? Yes, because the bridge was
O ld t Then why did he fall in ? Because he disobeyed his
254 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
mother. And if he had not disobeyed would he have
fallen in just the same ? Yes. The bridge was old, after all.
Then why would the boy have fallen in who had not
disobeyed? Not because of that. Why? . . ."
MERM (9), Story II : " What do you think about it ?
It served the boy right who fell into the water. Why ? It
was his punishment. And if he had not stolen any apples,
would he have fallen in ? Yes, because the bridge was not
firm. But then it wouldn't have been fair. He would not
have done anything wrong.' 3
VAT (10) : " He was punished for his wicked deed. And
if ... etc. ? May be he might have fallen in."
CAMP (u), Story I : " And if he had not stolen would
he have fallen in ? Perhaps he would have if the bridge
had been rotten. But perhaps it was that God punished him."
The little ones obviously do not feel the contradiction.
The case of Schma is typical of children under 7 ; it is
agreed that the child falls into the water because he has
disobeyed, but he would have fallen in even if he had not
disobeyed. The older ones, on the contrary, feel the
difficulty well enough, but they try to reconcile the two
themes of immanent justice and mechanical chance.
Before taking up the question once again from the point
of view of moral psychology, it will be well to ask whether
and in what manner the child tries to picture the mechan-
ism of this justice immanent in things which he seems to
believe in. Does he establish an immediate bond between
the offence and the physical punishment, or does he seek
to find intermediate links in the form, for example, of
miracles or of some sort of artificialist causality ?
We have sometimes asked this very question. The
subjects who answer " God did it " should immediately be
put aside. This is sure to be a learnt formula. Many
parents take advantage of the least coincidence that may
occur between the minor accidents of which the child is a
victim and his acts of disobedience, and declare with
conviction, " You see, God has punished you," etc. But
apart from this adult intervention we do not think that
the question of the " how " really exists for the child.
Whatever may be the manner in which belief in immanent
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 255
justice first takes root, It seems quite natural to the cMld
that a fault should automatically bring about its own
punishment. For nature, in the child's eyes, is not a
system of blind forces regulated by mechanical laws
operating on the principle of chance. Nature is a har-
monious whole, obeying laws that are as much moral as
physical and that are above all penetrated down to the
least detail with an anthopomorphic or even egocentric
finalism. It therefore seems quite natural to little children
that night should come in order to put us to sleep, and
that the act of going to bed is sufficient to set in motion
that great black cloud that produces darkness. It seems
quite natural to them that their movements should com-
mand those of the heavenly bodies (the moon follows us
in order to take care of us). In short, there is life and
purpose in everything. Why then should not things be
the accomplices of grown-ups in making sure that a
punishment is inflicted where the parents' vigilance may
have been evaded ? What difficulty should there be in a
bridge giving way under a little thief, when everything in
nature conspires to safeguard that Order, both moral and
physical, of which the grown-up is both the author and the
raison d'etre ?
With the older children,. from the age of about 8, this
mentality tends to disappear little by little. Belief in the
justice immanent in things also diminishes, the two
processes being no doubt correlative. But where this
belief does survive in our children, it is only among the
little ones that it entails any sort of enquiry as to the
" how " of its execution. What happens here is something
analogous to the adult's use of finalism. A semi-educated
man may very well dismiss as " contrary to science " a
theological explanation of the universe, and yet find no
difficulty in accepting the notion that the sun is there to
give us light. Thus finalism, although at first united to a
more or less systematic artificialism, comes to outlive it in*
the end and even as does every habitual conception
to give the illusion of intelligibility. The idea of a justice
256 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
immanent in things could not appear unaided in the mind
of a child of twelve, but it may survive in such a
mind, as indeed in that of many an adult, without for
that matter creating problems or giving rise to difficulties.
We have not, therefore, observed any spontaneous
reflections concerning the causal mechanism of immanent
justice. Such preoccupations only appear in those who
no longer believe that the physical universe functions
like a policeman. Thus Fleu (age 12) could remark to us
jokingly that " the bridge was not supposed to know
whether the boy had stolen apples ". The little ones do
not ask themselves whether or not the bridge " knows "
what happens : they act as though the bridge did know,
or as though the mana which guides all things knew in
place of the bridge ; but they do not formulate this
belief. All the same, we may ask ourselves what they will
answer if they are pressed for a more exact statement.
On this point, as in the case of our questions on child
artificialism and animism, the child does not hesitate to
invent myths, which have, of course, no value as beliefs,
but which are the indices of an immediate and inex-
pressible connection established by himself.
SE (6J) : "It wouldn't have happened if he hadn't picked
apples. Did the bridge know what the boy had done ?
No. Then why did it break ? Perhaps the thunder made
the bridge break. And did the thunder know ? Perhaps
God saw, and then he made thunder by scolding. That broke
the bridge and he fell into the water"
Cus (6) : " Did the bridge know he had stolen ? No,
but it had seen."
EUR (6) : " The bridge must have known, since it gave way
and he was punished" 'And in Story II : " Did the knife
know ? Yes, It heard what the teacher said since it was on
the desk. And it said, ' since the boy is going to sharpen it,
he'll cut himself:"
AR (6) : " Did the bridge know ? Yes. How did it
know ? It had seen."
GEO (7 ; 10) : " And if he had not stolen any apples,
would he have fallen into the water ? No. It was his
punishment, because he had stolen apples. Did the bridge
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 257
? ff 09 fatf it broke because there was a wind, and the
wind knew."
These answers must not, of course, be regarded as
corresponding to beliefs. Only the last may perhaps be
said to contain an element of spontaneous belief. For we
have often had occasion to see (C.W. and C.C.) the in-
telligent role which the child seems to assign to the wind.
Most of these answers therefore simply indicate that the
child finds quite natural the connection between the fault
that has been committed and the physical phenomenon
which serves as punishment. When the child is forced to
make this connection explicit, he invents a story arti-
ficialistic in one case, animistic in the other. But this way
of reacting proves nothing more than that nature, in the
child's eyes, is the adult's accomplice, no matter what
methods she may employ in the process.
Yet the intermediate answers quoted above raise a
problem. Some children maintain that the bridge has
given way as a punishment and that it would have given
way even if the boy had not stolen the apples. This can
be very simply explained if we remember that a form of
causality to which the mind has attached itself during a
given period (such as the physical and moral precausality
of the child of 2 to 7) never disappears all at once but
coexists for a time with the later types of explanation.
The adult is familiar with these contradictions and justi-
fies them with a cloak of words. It is only to be expected
that they should appear all the more frequently in chil-
dren.
Let us now come to the main point and ask what, from
the point of view of moral psychology, is meant by the
facts we have put on record. For this purpose it will
be necessary to state more precisely how the belief in the
immanent justice in things is born and how it passes
away. The intellectual dement of this belief is, moreover,
such as to facilitate the question of its origin.
Three solutions as to the problem of origin offer them-
selves for choice. The belief in immanent justice may be
258 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
inborn, or it may be the direct result of parental teaching,
or, again, it may be an indirect product of adult con-
straint a product, therefore, to which the child mind will
itself have contributed under the double aspect, intellectual
and moral, of its nature.
The first solution is highly improbable. It has, however,
been claimed that onanism gives rise to spontaneous
feelings of remorse and to auto-punishment in thought or
in act, whence it would be possible to infer in individuals the
general presence of a predisposition to see in the events of
life the mark of immanent justice. And as a matter of fact
it cannot be denied that we can observe in masturbators
a systematic fear of the retribution residing in things
not only the fear of the result their habits may have upon
their health, the fear of making themselves stupid, etc., but
also a tendency to interpret all the chance misfortunes
of life as punishments intended by fate. But would all
these attitudes develop in a child who had not acquired
the experience of punishment from the world outside him ?
We are ready to believe that such ideas arise independently
of any direct adult instruction, and in children whose
habits are hidden from those around them. But it is those
persons around them who are, after all, the indirect cause
of this belief in punishments emanating automatically
from things, and facts of this kind seem to us to speak far
more strongly in favour of the third solution than of the
first. Too many taboos relating to sex are imposed from
the first years of life for the child's most secret reactions in
this domain to be regarded as really inborn. At any rate,
in order to prove the absolutely spontaneous character
of auto-punishment and of the beliefs connected with
it, one would have to bring up a child in very special
circumstances, if not outside social contact of any kind.
As to the second solution, it contains, as we have already
seen, a large proportion of truth. A great many children
think that a fall or a cut constitute a punishment because
their parents have said to them, " It serves you right ",
or, " That will be a punishment for you ", or, " God made
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 259
it happen", etc. And yet, even if these propositions
explain the majority of cases, we do not think that they
cover the whole ground. In other words, we believe that
situations frequently occur in which the child quite spon-
taneously considers an accident of which he is the victim
as a punishment, and we believe that this happens with-
out anything analogous having been suggested by the
parents in other situations. According to this hypothesis,
the child, having acquired, thanks to adult constraint, the
habit of punishment, attributes spontaneously to nature
the power of applying the same punishments. The third
solution therefore seems to us to contain a part of the
truth.
Apart from the facts relating to onanism, we may
mention here several examples which show how easily
such attitudes are adopted by the child.
I. A well-known German-Swiss psychiatrist has told us
that one of the most vivid of his childish memories is that
of having been prevented from taking apples out of a
basket by the cover of the basket unexpectedly closing
over it. The basket was open and the child had put his
hand inside it, without, as a matter of fact, regarding
himself as a thief, when the cover suddenly fell on to his
arm. He immediately felt that he was doing wrong, and
simultaneously that he was being punished. No one else
was present at the scene.
II. Another memory. A child would often look for
animals to add to his natural history collection. On days
when he had anything to reproach himself with, he had
the feeling that his bag was a bad one and that it was so
because of his misdeeds.
III. We have cited elsewhere (C.W., p. 149) the case of
the deaf-mute d'Estrella studied by W. James, who
associated the inoon with the punishments to which he
was subjected.
IV. We have also described (C.W., p. 101) the singular
reactions of those children who* looked upon nightmares as
punishments for the faults they had committed during the
day.
In these four observations, which could be added to
indefinitely, it seems to us that the child's attitude takes
260 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
shape without any direct influence on the part of the
adult . The subject is the only person who knows what
happens to Mm, and he takes good care not to talk about
it to those around him. Of course one cannot prove that
children have never heard their parents invoking imma-
nent justice ; it may be that all parents do so. But the
ease with which the child interprets everything in terms
of immanent justice seems to indicate that we have here a
tendency corresponding to his own mentality; and this
is all we wished to establish.
Belief in immanent justice originates therefore in a
transference to things of feelings acquired under the
influence of adult constraint. But this does not fully clear
up yet the moral significance of the phenomenon. In
order to understand it, we have still to ask how such
beliefs disappear, or at any rate diminish in importance
with the mental age of the child. For the progressive
decrease of answers pointing to the existence of these
beliefs as the child grows older is a result worthy of our
attention. What are the factors that account for this
diminution ?
One might point simply to the child's growing experi-
ence and to his intellectual advance. Experience shows
that wickedness may go unpunished and virtue remain
unrewarded. The greater the child's intellectual develop-
ment, the more clearly will he see this. Such an explana-
tion, though true up to a point, would be too simple if it
were brought forward to the exclusion of all others. For
it is not such an easy matter to be guided by experience.
The more we analyse the conduct which consists in
consulting facts the more delicate and complex an opera-
tion does it appear. Not only does experience presuppose
the active participation of intelligence, but in order to
eliminate the affective factors which run the risk of
falsifying our interpretations we also require a veritable
ethic of thought, an ethic which can only come into being
in certain individual or social situations. M. Levy-Bruhl
has shown very well how impervious to experience are
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 261
primitive societies where the vital beliefs of the whole com-
munity are involved. And when we see how " primitives "
contrive to justify a magical or mystical attitude after
repeated failures, we cannot help being reminded of those
of our contemporaries who can never learn from facts,
To take only the case of immanent justice, how many
simple souk still think that even in this life people's
actions are the object of equitable rewards and punishments,
and would rather assume some hidden fault to explain a
neighbour's misfortune than admit the fortuitous char-
acter in the trials that befall mankind. Or how often do not
the more charitably minded invoke the mystery of destiny
to defend universal justice at all costs rather than in-
terpret events independently of any presupposition what-
soever. It is obvious, then, that even for adults to accept
or reject the hypothesis of immanent justice is a matter
not of pure experience, of scientific observation, but of
moral evaluation and of a general attitude.
It is therefore not mere experience, but moral experiences
of a certain sort that will guide the child in one direction
or another. What experiences do we mean ? In the first
place, we may assume that it is the discovery of the
imperfection of adult justice. When, as is almost bound
to happen, a child is submitted to unjust treatment by
his parents or his teachers, he will be less inclined to
believe in a universal and automatic justice. We may
recall in this connection the crisis which M. Bovet has
described in the sphere of filial piety and which is so
important from the point of view of the evolution of
beliefs. But this discovery of the inadequate character of
adult justice is only one episode in the general movement
which takes the child away from the morality of constraint
and towards that of cooperation.
It would seem to be to this general process and to its
consequences in regard to the idea of retribution that we
must, in the last resort, look for an explanation of the
progressive disappearance of " immanent justice ".
262 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
4. RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE.
In the last three sections of this chapter we have been
led to the conclusion that the importance of expiatory
punishment seems to decrease as the child grows older
and to the extent that adult constraint is replaced by
cooperation. The time has now come for us to approach
the study of the positive effects of cuoperation in the
domain of justice, and to do this we shall first have to
analyse the conflicts that may take place between dis-
tributive or equalitarian justice and retributive justice.
For it is easy, as we shall try to show, to assume that
equalitarian ideas acquire their force from cooperation and
thus constitute a form of justice which, while it does not
contradict the more evolved forms of retributive justice
(punishment by reciprocity is due to the progress of just
such ideas), is yet opposed to the primitive forms of
punishment, and even ends by giving the preference to
equality whenever the latter is in conflict with retribution.
And such conflicts are very frequent in the life of the
child. It often happens that parents or teachers favour
the obedient child at the expense of the others. Such
inequality of treatment, which is fair from the retributive
point of view, is unjust distributively. How, then, will the
child judge it at the different ages he traverses ? To this
end, we told our subjects three stories, asking each time
whether or not it was fair to favour the well-behaved
child. The difficulty of the interrogatory lies in the fact
that two questions necessarily interfere with each other
in such cases that of the severity of the adult (a question
of degree) and that of the conflict between retribution and
equality (a question of principle). The second alone is of
any interest, but it is difficult to eliminate the first. We
limited ourselves to varying the stories in the following
manner. The first mentions no special fault and es-
tablishes the conflict between retributive and distributive
justice in the abstract; the second introduces only
negligible faults and minor punishments; the third,
finally, brings in a punishment which may strike the child
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 263
as very severe. In spite of variations (which are marked
of course by deviations in the average ages of the corre-
sponding types of answer), the children's -reactions evolve
according to a relatively constant law. With the little
ones punishment outweighs equality, whereas with the
older ones the opposite is the case.
Here is the first story. " A mother had two little girls,
one obedient, the other disobedient. The mother liked the
obedient one best and gave her the biggest piece of cake.
What do you think of that ? " According to Mile Ram~
bert's statistics 70% of the children of 6 to 9 approve of
the mother, and only 40% of those from 10 to 13. These
figures are of value, of course, only as a general indication.
Here are some examples of children who put retributive
justice above equality.
BAR (6) : " It was fair. The other one was disobedient.
But was it fair to give more to one than to the other ?
Yes. She [the disobedient one] must always do what she is
told."
WAL (7) : " They both ought to have been given the same
[if they were good]. And the naughty ought to have been
given nothing. She just ought to have been good. 11
Gis (7!) : " The mother was quite right ? Yes, because
you must always obey your mother. Was it fair to give one
of them more than the other ? Yes, otherwise she would
be more and more disobedient, and the mother doesn't love us
very much. She likes better those who do what she tells
them: 1
BE (7:9): " It was right. Was it fair ? Yes, so as to
show the other one how she would love her if she obeyed so
that she should become obedient."
VER (8) : " She was right to reward the one who does what
she is told. Was it fair ? Yes. If they had both been
obedient she would have given them both the big piece."
GRA (9 ; 4) : " It was fair. Why ? Because she did
what she was told. The other one ought to be punished.
Was it fair that the mother should love one better than
the other ? Yes, because the other was disobedient"
HERB (9 ; 10) : "It was fair because the most obedient
ought to have the best things. When we are obedient, people
give us the best things."
264 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
PIT (9) : " It was fair, because those who are obedient
deserve more things than those who are disobedient. Was it
fair that she should not love them both the same ? Yes. 9 '
BA (10 ; 5), a girl who is first in her class and whose
character is inclined to be what children call " goody-
good " (Fr. "petit saint "). " Was what the mother did
fair? SA^ was guile fair! [Shrugs her shoulders.]
\Vhy ? Because sfie rewarded the one who obeyed her."
DEA (n) : " The mother was quite right. Why ?
Because she was obedient. Tfo other hadn't the right to have
as much as the one who obeyed her"
Here, now, are examples of children who set equality
above retributive justice.
MON (6), G. : " Is it fair ?No. Why not IShe aught
to have given t^i both the^samt.~\Vhy ? . . .Was what
the mother did fair ? No."
Rj (7 ; 6) : " They ougJit both to be given some cake.
Why ? Because if they aren't, it isn't fair."
SCA (7 ; 6) repeats the story correctly and realizes that
the measure involved is a repressive one. But he affirms :
" It isn't fair. They should always have the pieces that are
the same. It's like' at home, when there is a piece of cake
that's bigger than the others I take it, and then my brother
snatches it away from me"
PA (8) : " Ttiey should be given the same amount." Pa
realizes that one 'of the girls has been given less than the
Bother " because she ougfti to have been good ", but he insists
there should be equality of treatment.
MER (9 ; 6), G. : " The (me -who was disobedient ought
to obey, but the mother ought still to give her the same a$
the other. Why ? Because you can't have people being
jealous. 19
PRES (10 ; o) : " The mother ought to have loved the other
one too and been kind to her, then perhaps she would have
become more obedient. Is it fair to give more to the
obedient one ? No."
THE (10 ; 7), G. : " She ought to Iiave given them both the
same amount. Why ? Because tJiey were her daughters,
she ought to Jiave loved them both the same.'*
SON (10 ; 7) : " // she gives more to the nicest one, it will
make the other one worse. But wasn't it fair to give more
to the most obedient one ? No. Why ? She shouldn't
have been giving her everything just because she was nice."
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 265
JAX (n) : " The mother was wrong. Why ? She ought
to have given them each a piece of cake of the same size.
Perhaps it was not her fault if she was disobedient. Perhaps
it was her parents' fault. No. It was her fault. Still, she
ought to have had the same piece of cake! 9
Dis (n), G. : " She ought to have given them both the
same. Why ? Because she will only get naughtier and
naughtier. She'll be revenged against her sister. Why will
she be revenged ? Because she'll only get a small piece of
cake. Was it fair, what the mother did ? No, it wasn't
fair: 9
ERI (12 ; 5) : " She ought to love them both the' same,
without any difference between them. She may love the
obedient one best, but without showing it so as not to make
anyone jealous."
HOL (12 ; 5), G. : " Even though the other one was not
obedient, she shouldn't have made any difference between the
two. She should have punished her in another way. Why
should there be no difference ? Children should be loved
the same. Sometimes the other one is jealous."
MAG (12 ; n), G. : " It wasn't fair. Perhaps it wasn't
altogether the fault of the disobedient one. She ought to have
been taught, and not only loved less. Otherwise, she'll grow
more and more naughty"
DEJ (13 ; 2) : " It wasn't fair. On the contrary, the
mother ought to have been just the same with the other one.
Then perhaps she would have behaved better. Perhaps [in
this way] she was jealous and sillier than ever. Whatever
your children are like, you must love them all the same"
PORT (13 ; 10), G. : " It wasn't fair. The other one saw
that she wasn't loved. She didn't take any trouble to im-
prove"
The two types of answer stand out in clear contrast to
one another. For the little ones, the necessity for punish-
ment is so strong, that the question of equality does not
even arise. For the older children, distributive justice
outweighs retribution, even after consideration of all the
relevant data. It is true that both types of answer are to
be found at every age, though in varying proportions ;
but it is only natural, given the multitude of possible
influences, that on so delicate a point as this the moral
judgment should evolve with less regularity than it does
266 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
when occupied with simpler and more objective orders of
ethical fact. In homes where punishment is meted out in
large quantities and where rules are rigid and weigh
heavily on the children, these, if they are not secretly
rebellious, will continue for a long time to believe in the
superiority of punishment over equality of treatment. In
a large family where moral education depends more upon
the contagion of example than upon constant parental
supervision, the idea of equality will be able to develop
much earlier. Thus there can be no question of clear-cut
stages in moral psychology. All the more significant,
therefore, is the evolution which we noted as taking place
between the ages of 6 and 13, and of which the age of 9
would seem to be the turning-point. For the difference
between 70% and 40% is a remarkable one, especially if
it be borne in mind that after 12-13 preference is given to
punishment in only 25% of the cases examined.
Before turning to the examination of the other two
stories and trying to draw a lesson from them, let us pause
once more to see how different is the attitude of children
who set a premium on retribution from that of children
who demand complete equality. The first do not attempt
to understand the psychological context ; deeds and
punishments are for them simply so much material to be
brought into some sort of balance, and this kind of moral
mechanics, this materialism of retributive justice, so
closely akin to the moral realism we studied before, makes
them insensible to the human side of the problem.
Whereas most of the answers we have quoted as examples
of the predominance of equalitarian tendencies show signs
of a singularly delicate moral sense the mother's prefer-
ence for the obedient child will discourage the other, will
make it jealous, lead it to revolt, and 'so on. All the very
sound remarks made by Pres, by Son, and by Eri are
sufficient to show that the child is no longer preaching a
little sermon, as do the upholders of punishment, but is
simply trying to understand the situation, though natur-
ally under the influence of what he has experienced or
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 267
observed in Ms own life. It is in this sense, once again,
that we can mark the contrast between cooperation, the
source of mutual understanding, and constraint, the source
of moral verbalism. Jax even goes so far as to think that
children are not always disobedient through their own
fault, but sometimes through that of their parents. The
psychologist can only admire this expression of a point of
view which the average adult still seems so little capable
of adopting. In short, then, we may take it that children
who put retributive justice above distributive are those
who adopt the point of view of adult constraint, while
those who put equality of treatment above punishment
are those who, in their relations with other children, or
more rarely, in the relations of mutual respect between
themselves and adults, have learnt better to understand
psychological situations and to judge according to norms
of a new moral type.
It may be noted in passing how completely the results
of this interrogatory confirm our findings in Section i
concerning children's views on the utility of punishment.
According to many of the older subjects questioned, it was
the child to whom the results of his actions had been
explained who was least exposed to a moral relapse, and
not the child who had been severely punished. Similarly,
in the present question, systematic punishment appears
harmful to all those of the subjects whose psychological
insight has become sharpened in the course of family and
social life.
We now come to the second story. Its object is to
facilitate the analysis of the same problem, but in con-
nection with trivial deeds devoid of any moral importance.
" One afternoon, on a holiday, a mother had taken her
v children for a walk along the Rhdne. At four o'clock she
gave each of them a roll. They all began to eat their rolls
except the youngest, who was careless and let his fall into
the water. What will the mother do ? Will she give him
another one ? What will the older ones say ? " The
answers may be of three types. Not to give him another
268 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
roll (punishment) ; to give him another, so that everyone
should have one (equality), or to give him another because
he is small (equity, i.e. equality allowing for the circum-
stances of each, in this particular case the differences of
age). Mile Rambert obtained the following figures from
the 167 children she questioned :
PUNISHMENT.
EQUALITY.
EQUITY.
48%
35%
17%
3%
55%
42%
o%
5%
95%
Age 10-12 .
Age 13-14
We ourselves presented some other children with a
variant of the same story framed so as to eliminate the
factor of equity introduced by the difference of age. " A
mother is on the lake in a little boat with her children.
At four o'clock she gives them each a roll. One of the
boys starts playing the fool at the end of the boat. He
leans right over the boat and lets his roll fall in. What
should be done to him ? Should he have nothing to eat,
or should they each have given him a little piece of
theirs ? " The figures here are from 6-8 years old, 57%
for the punishment and 43% for equality ; and 25% for
punishment as against 75% for equality between the
years of 9 and 12.
Here are examples of answers favouring punishment.
VA (6 J) : " He mustn't be given any more, because he lei it
fall in. What does the older brother say IHe wasn't
pleased, because the little one had let his roll fall into the
water. He said it was naughty. Would it have been fair to
give him any more ? No. He shouldn't have let his drop**
MON (6J), G. : "He mustn't be given any more. Why
not ? Because the mother isn't pleased. And what would
his elder sister have said ? That he should be given another
roll" (Cf. the opposition between solidarity and retri-
bution !)
PAIL (7) : " He shouldn't be given another. He didn't
need to let it drop. And what would the older ones have
said if the little boy had been given another roll ? That it
wasn't fair : ' He's let it drop into the water and you go
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 269
and give Mm another one.' Was It right to give him
another one ? No. He hadn't been good"
DED (8) : ** She mustn't be given another one because she
let it drop. What did the mother do ? She was going to
scold her. What did her elder sisters think ? That it was
quite fair became she had not been careful.'*
WY (9) : " Mustn't give her any more. Why ? As a
punishment. 33
The answers favouring punishment in connection with
the story of the boat are naturally of the same type.
Here, however, are two other examples, which will show
to what extent, in the case of those who put retribution
before equality, the criterion remains heteronomous and
dependent upon the will of the parents.
SCHMA (7) : " He didn't need to go and play the fool at the
end of the boat. It would teach him for another time. Then
what should have been done ? Not to go shares. And if
the mother said they were to go shares ? Then they must
do as she tells them. But was it fair, or^ not ? Fair,
because you have to do what your mother says.'*
JUN (9) : " They shouldn't go shares because it was his
fault. His brothers decided to go shares. Was that fair ?
I don't know. Was it nice of them ? Yes, nice. Fair
and nice ? M ore nice than fair. The mother tells them
to go shares. Is it fair ? Yes, then it is fair"
And here are cases of children for whom equality out-
weighs the necessity for punishment. As a matter of fact,
there are already to be found in the preceding group
subjects who appealed to equality. The careless child
must be punished, otherwise he will get two rolls, which is
contrary to equality. But the preoccupation here is only
derivative and attaches itself only to the punishment,
whereas the following children are actuated primarily by a
search for equality which they set above any sort of
punishment.
SCA (7) : " The little boy should be given another one
because he is hungry. And what do the others say IHe
must be given some bread because the big ones have some, so
he ought to have some [too] ."
Zi (8) : " He ought to be given some more, because htUe
children are not very clever ; they don't know what they are
270 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
doing. Was It fair to the older one or not ? It isn't fair
that tHe older one should have his roll, and not the little one.
The older one ought to have gone shares.' 3
PER (n) : " He ought to be given some more, because it
wasn't his fault that he let it drop, and it isn't fair that he
should have less than the others!'
XA (12) : " He ought to have been given a little back by
taking away from the roll what the child had already eaten.
And what did the others say ? If they were nice, they said,
* He is getting as much more as we have *. If they were horrid,
* Serve him right ! * " (Fr. " Tant pis pour lui J").
MEL (13), G. : " They should have divided up what the
other children had left and given some to the little chap. Was
it fair to give him any more ? Yes, but the child ought to
have been more careful. What does ' fair ' mean ? It
means equality among everyone."
Here are a few more answers obtained from the story
about the boat. This story differs from the preceding one
in that the fault is more clearly marked in the child who
loses his roll, and in that the child is not represented as
the youngest. There should therefore be all the more
chance of punishment winning as against equality. Yet
the reactions are the same as in the previous case, and the
need for equality is even, after the age of 7-8, set up in
opposition to the punishment demanded by the adult.
WAL (7) : " They ought to have gone shares. But the
mother said, ' No. It serves him right. He played the
fool. You mustn't go shares with him/ Was that fair ?
It wasn't fair because he would have less than the others.
And when people play the fool, isn't it fair that they
should have less than the others ? . . . If you were the
father what would you say ? That he should be given
some more."
ZEA (8) : " They ought to have gone shares with him.
Was it more fair or only nice of them to share ? More
fair. But the mother said, 'No, -it's his own fault'.
Well, I would have gone shares. Even if the mother said
no ? Yes, you ought to share."
ROB (9) : " He ought to be given some more. But he
played the fool. They ought to share. What had he
done ? He was playing. Sometimes you lose pennies that
way. That's a lot worse ! But the mother had said they
were not to lean over the edge. What ought she to have
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 271
said, that lie should have some more, or not ? That they
ought not to go shares. And what would the other boys have
said ? That they ought to share, because it wasn't fair"
SCHMO (no): " They ought each to have given him a
little piece. Would that have been fairer or only nicer ?
It was nicer, and fairer too. And if the mother says they
mustn't share ? They should obey but it wasn't fair."
And now here are cases of children, who, though not
possessing the requisite vocabulary, make the legal dis-
tinction between equity and justice. According to these
children, from the point of view of pure justice, the boy
who drops his roll should be given nothing more, because
he has had his share along with the others, and if he loses
what is his, that concerns himself alone. But in addition
to considerations of pure justice, the circumstances of the
individual must be taken into account. The child is small,
clumsy, and so on ; thus a kind of superior equality
requkes that he should be given some more. This more
subtle attitude is naturally only to be met in the children
of 9 to 12. Before this, the child already has these
feelings, but does not succeed in distinguishing them from
those of justice pure and simple. Here are examples.
DEP (9), G. : " He must be given some more. What did
the older ones say ? It's not fair. You've given two to the
kid and only one to us. And what would the mother have
answered ? She's the youngest. You've got to be sensible."
BRA (9) : " He shouldn't have let it drop. He mustn't
have another one. But it would be more fair all the same
that he should have some more, that they should give him
another. Would it be more fair, or only just more kind ?
More kind, because he didn't need to go and let it drop
into the water!'
CAMP (n), G. : "The little boy ought to have taken care.
But then he was a little boy, so they might give him a little
piece more. What did the others say ? They were jealous
and said that they ought to be given a little piece more too.
But the little one deserved to be given a little piece more. The
older ones ought to have understood. Do you think it was
fair to give him some more ? . . . Of course ! It was a
shame for the little one. When you are little you don't
understand what you are doing."
272 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Now for our tMrd story. We can put the matter briefly.
The answers obtained entirely confirm t&ose given up to now.
But as the punishment in this case is particularly severe,
the feeling of equality is sooner in gaining the ascendant
over the need for retribution. " There was once a family
with a lot of boys. They all had holes in their shoes, so
one day their father told them to take their shoes to the
shoemaker to be mended. Only, as one of the brothers
had been disobedient several days before, the father said,
' You won't go to the shoemaker. You can keep your
holes since you have been disobedient/ " The children of
6 to 7 were divided into 50% for equality, 50% for punish*
ment. But after the age of 8, nearly nine-tenths are in
favour of equality of treatment.
Here are two examples of children who approve of such
a punishment.
NEU (7) : " What do you think about it ? It is fair.
? Because he had disobeyed"
FAL (7) : " It is fair. Why ? Because he was naughty.
Is it fair or not that he should not have fresh soles to
his shoes ? It is fair. If you were the father, would you
take his shoes to be mended or not? / wouldn't take
them/'
And a few examples of subjects who prize equality.
ROB {9) : " It wasn't fair. The father had told them that
they were all to be done"
WALT (10) : " It wasn't fair. Why ? Because one boy
would have a good pair of shoes and the other would have wet
fed. But he had been disobedient. . . . What do you
"think about it ? That it was not fair"
Nus (10) : " It isn't fair . What should the father have
done ? Punish him in some other way."
Thus, whatever may be the variations in our stories, the
answers are always the same. In case of conflict between
retributive and distributive justice, the little ones always
favour punishment, and the older ones equality of treat-
ment. The result is the same whether we are dealing with
definitely expiatory punishments, as in Stories I and III,
or with a punishment that is the consequence of the act.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 273
as in Story II. We may note, moreover, without as yet try-
ing to interpret it, the fact that here, as in the .case of moral
realism, the child's reactions to the interrogatory i.e. Ms
theoretical reflections are always a year or two behind
his life reactions, that is to say, Ms effective moral feelings.
A child of 7, say, who regards as just the punishments dealt
with in our stories, would certainly feel their injustice if
they were inflicted on him or on Ms friends. The interro-
gatory therefore inevitably distorts the moral judgment.
But here, as before, the question is to know whether the
products of the interrogatory simply lag behind those of
life or whether they do not correspond to anything that
has ever been really experienced. As in the case of moral
realism, we believe that it is chiefly a matter of lagging
beMnd, and that our results do correspond to what can be
observed in real life, though separated from this by a
time-lag. Broadly speaking, then, we may say that if
punishment holds the day during the early years, it
gradually makes way for equality during the course of
mental development.
What is at the back of such an evolution ? It is obvious
that equality will prevail over punishment by reciprocity,
since the latter is derived from it. As to expiatory punish-
ment we have notMng new to say on the subject. It is
impossible to see how such a notion could have come into
being except under the influence of adult constraint. There
is nothing in the idea of right and wrong that implies reward
or punishment. In other words, it is only because of ex-
ternal associations that the altruistic or egoistic sentiments
are bound up with expectation of rewards or punishments.
And if this is so, whence can these associations arise if
not from the fact that from its tenderest years the cMld's
behaviour is submitted to the sanctions of adults ?
But, tMs being so, how are we to account for the fact
that retributive justice, wMch in all cases of conflict with
distributive justice carries the day during the early years,
should diminish in importance with the increase of years ?
It can hardly be maintained that the fear of punishments
s
274 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
is less strong at ten than it is at six. On the contrary,
from the age of seven to eight onwards school punishments
are added to those already incurred in the family, and
even if punishments are less frequent at this age than at
four or five, they have, on the other hand, a certain
gravity which renders them the more apt to impress the
youthful mind. So that the feeling of retributive justice
ought really to increase with the years, and should be
sufficiently strong to hold in check the desire for equality
wherever this shows itself. Why is this not so ?
Evidently because of the intervention of a new factor.
The desire for equality, far from assuming an identical
form at every age, seems, on the contrary, to grow more
acute as the child's moral development proceeds. Two
solutions are conceivable. It may be that equalitarianism,
like retributive justice, is the fruit of the child's respect
for the adult. Some parents are extremely scrupulous in
matters of justice and instil in their children a keen sense
of equality. Thus distributive justice may perhaps be
merely a second aspect of adult constraint. But it may
also be the case that, far from being the direct result of
parental or scholastic pressure, the idea of equality de-
velops essentially through children's reactions to each
other and sometimes even at the adult's expense. It is
very often the injustice one has had to endure that makes
one take cognizance of the laws of equality. In any case
it is hard to see how such a notion could take on any
reality for a child before he had come in contact with his
equals either in the home or at school. The relation
between child and adult as such does not allow for
equality. And since equalitarianism is born of the contact
of children with one another, its development must at
least keep pace with the progress of cooperation between
them.
We cannot as yet make our choice between these two
hypotheses, for the analyses that will follow are essentially
designed to facilitate this decision. But the facts we have
presented already speak in favour of the second solution.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 275
For we have noticed that the champions of retributive
justice are not generally those endowed with most psycho-
logical penetration. They are apologists rather than
moralists or psychologists. The votaries of equality, on
the contrary, have given proof of a delicate sense of moral
distinctions. And this feeling of theirs seems very often
to be the product of reflections made on the moral clumsi-
ness of the adult. In any case it is remarkable with what
force these children contrast the cause of justice with the
decrees of authority. But all this is only an impression,
and we must now pursue our analysis of distributive
justice and equality among children.
5. EQUALITY AND AUTHORITY. The first point to be
settled in an enquiry of this kind is the form in which the
possible conflicts between the sense of justice and adult
authority present themselves and the relation in which
they stand to the subject's age. If we appeal to our
memories of childhood, we very often find as examples of
injustices (apart, naturally, from cases of unmotivated
punishments) inequalities of treatment on the part of our
parents. For it is very difficult, when one is dividing a
piece of work among a few children, or expressing one's
affection or one's interest to each, to maintain a strict
impartiality and to avoid hurting the feelings of the
more sensitive. It happens particularly often that chil-
dren experience, either continuously or in bouts, those
" feelings of inferiority " on which Adler has laid so much
stress, and which make the best of them jealous, in spite
of themselves, of their brothers and sisters. The least
mistake in the treatment of such sensitive children will
keep alive in them a vague impression of injustice, with
or without foundation. What, then, is going to happen
when children are told in the crude schematic form that is
indispensable to an interrogatory addressed to all, stories
which pit the desire for equality against the fact of
authority ? Will the subjects who are examined put the
adult in the right, out of respect for authority (justice
276 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
being in this case confused with the Law, even if the latter
is unjust), or will they defend equality out of respect for
an inner ideal, even if the latter is in opposition with
obedience ? As might have been expected from the pre-
ceding results we found a predominance of the first solution
among the little ones, and as the age of the subjects
increased, a definite progression in the direction of the
second.
We made use of the four following stories :
Story I. Once there was a camp of Boy Scouts (or Girl
Guides). Each one had to do his bit to help with the work
and leave things tidy. One had to do the shopping,
another washed up, another brought in wood or swept the
floor. One day there was no bread and the one who did
the shopping had already gone. So the Scoutmaster
asked one of the Scouts who had already done his job to
go and fetch the bread. What did he do ?
Story II. One Thursday afternoon, a mother asked her
little girl and boy to help her about the house, because
she was tired. The girl was to dry the plates and the boy
was to fetch in some wood. But the little boy (or girl)
went and played in the street. So the mother asked the
other one to do all the work. What did he say ?
Story III. Once there was a family with three brothers,
one older one and two who were twins. 1 They all used to
black their boots every morning. One day the big one
was ill. So the mother asked one of the others to black
his boots as well as his own. What do you think of that ?
Story IV. A father had two boys. One of them always
grumbled when he was sent messages. The other one
didn't like being sent either, but he always went without
saying a word. So the father used to send the boy who
didn't grumble on messages oftener than the other one.
What do you think of that ?
Although we attach no magical value to figures, it may
be of interest to mention here those obtained by Mile Ram-
bert on some 150 children of 6 to 12 from Geneva and the
Canton of Vaud by means of Stories I and II. The
regularity of these results shows that we have at any rate
to do with a form of evolution that proceeds as a function
1 This detail is added so as to eliminate the question of age which
several subjects spontaneously introduced.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 277
of age. The little ones incline to authority and even think
the command given to the child quite just (not only
should one obey, but the action commanded is just in
itself, in so far as it conforms with the order given),
whereas the older children incline to equality and think
the order described in the story unjust.
STORY I STORY II
Age Obedience Equality Obedience Equality
o/ o/ o/ o/
/o /o % %
6 . . 95 5 89 ii
7 * 55 45 41-2 58-8
8 . . 33-3 66-6 22-2 77-8
9 16-6 83-4 o 100
10 . . 10 90 5 -9 94*i
11 . . 5 95 o 100
12 . * O IOO IOO
For our part, we found at Neuch&tel, by means of
Stories III and IV, that about 75% of the children of 5
to 7 defend obedience, and that about 80% of the subjects
between 8 and 12 defend equality. But let us leave these
figures and turn to the qualitative analysis which is alone
of a nature to tell us what the child is trying to say and
whether he knows what he is thinking about.
Four types of answers can be observed. First of all
there are the children who regard the adult's order as
"fair", and who thus do not distinguish what is just
from what is simply in conformity with the order received
or with the rule of obedience. Then there are the children
who think the order unjust, but who deem that the rule
of obedience comes before justice, so that it behoves us
to carry out the order without comment. Children of this
type can therefore distinguish justice from obedience, but
think it evident that the latter must prevail over the
former. In our statistics we have classed these two
groups as one, seeing that they are linked together by all
the intermediate cases. In the third place, there are the
children who think the order unjust, and put justice
above obedience. In the fourth place, finally, there are
278 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the children who also deem the order unfair, and do not
necessarily regard blind obedience as incumbent upon the
child in the story, but who think it better to be obliging
and submit rather than argue and rebel. In the statistics
we treated these two groups as one, owing to the autonomy
given to the sense of justice in both cases.
Here are examples of the first type, which naturally
finds no representatives except among the very little ones.
BAR (6J), G., Story I : " She ought to have gone to get the
tread. Why ? Because she had been told to. Was it fair
or not fair to have told her to go ? Yes, it was fair, because
she had been told to."
ZUR (6J), Story I : " He ought to have gone. Why ?
To obey. Was it fair, what he had been asked to do ?
Yes. It was his boss, his chief." Story II: "He should
have gone. Why ? Because his sister was disobedient. He
ought to be kind"
HEP (7), G., Story I : " Was it fair what she was asked
to do ? It was fair because she had to go. Even though
it was not her job ? Yes, she had been told to go." Story
II : " It was fair because her mother had told her to."
ZIG (8), Story II : "He ought to have done both things
because his brother wouldn't. Is it fair? It -is very fair.
He is doing a good deed." Zig seems not to know the
meaning of the word " fair ". But he has given us else-
where an unequal division as an example of unfairness.
In this Story II, therefore, what is just is identified with
what is in conformity with obedience.
JUN (9), Story III : " Was it fair IYes, I think so.
What did the second boy say ? You ought to give three
[boots] to one and three to the other. Very well then ?
But you must do as the mother said. But was it fair, or
was it because the mother said so ? It was fair ! "
The character of these cases is obvious. It would be an
exaggeration to say that the child of 6-7 has no idea of
justice. Several of the above subjects hesitate to say
outright that the orders given in the story were fair.
Only, what is just is not differentiated in their minds
from what is in conformity with authority, and it is only
in so far as there is no conflict with authority that the
idea of equality intervenes. So that with the little ones
it goes without saying that an order received, even if it is
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 279
contrary to equality, is still just, since it emanates from
the adult. Justice is what is law. With the older of the
children quoted above, this no longer goes without saying,
but they decide that it must be so.
Facts such as these lend confirmation to M. Bovet's I
extremely interesting theory, according to which the child
begins by attributing moral perfection to his parents and
does not till the age of about 5-7 discover or face the fact
of their possible imperfections. We shall return to this
point. For the moment, the only question is whether
such a systematic respect for the adult on the part of the
child is of a nature to develop or to thwart the formation
of equalitarian justice. With regard to the last set of
answers examined, the hypothesis may be advanced that
unilateral respect, which is of neutral content in relation
to distributive justice parents can use the respect con-
ferred upon them equally to uphold the example of justice
and to impose a rale that is contrary to justice, such as
the right of primogeniture that unilateral respect, then,
does, by the very nature of its mechanism, constitute an
obstacle to the free development of the sense of equality.
Not only is there no possible equality between adults and
children, but further, reciprocity between children cannot
be produced to order. If it is imposed from without it
leads only to a calculation of interests or remains subordin-
ated to ideas of authority and external rales which are its
very negation. According to the subjects whose answers
we quoted above, what has been imposed is what seems
just. It will be agreed that this is the very opposite of
that autonomy required by the development of justice :
justice has no meaning except as something that is above
authority.
We shall now give examples from the second group of
answers. The child always extols perfect obedience, but
without complete inner acquiescence : authority still pre-
vails over justice, but the two are no longer confused with
one another.
1 Bovet, op. df., The Child's Religion.
280 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
CHRI (6), Story I: " Is it fair ? No, the girl does more.
She'll be jealous. Did she go or not ? She went. Did she
think it fair ? No, she'll say, ' It wasn't me was to go and
fetch the bread '. Why did she go ? Because the chief
wanted her to."
DED (7), G., Story II : " She ought to have gone because
her mother told her to. Was it fair ? No, because the other
one ought to have gone."
TRU (8 ; 7), Story II : " She ought only to have done one
[one job]. Why ? It isn't fair if the boy didn't go [to
fetch the wood]. But he didn't go, and so ? She ought to
have done it att the same. Why ? To be obedient."
HERB (9), G., Story II : " She ought to have gone at once.
Why ? Because when you're asked to t you must go at
once. Was it fair ? No, it wasn't her turn. Why did she
go ? To do as she was told."
Nuss (10), Story III ; " He ought to have done it, but it
wasn't fair."
WAL (10), Story III : " They should have blacked three
shoes each. But the mother said one boy was to black
two and the other four. Is that fair ? Not fair. The
mother went out. What did the boys do as she had told
them, or three boots each ? Three each. Was that right ?
It would have been better to have done as the mother said.
Was it fair? As [=what] the mother said, it wasn't
fair."
REN (n), Story II : " He did it. Why ? You must
obey. Was it fair ? No, not very."
Thus these children, while they uphold the supremacy
of obedience, distinguish between what is just and what is
imposed by authority. Here are examples of the third
group, of those, that is to say, who set justice above
submission.
WAL (7J), Story II : " She shouldn't have gone because it
wasn't her job. Why should she not have gone ? Because
it was not her job. Was what the mother asked her to do
fair ? Oh no. She shouldn't have gone. She should have
done her work and the boy his. And if the mother asked
her to ? . . . She would go. Why ? Because . . . she
would have to." Thus Wai gives material constraint its
due, but does not recognize any inner obligation.
LAN (7 ; 6), Story I : " He shouldn't have done it because
it wasn't his job. Was it fair or not to ask him to do it ?
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 281
Not fair" Story II : " He ought not to have done it
because the girl had gone away and it wasn't fair.''
PAI (8), Story I : "He said no, because it wasn't his job"
DOL (8), Story III : " It wasn't fair. They should each
have been given one boot. But the mother had said they
must. The other one should have been given a boot. Ought
they to do as they were told, or divide things equally ?
They should have asked their mother." Story IV : " It's
not fair. The father should have asked the other one too.
But that is what the father had said, It's not fair.
What should the boy have done ? Gone the messages, or
not gone, or told the father to send the other boy ? He
should have done nothing. Not gone."
CLA (9 ; 8), G., Story II : " She ought to have done her
own work and not the other ones. Why not ? It wasn't
fair" Story I : " She oughtn't to have done it. It was not
her job to do it. Was it fair to do it ? No, it was not fair."
PER (10) : " He wouldn't go. He said the other one ought
to go"
FBI (ii), Story III : " He shouldn't do it. But the
mother said he must. The mother was wrong. It's not
fair."
SCHN (12), G., Story II : " She shouldn't have done it. If 3
not fair that she should work twice as hard and not the other.
What was to be done ? She should have said to her
mother, ' It's not fair. I ought not to do double the work V
For these children, unlike those of the second group,
equality outweighs everything not only obedience, but
even friendliness. The answers of the fourth type, on the
contrary, present the special feature, that while he
declares the order received to be unjust, the child thinks
it should be carried out for the sake of being agreeable and
helpful. Children of this group must not be confused with
those of the second. For subjects of the second type
consider that obedience comes before justice, whereas
those whose reactions we are now going to examine
recommend a voluntary mutual help which is superior
both to bare justice and to forced obedience. The differ-
ence is therefore considerable. On the one hand, justice is
subordinated to obedience, thus to a heteronomous prin-
ciple, on the other hand, justice itself is extended along a
282 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
purely autonomous line of development into the higher
form of reciprocity which we call " equity ", a relation
based not on mere equality but on the real situation in
which each individual may find himself. In this particular
case, if strict justice is opposed to obedience, equity
requires that the special relations of affection existing
between parent and child should be taken into account.
Thus a tedious job, even if it is unjust from the point of
view of equality, becomes legitimate as a free manifestation
of friendliness. Here are a few examples :
PER (n ; 9), Story I : " He went to fetch some. Was it
f a j r ? n wasn't fair, but it was obliging."
BALT (n ; 9), Story II : " She did it. What did she
think IThat her brother was not very nice.W&$ it fair
that she should do this ? It wasn't fair, but she did U to
help her mother." t(
CHAP (12 ; 8) answers with regard to Story I that he
thought his chief was a nuisance ", but in connection with
Story II he says : " It depends on whether he's a good boy.
If he is fond of his mother, he will do it ; otherwise he'll do
the same as his sister so as not to have to work any harder
than her."
FED (12 ; 5) himself makes the distinction which seems
to us to characterize the present type most clearly, and
this in connection with Story I : " He must go and fetch
the bread. What did he think IMy master orders me to;
I must help him. Was it fair ? Yes, it was fair because it
was from obedience. It wasn't quite fair if he was made to
go, but if he accepted to, it was fair." One could not fonnu-
late better the principle of autonomy which characterizes
the attitude we are speaking of : if you are forced to do
something against equality, it is unjust, but if _you accept
to do a service, you are doing something superior to strict
justice, and you are behaving with equity towards your
chief.
GIL (12), Story II ; " He wasn't pleased. Did he do it ?
_0h, yes. Was it fair ? No. Why did he do it ? To
please his mother."
FRI (12), G., Story II : " She might have refused. She
thought that her brother would go and have a good time and
that she would have to work. Was it fair or not to do it ?
Not fair. Would you have done it or not ? I would have
done it to please my mother."
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 283
A law of evolution emerges sufficiently clearly from aH
these answers. True, we cannot speak of stages properly
so called, because it is extremely doubtful whether every
child passes successively through the four attitudes we
have just described. It is greatly a question of the kind
of education the child has received. Thus the fourth
kind of reaction might appear very early if one were
willing to replace the absurd principle of blind obedience
(" You've got to do it, and there's an end of it ! ") by an
appeal to cooperation. A little girl of three of our ac-
quaintance used to accept every suggestion from her
mother, saying "I'll help you", where her pride would
have resisted any sort of constraint. In addition to which,
and in order to anticipate the inevitable objection, we repeat
what we have said before that results of an interrogatory
obviously come later in time than do those of real ex-
perience.
With these reservations, however, it seems to us possible
to distinguish three broad stages in the development of
distributive justice in relation to adult authority. (And
we shall see later on that the same holds good of the
relations between children.)
During the 'first stage, justice is not distinguished from
the authority of law : " just " is what is commanded by the
adult. It is naturally during this first stage that retribu-
tive justice, as we saw in the last section, proves stronger
than equality. This first stage might therefore be character-
ized by the absence of the idea of distributive justice,
since this notion implies a certain autonomy and a certain
degree of liberation from adult authority. But there may
well be something rather primitive in the relation of
reciprocity, and the germs of equalitarianism may be
present from the first in the relations that children have
to each other. Only, so long as the respect for the adult
predominates, that is to say, throughout the whole of
this first stage, these germs could not give rise to any
genuine manifestations except in so far as they created no
conflict with authority. Thus a child of two or three
284 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
years old will think it quite right that a cake should be
equally divided between him and another child, or that
he and a playmate should lend each other their toys. But
if he is told that he must give more to the other child, or
keep more for himself, he will promptly turn this into a
duty or a right. It is unlikely, on the contrary, that such
an attitude should survive for long in a normal child of
ten or twelve ; the sense of justice here is founded on an
autonomous feeling that is superior to any commands that
may be received.
During a second stage, equalitarianism grows in strength
and comes to outweigh any other consideration. In cases
of conflict, therefore, distributive justice is opposed to obedi-
ence, to punishment, and very often even to those more
subtle reasons that come to the fore in the third period.
Finally, during a third stage, mere equalitarianism
makes way for a more subtle conception of justice which
we may call " equity ", and which consists in never
defining equality without taking account of the way in
which each individual is situated. In the domain of
retributive justice, equity consists in determining what are
the attenuating circumstances, and we have seen that this
consideration enters very late into children's judgments.
In the domain of distributive justice, equity consists in
taking account of age, of previous services rendered, etc. ;
in short, in establishing shades of equality. We shall come
across fresh examples of this process in the course of the
next section.
Let us now turn to the analysis of more cases in which
respect for authority enters into conflict with the sense of
justice. It may happen not only that the child desires
equality with his own kind, but that in some circum-
stances he claims to be on a level with the adult himself.
Mile Rambert conceived in this connection the happy idea
of studying the situation to which the child is so often
submitted, namely that of being made to wait at the
counter of a shop while the grown-up customers are being
served. She asked her subjects : " Is it fair to keep
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 285
cMldren waiting in shops and to serve tie grown-ups
first ? " The reaction was very definite. Only the very
youngest of the subjects hesitated to say so, but the
majority even of the six-year-olds maintained with
astonishing precocity that each should be served in turn.
Here are two examples showing respect for adult
priority.
SAN (6|) : " Little children are not in such a hurry as
grown-ups. 9 '
PAI (7!) : " Whoever comes first is served first. Have
children as much right to be served as grown-ups ? No,
because they are smaller and don't quite know how to give
an order. Grown-up people have a lot to do and have to
hurry" Pai adds that he is looking forward to growing
up so as to " be able to give orders ".
And a few examples of those who demand exact
equality.
MART (9) : " They [the salesmen] ought not to keep
children waiting. Why not ? Because it's not fair to keep
them waiting. Grown-ups should always be served last [ = in
turn]. Why ? Because sometimes little children are just as
much in a hurry and it isn't fair [to keep them waiting],
Should they be served when their turn comes or before
the grown-up people ? When their turn comes."
DEP (9) : " It isn't fair. Everyone should be served in
turn."
BA (10) : " They ought to have served him [the child]
when his turn came. Why ? Because it isn't fair to serve
those who came afterwards."
PRE (10) : " Even if he was little he shouldn't have been
made to wait. He was shopping just as much as the grown-up
people"
It will be seen how definite is the desire for equality in
these answers and how vividly they reflect the experiences
of real life.
To conclude our examination of the various contacts
between authority and equality, let us try to analyse two
school situations where the same factors may come into
play : Why should one not cheat at school ? and : Should
286 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
one " tell " if it is in the adult's interest or if the adult
has commanded it ?
Cheating is a defensive reaction which our educational
systems seem to have wantonly called forth in the pupil.
Instead of taking into account the child's deeper psycho-
logical tendencies which urge him to work with others
emulation being in no way opposed to cooperation our
schools condemn the pupil to work in isolation and only
make use of emulation to set one individual against
another. This purely individualistic system of work,
excellent no doubt if the aim of education be to give good
marks and prepare the young for examinations, is nothing
but a handicap to the formation of reasonable beings and
good citizens. Taking the moral point of view only, one of
two things is bound to happen. Either competition proves
strongest, and each boy will try and curry favour with the
master, regardless of his toiling neighbour who then, if he
is defeated, resorts to cheating. Or else comradeship will
win the day and the pupils will combine in organized
cheating so as to offer a common resistance to scholastic
constraint. The second of these two defence mechanisms
appears chiefly in the older classes and, according to our
personal memories, between the ages of 12 and 17. We
hardly found a trace of it among the Elementary School
children whom we examined. 1 In the first system the
problem which arises is to know why cheating is reproved.
Is it because the master forbids it, or because it is contrary
to the equality between children ?
Here again, the result of our enquiry is very definite.
It shows a gradual diminution in the preoccupation with
1 This may be because such confessions are neither easy to make
nor to elicit. But as far as our personal recollections go, this cheating
in common, though unconfessed, never seemed to us a sin. For years,
as boys, we calmly did our home-work together and arranged to help
each other in class within the limits of possibility. Nor was this
clandestine work in common altogether useless, and we can recall
many things that were learned by discussing them with our comrades.
But of course this sort of thing diminishes individual effort to a great
extent, a disadvantage from which precisely the work in common that
is done in " Activity Schools " is free.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 287
authority and a correlative increase in the desire for
equality. This result is all the more remarkable, because
in this particular case authority and equality are not the
only possible solutions. For the answers to the question,
" Why must you not copy from your friend's book ? " can
be classed under three heads : i " It is forbidden ", " it
is naughty ", " it is deceit ", " a lie ", " you get pun-
ished ", etc. We group all these answers under one head
because, if the child's argumentation be analysed, the
ultimate reason always proves to be the adult's prohibi-
tion. It is naughty to cheat because it is deceiving, etc.,
and it is naughty to deceive because it is forbidden. 2 It
is contrary to equality (it does harm to the friend, it is
stealing from him, etc.). 3 It is useless (one learns
nothing, one always gets caught, etc.). This third sort
of answer is probably of adult origin : the child is merely
repeating the sermon that has been preached to him
when he has been caught cheating. It only appears after
the age of 10. The percentages are : 5% at 10, 4% at u,
and 25% at 12. Reasons in favour of authority are
invoked in the following proportions : 100% at 6 and 7,
80% at 8, 88% at 9, 68% at 10, 32% at n, and 15% at 12.
The decrease is therefore unmistakable. The great ma-
jority of the children simply say that cheating is forbidden.
Only a small minority assimilates it to lying. Finally,
equality is the reason defended by 16% of the children of
8 and 9 years old, 26% of those of 10, and 62% of those
of ii and 12. In the main, therefore, equality grows
stronger with age, whereas the importance of adult pro-
hibition decreases in proportion.
Here are examples of answers that appeal to authority.
MON (6i) : " Why must you not copy from your
neighbour ? The master rows us."
DEP (6J) : " Teacher punishes us/'
TH (6J) : " Because it is naughty"
MIR (6J) : " It's bad. You get punished: 1
The definition " It is deceit " is given only by 5% of the
children of 8 and 9 and by 10% of those of 10 to 12.
288 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
MART (9) : " He shouldn't haw copied from his neighbour.
He was being deceitful. Why must yon not copy ?
Because it is deceit"
Here are examples of children who appeal to equality.
TH (9 ; 7) : " You ought to try and find out your self. It
isn't fair they should both have the same marks. You ought
to find out by yourself ."
WILD (9 ; 4), G. : " If s stealing her work from her.
And if the master doesn't know ? It's naughty because of
the girl beside her. Why ? The girl beside her might have
got it right [got a good mark] and her place is taken away. 9 '
Finally, let us quote a child to whom cheating is some-
thing perfectly natural and in whose case the solidarity
between children is clearly stronger than the desire for
competition.
CAMP (n ; 10) : " What do you think about cheating ?
For those who can't learn they ought to be allowed to have
just a little look, but for those who can learn it isn't fair. A
child copied his friend's sum. Was it fair ? He ought not
to have copied. But if he was not clever it was more or less
all right for him to do it"
This last attitude seems to be rather the exception among
the children we examined. But no doubt many others
thought the same without having the courage to say so.
If the letter only be considered in the answers appealing
to equality, it might seem that competition was stronger
in children than solidarity. But this is so only in appear-
ance. In reality, equality grows with solidarity. This will
appear from the study of one more question which we
shall now analyse in order to obtain additional information
on the conflicts between adult authority and equality or
solidarity between children. We mean the question of
" telling tales ".
The contempt which every school child feels for tell-
tales or sneaks (Fr. " mouchards ", " cafards ") the
child's language is significant in itself and the spon-
taneous judgment which is pronounced upon them are
sufficient to show that this is a fundamental point in the
ethics of childhood. Is it right to break the solidarity
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 289
that holds between children in favour of adult authority ?
Any adult with a spark of generosity in him will answer
that it is not. But there are exceptions. There are
masters and parents so utterly devoid of pedagogic sense
as to encourage the child to tell tales. In such cases,
should one obey the adult or respect the law of solidarity ?
We put the question by laying the following story to the
charge of a father whom we removed to a great distance
both in time and space.
" Once, long ago, and in a place very far away from
here, there was a father who had two sons. One was very
good and obedient. The other was a good sort, but he
often did silly things. One day the father goes off on a
journey and says to the first son : ' You must watch
carefully to see what your brother does, and when I come
back you shall tell me/ The father goes away and the
brother goes and does something silly. When the father
comes back he asks the first boy to tell him everything.
What ought the boy to do ? "
Here, again, the result was perfectly clear. The great
majority of the little ones (nearly nine-tenths of those
between 6 and 7) are of opinion that the father should be
told everything. The majority of the older ones (over 8)
ttgink that nothing should be told, and some even go so
far as to prefer a lie to the betrayal of a brother.
Here are examples of the different attitudes adopted,
beginning with that of complete submission to authority.
WAL (6) : " What should he have said IThat he [the
other] had been naughty. Was it fair to say that, or not ?
Fair. I know a little boy in the same story who said
to his father : ' Look here, it's not my business what my
brother has done, ask him himself.' Was he right to say
this to his father ? Wasn't right. Why IHe ought to
have told. Have you got a brother ? Yes. Then we'll
pretend that you have made a blot in your copy-book at
school. Your brother comes home and says : ' I say,
Eric made a blot.' Was it right of him to say this ? He
was right. Do you know what a tell-tale is ? It's telling
what he [the other] has done. Is it telling tales if your
290 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
brother says that you made a blot ? Yes. And in my
story ? It's not telling tales. Why ? Because the father
had asked him"
SCHMO (6) : " He ought to say that he [the other one] was
naughty. He ought to say what the other one had done.
The father had told him to. The child answered his father :
' Ask my brother yourself, daddy, I don't want to say/
Was it nice of him to say that, or not ? Not nice, because
the father had asked him."
DESA (6) : " He ought to have told. His father had asked
him to. Should he have told, or not told ? He ought to
have told. If he answers, * It's not my business what my
brother does ', will that be all right ? He might have said
that. Is it best to say that or to tell what the brother
did ? Yes, it was better to tell what his brother did. Do
you know what a tell-tale is ? No."
SCHU (6) : " Should he have told, or not ? Yes, because
Ms father told him to tell what his brother had done. Should
he tell everything ? When they^ are very silly and naughty
(Fr. f des grandes vilaines manieres ') you must tell every-
thing. And when they are a little silly and naughty (Fr.
' des petites vilaines manures ') ? No, because it's not very
naughty. [This distinction anticipates the next stage !]
Is that telling tales ? No, if you're asked to tell, it isn't
idling tales. Might he have said, * Jean will tell you
himself ' ? No. Or else, ' You ask Jean. It is not my
business J ? No. Is it nice to tell tales about what your
brother has done ? Yes"
CONST (7), G. : " He ought to have told. The father had
asked him to. Do you know what telling tales is ? It's
telling things. Was it telling tales, or not ? It was telling
tales. Have you any sisters ? Yes, one. She is eleven.
Does she tell tales about what you do ? Yes. Tell me
about once when she did it. Who did she tell tales to ?
To mother. Tell me about it ? / didn't dare to go out.
And I did go all the same. Was it nice to tell tales about
that, or not ? Nice. Was she right to tell about it or
not ? She was right"
SCHMA (8) : " He ought to have told. Was it fair, or
not ? Fair. Once he said that it wasn't his business.
That was not fair, because his father had said he was to tell.
Was he telling tales ? Just then he ought to tell because his
father had asked him, but other times he ought not to tell
because he hadn't been asked."
IN (9) : " He ought to have told. I am going to tell you
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 291
three stories : In the first, the boy did tell ; in the second,
be told the father to ask Ms brother himself ; and in the
third, he said that his brother hadn't done anything.
Which was best ? The first. Why ? Because he told
what he [the brother] had done, as his father had asked him
to. Which way was the nicest ? The first. And the
fairest ? The first one too. Do you know what telling
tales is ? Telling what someone else has done. And here ?
He didn't tell tales, he did what he was told"
Here are cases of children who are opposed to telling
tales.
TEHU (10 ; 6) : " / wouldn't have told the father because
it was telling tales. I would have said, ' He's been good '.
But if it isn't true ? I would have said, ' He's been good '.
One child said, ' It's not my business. Ask him him-
self. 1 Was that right ? I can't say that, it's not my
business. I would have said he had been good"
LA (7$) : " What do you think about it ? I wouldn't
have told because the father would have spanked him. You
would have said nothing ? No. I'd have said he hadn't
done anything silly. And if the father asked you ? /
should say that he hadn't done anything silly."
FAL (8) : " Should he have told ? No, because that's
telling tales. But the father had asked him to. He
should have said nothing. Have said he'd been ni&* and
good. Was it better to say nothing, not to answer, or to
say that he'd been nice and good ? Say he'd been nice and
good."
BRA (9) : "It was rotten of him the one who went and told
tales. But the father had asked him to. What should he
have done ? Not told tales"
MCHA (10) : " He should have said that he hadn't done
anything. But the brother had played with his father's
bicycle and burst one of the tyres. The father wouldn't
be able to bicycle to his office the next day and would be
late. All the same he shouldn't have told. [Then after
some hesitation] He ought to tell so that he could put things
right at once. 9 '
Here, finally, are two examples of subjects who hesitate.
They are, as usual, the most illuminating, because they
reveal the nature of the contradictory motives at the back
of each of the two views of the matter.
292 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
ROB (9) : "I don't know. Should the boy have told ?
In a way it was fair, because the father had said so [asked
for it]. Then what should be done IHe might have told
the father a lie because [otherwise] it would have been telling
tales. But he was bound to tell Which was most of a
sport, the one who told what the brother had done, or the
one who told a lie IThe one who didn't tell tales. And
which would have been nicest ? The one who hadn't told
tales. Which would have been most fair ? The one who
told, because his father had said he must. 13
WA (10 ; 3) : " He was quite right, because his father had
told him to tett him [a pause, during which he hesitates].
Are you sure, or were you hesitating ? / was hesitating.
Why? Because I was thinking that he might also say
nothing, so that his brother shouldn't be punished. It's hard,
isn't it ? Yes. Then, which one do you think is the most
of a sport ? The one who said nothing. What would be
the best thing to do ? It would be best for him to say
nothing. What would he have said ? That he had been
good"
The mechanism of these judgments is clear. On the one
hand there is law and authority : since you are asked to
tell tales, it is fair to tell tales. On the other, there is the
solidarity between children : it s wrong to betray an
equal for the benefit of an adult, or at any rate it is
illegitimate to interfere in your neighbour's business. The
first attitude predominates among the younger children
and is related to all the manifestations of respect for the
adult which we studied before. The second prevails
among the older children for reasons which have also been
elucidated by all that has gone before. This second
attitude is sometimes so strong that it leads the subject
to justify lying as a means of defending a friend. 1 This
interrogatory shows, even better than our previous results,
the contrast of the two moralities that of authority and
that of equalitarian solidarity. The style of speech used
1 It should be noted in passing that this is a clear case of a lie being
evaluated as a function of the motive that inspires it. The children
who think it " sporting " (Fr. chic type) to tell a lie to protect a
brother told us very definitely that the same lie would be " naughty "
(Fr. vilain) if told in self-protection.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 293
by children in this connection is highly significant, and
one may say that the terms used by children to describe
behaviour in school are sufficient to differentiate the two
types of reaction. The expression that symbolizes the first
type most clearly is that of the "petit saint".' 1 The
" petit saint " (lit. little saint) is the boy who ignores his
playmates and only cultivates the master, who always
sides with the grown-ups against the children. It is the
well-behaved submissive pupil. This is how he is de-
scribed by some children of 10 to 12 years old : " It's a
chap who is always hanging on to his mother's skirts."
" It's a ttche-cul (a groveller)/' " it's a Itche-cuteur (idem)"
" a boy who tells tales," etc. The opposite of the " petit
saint " is the " chic type " or sport, one who on occasions
is up against the established order, but who is the incar-
nation of solidarity and equity between children : " It's a
fellow who will give aU he has to the others," " One who
does not tell tales/' " A boy who plays again with the
others when he has won everything at marbles/' " One
who is fair," etc.
This is a psychological work, and it is not for us to take
up a moral standpoint. And yet when it comes to fore-
telling character, it is perhaps worth while raising the
question as to which of these two the " petit saint " or
the " chic type " will develop into what is generally felt
to be the best type of man and of the citizen ? Given our
existing system of education, one may safely say that there
is every chance of the " chic type " remaining one all his
life and of the " petit saint " becoming a narrow-minded
moralist whose principles will always predominate over his
common humanity.
The conclusion to be drawn from the above facts would
therefore seem to be the following. Equalitarian justice
develops with age at the expense of submission to adult
authority, and in correlation with solidarity between
children. Equalitarianism would therefore seem to come
i English equivalents for these expressions will occur to the reader
" goody-good ", " pi ". etc. [Trans.]
294 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
from the habits of reciprocity peculiar to mutual respect
rather than from the mechanism of duties that is founded
upon unilateral respect.
6. JUSTICE BETWEEN CHILDREN. If the result of our
previous analyses is correct, the most favourable setting
for the development of the idea of distributive justice and
of the more advanced forms of retributive justice would
seem to be the social relations between contemporaries.
Expiatory punishment and the earlier forms of retributive
punishment would seem to be created by the relations
between children and adults. The time has now come for
us to undertake a direct verification of these hypotheses
by trying to see what is the child's conception of justice
between comrades. Two points have to be considered
punishment between children and equalitarianism.
It cannot be denied that there are elements of retribu-
tive justice in social life among children. The cheat is
sent to Coventry, the fighter gets back the blov/s that he
deals, etc. But the problem is to know whether these
punishments are of the same kind as those to which the
child is generally submitted by the adult. It seems to us
that they are not. Adult punishment gives rise in the
child's mind to ideas of expiation. A lie, or an act of
insubordination, for example, will mean being shut up, or
being deprived of a pleasure. To the child this punish-
ment is a sort of putting things right, which will re-
move the fault by placating authority. At any rate, the
punishment is regarded as " fair " only in so far as the
feeling for authority is present, together with remorse at
having offended this authority. This is why, as the years
go on and unilateral respect diminishes in strength, the
number of punishments approved of by the child also
grows sensibly less. As we saw at the beginning of this
chapter, punishment by reciprocity gradually supplants
expiatory punishment and in many cases even ends by
being considered useless and harmful. Punishments be-
tween children, on the contrary (except in the relations of
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 295
older to younger children as in games with rules), could
hardly rest on authority and consequently could not
appeal to the idea of expiation. And we shall see, as a
matter of fact, that they nearly all fall under what we
have called punishment " by reciprocity " and are con-
sidered " fair " in the measure that solidarity and the
desire for equality among children is on the increase.
It is possible to distinguish two (more or less arbitrary)
classes of punishments among children. The first belongs
essentially to games, and is applied when a player in-
fringes upon one of the rales or customs. The other
appears as chance determines, wherever the bad behaviour
of some calls forth the vengeance of others, and where
this vengeance is submitted to certain rules which render
it legitimate. Now we shall find that not one of this last
variety of punishment can be classified among expiatory
punishments. When a boy gives blow for blow, etc., he is
not seeking to chastise, but simply to show an exact
reciprocity. We shall see, moreover, that the ideal aimed at
is not to give more than one has received, but to mete out
its mathematical equivalent. As for collective punishments,
they are nearly all of the type " by reciprocity ", with one
or two exceptions which we must now examine more closely.
In the sphere of play, for example, we found only non-
expiatory punishments. The boy who cheats is excluded
from the game for a period of time proportionate to the
gravity of his offence. Marbles unlawfully won are
restored to their owner or distributed among the honest
players. Similarly, where things are exchanged, if the
strong takes advantage of the weak, he is brought to
order by others stronger than himself, made to restore
goods acquired by illicit bargains, and so on. In none
of all this is there expiatory punishment properly so
called, but only restitutive penalties, acts of exclusion
marking a breach in the bond of solidarity, and so on.
Only in cases of exceptional gravity, on the occasion of
those crimes which Durkheim characterizes as directed
against the " strong and definite feelings of the collective
296 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
consciousness '*, have we noted the appearance of expia-
tory punishment. For example, there is a certain board-
ing school in NeucMtel where the " cafards " (sneaks) are
ritually conducted " an jus " (to stew) ; which means
that after school the whole body waits for them and
leads them forcibly down to the edge of the lake, where
they are ducked in the cold water with all their clothes
on. But how is it that everyone regards this punishment
as legitimate? There is obviously in each child the
feeling of a moral authority presiding over executions of
this kind. But is the authority that of the particular
group taken at the moment when the event is happening ?
Do the children who at a given moment constitute a class
and are united by relations of reciprocity, do these chil-
dren, by the mere fact of being so grouped, succeed in
creating a collective consciousness, which will impose upon
each and sundry its sacred character and thus become the
equivalent of adult authority ? If this were the case the
distinction between cooperation and constraint would
become illusory : the union of a certain number of indi-
viduals living in reciprocity with each other would be
sufficient to produce the most rigid of constraints. But
things are not so simple as this, and in the facts we are
discussing there is a factor of age and tradition which
makes the example in question comparable to those in
which pressure is brought to bear upon the child by the
adult. For putting an offender " to stew " is an ancient
and venerable custom, and the class which for the time
being is invested with the divine right of chastising the
criminal is fully conscious of carrying on a time-honoured
tradition. And it is our belief that because of this con-
straint exercised by tradition the punishment seems just
and becomes an expiation. I remember very definitely
having been filled with two contradictory feelings when,
as a school-boy, I was a witness for the first time of one
of these sacred immersions. On the one hand, there was
the feeling of the barbarity of the punishment (it was
mid-winter), but on the other hand, there was the feeling
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 297
of admiration and almost of respect for the " elders " of
the class who could thus incarnate a part which we all
knew to have been played by leaders of the older classes
in similar circumstances. In short, the ducking of the
sneaks, which was at first simply an act of vengeance and
felt perhaps to be cruel by those who were not directly
interested, had become for me, by being ritualized and
transmitted from generation to generation, the expression
of a just expiation. This shows that in the rare cases
where punishments between children are truly expiatory,
a factor of authority, of unilateral respect, of the con-
straint of one generation upon the other has been intro-
duced. Wherever this factor plays no part, punishments
between children are and remain merely punishments " by
reciprocity ".
We now come to " private " punishments. Private
punishment is, at its origin, revenge rendering evil for evil
as one renders good for good. But can this vengeance be
submitted to rules and to this extent appear legitimate ?
We shall see that this is the case, and that this pro-
gressive legitimacy is in direct ratio to the growth of
equality and reciprocity among children.
Mile Rambert put the two following questions to the
167 children whom she interviewed : (I) " There was a
big boy in a school once who was beating a smaller boy.
The little one couldn't hit back because he wasn't strong
enough. So one day during the recreation he hid the big
boy's apple and roll in an old cupboard. What do you
think of that ? " (II) " If anyone punches you, what do
you do ? "
The statistics show very clearly that reciprocity grows
with age, and that in the same measure the punishment
seems just. With regard to the first story, two answers
are possible. " It was naughty ", or " The little one was
quite right to pay him back ". The second answer was
given in the following proportions :
Age 6 Age 7 Age 8 Age 9 Age 10 Age n Age 12
19% 33% 65% 72% 87% 91% 95%
298 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Here are examples of children who do not approve of
the little boy. Curiously enough, they are thus mostly
the little ones themselves.
SAV (6) : " He oughtn't to have done it because it is
naughty (Fr. mechant *). Why ? Because you get hungry,
and then you look and you can't find it again. Why did
the little chap take his roll ? Because the big one was
naughty (mechant). Should he have taken it or not ?
No, because it's naughty (m&hant)."
PRA (6) : " He shouldn't have done it because it was the
big boy's roll. Why did he do it ? Because the big boy
was always beating the little one. Should he have let him
beat him ? No. He ought to have defended himself. Not
given in. Gone away. Why shouldn't he have taken the
roll ? It's not fair to take things. You mustn't take
things."
MOR (6) : " He shouldn't have taken it. Why tIt's
naughty (mechant). Why did he do it ? The other one
beat him. Was it fair to take it ? Not fair. He ought to
have told the teacher."
BLI (6) : " He shouldn't have, because he was a thief.
What should he have done ? Tell his mother. Should he
have hit back ? No. His mother will scold him [the big
DED (7) : " He shouldn't have done it because it wasn't
nice of him. Why did he do it ? Because his brother was
always hitting him. What should he have done ? Let the
boy beat him and tell his mother. Not hit back."
Ric (7 ; 6) : " He shouldn't have, because it's dis-
obeying.''
TEA (8) : " He shouldn't have done it. Why ? After-
wards the other boy looked for it everywhere and had nothing
to eat. Why did he hide the roll ? Because the big one had
beaten him. Was it fair, then ? No. Why ? He should
have told the master."
MAR (9 ; 8) : "He shouldn't have done it. Why ?
Because it was stealing. But the other chap had beaten
him. He should have told the master. Is it fair to take a
revenge ? Yes . . . [hesitates] no."
PRES (10) : " Shouldn't have. Why ? Because he was
1 " Mfahant " which, for the sake of naturalness in the dialogue,
we have rendered as " naughty ", conveys a sense of wickedness or
violence which is not necessarily present in " vilain " [Trans.]
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 299
stealing. What should he have done ? He should have
complained"
JAC (n) : "He shouldn't have done it because the Ug boy
would have nothing to eat. Should he have let himself be
beaten? No. He should have taken his revenge. Told
someone to help him to take his revenge, but not take his
roll!'
TRIP ^ (12), G. : "He wanted to take a revenge, but he
shouldn't have. When people are unkind to us, we mustn't
pay them back, we must tell our parents "
It is easy to see what the attitude of these children is.
Most of the little ones and a few of the older ones think
that one should not take one's revenge, because there is a
more legitimate as well as a more efficacious way of
obtaining redress to call in the grown-up. With these
children it is a question either of a petty calculation or of
the predominance of the morality of authority over the
morality of the relations between children. Telling tales
(which constitutes an offence according to the latter code
of morality) does not matter in the least, the great thing
is to get fair treatment. For these children vengeance is
wrong, but it is so at bottom because it has been forbidden.
You must not render evil for evil, but you can have the
fellow who wronged you punished. In addition to this,
the little ones condemn the hero of the story because
stealing is wrong, whatever may be the motive of the
theft (moral realism). But with the older of the children
quoted just now what predominates is not this complete
submission or appeal made to adult justice it is the idea
that there is not sufficient correspondence between the
theft of the roll and the blows that have been received.
Thus Jac, who is typical of this attitude, tells us quite
clearly that the little boy ought to have returned the blows
or got an older boy to return them, but not to have taken
the roll. Justice, therefore, resides in reciprocity and not
in mere brutal revenge. One should give back exactly
what one has received, but not invent a sort of arbitrary
punishment whose content bears no relation to the
punishable act. These subjects are therefore not very far
300 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
from approving of the hero of the story. At any rate they
argue from the same reasons.
Here are examples of those who approve of the little boy.
MON (6J) : " He was quite right to have done it. Why ?
Because the big boy was always beating him. Was it fair
to hide his roll ? Yes. Was it right ? Yes."
AUD : " He was quite right. Why ? Because his
ldn't beat him. Was it fair to take his revenge ?
brother sh
. . . [Does not understand the word.] Was it naughty
to do what the little boy did ? Not naughty."
HEL (7^) : " He ought to have done it. Why? Because
the big boy was always teasing him. Was it fair to do it ?
Yes, it was fair. And was it right ?--. . . [Thinks it
over] Yes, it is right."
JAQ (7J), G. : " He was quite right. Why ? Because
the big boy was always beating him. Was it fair ? Yes."
But elsewhere Jaq answers : " Is it fair to be avenged ?
Oh, no" In her eyes, therefore, the little boy's behaviour
is not an act of vengeance but a punishment by reci-
procity.
WID (8 ; 9) : " He should have done it because the big boy
was always beating him. Was it fair ? Yes. Is it fair to
take your revenge ? You mustn't take your revenge"
CANT (9 ; 3) : " He should have done it. Why ? Be-
cause he had been beaten. Was it fair to do it ? Yes.
Was it right ? He shouldn't have hidden it. Why IHe
need only have taken his revenge. How ? He ought to have
kicked him."
AG (10) : " He was quite right because the big boy was
mean. Was it fair ? Yes, because big boys mustn't beat
the little ones:'
BACIN (n ; i), G. : "He was right to do it because he
couldn't defend himself. Was it fair to do what he did ?
Not very fair, because the big boy had been given the roll and
the apple and then couldn't eat them. What would make it
quite fair 1Hif him back: 1 Thus the little boy's theft is
tolerated failing the correct punishment which would
consist in giving back exactly what one had received.
COLL (12 ; 8) : " In a way it is fair because there is
nothing else he can do. In another way it is not fair to take
his brother's roll"
Thus we get one of two things. Either revenge is
giving back exactly what you have received, and then it
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 301
is fair (case of Cant), or else it is inventing in cold blood
something unpleasant that will hurt the person who has
hurt you and then it is unfair (case of Jaq, Wid, etc.).
But all the children are agreed upon one point in the
story : the little boy would have done best simply to give
back the blows he had received ; but given the impossi-
bility of such a procedure, he may be allowed to restore
the balance of things by hiding the big boy's lunch.
The second question should one hit back ? raises no
difficulties, and the answers it calls forth are extremely
simple. While they affirm in perfect good faith that one
must not take one's revenge (in the special sense of being
revenged in cold'blood) nor render evil for evil, the children
maintain with a conviction that grows with their years
that it is strictly fair to give back the blows one has
received. Mile Rambert obtained the following statistics,
taking girls and boys separately.
" It is Give back Give back Give back
naughty." the same. more. less.
% % %
(Girls . . 82 18
A eb \Boys . . 50 37 "5 *2'5
(G. ... 45 45 10
7 IB. . . . 27 27 46
JG. ... 25 42 8 25
lB. ... 45 22 33
JG. . . . 14 29 57
9 IB. . . . 29 57 14
fG. . , . 20 80
10 IB. ... 8 54 31 7
fG. ... - 33 - 67
XI IB. ... 31 3^ 38
/G. . . . 22 78
I2 \B. ... 67 10 23
This will show that in spite of inevitable irregularities
of detail there exists, in girls as well as in boys, a tendency
that increases with age to consider it legitimate to give
back the blows one has received. Whereas more than half
of the six-year-olds and a large proportion of those be-
tween 7 and 8 still think that " It is naughty ", this
302 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
answer almost completely disappears after the age of 9.
But while this evolution is common to boys and girls,
the former differ from the latter on the question of whether
one should give back more, or less, or exactly the same
as one has received. Boys, especially towards the age
of 7-8, are inclined to give more, the desire for equality
gaining the ascendent later towards 11-12. Girls, on
the contrary, as soon as they have ceased in the majority
of cases to think it " naughty " to hit back, are of opinion
that one should give back less than one has received.
Here, to begin with, are examples of those who think
it " naughty " to hit back.
JEA (6), G. : " If anyone hits you what do you do ? /
tell teacher. Why do you not hit back ? Because it
is naughty.' 9
SAV (6) : "What do you do? I tell my mother.
Do you hit back ? No, I'm afraid of being hurt. I go
an<i tell teacher, so she'll punish him. Why must the
teacher punish him? Because he's naughty (mdchant).
If he has been naughty (m&chant), is it fair to punch
him back again ? No, because that you would be [ = we
would be] naughty (mechant)."
BRA (6), G. : " What do you do ? I call my mother.
Do you hit back ? No. Why do you call your mother ?
Because he ought not to have given me a punch. Is it fair
to hit back ? It's not fair, it's naughty (mechant)."
Au (7 ; 9) : " I go and tell my daddy. And if he's not
there ? / tell teacher. And if she is not there, do you
hit back ? No. Why ? You get punished afterwards.
Is it fair not to hit back ? Yes. People love us after-
wards, and mummy and daddy are pleased."
CHA (8) : " / tell teacher. I don't hit back. It's naughty
(mechant) "
NEN (9 ; 7), G. : " I don't hit back at all. I want to
show her a good example. I am not horrid (mechant) to her."
Here are examples of those who give back as many
hits as they receive.
PRA (6|) : " / don't let them hit me. How many punches
do you give ? One for one. If he only gives me one, then
I only give him one back. If he gives me two, I give him
two. If he gives me three, I give him three. And ten ? I
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 303
give him that back too. Is it fair to hit back ? Yes, it is
fair. Why ? Because he had hit me too!'
SCA (7$) : " / hit him back. I don't want it [the punch
he gives me]. I give it to the other boy. Is that fair?
Yes. Oh, no. I was wrong. You must never hit back.
That's what my daddy said. But I'm like that. I won't let
people punch me and kick me.' 3 Thus Sea knows Ms lesson,
but he hits back all the same, and thinks it fair to do so.
HEL (7$) : " I give him back two if he has given me two,
six if he has given me six, four if he has given me four.
Is it fair to hit back ? Yes, it is quite right."
Die (8|), G. : "I defend myself. I hit back once for
each hit. Why not oftener ? Because the other one would
give me twice as much [and if I gave Mm back two for one,
he would give me four]. Is it fair ? Yes. Three for three.
You mustn't give in. You must defend yourself. Is that
right ? Not very" [Die knows that it is not allowed.]
(9 ; 7), G, : t( I hit her back again. How ma
^ many
hits do you give her ? As many as she has given me.
Why not more ? So that they should add up the same.
Is that right ? Yes."
Pi (10) : "I give back one, and according how hard it is
[the blow received], two. If you get five? Then I give
five back. Why not more ? It would have hurt him more."
ER (10 ; 2) had answered to question I that the little
boy ought not to have stolen the big boy's roll and apple :
" Why ? You mustn't take a revenge on people. Why ?
Because it isn't nice." But when we ask Mm what he
does when anyone gives him a punch, he answers, " /
give him one back. And if you get two punches ? / give
back two. You must never give more, otherwise the other
boy gives you another again. Is it fair to hit back ?
Yes. And to take a revenge ? Oh, no. To take a re-
venge is not the same as punching back."
HEN (n ; 2) : "I give him back a punch. If you are
given two punches ? / give back two. If you are given
three ? / give back three. W T hy not more ? Because I
don't want to be worse than he is. I give him back his own
hits. Is that fair ? No, because I ought to show myself
better than he. Is taking your revenge the same thing as
giving a punch ? It's not the same. To hit back is to give
a punch. To take your revenge is mean."
ELIS (ii), G. : " / hit back. Is it fair to do that ?
[She hesitates.] Yes f it's fair. If anyone hits you once ?
I hit back once. If I hit back twice, it isn't fair."
304 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Here are examples of boys who hit back oftener than
they have been hit.
JE (7) : " What do you do when anyone gives you
a punch ? I give 'em back too. And if they give you
three II give them back four. Is it fair to do that ?
Yes: 9
ET (10) : " // they give me one I give back two. If they
give me two, I give back three"
And of girls who give back less.
BOE (8 ; 5), G. : " You ought to hit back. If they hit
you three times? I hit back once. Why not three
times ? That would be naughty (mechant). Is it fair to
hit back ? No, you oughtn't to hit back/'
BER (10), G. : "I hit him back less, because if I hit
him back the same or more', he begins again. Is it right to
hit back ? No, it's not right."
It will be seen by these examples that the children
who do not hit back (most of them are from among the
younger ones), are primarily submissive children who
rely upon the adult to protect them, and who are more
anxious to respect or make others respect the orders that
have been received than to establish justice and equality by
methods appropriate to child society. As for the children
who hit back, they are far more concerned with justice
and equality than with revenge properly so called. The
cases of Er and Hen are particularly clear. These children
disapprove of cold-blooded revenge and petty scheming,
but they uphold exact reciprocity from a sense of justice.
Among those who give back more blows than they re-
ceive there is, of course, a combative attitude which
goes beyond mere equality ; but it is precisely this atti-
tude which diminishes with age.
Let us now turn to a question which will serve as a
transition between retributive and distributive judgment
between children why should one not cheat at games ?
You ask the child what is his favourite game, and you
tell him the story of a little boy who cheated (e.g. to
change one's place more than necessary during a game
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 305
of marbles). When the subject has stated that this is
cheating, you ask him why one should not cheat at
games. The answers fall under four heads : i It is
naughty (forbidden, etc.). 2 It is contrary to the rules
of the game. 3 It makes cooperation impossible
(" You can't play any more "). 4 It is contrary to
equality.
If we divide the children into two groups according
to age, the first from 6-9 (it will be remembered that it
was round about 9 that rules began to be stabilized),
and the second from 10-12, we shall note the following
changes as we pass from one group to another. Answers
appealing to the authority of rules (whether of morality
or games) i.e. answers of types I and II, drop from 70%
to 32%, whereas answers of types III and IV, appealing,
that is, to cooperation or to equality, rise from 30% to
68%. These data can, moreover, be given in greater
detail. First type answers (simply it is naughty, for-
bidden, etc.) fall from 64% to 8% ; while those of the
second type are 6% before, and 24% after 9. Third type
answers (cooperation) rise from o% to 20%, and those of
the fourth type (equality) from 30% to 48%.
Such a result as this is easy to understand if our
analysis of game rules be brought to mind. According
to the little ones, in whom unilateral respect predominates
and who identify a game rule with a moral rule, to
cheat is " naughty ", like lying or using a rude word :
it is forbidden by order and suppressed by punishment.
Hence the abundance of type I answers before 8-9. This
frequency might, of course, be explained by the difficulties
which little children experience in analysing their thoughts,
but there is, we believe, in addition to this, the moral
element, to which we have just drawn attention. The
older children, for whom rules have become a direct
emanation of the autonomous group, condemn cheating
for reasons which appeal to this very solidarity and to
the resulting equalitarianism.
Here are examples of the first type,
u
306 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
DEM (6 ; 2): "It's naughty (Fr. vilain).Why?~
You must never cheat (Fr. frouiller). Why ? My [eldest]
brother told, me."
BRAIL (6) : " It's not fair. The others don't let us cheat
(Fr. frouiller). They say, ' Go away ! ' "
VAN (6|) : " Because you mustn't. It's naughty.
Why ? Because it's very naughty. Why is it naughty ?
Because you ought never to do it. Why not do it ?
Because it's very bad. You never must. Why must you
never ? Just because."
GREM (7 ; 2) : " You mustn't. Why ? Because it's
naughty. Why ? Because it's a bad thing to do."
Gis (8), G. : " Because it isn't nice (Fr. /ofo*). Why ?
Must never cheat. Why ? It's ugly. Why ? You must
never cheat. It's very naughty."
These arguments simply amount to this, that the
thing is forbidden. The answers of the second type are
not very different.
ZUR (6 ; 6) : " It's not the game. Why ? Because he
ought not to have done -it. Why ? Because the one who
cheated (Fr. frouille) has spoilt the game. You can't have
fun any more. Why ? It's naughty."
CHRI (6 ; 10) : " You mustn't cheat. Why ? Because
it isn't fair. Why ? Because it wouldn't finish the game.
The game would be wrong."
WAL (7}) : " It's not allowed because it's not the game."
MARG (9) : " It's not doing it right. Why must people
not cheat ? Because 'it's not the game. Why ? You
mustn't. Why not ? It's not the game."
And here are examples of the third type (cooperation).
SCHA (7) : " People mustn't cheat. Otherwise you don't
have them again [ = You don't play with the cheaters
again]. You don't like them. Why ? Because you aren't
good friends any longer. Why ? They get naughty (Fr.
mdchants)."
Go (7 ; 2) : " It upsets the game and makes the others
angry. It mixes the game all up because he has made us
angry. You can't play any more."
BRU (9 ; 2) : "It spoils the game."
Tis (10 ; i) : " You don't want to play any more.
Why ? It isn't fair. Why ? If everyone did that no
one II play any more."
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 307
Wi (10) : " It's not doing it fight. It's deceiving the
others. Why must you do things right in a game ?
So as to be honest when we grow up! 9 [There is a boy who
has understood how much more useful is a well-regulated
game than a lesson in morals.]
THEV (10), G. : " It's a bad action. Why IShe acted
wrongly. She shouldn't have done that. And supposing
she had lost ? It would have been better to lose "than to
deceive. And supposing she had cheated and lost all the
same ? She would have been punished [ipso facto]. It
wasn't fair that she should have won. Why must we not
cheat ? Because it's committing a lie. 3 '
PERO (10) : " You say to them, * // you are going to
cheat we won't have you any more '. Why ? Because
people who cheat are rotters (Fr. des sales types)."
ZAC (n) : " It isn't nice. Why ? You can't have any
nice fun. You call him liar."
BOIL (12) : " If people cheat, it's not worth while playing. 19
And finally some cases of the fourth type (equality).
MER (9 ; 6) : " It's not fair. Why ? The others don't
do it> so you mustn't do it either."
THER (9 ; 7) : " It's not fair on the others."
PER (n ; 9) : " It's not fair. You win what you haven't
the right to [win]/*
Gus (n) : " It's not fair. Why ? The others don't
cheat, so it isn't fair."
GAG (12 ; o) : " It would be unjust to the others"
It is easy enough to see that between the answers
appealing to cooperation and those that lay more stress
on equality, there are innumerable intermediate stages.
In the child as everywhere else solidarity and equali-
tarianism are interdependent. In short, there would seem
to be two fundamental types of answer the one appeal-
ing to authority (types I and II), the other to cooperation
(types III and IV). Between them, naturally, there
are intermediate cases. Thus there is not complete
heterogeneity between the answers given by Thev and
those of type I. But broadly speaking, the two types are
distinct, and the second gradually gains preponderance
over the first.
308 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
It may be worth while, in this connection, to recall
the results of an enquiry made on lying (Chap. II, 4),
and which also has a certain bearing upon the problem
of equality between children. Is it as bad (vilain) * to lie
to one's companions as to grown-ups, or is it different ?
According to Mile Rambert's results, 81% of the subjects
between 6 and 9 think it worse to lie to adults, while
51% of those between 10 and 13 that it is equally bad to
lie to children, and of these, 17% are even of opinion
that it is worse to lie to a companion than to an adult.
Let us now turn to the questions of distributive justice
properly so-called, in the relations between children.
We studied in this connection the two points that seemed
to us most important equality between contemporaries,
and the problem of differences in age. Here are two
stories that were used for the analysis of the first of these
two questions.
STORY I. Some children are playing ball in a court-
yard. When the ball goes out of bounds and rolls down
the road one of the boys goes of his own free will to fetch
it several times. After that he is the only one they ask
to go and fetcfi it. What do you think of that ?
STORY II. Some children are having their tea on the
grass. They each have a roll that they have bought,
and put it down beside them to eat after their brown
bread. A dog comes up very softly behind one of the boys
and snatches away his roll. What should be done ?
We shall not require a lengthy analysis to sort out the
answers : the children were unanimous in demanding
equality. In the first story, it is not fair that it should
always be the same child who works for the group, and
in the second, each should give the victim enough to
supply him with a share that will be equal with that of
the others. We lay stress on these answers, simply be-
cause in analogous stories, but where the desire for equality
1 The word " vilain ", which we have throughout translated as
" naughty ", can also mean " horrid ", and therefore ba.s a slightly
different shade of meaning when used between children. [Trans.]
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 309
found itself pitted against adult authority, the younger
children very often, it will be remembered, put authority
in the right ( 5).
Here are some examples.
WAL (6), Story I : " It isn't fair. Why ? Because
another boy should go" Story II : " They must share.
Why ? So as all to have the same."
SCHMA (7), Story I : " It's not fair, because they should
have asked the others, and each in turn." Now, in the story
about the father who sent one boy on more messages
than the other, Schma had answered, " It is fair, because
the father said. . . ."
As to Story II : " The others must share with him so
that he should have a piece" Then we ask, just to see
whether this desire for equality keeps authority at bay,
" But if the mother doesn't want him to be given any
more. She says he need only have stopped the dog taking
the roll. Is it fair ? Yes. He need only have been
careful. And if the mother had said nothing, what
would have been fairest ? They ought to have shared"
DELL (8), Story I : " It's not fair. They ought to have
gone themselves." Story II : " They ought to have shared."
ROB (9), Story I : " They should each have gone in turn"
Story II : " They should have shared. The mother said
they mustn't. That's not fair "
FSCHA (10), Story I : " Another one ought to have gone"
Story II : " They ought each to have shared a half with
the boy who had none"
We have already met with so many examples of the
progressive development of equalitarianism ( 5), that
we need press the point no further.
But there remains the question as to what children
think about differences of age. Should precedence be
given to the seniors, or should the younger ones be
favoured, or should all be treated equally ? We pre-
sented the two following stories to our subjects :
Story I. Two boys, a little one and a big one, once
went for a long walk in the mountains. When lunch-
time came they were very hungry and took their food
out of their bags. But they found that there was not
3io THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
enough for both of them. What should have been done ?
Give all the food to the big boy or to the little one, or the
same to both ?
Story II. Two boys were running races (or playing
marbles, etc.). One was big, the other little. Should they
both have started from the same place, or should the
little one have started nearer ?
The second question is complicated by the fact that
the game is an organized one, and consequently regu-
lated by tradition. The first, on the other hand, gave
rise to a very interesting reaction. The younger children
are in favour of equality or else, and chiefly, of precedence
being given to the big boys out of respect for their age ;
whereas the older children are in favour either of equality
or else, and chiefly, of precedence being given to the little
boys out of equity.
Here are examples of the little ones 1 answers.
JAN (7!) : " They should both have been given the same.
They gave most to the little boy. Was it fair ? No.
They should all have had the same. All half. Aren't
little children more hungry ? Yes. If you had been the
little boy what would you have done ? I'd have given
less to myself and more to the big boys."
NEV (7!) : " The big boys should have had most. Why ?
Because they're bigger"
FAL (7!) : " The big boy should have had most. Why ?
Because he's the eldest. If you had been the little one,
would you have given most to the big ones ? Yes.
Ought they to have more, or is it that they want more ?
They ought to have more"
ROB (9) : " A little more to the big one. Why ? Be-
cause he is the eldest. Who gets most hungry during
walks, little boys or big ones ? Both the same. If you
were out on a walk with a boy of twelve and there was
only one piece of bread between you, what would you
do ? I'd give him most. Would you think that was
all right ? Yes } I'd want to give him most"
Here are children in favour of equality.
WAL (7) : " Each must be given the same. Why ?
Another time they had five bars of chocolate. The
little boy asked for three. Was it fair ? They ought to
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 311
have had two and a half each. Supposing you are going
for a walk with a boy, and you are the biggest, and keep
most for yourself. Is it fair ? Not fair."
Nuss (10) : " They ought to have gone shares. The
little boy said, ' I'm the smallest so I ought to have most/
Is it fair ? Not fair. The big boy said he had right
to most because he was the biggest. Is that fair?
They ought each to have taken the same amount. You
are ten. Suppose you are going for a walk with a boy
of fifteen who gives you most of what there is, what
would you think of it ? It would be nice of him. And
fair ? It would be still more fair both to be given the same."
And examples of equity.
SCHMO (10) : " They should have given more to the little
boy because he was smaller. They both ate the same.
Was it fair? Not quite so fair' 9
BRA (10) : " The same for everyone. They gave the
little one most ; was it fair or not ? It was fair. Oh,
no. The big boy kept most for himself, because he was
the biggest. Was it fair ? It wasn't fair."
As to the games, the answers differ according as the
game is a race or marbles. Running races is relatively
uncodified, and this freedom from rules allows for the
little ones being favoured. In the game of marbles, the
authority of the rules complicates the reactions. The
little ones demand equality because it is the inviolable
rule of the game, whereas the older boys are inclined to
make exceptions in favour of the little ones. Here are
two examples of the younger children's reactions.
BRI (6). In running races : " The little boy must have
a start because the big boy can run faster than the little one."
But in marbles it must be " the same for both." Why ?
Because [if both do not start from the same point and the
little one is helped] God will make it happen that the big
boy hits the marbles, and the little one can't" To make an
exception is thus identified with cheating, which will be
punished by divine justice.
WAL (7) : In running races one must put " the smallest
boy a little farther forward " t but at marbles " all at the
coche [the starting-line]. Why ? You always start at the
line."
312 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
And one example of the reaction in older children.
BRA (10) : In races the little ones must have a start.
At marbles the same applies, " Because it is always done
when they are two or three years younger."
In conclusion, we find that the notions of justice
and solidarity develop correlatively and as a function
of the mental age of the child. In the course of this
section, three sets of facts have appeared to us to be
connected together. In the first place, reciprocity asserts
itself with age. To hit back seems wrong to the little
ones because it is forbidden by adult law, but it seems
just to the older children, precisely because this mode
of retributive justice functions independently of the
adult and sets " punishment by reciprocity " above
" expiatory punishment." In the second place, the desire
for equality increases with age. Finally, certain features
of solidarity, such as not cheating or not lying between
children, develop concurrently with the above tendencies.
7. CONCLUSION : THE IDEA OF JUSTICE. To bring our
enquiry to a close let us examine the answers given to a
question which sums up all that we have been talking
about. We asked the children, either at the end or at
the beginning of our interrogatories, to give us them-
selves examples of what they regarded as unfair. 1
The answers we obtained were of four kinds : i Be-
haviour that goes against commands received from the
adult lying, stealing, breakages, etc. ; in a word, every-
thing that is forbidden. 2 Behaviour that goes against
the rules of a game. 3 Behaviour that goes against
equality (inequality in punishment as in treatment).
4 Acts of injustice connected with adult society (eco-
nomic or political injustice). Now, statistically, the results
show very clearly as functions of age :
Forbidden Games Inequality Social Injustice
6-8 . . 64% 9% 27%
9-12 . . 7% 9% 73% 11%
1 As a matter of fact this term is not understood by all, but it can
always be replaced by " not fair " (Fr. pas juste).
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 313
Here are examples of the identification of what is
unfair with what is forbidden :
AGE 6 : " A little girl who has broken a plate ", " to
burst a balloon ", " children who make a noise with their
feet during prayers ", " telling lies " t " something not
true ", " it's not fair to steal ", etc.
AGE 7 : " Fighting ", " disobeying ", "fighting about
nothing " t " crying for nothing ", " playing pranks ", etc.
AGE 8 : " Fighting each other ", " idling lies ", " steal-
ing ", etc.
Here are examples of inequalities :
AGE 6 : " Giving a big cake to one and a little one to
another" " One piece of chocolate to one and two to another."
AGE 7 : " A mother who gives more to a little girl who
isn't nice." lt Beating a friend who has done nothing to
you."
AGE 8 : " Someone who gave two tubes [to two brothers]
and one was bigger than the other " [taken from experience,
this !] " Two twin sisters who were not given the same
number of cherries " [also experienced].
AGE 9 : " The mother gives a [bigger] piece of bread
to someone else." (t The mother gives a lovely dog to one
sister and not to the other." " A worse punishment for one
than for the other."
AGE 10 : " When you both do the same work and don't
get the same reward." " Two children both do what they
are told, and one gets more than the other" " To scold one
child and not the other if they have both disobeyed"
AGE ii : " Two children who steal cherries : only one
is punished because his teeth are black" "A strong man
beating a weak one" " A master who likes one boy better
than another, and gives him better marks"
AGE 12 : "A referee who takes sides"
And some examples of social injustice.
AGE 12 : "A mistress preferring a pupil because he is
stronger, or cleverer, or better dressed"
11 Often people like to choose rich friends rather than poor
friends who would be nicer"
" A mother who won't allow her children to play with
children who are less well dressed"
" Children who leave a little girl out of their games, who
is not so well dressed as they are."
314 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
These obviously spontaneous remarks, taken together
with the rest of our enquiry, allow us to conclude, in so
far as one can talk of stages in the moral life, the existence
of three great periods in the development of the sense
of justice in the child. One period, lasting up to the age
of 7-8, during which justice is subordinated to adult
authority ; a period contained approximately between
8-ii| and which is that of progressive equalitarianism ;
and finally a period which sets in towards 11-12, and
during which purely equalitarian justice is tempered by
considerations of equity.
The first is characterized by the non-differentiation
of the notions of just and unjust from those of duty and
disobedience : whatever conforms to the dictates of the
adult authority is just. As a matter of fact even at this
stage the child already looks upon some kinds of treat-
ment as unjust, those, namely, in which the adult does
not cany out the rules he has himself laid down for children
(e.g. punishing for a fault that has not been committed,
forbidding what has previously been allowed, etc.). But
if the adult sticks to his own rules, everything he pre-
scribes is just. In the domain of retributive justice,
every punishment is accepted as perfectly legitimate, as
necessary, and even as constituting the essence of morality :
if lying were not punished, one would be allowed to tell
lies, etc. In the stories where we have brought retributive
justice into conflict with equality, the child belonging
to this stage sets the necessity for punishment above
equality of any sort. In the choice of punishments,
expiation takes precedence over punishment by recipro-
city, the very principle of the latter type of punishment
not being exactly understood by the child. In the domain
of immanent justice, more than three-quarters of the
subjects under 8 believe in an automatic justice which
emanates from physical nature and inanimate objects.
If obedience and equality are brought into conflict, the
child is always in favour of obedience : authority takes
precedence over justice. Finally, in the domain of justice
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 315
between children, the need for equality is already felt,
but is yielded to only where it cannot possibly come into
conflict with authority. For instance, the act of hitting
back, which is regarded by the child of 10 as one of ele-
mentary justice, is considered " naughty " by the children
of 6 and 7, though, of course, they are always doing it
in practice. (It will be remembered that the heterono-
mous rule, whatever may be the respect in which it is
held mentally, is not necessarily observed in real life.)
On the other hand, even in the relations between children,
the authority of older ones will outweigh equality. In
short, we may say that throughout this period, during
which unilateral respect is stronger than mutual respect,
the conception of justice can only develop on certain
points, those, namely, where cooperation begins to make
itself felt independently of constraint. On all other
points, what is just is confused with what is imposed
by law, and law is completely heteronomous and imposed
by the adult.
The second period does not appear on the plane of
reflection and moral judgment until about the age of
7 or 8. But it is obvious that this comes slightly later
than what happens with regard to practice. This period
may be defined by the progressive development of au-
tonomy and the priority of equality over authority. In
the domain of retributive justice, the idea of expiatory
punishment is no longer accepted with the same docility
as before, and the only punishments accepted as really
legitimate are those based upon reciprocity. Belief in
immanent justice is perceptibly on the decrease and
moral action is sought for its own sake, independently
of reward or punishment. In matters of distributive
justice, equality rules supreme. In conflicts between
punishment and equality, equality outweighs every other
consideration. The same holds good a fortiori of conflicts
with authority. Finally, in the relations between children,
equalitarianism obtains progressively with increasing
age.
316 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Towards 11-12 we see a new attitude emerge, wMch
may be said to be characterized by the feeling of equity,
and which is nothing but a development of equalitari-
anism in the direction of relativity. Instead of looking
for equality in identity, the child no longer thinks of the
equal rights of individuals except in relation to the par-
ticular situation of each. In the domain of retributive
justice this comes to the same thing as not applying the
same punishment to all, but taking into account the
attenuating circumstances of some. In the domain of
distributive justice it means no longer thinking of a law
as identical for all but taking account of the personal
circumstances of each (favouring the younger ones, etc.).
Far from leading to privileges, such an attitude tends to
make equality more effectual than it was before.
Even if this evolution does not consist of general
stages, but simply of phases characterizing certain limited
processes, we have said enough to try to elucidate
now the psychological origins of the idea of justice
and the conditions of its development. With this in
view, let us distinguish retributive from distributive
justice, for the two go together only when reduced to
their fundamental elements, and let us begin with dis-
tributive judgment, whose fate in the course of mental
development seems to indicate that it is the most funda-
mental form of justice itself.
Distributive justice can be reduced to the ideas of
equality or equity. From the point of view of episte-
mology such notions cannot but be regarded as a priori,
if by a priori we mean, not of course an innate idea, but
a norm, towards which reason cannot help but tend as
it is gradually refined and purified. For reciprocity im-
poses itself on practical reason as logical principles impose
themselves morally on theoretical reason. But from the
psychological point of view, which is that of what is,
not of what should be, an a priori norm has no exist-
ence except as a form of equilibrium. It constitutes
the ideal equilibrium towards which the phenomena
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 317
tend, and the whole question is still to know why,
the facts being what they are, their form of equilibrium
is such and no other. This last problem, which is of a
causal order, must not be confused with the first, which
can be solved only by abstract reflection. The two will
coincide only when inind and reality become coextensive.
In the meantime let us confine ourselves to psychological
analysis, it being understood that the experimental
explanation of the notion of reciprocity can in no way
contradict its a priori aspect.
From this point of view it cannot be denied that the
idea of equality or of distributive justice possesses in-
dividual or biological roots which are necessary but not
sufficient conditions for its development. One can observe
in the child at a very early stage two reactions which will
play a very important part in this particular elaboration.
Jealousy, to begin with, appears extremely early in babies :
infants of 8 to 12 months often give signs of violent rage
when they see another child seated on their mother's
knees, or when a toy is taken from them and given to
another child. On the other hand, one can observe in
conjunction with imitation and the ensuing sympathy,
altruistic reactions and a tendency to share, which are
of equally early date. An infant of 12 months will hand
his toys over to another child, and so on. But it goes
without saying that equalitarianism can never be regarded
as a sort of instinct or spontaneous product of the in-
dividual mind. The reactions we have just alluded to
lead to a capricious alternation of egoism and sympathy.
It is true, of course, that jealousy prevents other people
from taking advantage of us, and the need to communi-
cate prevents the self from taking advantage of others.
But for true equality and a genuine desire for reciprocity
there must be a collective rule which is the sui generis
product of life lived in common. There must be born
of the actions and reactions of individuals upon each
other the consciousness of a necessary equilibrium binding
upon and limiting both "alter" and "ego". And this
3 i8 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
ideal equilibrium, dimly felt on the occasion of every
quarrel and every peace-making, naturally presupposes
a long reciprocal education of the children by each other.
But between the primitive individual reactions, which
give the need for justice a chance of showing itself, and the
full possession of the idea of equality, our enquiry shows
the existence of a long interval in time. For it is not
until about 10-12, at the age where, as we saw elsewhere,
children's societies attain to the maximum of organization
and codification of rules, that justice really frees herself
from all her adventitious trappings. Here, as before, we
must therefore distinguish constraint from cooperation,
and our problem will then be to determine whether it is
unilateral respect, the source of constraint, or mutual
respect, the source of cooperation, that is the preponder-
ating factor in the evolution of equaHtarian justice,
Now on this point the results of our analysis seem to
leave no room for doubt. Authority as such cannot be
the source of justice, because the development of justice
presupposes autonomy. This does not mean, of course,
that the adult plays no part in the development of justice,
even of the distributive kind. In so far as he practises
reciprocity with the child and preaches by example
rather than by precept, he exercises here, as always,
an enormous influence. But the most direct effect of
adult ascendancy is, as M. Bovet has shown, the feeling
of duty, and there is a sort of contradiction between
the submission demanded by duty and the complete
autonomy required by the development of justice. For,
resting as it does on equality and reciprocity, justice can
only come into being by free consent., Adult authority
even if it acts in conformity with justice, has therefore
the effect of weakening what constitutes the essence of
justice. Hence those reactions which we observed among
the smaller children, who confused what was just with
what was law, law being whatever is prescribed by adult
authority. Justice is identified with formulated rules
as indeed it is in the opinion of a great many adults, of
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 319
all, namely, who have not succeeded in setting autonomy
of conscience above social prejudice and the written
law.
Thus adult authority, although perhaps it constitutes
a necessary moment in the moral evolution of the child,
is not in itself sufficient to create a sense of justice. This
can develop only through the progress made by co-
operation and mutual respect cooperation between
children to begin with, and then between child and adult
as the child approaches adolescence and comes, secretly
at least, to consider himself as the adult's equal.
In support of these hypotheses, one is struck by the
extent to which, in child as well as in adult society, the
progress of equalitarianism goes hand in hand with that
of " organic " solidarity, i.e. with the results of co-
operation. For if we compare the societies formed by
children of 5-7 with those formed at the age of 10-12,
we can observe four interdependent transformations. In
the first place, while the little ones' society constitutes
an amorphous and unorganized whole, in which all the
individuals are alike, that of the older children achieves
an organic unity, with laws and regulations, and often
even a division of social work (leaders, referees, etc.).
In the second place, there exists between the older children
a far stronger moral solidarity than among the younger
ones. The little ones are simultaneously egocentric and
impersonal, yielding to every suggestion that comes along
and to every current of imitation. In their case the group
feeling is a sort of communion of submission to seniors and
to the dictates of adults. Older children, on the contrary,
ban lies among themselves, cheating, and everything that
compromises solidarity. The group feeling is therefore
more direct and more consciously cultivated. In the third
place, personality develops in the measure that discussion
and the interchange of ideas replace the simple mutual
imitation of the younger children. In the fourth place,
the sense of equality is, as we have just seen, far stronger
in the older than in the younger children, the latter
320 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
being primarily under the domination of authority.
Thus the bond between equaEtarianism and solidarity
is a universal psychological phenomenon, and not, as
might appear to be the case in adult society, dependent
only upon political factors. With children as with
adults, there exist two psychological types of social
equilibrium a type based on the constraint of age,
which excludes both equality and " organic " solidarity,
but which canalizes individual egocentrism without
excluding it, and a type based on cooperation and resting
on equality and solidarity.
Let us pass on to retributive justice. In contrast to
the principles of distributive justice, there does not seem
to be in the ideas of retribution or punishment any pro-
perly rational or a priori element. For while the idea
of equality gains in value as intellectual development
proceeds, the idea of punishment seems actually to lose
ground. To put things more precisely, we must, as we
have already done, distinguish two separate elements
in the idea of retribution. On the one hand there are the
notions of expiation and reward, which seems to con-
stitute what is most specific about the idea of punishment,
and on the other, there are the ideas of " putting things
right " or making reparation, as well as the measures
which aim at restoring the bond of solidarity broken by
the offending act. These last ideas, which we have
grouped under the title of " punishment by reciprocity " t
seem to draw only on the conceptions of equality and
reciprocity. It is the former set of ideas that tends to be
eliminated when the morality of heteronomy and authority
is superseded by the morality of autonomy. The second set
are of far more enduring stuff, precisely because they are
based upon something more than the idea of punishment.
Whatever may be said of this evolution of values, it is
possible here, as in connection with distributive justice,
to assign three sources to the three chief aspects of re-
tribution. As we saw above ( i) certain individual
reactions condition the appearance of retribution ; adult
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 321
constraint explains the formation of the idea of expiation,
and cooperation accounts for the eventual fate of the idea
of punishment.
It cannot be denied that the idea of punishment has
psycho-biological roots. Blow calls for blow and gentle-
ness moves us to gentleness. The instinctive reactions
of defence and sympathy thus bring about a sort of
elementary reciprocity which is the soil that retribution
demands for its growth. But this soil is naturally not
enough in itself, and the individual factors cannot of
themselves transcend the stage of impulsive vengeance
without finding themselves subject at least implicitly
to the system of regulated and codified sanctions implied
in retributive justice.
Things change with the intervention of the adult.
Very early in life, even before the infant can speak, its
conduct is constantly being subjected to approval or
censure. According to circumstances people are pleased
with baby and smile at it, or else frown and leave it
to cry, and the very inflections in the voices of those
that surround it are alone sufficient to constitute an
incessant retribution. During the years that follow, the
child is watched over continuously, everything he does
and says is controlled, gives rise to encouragement or
reproof, and the vast majority of adults still look upon
punishment, corporal or otherwise, as perfectly legitimate.
It is obviously these -reactions on the part of the adult,
due generally to fatigue or impatience, but often, too,
coldly thought out on his part, it is obviously these adult
reactions, we repeat, that are the psychological starting-
point of the idea of expiatory punishment. If the child
felt nothing but fear or mistrust, as may happen in extreme
cases, this would simply lead to open war. But as the
child loves his parents and feels for their actions that
respect which M. Bovet has so ably analysed, punish-
ment appears to him as morally obligatory and necessarily
connected with the act that provoked it. Disobedience
the principle of all " sin ''is a breach of the normal
x
322 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
relations between parent and child ; some reparation is
therefore necessary, and since parents display their
" righteous anger " by the various reactions that take
the form of punishments, to accept these punishments
constitutes the most natural form of reparation. The
pain inflicted thus seems to re-establish the relations that
had momentarily been interrupted, and in this way the
idea of expiation becomes incorporated in the values of
the morality of authority. In our view, therefore, this
" primitive " and materialistic conception of expiatory
punishment is not imposed as such by the adult upon
the child, and it was perhaps never invented by a psycho-
logically adult mind; but it is the inevitable product
of punishment as refracted in the mystically realistic
mentality of the child.
If, then, there is such close solidarity between the idea
of punishment and unilateral respect plus the morality
of authority, it follows that all progress in cooperation
and mutual respect will be such as to gradually eliminate
the idea of expiation from the idea of punishment, and
to reduce the latter to a simple act of reparation, or a
simple measure of reciprocity. And this is actually what
we believe we have observed in the child. As respect
for adult punishment gradually grows less, certain types
of conduct develop which one cannot but class under the
heading of retributive justice. We saw an example of
this in the judgments made by our subjects on the topic
of " hitting back " ; the child feels more and more that
it is fair that he should defend himself and to give back
the blows he receives. This is retribution without doubt,
but the idea of expiation seems not to play the slightest
part in these judgments. It is entirely a matter of re-
ciprocity. So-and-so takes upon himself the right to give
me a punch, he therefore gives me the right to do the
same to him. Similarly, the cheat gains a certain advant-
age by the fact of cheating ; it is therefore legitimate
to restore equality by turning him out of the game or by
taking back the marbles he has won.
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 323
It may be objected that such a morality will not take
one very far, since the best adult consciences ask for
something more than the practice of mere reciprocity.
Charity and the forgiving of injuries done to one are, in
the eyes of many, far greater things than sheer equality.
In this connection, moralists have often laid stress on the
conflict between justice and love, since justice often pre-
scribes what is reproved by love and vice versa. But in
our view, it is precisely this concern with reciprocity
which leads one beyond the rather short-sighted justice
of those children who give back the mathematical equiva-
lent of the blows they have received. Like all spiritual
realities which are the result, not of external constraint
but of autonomous development, reciprocity has two
aspects : reciprocity as a fact, and reciprocity as an
ideal, as something which ought to be. The child begins
by simply practising reciprocity, in itself not so easy a
thing as one might think. Then, once he has grown
accustomed to this form of equilibrium in his actions,
his behaviour is altered from within, its form reacting,
as it were, upon its content. What is regarded as just
is no longer merely reciprocal action, but primarily be-
haviour that admits of indefinitely sustained reciprocity.
The motto " Do as you would be done by ", thus comes to
replace the conception of cnide equality. The child sets
forgiveness above revenge, not out of weakness, but
because "there is no end" to revenge (a boy of id).
Just as in logic, we can see a sort of reaction of the form
of the proposition upon its content when the principle
of contradiction leads to a simplification and purification
of the initial definitions, so in ethics, reciprocity implies
a purification of the deeper trend of conduct, guiding it
by gradual stages to universality itself. Without leaving
the sphere of reciprocity, generosity the characteristic
of our third stage allies itself to justice pure and simple,
and between the more refined forms of justice, such as
equity and love properly so called, there is no longer
any real conflict.
324 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
In conclusion, then, we find in the domain of justice,
as in the other two domains already dealt with, that
opposition of two moralities to which we have so often
drawn the reader's attention. The ethics of authority,
which is that of duty and obedience, leads, in the domain
of justice, to the confusion of what is just with the content
of established law and to the .acceptance of expiatory
punishment. The ethics of mutual respect, which is
that of good (as opposed to duty), and of autonomy,
leads, in the domain of justice, to the development of
equality, which is the idea at the bottom of distributive
justice and of reciprocity. Solidarity between equals
appears once more as the source of a whole set of com-
plementary and coherent moral ideas which characterize
the rational mentality. The question may, of course,
be raised whether such realities could ever develop without
a preliminary stage, during which the child's conscience
is moulded by his unilateral respect for the adult. As
this cannot be put to the test, by experiment, it is idle to
argue the point. But what is certain is that the moral
equilibrium achieved by the complementary conceptions
of heteronomous duty and of punishment properly so
called, is an unstable equilibrium, owing to the fact that
it does not allow the personality to grow and expand to
its full extent. As the child grows up, the subjection of
his conscience to the mind of the adult seems to him
less legitimate, and except in cases of arrested moral
development, caused either by decisive inner submission
(those adults who remain children all their lives), or by
sustained revolt, unilateral respect tends of itself to grow,
into mutual respect and to the state of cooperation which
constitutes the normal equilibrium. It is obvious that
since in our modern societies the common morality
which regulates the relations of adults to each other is
that of cooperation, the development of child morality
will be accelerated by the examples that surround it.
Actually, however, this is more probably a phenomenon
of convergence than one simply of social pressure. For
COOPERATION AND THE IDEA OF JUSTICE 325
if Iranian societies have evolved from heteronomy to
autonomy, and from gerontocratic theocracy in all its
forms to equalitarian democracy, it may very well be
that the phenomena of social condensation so well de-
scribed by Durkheim have been favourable primarily to
the emancipation of one generation from another, and
have thus rendered possible in children and adolescents
the development we have outlined above.
But having reached the point where the problems of
sociology meet those of genetic psychology, we are faced
with a question of too great moment to allow us to rest
content with these indications, and we must now compare
our results with the fundamental theses of sociology and
psychology concerning the empirical nature of the moral
life.
CHAPTER IV
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD
AND TYPES OF SOCIAL RELATIONS
WHETHER we wish it or not, the questions we have had to
discuss in connection with child morality take us to the
very heart of the problems studied by contemporary
sociology and social psychology. Society, according to
Durkheim's followers, is the only source of morality. If
this is so, then there is no discipline in a better position
to discover it than child psychology. Every form of
sociology will in fact inevitably lead to a system of
pedagogy, as readers of Durkheim's excellent book on
L'Education Morale will have had occasion to note. It is
for this reason that we intend, in spite of the difficulties
attending an attempt of this kind, to examine some of
the more significant of the sociological and ethico-psycho-
logical theories of the day, and to compare them with our
own findings. We shall abstain from any discussion that
would be too general in character, and shall confine our-
selves to those spheres in which the theories of social
psychology in vogue have a direct bearing upon the child.
With this aim in view, the following points seem to us
to deserve examination. The ideas of Durkheim and
Fauconnet on responsibility, which gave rise to Durkheim's
writings on punishment in schools, Durkheim's theory of
authority as the source of the moral life of the child, the
theories of M. Baldwin, and above all those of M. Bovet
on the genesis of the moral sentiment, and finally certain
educational ideas concerning autonomy of conscience in
the child.
But in order to prevent ary misunderstanding, we must
point out from the first that in these discussions on
3*6
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 327
educational matters proper, It is as psychologists and not
as educationalists that we approach the subject. Educa-
tional facts are facts of social psychology, perhaps, indeed,
the most important of their number, and while we do not
wish to establish a system of education on the results of
our enquiry, we cannot abstain from asking, for example,
whether a given authoritarian procedure is, as Durkheim
maintains, really necessary to the constitution of the moral
life. This question is one of pure, as well as of applied,
psychology. Whether a cure recommended by some doctors
will kill the patient or cure him is a matter that interests
the physiologist as well as the doctor, and it is as an
experimenter, not as a practitioner, that we wish to speak
of the subject of education.
i. THE THEORIES OF DURKHEIM AND FAUCONNET ON
RESPONSIBILITY. 1 M. Paul Fauconnet in Ms excellent
book on La Responsabiliti has developed Durkheim's ideas
on retributive justice and penal law in a striking and
original manner. He ends by showing that the earliest
and, in his view, the purest form of responsibility is no
other than the objective responsibility of which we found
so many examples in connection with children. No better
theme could be better found, therefore, to assist us in the
critical examination of what probably constitutes the
quintessence of Durkheim's teaching, the idea, namely,
that society is always one and the same, and that its
permanent features are such as to ensure the existence and
invariability of moral values.
Responsibility is, according to M. Fauconnet, the
" quality belonging to those who must ... in virtue of a
rule be chosen as the passive subjects of a punishment "
(p. n) ; to be responsible is to be " justly punishable "
(p. 7). Now the comparative study of different societies
about which we have sufficient information allows us to
establish a sort of evolutionary law which dominates the
whole history of responsibility. Starting with far richer
1 P. Fauconnet, La Responsabilitt, Etude de Sociologie, Alcan. 1920.
328 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
and more comprehensive forms, responsibility has only
gradually shrunk to its present dimensions. To begin
with, in contemporary civilized communities, responsible
subjects consist exclusively of adults who are alive and in
their right minds. In older or non-civilized societies, as
in the Middle Ages, and frequently in more recent times,
responsible subjects included children, insane persons (even
recognized as such), the dead, animals and above all collec-
tive groups as such. The study of situations generative of
responsibility leads to the same conclusion. In our com-
munities, intention (or other psychological features, such
as negligence, forgetfulness, etc.) is a necessary condition
of responsibility. Ethically, the intention is everything.
Legally, there must be a corpus delicti, but there is no
offence without intent, imprudence or negligence. Now,
" as we trace our way back through the history of penal
law, we gradually come to purely objective responsi-
bility " (p. 105). In other words, in primitive ethics or in
archaic law, responsibility is ascribed even to involuntary
acts, accidents, acts committed without either negligence
or imprudence. In short, primitive responsibility is above
all objective and communicable, ours is subjective and
strictly individual.
What, then, is responsibility ? In order to solve this
problem, M. Fauconnet, true to the spirit of Durkheim,
seeks to explain the phenomena, not by establishing the
laws governing their making or growth but by empha-
sizing the elements that are invariable and common to
every stage. Note should be taken of this fundamental
point of method. Thus philosophical explanations of
responsibility are to be put aside as ignoring the early
forms of the phenomenon in question. Evolutionary
doctrines, like Westermark's and others, have this dis-
advantage that they reduce the early forms to moral or
intellectual aberrations, as though our present conceptions
constituted the supreme norm or necessary outcome of all
that preceded them. If, on the contrary, we ascribe the
same value to all cases brought to light by the compara-
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 329
tive method, we shall see that even if the punishment does
not maintain an unequivocal and well-defined relation to
the victim, it is always clearly determined in relation to
the crime. In other words, crime has been punished in all
times and in all places, and if the punishment does not
fall directly upon the head of the culprit, it will always
reach someone or other. A crime taken as a material act
independent of the motives involved is a sort of centre of
infection which must be destroyed, together with every-
thing around it, both far and near. "The penalty is
directed against the crime. It is only because it cannot
reach the crime that it is deflected on to a substitute
for the crime " (p. 234).
This is where the theory of crime elaborated by Durk-
heim comes in. Every society consists primarily in a
collection of beliefs and feelings forming a whole which
must be defended. The kernel of these beliefs is the
feeling of the sacred, the source of all morality and re-
ligion. Whatever offends against these powerful and well-
defined feelings is crime, and all crime is sacrilege. A
crime that breaks down the social bond takes on, by the
mere fact of doing so, a mystical significance. It is a
source of impurity and contamination, and its repercussions,
visible and invisible, are incalculable. It must therefore
be suppressed, its disastrous consequences must be sup-
pressed, and things must be put right. Punishment is the
mystical procedure that will effect this restitution.
Consequently it matters very little on whom the punish-
ments fall. The great thing is that they should be inflicted
and that they should be proportionate to the crime. Thus
there is an " institution of responsibility ". Moreover, it
is easy to understand how the choice of the responsible
subject comes to be made. The process takes place in
virtue of a mechanism of transference which obeys the
usual laws of psychological transference. First, there is an
affective transference : the emotions aroused by the crime
are carried over to everything that touches it from near
or far. Then there is a judgment : the community
330 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
decides that a given individual is responsible, and this
judgment is dominated by relations of contiguity and
resemblance. It follows, naturally, that the culprit himself,
when he can be found, is held to represent the maximum of
relationship with the crime. But failing this, anything
that touches the crime must be punished. Thus responsi-
bility descends from outside upon the culprit or any of his
substitutes, and transforms them into scapegoats or instru-
ments of social purification. Thus responsibility has a very
definite function : " to make the realization of the penalty
possible by letting it play its useful part " (p. 297). Now
this rdle is essentially moral : " It is only on the condition
that punishments exist that the existence of morality itself
is ensured : punishment, and consequently responsibility
have therefore a share in the value of morality " (p. 300).
But there remains a problem. How is it, if this is the
essence of responsibility, that this " institution " should
have evolved to such a point that we are no longer able,
at first sight, to make head or tail of its primitive forms ?
How has responsibility come to shrink in this way .and to
be directed on none but the one intentional, adult, and
normal culprit ? Why has responsibility individualized
and spiritualized itself in this fashion ?
Far from constituting the necessary culmination in an
inner transformation of responsibility, its contemporary
form results, on the contrary, according to Fauconnet, from
a gradual weakening of primitive values due to the action of
antagonistic factors. The general cause of this evolutionary
process would therefore seem to be external to responsi-
bility itself it is pity and humanitarianism. For though
the community may be outraged by crime, antagonistic
feelings will appear at the moment of punishment, and, as
Ihering has said, the story of penalties is the story of
constant abolition. This is why responsibility shows a
constant tendency to shrink.
In the beginning, the community will punish anyone,
and the individual is only a means to an end. In our day,
we punish almost against our wills, and the culprit is
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 331
given every chance of defending himself and of escaping
punishment.
This gives rise to two fundamental consequences. In
the first place, " we may say that in the course of its
evolution, responsibility becomes individualized. Collec-
tive and communicable in elementary communities, it
is, in principle, strictly personal in the most civilized
societies." Only in Theology, that is to say, in the most
conservative of our institutions, does the idea of Original
Sin keep alive the idea of collective responsibility ; Adam's
fall leaves upon the whole of humanity a stain that calls
for expiation. In law and in ethics such ideas would
revolt us. But our purely individual responsibility is
nothing but a bastard form of the real thing. " We are
generally taught that responsibility is individual by nature,
communicable by accident. The history of responsi-
bility is interpreted as a progress, and true responsibility,
strictly personal in character, is supposed to have been
achieved in the course of evolution. We are led, however,
to present the facts under a totally different light. The
expanding and contagious character of responsibility has
seemed to us to be its fundamental feature. The indi-
vidualization of responsibility is the result, on the contrary,
of a limiting and attenuating process. Far from purifying
it and perfecting it, the forces that individualize responsi-
bility are antagonistic to its nature. Strictly personal
responsibility is like the last positive value of a responsi-
bility that is tending towards zero-point. From this point
of view, the evolution of responsibility appears as a
regression. What one takes to be perfect responsibility
is responsibility whittled down to vanishing point"
(PP. 343~4)-
Hence a second aspect of the evolution of responsibility
its spiritualization. Primitive responsibility is above all
objective. A crime is "first and foremost a material
event. And the bond uniting the crime to whoever is
responsible for it is nearly always, to begin with, a
material bond " (p. 345). But, " in the eyes of our con-
332 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
temporaries, responsibility arises in the conscience of the
man who is responsible, on the occasion of a spiritual act,
by reason of a psychological relation between the con-
science and the act. These features contrast line for line
with the objectivity described above " (pp. 345-6)- The
cause of this phenomenon of spiritualization is that
society, which begins by being external to men's minds,
" becomes more and more immanent to the individual.
More and more of him becomes socialized with time, and
the contribution of social life is added to and modifies
what is of psycho-organic origin. The spiritualization of
moral or religious ideas expresses this veritable penetra-
tion of the social into the individual " (p. 367). In short,
if responsibility takes account of intentions only, it does
so in virtue of the same process as that by which it has
become individualized. "As social life becomes indi-
vidualized it becomes more interiorized " (p. 351). So
that our moral consciousness is nothing but the interiorized
residuum of the collective consciousness. But this is not
a gain. " Like the individualization of responsibility, its
spiritualization in the course of history appears therefore
as an immense impoverishment, a perpetual abolition.
Subjective responsibility, far from being, as is generally
thought, responsibility par excellence, is only an atrophied
form of responsibility " (p. 350).
But one must not be too absolute. There are still in
our societies traces of collective and objective responsi-
bility, and M. Fauconnet claims to find examples of it in
the present trend of criminal law in Italy. The primitive
form has therefore not been completely killed by the
existing form. " So true is it that the former is still a
living branch on the common stock from which the latter
has gradually become detached" (p. 377). From the
educational point of view, it will therefore be natural to
come with Durkheim to the conclusion of the necessity for
a systematic method of school punishments as the only
means of reviving in men's minds the permanent source of
all responsibility.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 333
For ourselves we know of no thesis so well suited as this
doctrine of Durkheim's and Fauconnet's to throw light on
the problems raised by the affirmation of the moral unity
of society. For M. Fauconnet has accomplished a tour de
force. He has tried to explain by the permanence be-
longing to the conditions of the collective consciousness a
phenomenon of which he, more successfully than anyone
else, has traced the evolution down history. Nor do we
wish to dispute M. Fauconnet's subtle analysis and
masterly classification of the facts he has collected. The
kinship between the phenomena of objective responsibility
that can be observed in the child and the phenomena that
characterize primitive social constraint furnishes, on the
contrary, an excellent confirmation of the hypothesis that
the initial externality of social relations is bound to bring
with it a certain moral realism. What seems to us more
questionable is the general interpretation he gives of re-
sponsibility, of punishment, and of the relations holding
between moral facts and society regarded as a fixed and
unchanging whole.
The great lesson of comparative sociology is that there
exist at least two types of responsibility one objective
and communicable, the other subjective and individual,
and that social evolution has gradually caused the second
to predominate. Having established this, two solutions
were equally conceivable : to define responsibility by the
direction it took in history, by its vector, or to define it
by its constant structural elements.
, On the strength of Durkheim's methodological postulates,
M. Fauconnet has chosen the second solution. He tells us
at once that what interests him in the history of responsi-
bility is not so much the transformations as the invariables.
And what leads him to this choice is the deep and funda-
mental unity of social facts. " However diverse civiliza-
tions may be, there is such a thing as civilization " (p. 20).
But it may be questioned whether such a method is
satisfactory beyond a given point. What would we think
of a psychologist who, in his explanation of causality and
334 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
number, put magical and mystical views of causality on
the same level as Einstein's treatment of causality or as
the theory of complex numbers ? If you look only for
the elements that are common to all stages and eliminate
all considerations of direction, you will achieve nothing
but a flimsy and static residue (what, after all, do the
elements common to all the different stages of causality
amount to ?), or else you will lay all the stress as we fear
M. Fauconnet has done on the primitive forms. Now
it is, no doubt, indispensable to be acquainted with the
primitive forms of the facts one wishes to analyse, but
their subsequent evolution furnishes data of at least equal
importance upon the conditions of their genesis. To put
the matter more clearly, we should try both to determine
the direction of the successive stages, and to establish the
invariables common to all these stages. But what is
invariable is not a given structural feature otherwise the
primitive form could always be erected into the " true "
form but only the function. As for the structure, it
varies indefinitely in so far as its variations are subjected
to its function, and the laws of evolution controlling such
variations are more instructive than the features peculiar
to any particular stage.
It is neither with the laws of the evolution of responsi-
bility that M. Fauconnet deals, nor with the function that
is common to its different stages. He tells us clearly why
it is not the laws of its evolution. And neither is it the
common function, taken independently of the structure of
the phenomenon, since nowadays our responsibility is
no longer either ^communicable or objective, and since
M. Fauconnet considers these two features as constitutive
of " true " responsibility.
Now the psychological data of child morality suggest
to us an interpretation of responsibility which, while it
takes full account of the valuable results obtained by
M. Fauconnet, seems to us to fulfil the double claim
of invariability or functional continuity and of directed
structural evolution. For we have recognized the exist-
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 335
ence of two moralities in the child, that of constraint and
that of cooperation. The morality of constraint is that of
duty pure and simple and of heteronomy. The child
accepts from the adult a certain number of commands to
which it must submit whatever the circumstances may be.
Right is what conforms with these commands ; wrong is
what fails to do so ; the intention plays a very small part
in this conception, and the responsibility is entirely
objective. But, first parallel with this morality, and then
in contrast to it, there is gradually developed a morality
of cooperation, whose guiding principle is solidarity and
which puts the primary emphasis on autonomy of con-
science, on intentionality, and consequently on subjective
responsibility. Now it should be noted that while the
ethics of mutual respect is, from the point of view of values,
opposed to that of unilateral respect, the former is never-
theless the natural outcome of the latter from the point of
view of what causes this evolution. In so far as the child
tends towards manhood, his relations with the adult tend
towards equality. The unilateral respect belonging to
constraint is not a stable system, and the equilibrium
towards which it tends is no other than mutual respect.
It cannot, therefore, be maintained with regard to the
child that the final predominance of subjective over
objective responsibility is the outcome of antagonistic
forces in relation to responsibility in general. Rather is
it in virtue of a sort of inner logic that the more
evolved follow upon the more primitive forms, though
in structure the former differ qualitatively from the
latter.
Why, then, in an extremely schematic way, should the
same thing not hold good of society ? It is no mere
metaphor to say that a relation can be established between
the individual's obedience to collective imperatives and
the child's obedience to adults in general. In both cases
the human being submits to certain commands because he
respects his elders. Society is nothing but a series (or
rather many intersecting series) of generations, each exer-
336 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
cising pressure upon the one which follows it, and Auguste
Comte was right in pointing to this action of one genera-
tion upon the other as the most important phenomenon
of sociology. Now when we think of the part played by
gerontocracy in primitive communities, when we think
of the decreasing power of the family in the course of
social evolution, and of all the social features that charac-
terize modem civilizations, we cannot help seeing in the
history of societies a sort of gradual emancipation of
individuals ; in other words, a levelling up of the different
generations in relation to each other. As Durkheim him-
self has pointed out, one cannot explain the passage from
the forced conformity of " segmented " societies to the
organic solidarity of differentiated societies without in-
voking the diminished supervision of the group over the
individual as a fundamental psychological factor. The
" denser " the community, the sooner will the adolescent
escape from the direct constraint of his relations and,
coming under a number of fresh influences, acquire his
spiritual independence by comparing them with one
another. The more complex the society, the more au-
tonomous is the personality and the more important are
the relations of cooperation between equal individuals.
Now, if cooperation follows as naturally as this upon
constraint, and consequently the morality of mutual re-
spect upon that of authority, there seems no reason why
subjective responsibility should be looked upon as a
bastard form of " primitive " responsibility. The most
one could say would be that rational mentality was a
bastard form of prescientific or " prelogical " mental-
ity, and that independent morality was an attenuated
form of elementary religions. It seems to us, on the
contrary, that if the phenomena of education may legiti-
mately be regarded as exhibiting in embryo the principles
of social phenomena, then subjective responsibility is the
normal outcome of objective responsibility, in so far, at least,
as the constraint of conformity gives place to a coopera-
tion based upon social differentiation and upon individ-
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 337
ualism. So that it is not only because pity and humani-
tarianism exercise a check upon penalties that objective
and communicable responsibility is weakened. It is
because the ideas of involuntary crime and even of
expiatory punishment lose all meaning in the morality of
autonomy. Conceptions of offence and punishment evolve
at the same time as those of duty, of right and wrong,
and of distributive justice. The two types of morality
distinguished by M. Fauconnet seem to us, therefore, to
be connected with two general attitudes, with the two
moralities we have grown accustomed to, and the evolu-
tion from one to the other is not contingent but goes of
a piece with the psycho-sociological transformation that
characterizes the passage from the theocratic conformity
of so-called " primitive " societies to the equalitarian soli-
darity of modern times. The heteronomy that goes with
constraint begets objective responsibility, just as the
autonomy that goes with mutual respect and cooperation
begets subjective responsibility. For the morality of
cooperation, the germs of which are present in any society,
is stifled by the constraint prevalent in conformist so-
cieties. But the social differentiation and " organic "
solidarity peculiar to civilized communities allow it to
expand, and thus explain the transformation of responsi-
bility.
Let us examine M. Fauconnet's arguments more closely
and make our choice between the two interpretations.
Although he brings out very clearly the difference between
our conceptions and those of primitive times, M. Fauconnet
tries to soften the contrast by looking for signs of objective
responsibility and even for promising revivals of archaic
notions in our own times. Thus in speaking of the Italian
school of jurisprudence, which regards the criminal .as an
irresponsible degenerate, society itself being responsible
for his condition, M. Fauconnet declares : " Only by
returning to its own source can responsibility be renewed
and sustained " (p. 344). Thus the responsibility of the
community in the case of the delinquent drunkard is com-
Y
338 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
pared to that of the clan in the case of an individual
violation of the taboo. But at this point, we fear that a
confusion has crept in. If elementary communities look
upon responsibility as collective, they do so in order to
extend, as it were, the surface of application of the
penalty, and in order the better to chastise and thus
increase the mystical efficacy of the expiation. But in
declaring society responsible for the crime of one of its
members, what the modern mind seeks to do is, on the
contrary, to diminish the latter's responsibility and to
soften his punishment. In regarding a drunkard as the
victim of society we seek to remove all intentionality and
precisely all element of guilt from his misdeeds. Of course,
traces of collective responsibility are still to be found
among us, as when in war a whole nation is made re-
sponsible for the faults of its rulers, or in religion where
the whole of humanity is condemned to perdition because
of the sins of its first progenitors. These certainly are
instances of collective responsibility. But such judgments
are not generally made by the normal collective conscious-
ness and should be regarded as residua, or regressions,
rather than as a " renovation " of responsibility.
Another argument used by M. Fauconnet is that in
penal law there must be a corpus delicti. But this is a
circumstance of a practical nature rather than an ideal
principle to be adhered to by the collective consciousness.
If judges could really " try the reins and the heart ",
if, without risk of error, with the same or even greater
certainty than they use in establishing the proof of simple
matters of fact, they could lay bare the intention behind
the act, then it is undoubtedly the guilty intention itself
that would incur punishment. It is therefore for lack of
infallibility and not because of any positive principles of
objective responsibility that justice confines its activities
to material acts, in which restricted domain it already
encounters difficulties enough.
In short, modern responsibility tends to be entirely
individual and entirely subjective. But one must go
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 339
further than this. Between the primitive conception of
responsibility and certain existing ideas on the subject
there is a difference, not only of degree, but of kind. In
the case of the first, punishment is the moral conception
par excellence. And as the primitive notions are all
realistic, the idea of punishment, for lack of differentiation
between the psychical and the physical, has, to begin
with, a meaning that is as much magical as mystical.
The crime being a centre of physical and psychical
infection, its punishment will have effects that are both
material and spiritual. Except in regard to certain theo-
logical conceptions, these ideas have become completely
foreign to our way of thinking. At the same time, the idea
that a good action deserves its reward and an evil one its
punishment, is one that is still very widespread. This
conception, which combines very easily with that of
subjective responsibility, we willingly allow to be a product
of primitive, objective, and quasi-materialistic notions of
responsibility. But it will be admitted that a great many
of our contemporaries have freed themselves of this idea.
To the minds of many, not only, needless to say, should
good be sought for its own sake, but punishment of any
kind is immoral. If, with M. Fauconnet, we identify
responsibility with punishment, it will be only in reference
to those chosen few that we shall talk of an " attenuation
of responsibility". But the whole point about these
people is that they dissociate responsibility from punish-
ment, and reject punishment as energetically as they
cultivate the idea of responsibility. Of course we must
distinguish here between the legal and the moral point of
view. From a purely legal point of view, punishment is
perhaps necessary for the defence of society, though
modern writers on the subject also tend to place the idea of
social re-education and re-adaptation above that of expia-
tion. But from the moral point of view, there is always
something ambiguous about the idea of punishment, and
the least we can say of it is that it renders autonomy of
conscience impossible. M. Guyau's brilliant defence of
340 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
tbis theory will be remembered, and if it lacked a certain
depth, the same charge can hardly be laid to one of the
most substantial reactions ever made against the Kantian
Ethics, which, like so many, only went half the way to true
autonomy we mean the ethical system of F. Rauh.
In a word, inner responsibility, which goes with autonomy
of conscience and arises from the relations of cooperation,
is not simply derived from the form of responsibility that
is bound up with the idea of expiatory punishment, and
consequently with constraint and heteronomy : a new
type of moral attitude has replaced a superannuated
attitude, and the continuity of the two events in time
must not be allowed to hide the difference of their nature.
In conclusion and this is what we want to establish,
for it will be invaluable to us in what follows social
constraint and cooperation lead to results that do not
admit of comparison. Social constraint and by this we
mean any. social relation into which there enters an ele-
ment of authority and which is not, like cooperation, the
result of an interchange between equal individuals has
on the individual results that are analogous to those
exercised by adult constraint on the mind of the child.
The two phenomena, moreover, are really one and the
same thing, and the adult who is under the dominion of
unilateral respect for the " Elders " and for tradition is
really behaving like a child. It may even be maintained
that the realism of primitive conceptions of crime and
punishment is, in certain respects, an infantile reaction.
To primitive man, the moral and the physical universe are
one and the same thing, and a rule is both a law of nature
and a principle of conduct. For this reason, crime
threatens the very existence of the universe and must be
mystically set at naught by a suitable expiation. But
this idea of a law that is both physical and moral is the
very core of the child's conception of the world ; for
under the effect of adult constraint the child cannot con-
ceive the laws of the physical universe except in the guise
of a certain obedience rendered by things to rules. As to
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 341
ideas of punishment and expiation, how could they have
become so widespread in the adult community if men had
not all first been children, and if the child had not been
from the very beginning of his mental development re-
spectful towards the decisions of the adult who reprimands
him and punishes him ? Under the effects of social
differentiation and cooperation, on the contrary, the indi-
vidual is less and less dominated by the cult of the past
and by the forced conformity which accompanies it. He
then becomes really adult, and the infantile traits that
mark the conformist spirit make place for the features
that are the outcome of cooperation. Thus autonomy of
conscience takes the place of heteronomy, whence we have
the transformations studied by M. Fauconnet in the domain
of responsibility, and the criticisms which come to be raised
against the very idea of expiatory punishment ; thus the
purely interior responsibility which blames itself for not
reaching a certain ideal follows upon the responsibility
born of the reactions of the group. It is true that this
inner responsibility remains a social phenomenon ; unless
individuals cooperated, conscience would be ignorant of
right and of the sense of guilt. But this is a phenomenon
of different order from that of the facts of constraint,
though it constitutes in a fashion the form of equilibrium
towards which the whole history of responsibility tends.
2. DURKHEIM'S DOCTRINE OF MORAL AUTHORITY :
I. INTRODUCTION. Durkheim's ethical teaching, which
strikes so sincere a note and is imbued with such a deeply
scientific spirit, certainly raises the gravest question we
have to face in our interpretation of the facts of child
psychology. Where we see a struggle between two
moralities, and between two types of social relations,
Durkheim affirms the unity of all moral and social facts.
True, no one has realized better than he the deep socio-
logical foundation for the struggle between independent
and transcendent morality, but while we believe the first to
have been prepared for by the solidarity amongst children
342 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
themselves and the second to have proceeded from the
constraint of the adult over the child, Durkheim regards
all morality as imposed "by the group upon the individual
and by the adult upon the child. Consequently, from the
pedagogic point of view, whereas we would be inclined to
see in the " Activity" School, in " self-government ", and
in the autonomy of the child the only form of education
likely to produce a rational morality, Durkheim upholds
a system of education which is based on the traditional
model and relies on methods that are fundamentally
those of authority, in spite of all the tempering features
he introduced into it in order to allow for inner liberty
of conscience.
Before examining L'Education Morale let us devote a
little thought to the problem of Durkheim's moral soci-
ology in general. For Durkheim's ideas on the child can
only be understood in terms of his general sociology, and
as his ideas on children resemble so closely those of
common sense and current pedagogy we shall have to
examine them very closely if we wish to uphold the
soundness of our own theories on the subject.
In his book on the division of labour, La Division du
Travail Social, the least dogmatic and, theoretically, the
most suggestive of his works, Durkheim has shown greater
caution than he did later on with regard to the unity of
social facts and consequently the identity of moral facts
with each other. There are two great types of society :
on the one hand, there are the conformist communities
whose solidarity is segmented or mechanical ; and on the
other, there are the communities differentiated from within
by division of labour and possessing organic solidarity.
The first are exclusive of inner freedom and of ^person-
ality, the second mark the growth and expansion of
individual dignity. Now, social differentiation is a recent
phenomenon, as yet hardly defined and apt to over-
throw our social habits and moral rules. By causing
a break-down in traditional conformity, differentiation
applies a check to the theological symbols connected with
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 343
conformity, and since in communities of tlie first type
morality depends upon religion and the external forms
of religion, our first duty will be actually to create
a new morality for ourselves. Our equilibrium is
threatened. We need an inner equivalent of the outer
solidarity that belongs to conformity. What we lose
in the material constraint of traditional institutions we
must gain in inner morality, in a personal cultivation of
solidarity.
It seemed, then, according to this presentation of the
subject, that social pressure appeared under two different
manifestations : constraint properly so called in conformist
societies, and inner obligation in cooperation. It seemed,
at any rate, as though moral feelings would have to present
themselves under almost opposite forms according as they
belonged to the heteronomy of an obligatory conformity
or to the autonomy belonging to personality in differen-
tiated and organic societies. The tendency of Durkheim's
later works, however, was to reduce constraint and co-
operation to unity, and above all to fuse into a single
explanation the analyses he gave of the different aspects
of morality.
In the case of constraint, Durkheim has stretched his
definition of the word to cover all social phenomena what-
soever. Whether he is talking of the inward attraction felt
by the individual for universal human ideals, or of the
coercion exercised by public opinion or police, it is all
constraint. The " externality " of the social phenomenon
gives rise to the same generalizations. Logical and moral
principles are external to the individual in the sense that
the individual mind would not have been able to work
them out unaided. But so are verbal signs, mystical
symbols or economic values, in the sense that it is not in
the individual's power to alter them at will. In a word,
society is always one and the same, and the differences
between cooperation and obligatory conformity are more
a matter of degree than of quality.
Morality is treated in the same way. Morality is
344 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
born of religion, since obligatory acts were first sanc-
tioned in so far as they proceeded from the idea of
the sacred. Just as the sacred is what inspires both a
respectful fear and a feeling of attraction, so do moral
conceptions present two irreducible, but inseparable
aspects obligation and duty on the one hand, and
on the other, the sense of the good or of a desirable
ideal.
Again, just as the sacred gives rise to ritual prohibitions
and positive commands, so does morality forbid and
compel without giving reasons. The Categorical Impera-
tive is thus a direct emanation from social constraint.
The object of morality and the source of respect can be
only society itself, as distinct from individuals and
superior to them.
On the main thesis of Durkheim's doctrine, i.e. the
explanation of morality by social life, and the interpre-
tation of its changes in terms of the varying structure
of society, we can naturally only agree with his socio-
logical school, because of the results of our enquiry. We
found that the purely individual elements of morality
could be traced either to the feeling of respect felt by the
younger for the older children, which explained the genesis
of conscience and duty, or to the feelings of sympathy felt
by the child for those around him, which made coopera-
tion possible. Instinctive tendencies, together with others
more or less directly connected with them, are thus a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for the formation
of morality. Morality presupposes the existence of rules
which transcend the individual, and these rules could only
develop through contact with other people. . Thus the
fundamental conceptions of childish morality consist of
those imposed by the adult and of those born of col-
laboration between children themselves. In both cases,
that is to say, whether the child's moral judgments are
heteronomous or autonomous, accepted under pressure or
worked out in freedom, this morality is social, and on this
point Durkheim is unquestionably right.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 345
But the matter does not end here, and it remains to be
seen whether the unity of all social facts postulated by Durk-
heim is not such as to rob morality of its most fundamental
and most specific characteristic its normative autonomy.
The danger of the sociological explanation and Durkheim
was the first to notice it is that it may compromise
morality by identifying it with reasons of state, with
accepted opinions, or with collective conservatism ; in a
word, with everything that the greatest reformers have
attacked in the name of conscience. And we do not think
that the solution given by Durkheim to this crucial
problem is likely to remove our doubts. We ask the
reader's forbearance in laying so much stress on this much
discussed problem. But it is one that in spite of any
contrary appearance is so important in child psychology
Durkheim's pedagogy proves this if nothing else that
we must not be afraid of appearing to utter truisms in
our effort to remove all possible misunderstanding.
Durkheim seems to have remained undecided on this
essential point. In some passages he seems to attribute
moral value to prevalent opinion by the mere fact that
it is prevalent. " The affinity between habit and moral
practice is even such that any collective habit almost
inevitably presents a certain moral character. Once a
form of behaviour has become habitual in a group, any
departure from it provokes an impulse of disapproval very
closely akin to that called forth by moral faults properly
so called. Such habits command, in a measure, the
special respect that is paid to moral practices. While all
collective habits are not moral, all moral practices are
undoubtedly collective habits. Consequently, whoever is
refractory to all that is habit may very easily prove so to
morality ' ' (Education Morale, p. 3 1) . But in other places
and the passages we shall now quote seem to us to express
Durkheim's own ideal far better than those in which he
defends " collective habit " Durkheim seems to say the
exact opposite. " It has been objected to this view that it
subjects the mind to the prevailing moral opinion. But
346 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
this is not so, for the society which morality tells us to
desire is not society as it appears to itself but society as it
really is or tends to be. And it may happen that society's
own consciousness of itself, acquired in and through
opinion, may be an inadequate reflection of the under-
lying reality. Public opinion may be full of anachronisms
which make it lag behind the actual state of society "
(Sociologie et Philosophic, p. 51). And most important of
all, in answer to a criticism by M. Parodi, Durkheim
did not hesitate to declare before the " Soci<*t fran$aise
de Philosophic " that according to his system . of
Ethics it was the consciences of great individuals that
were in the right when they came into conflict with
public opinion. It may be granted, for instance, that
public opinion in Athens condemned Socrates, but it
was he who was in the right and not the Athenians,
because "Socrates expressed more faithfully than his
judges the morality that suited the society of his time "
Clearly, one must make one's choice between these two
solutions. But this is just what Durkheim could not
admit, for the choice would at the same time settle the
problem of constraint and cooperation. For, either society
is one, and all social processes, including cooperation, are
to be assimilated to pure constraint alone, in which case
right is bound to be determined by public opinion and
traditional use ; or else, a distinction must be made
between actual and ideal society, that is to say, between
" opinion " and society such as it is " really tending to
be ", in which case one is inevitably led to distinguish
between constraint and cooperation more fundamentally
than Durkheim wished to do, so as to place moral values
above reasons of state.
For how, we would ask, is it possible to distinguish
between society as it is and society as it is tending to
become ? Under a r&gime of compulsory conformity, i.e.
of more or less unadulterated social constraint, such a
distinction is unthinkable. A given set of beliefs and
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 347
practices are handed to the individual, and morality con-
sists in preserving them as such. Involuntary alterations
may, of course, occur in the established usage, and the
breach may become appreciable between the new and the
traditional usage. But the ideal is at one's back, not
before one's eyes. For what constraint imposes is an
already organized system of rules and opinions ; you can
take this system or leave it, but any form of argument or
personal interpretation is irreconcilable with conformity.
In differentiated communities like ours, on the contrary,
new relations between individuals become conceivable,
germs of which, indeed, were already to be found in
primitive communities, particularly in matters of technical
labour. In the midst of the network of groupings which
constitute our present society, individuals agree, not so
much to preserve a set of dogmas and rites, as to apply
a " method " or set of methods. What one affirms is
verified by the others; what one has done is tried out
and tested by the others. The essence of experimental
behaviour whether scientific, technical, or moral con-
sists, not in a common belief, but in rules of mutual control.
Everyone is free to bring in innovations, but only in so far
as he succeeds in making himself understood by others
and in understanding them. This cooperation, which, it
must be admitted, is in many spheres still far from pre-
vailing over social constraint, though it constitutes the
ideal of democratic communities, is the only thing that
allows for the distinction between what is and what ought
to be. For the word "method" implies that certain
provisional truths have been established, but above all
that there is more to discover and that progress de-
pends on compliance with certain norms. In this way
the characteristics of the ideal are safeguarded. The
essence of social constraint and of external authority, on
the contrary, is to identify what is with what ought to be,
the ideal state of things being thus conceived as already
realized.
Durkheim's refusal to admit any other difference than
348 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
one of degree between constraint and cooperation must be
due to the fact that the two processes are connected by
an endless series of intermediate links. As he showed in
his first work, it is to the extent that a community grows
in volume and in density that division of labour, indi-
vidualism and cooperation triumph over compulsory con-
formity. The hypothesis may therefore be advanced that
in all communities the social totality exercises constraint
upon the individuals, and that this constraint takes .the
form of cooperative solidarity in our civilization, whereas
it remains limited to a compulsory conformity in primitive
communities. Only this factual continuity, which we in
no way wish to deny, does not exclude a qualitative
contrast in the results. One may conceive of cooperation
as constituting the ideal form of equilibrium towards which
society tends when compulsory conformity comes to
break down. As this ideal is approached, the character
of social life comes to differ qualitatively from its primitive
state, although the movement between the two forms is
continuous.
Let us approach the matter as psychologists in order
to see more clearly its relationship to the two moralities
of the child. Durkheim, except on rare occasions, has in
mind only society as made up of adults. Everything
happens, in his books, as though the group as a total
synthesis simply exerted its pressure upon all individuals
independently of their age. Now let us imagine a com-
munity of which the members had always been each
other's contemporaries, and had lived their lives without
experiencing either the constraint of the generations pre-
ceding them, or the education of the generations follow-
ing them. However many centuries we allow these
individuals to have lived, and however collective we
picture their psychology, the chances are a thousand to
one against their ever reproducing the sociology to which
we have been accustomed in the communities described
as " primitive ". These people would gradually discover a
language, a logic, a science, an ethic, and a metaphysic of
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 349
their own, but allowing for groping experiments, for errors,
and for momentary collective deviations, one cannot
imagine anything that would lead them to accept a social
constraint as firmly crystallized as those of the com-
munities in which compulsory conformity holds its sway.
For it seems to us obvious that all the elementary social
phenomena would be radically different from what they
are if communities had never been foimed except by indi-
viduals of the same age and ignorant of the pressure of
one generation upon the other. The younger child feels
respect for the older, and for its parents and the more
simply constituted the society in which he lives, the more
durable a part does this unilateral respect pay in the life
of an individual, as the respect for age and elders in the
more primitive communities seems to show. Without this
unilateral respect one simply does not see how the ethics
and the logic peculiar to social constraint and conformity
could ever have come into being. In the moral sphere, it
may very well be that such facts as ritual obligations and
prohibitions, moral realism and objective responsibility
would not exist without the respect which the child feels
for the adult. But one can go a step farther and sur-
mise that the outstanding features of " primitive men-
taEty " can be explained by a conjunction of the childish
mentality with the effects of the constraint exercised by
one generation upon the other. Primitive mentality would
therefore be due to social constraint being refracted
through the childish mind. 1 In our civilization, on the
contrary, with its foundation of cooperation and individual
differentiation, the egocentric mentality of the child hardly
enters into fundamental social phenomena except in the
case of those which constitute "survivals", as Durkheim
has called them, or which are " behind-hand in relation to
1 In saying this, we do not, of course, wish to return to the pre-
sociological phase of psychology, but simply to show that within the
framework established by sociology there is everything to be said for
reinstating psychological analysis. There is at the present day far more
parallelism than antagonism between sociological studies and psycho-
logical research.
350 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the existing state of society/* The development of the
sciences, of industry, the economic division of labour,
rational morality, and democratic ideas, all seem to
be so many conquests standing in no relation to the
constraint of the generations upon one another and aris-
ing directly from a cooperation that is independent of
age.
In short, social constraint may be regarded from the
psychological point of view as arising partly from the
constraint exercised by the adult upon the child, and as
exercising in consequence of this a " consolidating " effect
upon child mentality. This assumption gains force if, as
we showed in the course of our enquiries, social constraint
does not really suffice to " socialize " the child but accen-
tuates its egocentrism. Cooperation, on the other hand,
seems to be essentially the social relation which tends
to eliminate infantile phenomena. And this is enough to
show that cooperation, while constituting the ideal form of
equilibrium towards which constraint approaches in so far
as social condensation liberates the younger generations,
leads eventually to results that are qualitatively the
opposite of constraint. It shows finally that if, with
Durkheim, we wish to distinguish between opinion and
reason, between the observance of custom and that
of moral norms, we must at the same time make
a vigorous distinction between a social process such
as constraint, which simply consecrates the existing
order of things, and a social process such as coopera-
tion, which essentially imposes a method and thus
allows for the emancipation of what ought to be from
what is.
We can now turn to the examination of the really
ethical part of Durkheim's sociology. Two parts should
be distinguished here : the theory of duty or of moral
obligation, and the theory of good or autonomy of
conscience. With regard to duty we cannot but sub-
scribe to Durkheim's theory, at any rate from the
point of view of static sociology. It seems to us
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 351
incontestable not only that the totality of duties in a
given society is bound up with the structure of this
society, but also that the very form of duty (the feeling
of obligation) is connected with the constraint exercised
by the society on the individuals. From the genetic point
of view, on the other hand, it can be maintained that the
pressure of an adult upon a child is sufficient to give rise
to the sense of duty in the latter's mind and to do so
independently of the pressure to which the adult is
subjected on the part of the whole society. But we do not
regard these facts as contradictory of Durkheim's teach-
ing, whatever Durkheim himself might have thought about
it. It is therefore unnecessary to press the point any
further, the more so as we shall deal with it again in
connection with M. Bovet's theory.
The theory of the morally good, on the other hand,
seems to us to persent difficulties which arise from those
very relations between constraint and cooperation of
which we have just spoken. Very rightly, Durkheim
begins by contrasting good and duty, and pronounces
these two aspects of the moral life so different as to be
irreducible. And yet soon after this, Durkheim almost
identifies them in so far as they seem to him inseparable,
and for him every moral act partakes both of the obligation
belonging to duty and of the desirability which character-
izes what is good. And these two notions are given to us
as having a common origin : good and duty both come
from the feeling of the " sacred ", the sacred being at once
imperative and desirable, just as is society itself, of which
the sacred is only the reflection.
Now this common origin is just what seems to us
questionable. True, there is no feeling of duty without
desirability, and therefore without a certain feeling of the
good. But the reason for this is clear. Unilateral respect,
which is at the back of all consciousness of duty, consists
of a sui generis mixture of fear and love, which implies
in consequence an element of desirability. But the con-
verse is not true. Actions can be good, yet devoid of
352 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
any element of obligation. 1 There are even individuals,
as Durkheim himself remarked, to whom goodness matters
far more than duty, and the converse is also true.
Durkheim, it is true, explains these individual differ-
ences in such a way as to fit them into his theory. " Each
individual/' he says, " expresses the common morality in
his own way ; each understands it, envisages it from a
different angle ; perhaps no one mind is completely
adequate to the morality of its own time " (Social, d
Phil., p. 56). In consequence, then, there would seem to
be a " common morality " existing as such in society and
regarded by the various individuals each from his own
point of view. This would explain why in reality the
good and duty are indissociable, each individual being free
to stress one or other of these two aspects of the moral
life, which would thus be rendered mutually irreducible.
But we shall have to examine more closely those re-
lations between common morality and individuals ; for
the whole of the part played by society in the genesis of
moral ideas is here the point at issue. When a number of
travellers are climbing a mountain or exploring a tract of
country, one can say that their individual points of view
are always inadequate, because they cannot see everything
that there is to be seen, or because they cannot see it
simultaneously. If " common morality " constitutes an
object that is thus external to the individuals, it goes
without saying that the separate minds will always be
inadequate, and that their respective viewpoints will be
reconcilable only in the absolute of such a realism. But
another solution is possible, and one which Durkheim does
not seem to have envisaged, namely that " common
morality " does not consist in a " thing " given to indi-
viduals from without, but in a sum of relations between
individuals. Common morality would thus be defined by
the system of laws of perspective enabling one to pass
1 According to Durkheim (Sociologie et Philosophic, p. 65) no moral
acts are " purely desirable, for they always require effort." But effort
is not necessarily the same thing as obligation.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 353
from one point of view to the other, and allowing in
consequence the making of a map or objective repre-
sentation of the mountain or country. In this case each
individual perspective could be different from the others
and yet at the same time adequate and in no danger of
jeopardizing the coherence of the whole. It is true that this
whole is extremely complex and that the individual con-
sciences are also perhaps inadequate in the first sense of the
term. But the point is that the second sense should also
have its share of truth, as we believe to be really the case.
For while duty constitutes a collection of commands more or
less identical in each case, the good demands in addition a
certain margin of personal elaboration and autonomy.
Which surely means that far from being the result of
constraint, it can be explained only by cooperation.
In this way we are led to examine the curious argumen-
tation by means of which Durkheim defines the object of
what is morally good. This ob j ect cannot be the individual,
since egoism is rejected by every kind of ethics. There-
fore, " if each individual taken separately is incapable of
giving any moral value to conduct, i.e. has in himself no
moral value, neither does the numerical sum of such
individuals possess any value " (Social, et Philos., p. 73).
Thus, " now that we have eliminated the individual
subject, there remains no possible objective for moral
activity than the sui generis entity formed by a plurality
of individual subjects associated in such a way as to form
a group ; there remains only the collective subject " (p. 74).
Society must therefore "be regarded as a personality
qualitatively different from the individual personalities of
which it is composed" (p. 54), and altruism becomes
legitimate in so far as the other person incarnates society.
For " though society is something different from the
individual, and though it can be found in its entirety in
none of us, yet there is not one of us in whom it is not in
a manner reflected " (Education Morale, p. 93).
It should be noted, in the first place, that such an ex-
planation of altruism could equally well be made to
354 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
justify egoism. For, after all, I am as much a reflection of
society as anyone else, and this inner reflection seems to
me far more direct than those that are refracted through
other people's personalities. Apart from this interpreta-
tion, these passages from Durkheim's writings can have
only one meaning : what we love in others is not so much
the individual as the possibility of a bond of affection, not
so much the friend as friendship. An inhuman formula if
the moral fact remains external to the individual, and is
imposed upon him from without, but one of singular
profundity if the good constitutes the law of perspective
and the rule of reciprocity which aim at bringing about
mutual understanding. Then what we seek in the other
person is the very thing that enables the other person to
come out of himself while yet remaining most profoundly
himself.
The good, in short, is not, like duty, the result of a
constraint exercised by society upon the individual. The
aspiration to the good is of different stuff from, the obedience
given to an imperative rule. Mutual respect, which consti-
tutes the good, does not lead to the same conformity
as unilateral respect, which characterizes duty. In our
modern societies, no doubt, the difference between the
two has become dulled, for the content of duty can be
more and more identified with the good. This is why
Kantian Ethics, in its form a morality of duty, is in its
content a morality of autonomous will, and defines the
good by a universality which rests on reciprocity itself
(though in Kant's persona,! mentality there are many
traces of heteronomy and legalism). But in primitive
communities the opposition is almost complete between the
whole set of legal prohibitions or taboos laid down by the
morality of duty and the rules of justice and reciprocity
which grow up between individuals without always being
codified. It is only in differentiated societies that, as
ritual obligations diminish along with conformity, the
morality of good wins against the morality of duty, and
becomes transmitted from one generation to another until
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 355
it comes to constitute the actual content of the duties
themselves.
In conclusion, the fundamental difficulty of Durk-
heimism seems to us to be the illegitimate identification
of constraint and cooperation. In the moral sphere, this
means that the identification of good and duty is pushed
too far and, what is worse, that morality is made sub-
servient to social conformity. There can be no complete
moral autonomy except by cooperation. From this point
of view, morality is still a social thing, but society cannot
be regarded as a completed whole nor as a system of fully
realized values. The morality of good develops progressively
and constitutes, in relation to society, a form of ideal equili-
brium, as it were, which rises above the false and unstable
existing equilibria which are based on constraint.
3. THE THEORY OF AUTHORITY ACCORDING TO DURK-
HEIM : II. MORAL EDUCATION. We now reach what
is to us the fundamental point of the controversy, that is to
say, Durkheim's ideas on child psychology in relation
to sociology. For the course of lectures embodied in his
Education Morale is the most powerful effort made
on scientific lines to justify the conceptions on which
traditional education rests. Whereas nearly all child
psychologists, Stanley Hall, Dewey, Clapar&de, etc.
speaking, it is true, more from the child's point of view
than from that of society have denounced the delusions of
the scholastic method, Durkheim, taking his stand on
society and approaching the child from that standpoint is,
on the contrary, extremely conservative. We must there-
fore test the soundness of his arguments in the light of
the actual facts of child morality.
Let us start with a discussion of the principle involved,
not only because this work of Durkheim's forms a wonder-
fully coherent whole, but because in many ways he re-
affirms here what was stated in his earlier writings.
There are, according to Durkheim, three elements in
morality : the spirit of discipline, the attachment to
356 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
social groups, and the autonomy of the will. The spirit of
discipline (V esprit de discipline) is in itself fundamental,
since morality consists in a body of rules sanctioned by
society. " To regularize conduct is a fundamental func-
tion of morality " (p. 30). But there is more in the idea
of rule than merely the notion of regularity : there is
authority. " By authority must be understood the ascend-
ency exercised over us by any moral power that we
recognize as superior to ourselves" (p. 33). Morality
is thus a system of commands, and individual conscience
nothing but the product of the interiorization of these
collective imperatives. It is also true that discipline,
far from thwarting the growth and expansion of the
individual, is the sole condition for the development of
personality (p. 52).
The attachment to social groups is no less important.
Individuals possessing no moral value in themselves,
the group is the only legitimate end. But here again,
far from checking individual initiative, this end enriches
personality : we are all social beings, and there is no real
antagonism between the individual and society (p. 80).
Moreover, " What shows that morality is the work of the
community is that it varies as do communities " (p. 98).
It is true that beneath all the variations of morality
there remains a basis that is permanent and unchanging,
but this is because society, though it evolves, retains
certain constant features : "A society remains, up to a
point, identical with itself, throughout the course of its
existence. Under the changes it undergoes its funda-
mental constitution is always the same. The ethical
system which it practises therefore presents the same
degree of identity and constancy " (p. 121). Finally,
it should be noted that the spirit of discipline and the
attachment to a group constitute, in the last analysis,
one and the same phenomenon. No individual possesses
authority or prestige in himself. " Society alone stands
above individuals. From it therefore emanates all autho-
rity. It is society that bestows upon such and such human
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 357
qualities that sui generis character, that prestige which
raises the individuals who possess it above themselves "
(p. 103).
This unity of discipline and attachment to groups also
explains the profound identity of duty and good. " Duty is
morality in so far as it commands ; it is morality conceived
as an authority which we obey because it is authority, and
for no other reason. Good is morality conceived as some-
thing desirable, which entices the will to its service, and
provokes a spontaneous longing. Now it is easy to see
that duty is society, in so far as it lays down rales and
sets limitations to our nature ; whereas the good is also
society, but in so far as it is a reality richer than our own,
and one to which we cannot become attached without a
resulting enrichment of our being" (p. no). These two
elements of morality are therefore only " two different
aspects of the same reality " (p. 112), and if it be true that
our societies lay more stress on good than on duty, and
that we are losing the sense of collective discipline (p. 116),
then it becomes the urgent task of education to restore
the unity of our moral consciousness by reconciling the
good and duty once again.
The third element of morality is the autonomy of the
will. It is contrary to rational morality to impose any-
thing whatsoever on conscience itself. " It is a rule, not
only of logic, but of morality, that our reason must only
accept as true what it has spontaneously recognized as
such " (p. 123). But the Kantian solution which explains
autonomy by the rational will reduces obligation to
" an accidental character, as it were, of the moral law "
(p. 125). But it is necessary, on the contrary, to justify
autonomy without disparaging the principle of obligation
and authority. " Kant has shown better than anyone
else that there was something religious in the feeling with
which the moral law filled even the highest reason. Now
we can have religious feeling only for some being, real or
ideal, who seems to us superior to the faculty by which
we conceive it. For the truth is that obligation is an
358 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
essential element of moral precept " (p. 126). Durkheim
claims to find this reconciliation of autonomy and social
authority in a comparison with natural science. It is
only by learning the laws of nature, by using them with-
out trying to infringe them, that we become free of
nature. Now " in the moral order there is room for the
same autonomy, and there is room for no other. Just as
morality expresses the nature of society, and that society
cannot be known directly any more than can physical
nature, so individual reason can no more legislate for the
world of morals than it does for the material universe. . . .
But this order which the individual, as an individual, has
not created, has not deliberately willed, can become his
by science" (p. 133). In short, autonomy consists in
understanding the why and wherefore of the laws which
society lays upon us and which we cannot choose but
accept.
After this analysis, Durkheim asks how we can instil
the elements of morality in the child. Durkheim's prin-
ciple is very elastic when he comes to deal with educational
matters, far more so, indeed, than the sociological doctrine
would have led one to suppose. On the one hand, the
child does not of itself possess the elements of morality,
and we must therefore " inform its nature." But on the
other hand, " educational action . . . does not work upon
a blank sheet of paper. The child has a nature of its own,
and since it is this nature that must be informed, we
must, if we are to work upon it effectually, begin by try-
ing to know it " (p. 147). It is these introductory remarks,
so wise and so much in tune with the contemporary
educational movement, that have led us to submit Durk-
heirn's ideas to a searching critical examination.
Unfortunately, under the influence of a " pre-notion ",
hard to account for in a sociologist, and especially in one
so methodical, Durkheim thinks of children as knowing
no other society than adult society or the societies
created by adults (schools), so that he entirely ignores
the existence of spontaneously formed children's societies,
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 359
and of the facts relating to mutual respect. Consequently,
elastic though Durkheim's pedagogy may be in principle,
it simply leads, for lack of being sufficiently informed on
the subject of child sociology, to a defence of the methods
of authority.
First question : How to form the spirit of discipline
in the child ? It should be noted from the first " that the
mental states which education must produce in the child
are only virtually present, and exist only in a general
form that is very far removed from that which they are
destined to take/' This is particularly true "of the
spirit of discipline. We may say indeed that not one of
the elements that compose it is present in its entirety in
the mind of the child " (p. 148). One of these elements
is the taste for a regular life. Now the child is all fantasy,
all restlessness. " The outstanding feature of infantile
curiosity is that it is unstable and fleeting" (p. 149).
The spirit of discipline, on the other hand, means modera-
tion and self-control. Now the child knows no limit to
its desires, sets no curb to its emotions and instinctive
tendencies. It is true that in spite of this there are " two
characteristics constitutive of the infantile mental make-
up which respond to our influence ; these are i childish
traditionalism; 2 the child's openness to suggestion,
especially to imperative suggestion " (p. 153). At this
point, Durkheim makes the very penetrating observation
that in spite of his restlessness the child is a " lover of
routine " (p. 153). The rituals attached to eating, going
to bed, etc., show the hold which habit has over his
nature. " Thus the child is at the same time unstable
and misoneistic " (p. 154). Like primitive man, the child
is a traditionalist (p. 155). At the same time, everyone
has noticed its suggestibility as well as the enormous
ascendency which the example of those around it exercise
upon its nature.
It is these features of child psychology which render
futile all those " oft-repeated arguments as to whether
the child is born moral or immoral, or whether it possesses
360 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
in itself the positive elements of morality and immorality.
Put in this way, the problem admits of no definite solu-
tion. To act morally is to conform to the rules of morality.
But "the rules of morality are external to the child's
conscience ; they are worked out apart from him ; he
only comes in contact with them at a definite point in
his life " (p. 167). This decisive moment in the making
of the spirit of discipline arrives when the child goes to
school. In the family altruistic leanings and feeling
of solidarity are stronger than duty. At school, on the
contrary, there must be rules. These rules must be
cultivated for their own sake. They constitute " an
instrument of moral education which it would be hard
to replace " (p. 171). It is therefore the master's business
to impose them. " Since it is by the master that rules
are revealed to the child, everything rests with him.
Rules can have no other authority than that which he
confers upon them: that is to say, than that of which
he suggests the idea to the children " (p. 176). The lay
teacher must be a kind of priest of society. " Just as
the priest is the interpreter of God, so he is the interpreter
of the great moral ideas of his time and his country "
(p. 177). But, on the other hand, the teacher's authority
must give way before that of the rule, " for the rule ceases
to be itself if it is not impersonal, and if it is not repre-
sented as such to people's minds " (p. 178).
Durkheim is therefore opposed to the form of education
based on individual interests and free initiative which
is advanced by the " Activity School " under all its forms.
He answers Montaigne with the classic argument : " Life
is not all play ; the child must prepare himself for pain
and effort, and it would therefore be a disaster if he were
allowed to think that everything can be done as a game "
(p. 183). There must therefore be not only a firm discipline
in schools, but also penalties that will enforce this discipline.
But what exactly do we mean by a penalty ? Some
people look upon it as preventive measure. But the
superficiality of such a justification has been recognized,
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 361
since it attributes to the child or delinquent a capacity
for prevision which is utterly foreign to their natural
impulsiveness. Others, again, take a penalty to be an
expiation. Durkheim, while he rejects the materialistic
form of the doctrine of expiatory suffering, thinks, never-
theless, that <c something of this theory should be retained.
The part of it to be retained is the principle that the
penalty wipes out the fault, or at any rate makes up for it
as much as is possible. But the penalty does not possess
the power of reparation because of the suffering it im-
plies : for suffering is an evil, and it would be absurd to
suppose that one evil can compensate for another and
nullify it" (p. 188). If suffering wipes out the fault,
this is because " the fundamental function of a penalty "
is "to reassure those spirits whose faith may indeed
must have been shaken by the violation of the law, even
though they were not aware of it, to show them that this
faith is as justified as it was before, and, especially in the
case of schools, that it is still held by the person who
first gave it to the children " (p. 191). Thus a punish-
ment wipes out a fault in so far as the pain inflicted proves
to the child that the teacher has taken this misdeed seri-
ously. So that the essence of a penalty is to symbolize
blame : " The punishment is only the material sign of
an inner state ; it is a system of notation, a language,
by means of which either public opinion or the school-
master's conscience expresses the feeling aroused in them
by the censured act " (p. 201).
As for Herbert Spencer's theory of natural punishment,
it rests on the illusion that education comes from nature,
whereas in reality it is a social process. Punishment
should undoubtedly be regarded as the natural conse-
quence of the fault committed, but the consequence in
this case is not the physical result of the guilty actions
themselves. Punishment is the result of the fault only
in so far as the latter sets afoot a movement of dis-
approval symbolized by the former. " The true punish-
ment, like the true natural consequence, is censure " (p. 205) .
362 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
It should be noted here that coercive in character as
is this type of pedagogy, Durkheim protests vigorously
against corporal punishment, and shows himself a very
subtle psychologist in doing so. Corporal punishment,
which is unknown to most primitive communities, de-
veloped with the school and reacted on the family. How
did it take its rise in the school ? This is " a special case
of a law which could be formulated as follows. Whenever
two peoples, two groups of individuals belonging to
different levels of culture, are brought into continuous
contact with each other, certain feelings will develop
which will make the group which has or believes itself to
have the higher culture tend to do violence to the other
group 1 ' (p. 219). Thus, faced with his pupils, the master
can easily be led to violence, or even megalomania :
since the school " has by nature a monarchical form, it
easily degenerates into despotism " (p. 224).
These considerations on discipline apply equally to
the second element of morality : how to form in the child
a normal attachment to the social groups that surround
him. The psychological origin of this part of our moral
life is to be sought for in our faculty for sympathy and in
our altruistic and disinterested tendencies. Now the
child is " neither purely altruistic nor purely egoistic, but
both at the same time, though to a far lesser extent than
we are " (p. 260). It will therefore be enough to extend his
social circle progressively in order to educate him. Before
going to school he has known family life and the society of
friends, in which altruism is strengthened by ties of blood
and comradeship. And in order to prepare him for political
society which does not possess these characteristics,
school is the obvious intermediary. Civic and historical
teaching are sufficient to initiate the child to the values
attaching to adult society.
Such, then, in broad outline is Durkheim's moral
pedagogy. We cannot enter upon a discussion of a work
so sincere, so lofty in inspiration as that which we have
just summarized without a feeling of profound respect for
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 363
the memory of its author. But such is the seriousness
of the questions at stake, that we must not hesitate to
examine these theories of Durkheim's in detail and in a
spirit of complete freedom. The greatest tribute we can
pay to his vigorous scientific spirit is to forget for a
moment his immense authority.
Now, the doctrinal foundation for Durkheim's pedagogy
is so contrary not only to the apparent achievements of
present-day child psychology, but also to all that seems
to have been established by the new pedagogy (and this
is more serious, for the experiments of pedagogy will
always be more conclusive than those of the laboratory),
that we find it impossible to accept Durkheim's con-
clusions as they stand. In spite of the force and fertility
of its methods and principles, Durkheim's sociology
carries with it a fundamental difficulty that, namely,
which we pointed out a little while ago, and of which
the effects are now apparent in child psychology. Not con-
tent with showing that the main key to human psychology
is to be found in social life, Durkheim tries to make of
society a whole, a " being ", and this realism, like all
realism, has given rise to those antinomies which a metho-
dical relativism alone can avoid. There are no more
such things as societies qua beings than there are isolated
individuals. There are only relations ; these relations
must be studied simultaneously from outside and from
inside (there being no possible conflict between psychol-
ogy and sociology), and the combinations formed by them,
always incomplete, cannot be taken as permanent sub-
stances. It is therefore impossible to subsume under one
concept the many and diverse effects which social life
exercises upon the development of the individual. The
unwarranted identification of constraint and cooperation
is therefore what we shall once again have to discuss, for
this identification vitiates the whole of Durkheim's
pedagogy, as it vitiates his ethics. Let us then examine
from this point of view the three elements which Durk-
heim recognizes in morality.
364 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
The spirit of discipline, it must be agreed, constitutes the
starting-point of all moral life. There must be, not only
a certain regularity of behaviour, but rules, and rules
clothed with sufficient authority. No one will seriously
deny that this is the price to be paid for the development
of personality. We can also agree with Durkheim when
he sees in the individual as such nothing but a creature of
habit and routine. Thus it is social life that elaborates
rules properly so called, and this point of view receives
full confirmation from our enquiries : all the rules followed
by children in all the domains we examined are due to
social relations.
Only and herein resides the whole problem of educa-
tion as of morality, and even of logic is there only one
type of authority and one type of rules ? Durkheim
settles the question almost without discussing it, and
without seeming to suspect that alongside of the social
relations between children and adults there exist social
relations that apply distinctly to the groups which children
form among themselves. The passages in which Durk-
heim commits this most disastrous petitio principii are pro-
bably among the most dogmatic in the whole of his works.
All authority comes from Society with a big S (" la "
societ^, p. 103) ; the schoolmaster is the priest who acts
as an intermediary between society and the child (p. 177) ;
everything therefore rests with the master (p. 176), and
rules are a sort of revelation (p. 176) which the adult
dispenses to the child.
Now, if psychological observation gives one indubitable
result, it is that, far from limiting himself to the rules
laid down by his parents and teachers (those which he
very often observes least closely), the child ties himself
down to all sorts of rules in every sphere of his activity,
and especially in that of play. These rules are no less
social, but they rest on different types of authority.
Now the question that educationalists asked themselves
was whether these rules distinctive of children's societies
could not be utilized in class, and their experiments
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 365
few in number and little known though they were towards
1902-3 and 1906-7 (the dates of Durkheim's lectures),
have given birth to a system of moral pedagogy, called
sdf -government, which is at the opposite pole from the
Durkheimian pedagogy. 1 A fundamental problem of
psychology thus comes to be formulated as follows :
Do these different kinds of rules obey the same psycho-
sociological laws, or do they not ? This is the question
which has occupied us throughout this book, and our
answer has been in the negative.
For it seemed to us that there existed at least two
extreme types of rules and of authority rales due to
unilateral respect, and rules due to mutual respect.
Durkheim tells us that the individual as such has no autho-
rity. But even if this statement is well founded (which
we shall consider in connection with M. Bovet's theory),
the fact remains that the playmate, or older child, con-
stitutes, like the schoolmaster or the parent, a reflection,
not of Society (with # big S), but of this or that society
thought of by the child, and that the respect felt for
a fair-minded companion in a match of marbles is
different from that called forth by an adult. And these
two types of rules lead to opposite results. The rule of
constraint, which is bound up with unilateral respect,
is regarded as sacred and produces in the child's mind
feelings that are analogous to those which characterize
the compulsory conformity of primitive communities.
But this rule of constraint remains external to the child's
spirit and does not lead to as effective an obedience
as the adult would wish. Rules due to mutual agreement
and cooperation, on the contrary, take root inside the
child's mind and result in an effective observance in the
measure in which they are incorporated in an autonomous
will.
If this distinction is based on fact we may in the very
name of sociology ask the following question. Contemporary
1 See, in particular, Ad. Ferriere's fine book, UAutonomie des Ecoliers,
Collection des Actualit6s PSdagogiques, NeucMtel et Paris.
366 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
civilized society, that, namely, 'to which we are seeking
to adapt the child, is tending more and more to sub-
stitute the rule of cooperation for the rule of constraint.
The essence of democracy resides in its attitude towards
law as a product of the collective will, and not as some-
thing emanating from a transcendent will or from the
authority established by divine right. It is therefore the
essence of democracy to replace the unilateral respect
of authority by the mutual respect of autonomous wills.
So that the problem is to know what will best prepare
the child for its future task of citizenship. Is it the habit
of external discipline gained under the influence of uni-
lateral respect and of adult constraint, or is it the habit
of internal discipline, of mutual respect and of " self-
government " ? It may be, of course, that only those
who have gone through the external discipline imposed
by a master will be capable later on of any inner discipline.
This is the commonly accepted view, but it requires to
be verified. The proof, however, would not be an easy
one to establish, for considering the large number of
people who reject all discipline as soon as they have
escaped from school and home ties, or who for the rest of
their lives are capable only of external discipline and legal
morality, it may very well be that it is in spite of adult
authority, or in spite of certain kinds of adult authority,
that the best of our young people sooner or later adopt
a disciplined way of living.
For ourselves, we regard as -of the utmost importance
the experiments that have been made to introduce demo-
cratic methods into schools. As Foerster x has so ably said,
it is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas
enter into every sphere of life, they should have been
so little utilized as instruments of education. If one thinks
of the systematic resistance offered by pupils to the
authoritarian method, and the admirable ingenuity
employed by children the world over to evade disciplin-
arian constraint, one cannot help regarding as defective
1 F. W. Foerster, UEcole et le Caractire. Fr. translation by Bo vet.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 367
a system which allows so much effort to be wasted Instead
of using it in cooperation.
One should study, for example, the evolution of a
born educator like Sanderson to see how this headmaster,
who was at first a partisan of strict authority and even
of corporal punishment, ended by introducing democracy
and the system of collaboration into his boarding-school. 1
We therefore do not at all agree with Durkheim in think-
ing that it is the master's business to impose or even to
"reveal" rules to the child. A "priest" is the last
thing a schoolmaster should be : he should be an elder
"collaborator, and, if he has it in him, a simple comrade
to the children. Then only will true discipline come into
being discipline that the children themselves have willed
and consented to. Every educationalist who has really
made the experiment has found that this is what actually
happens. The sense of a common law which, as we have
shown in connection with the rules of a game, is possessed
by children of 9-12, shows clearly enough how capable
is the child of discipline and democratic life, when he is
not, as at school, condemned to wage war against authority.
It is true that the problem of discipline is bound up with
that of functional education as a whole. Autonomous and
Inner discipline can exist in a class only to the extent that
the work enlists the major part of the child's spontaneous
initiative and activity. Interest being, according to
Dewey, the participation of the " Ego " in the work done,
it is obvious that it is necessary to the elaboration of a
discipline proper to a system of autonomy.
Only the Activity School, i.e. that in which the child is
not made to work by means of external constraint, but
where he works of his own free will (from the psychol-
ogical point of view the work done in these two cases is
completely different) only the Activity school is able to
realize cooperation and democracy in the class-room.
No.w it is precisely the principle of the Activity School
that Durkheim is disputing in his refutation of Montaigne
i H. G. Wells, A Great Headmaster.
368 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
and Tolstoi, and in doing so lie makes use of the traditional
objection that life is not a game, and that it is not by
playing that the child will learn to make efforts.
Nowadays, after the many Activity Schools that have
been established in Europe and America, it would no
longer be possible to use such an argument. Every
practising teacher who has made the experiment in
favourable conditions, has observed and anyone who
watches a child outside school hours will have noted the
same thing that if a child is interested in what he does
he is capable of making efforts to the limits of his physical
endurance. The problem can therefore be stated in the
same terms as above, but under the following general
formula : Who is the man who will be capable of the
greatest energy in precisely those circumstances where
life is not a game ? Is it the man who has best learnt
as a child to make this voluntary and spontaneous effort,
or the man who has never worked except in obedience
to a command ? The present writer has in this connection
some very definite recollections. In his class a little
class in a little town in Switzerland there were, as there
are in all classes, a few thoroughly lazy boys, a few sound
and conscientious boys, and a few who were only moderately
good pupils in school, but who went in for " interesting
things " at home chemistry, the history of aviation,
zoology, Hebrew, anything you like except what was
on the curriculum. The conscientious boys, who did not
take school life as a game have, some of them, become
civil servants, while others have filled minor academic
posts, and so on ; they cannot really be regarded to-day
as models of active energy. The same thing happened
to the lazy ones, when they did not disappear altogether.
As to the moderately good, after being told throughout
their school life that " If only you spent on your home-
work a quarter of the time you spend on your personal
pursuits, you would do exceedingly well", they ended by
giving up all their time to these personal pursuits, and
are now very sorry they were not able to extend this
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 369
method to many branches of learning in which they have
remained ignorant. It should be added, however, that
among our masters were some who not only understood
but encouraged and utilized this turn of mind and who,
like elder comrades, as it were, really enriched our fund
of knowledge because they had the tact to guess every-
thing and impose nothing.
In short, effort, like every other form of behaviour,
requires to ripen, and its primitive forms, though very
different from the final product which alone receives the
sanction of adult morality, 1 may well be indispensable
to the normal development of the individual. It is there-
fore not wasting a child's time to let him acquire by
himself the habit of work and of inner discipline. In
the moral as in the intellectual domain we really possess
only what we have conquered by ourselves. And if a
child is to achieve a desire for work and the habit of
making efforts, we must take his interests and the special
laws of his activity into account, and we must not impose
upon him from the first a system of methods and ways
too much like our own. Besides, do we ever in our own
lives carry out an effort that is comparable to that which
we require of children ? The tedious obligations laid
upon us by ordinary life, or the painful tasks called forth
by exceptional circumstances never set our effort going
unless we accept them, and we can only accept them by
really understanding them. And this is something very
different from that often meaningless obedience which
we claim to be a right preparation for life and which
as often lays the foundations of revolt or passivity.
This does not mean that the best method of education is
to let children do exactly as they like, or that the in-
dividual's own instincts will lead him to effort, work,
and discipline. For work and discipline to come into
being there must be and on this point Durkheim is
perfectly right an organized social life. But the founda-
1 ClaparMe (Educational Experiment and Child Psychology) has
written conclusively on this point.
2 A
370 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
tions of this social life can be laid without despotism or
constraint. The school, according to Durkheim, is a
monarchy founded on divine right. We have seen that
children are capable of democracy. These youthful
tendencies should be utilized and not lost or set up against
adult authority, as is so often the case in school life or
in the dreams of adolescence.
Thus the whole question of punishment requires re-
vision. According to Durkheim expiatory punishment is
necessary, because it is a symbol of censure. But we have
here at least two points that require closer investigation :
who should impute the blame, the master or the com-
munity, and is it really necessary that blame should be
symbolized by expiatory suffering ?
As to the first point, educationalists who have applied
self-government have been gradually led to give up
adult punishment and to allow free play to retributive
justice as exercised by the tribunals constituted by the
children themselves. One need only read the reports
of these children's debates and judgments to form an
opinion on the immense progress represented by this
innovation.
As to the psychological character of punishments, must
we admit without argument that expiatory suffering is
necessary in order to symbolize blame and reassure
people's consciences ? Even if the symbol is necessary
for those who are incapable of understanding the reasons
for which blame is imputed, it loses all significance for
those who understand these reasons. Moreover, if the
punishment has no other relation with the act it
punishes than this relation of being a simple sign, it will
always be " arbitrary " in its content. Now this is just
what the rational mind cannot allow, and what those
people try to avoid, who want to make the punishment the
natural result of the action. Durkheim, it is true, objects
to such a view on the ground that the natural consequence
of the action is the disapproval and consequently the
punishment which it provokes. But this is to give a very
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 371
wide meaning to the term " natural ". One might as
well say that the natural consequences of disobedience
are the master's anger and the resulting blows he delivers,
which is the last thing Durkheim would approve of. By
" natural " Durkheim means a well-defined social reaction,
and one that has been defined, by means of judgments
of moral value. In that case would it not be more natural
to be content to impute blame without symbolizing it
by arbitrary suffering, or to content oneself with punish-
ments having the approval of the morality of mutual
respect, such as punishment by reciprocity ? In short,
on this point as on so many others, Durkheim strikes us
as trying artificially to maintain the unity of the morality
of authority with rational morality. Hence his efforts to
safeguard the idea of expiation which the morality of co-
operation can only denounce as materialistic and immoral.
If we consult the children themselves and this is the
only possible course for a psychologist who wishes to
observe the laws governing the evolution of moral con-
sciousness and not merely to lay down an a priori ethic
we find that the punishment that seems most fair at the
stage of cooperation is that which is based on the idea
of reciprocity. Now, to return to Durkheim's argumenta-
tion, is not this type of punishment sufficient to " reassure
people's consciences", and to "symbolize" blame?
Punishment by reciprocity, instead of being an arbitrary
symbol, is " motivated " by its own content. As for the
childish conscience, it will be all the more "reassured"
with regard to the authority of rules, owing to the fact
that in the case of punishment by reciprocity this
authority emanates, not from adult revelation but simply
and solely from mutual and autonomous respect.
We come now to the attachment to social groups.
Durkheim very reasonably remarks in this connection
that the child is neither fundamentally selfish, as has so
often been held, nor purely altruistic, as has also been
maintained, but both egoistic and altruistic, though to
a lesser degree than the adult. This state of things is,
372 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
in our opinion, bound up with the phenomenon of childish
egocentrism in which we have tried to find the key to
the psychological phenomena characteristic of the child
mind. For in childhood, society and the individual are
as yet undissociated, so that while the child is in the
highest degree suggestible to his adult surroundings, whether
through imitation of example or through constraint, he
yet contrives in a purely unconscious manner to reduce
everything to his own point of view. This state of things
combines very easily with the psychological attitude
that characterizes conformist societies, and we saw, in
connection with the game of marbles, how easy is the
synthesis of egocentricity and constraint ; but it is
strongly opposed to cooperation, in so far as the latter
implies personalities that are both conscious of themselves
and able to submit their point of view to the laws of
reciprocity and universality. The whole problem is
therefore how to take the child out of his egocentricity
and lead him to cooperation.
Durkheim remarks, in this connection, that the only
societies known to the child are the family and his friends,
whereas the aim of social education is to prepare him for
his country and for the more specifically human feelings.
The school is therefore the necessary link. All this is
perfectly true, but here again we are faced more irrevo-
cably than ever with the problem of constraint and co-
operation. The modern ideal is cooperation dignity of
the individual and respect for general opinion as elabo-
rated in free discussion. How are we to bring children
to this spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postu-
lated by democratic societies ? By the actual practice of
cooperation, as soon as this is psychologically possible,
by what Foerster has so happily called " democracy at
school ", or by a verbal initiation into the mechanism of
adult society ? Will the lessons in history and sociology,
will training in citizenship and instruction in the elements
of law, have the least effect on the youthful mind if the
school still remains the system of monarchical authority
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 373
favoured by Durkheim ? For who will turn out to be the
best citizen, the " sport ", the " chic type " of youthful
communities, or the pupil who can give the best answers
in his history and civic instruction examinations ? The
question is worth considering.
One last point remains ; its educational application
is not dealt with in the MSS. which Durkheim has left
of his course of lectures, but their author has studied it
in connection with the elements of morality, we mean
the autonomy of the will. The position which Durkheim
adopts with regard to Kantian Ethics is extremely sug-
gestive, and his penetrating remarks on the subject reveal
more than all the rest of his work, the strength and the
weakness of his own doctrine. According to Kant, the
autonomy of the moral will is due to its rational character,
the feeling of obligation belonging to duty as such being
the result of sensibility. Durkheim points out, quite
rightly in our opinion, that in this case the obligation
belonging to pure duty becomes " in a way an accidental
feature of the moral law "' (p. 125). Now, according to
Durkheim, everything proves " that the moral law is
invested with an authority that claims respect even from
reason " (p. 125), and that it is therefore the work of an
entity, real or ideal, which is superior to the faculty that
has conceived it" (p. 126). And as this higher being is
no other than society itself, the only possible autonomy
is free submission on the part of individual reason to the
laws of society.
The enormity of such a solution is obvious. Because
Durkheim seeks to assimilate to one another constraint
and cooperation, duty and good, he actually comes to
identify the two most antithetical conceptions of obliga-
tion the heteronomous submission of reason to the
" higher entity " and the necessity residing within reason
herself. That obligation in the first sense of the term, i.e.
duty in so far as it implies unilateral respect and the
feeling of authority as such, that obligation in this sense
should be external to morality, is the logical outcome of
374 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the Kantian critique, but it is also the natural conse-
quence of the morality of cooperation. This will shock
only those who are incapable of experiencing for them-
selves the higher and purely immanent feeling of obligation,
which is the product of rational necessity. " Duty/' says
Durkheim, " is morality in so far as morality commands ;
it is morality conceived as an authority which we must
obey, because it is authority and for this reason alone "
(p. no. The italics are ours). Well, if this is duty, all
one can say is that it is quite incompatible with the
morality of cooperation. Besides, even if Durkheim the
sociologist would have found himself embarrassed by such
a conclusion, Durkheim the man, Durkheim the free and
generous spirit, showed by the whole of his career that
the latter was his real faith.
Cooperation, mutual respect, therefore imply something
more than the illusory autonomy described by Durk-
heim ; they postulate the complete autonomy of reason. 1
When Durkheim reminds us that the individual is unable
of himself to create morality, this by no means implies
that the person (i.e. the individual in so far as he submits to
the norms of reciprocity) is not free to judge of everything
by his reason alone. Nothing could be truer than to say
that autonomy presupposes a scientific knowledge of social
as of natural laws and the ability to recognize these laws at
work. But social laws are unfinished and their progres-
sive formation presupposes the unfettered cooperation of
personal reason. The autonomy of reason has therefore
nothing to do with individual fancy, but it stands in direct
contradiction to the idea of external authority recognized
as such. As Rauh has so penetratingly shown, to be
personal is to " situate oneself ", which does not mean
that one must not first " inform oneself ". In order to
foster autonomy in the child it is therefore very useful
to " inform " him scientifically, but to do this it is not
sufficient to make him submit to the dictates of adult
i On this point, see amongst other works M. D. Parodi's excellent
book, Le PyobUme moral et la Pens be contemporaire, 3rd e<L, 1930.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 375
society and to explain from outside the reasons for tMs
submission. Autonomy is a power that can only be con-
quered from within and that can find scope only inside
a scheme of cooperation.
In conclusion, then, we find that on every point of
moral sociology and pedagogy Durkheim's teaching
presents both an optimum et pessimum. Profoundly
true in its conception of moral facts as social and bound
up with the structural and functional development of
collective groups, it overlooks the essential difference
existing between cooperation and constraint. Hence
Durkheim's illusion that an education which makes use
only of unilateral respect can lead to the results that are
peculiar to the morality of mutual respect. Hence, in
moral psychology, his confusion between the heterono-
mous character peculiar to pure duty and the quality
of fundamental autonomy which belongs to the good as
such. Hence, finally, in his general sociology the un-
warranted identification of the equilibrium of fact con-
stituted by constraint and that other, ideal equilibrium
still social though in another sense of the term which
is constituted by cooperation, the limit and norm of every
human group that has ever come into being.
4. M. PIERRE BOVET'S THEORY. The premises on
which M. Bovet bases his theory are at once very near
to and very far removed from those of Durkheim. Like
Durkheim, M. Bovet refuses to account for the moral
feelings by means of the psychological phenomena be-
longing to the individual as such. At any rate, in speaking
only of individuals, M. Bovet is of opinion that an isolated
being would never develop in himself a sense of moral
obligation, a feeling which does not admit of being reduced
to those facts of adaptation, of habit, or of instinctive
afiectivity to which it has been compared. Like Durk-
heim again, M. Bovet rejects the Kantian attempt to
interpret respect as an effect of rational law, and en-
deavours, on the contrary, to explain rational rules by
376 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
respect, and respect by the empirical conditions of
social relations themselves. Finally, like Durkheim,
M. Bovet carefully distinguishes between the feeling of
the good and the sense of duty. Only, where Durkheim
speaks of society as of a thing which exercises pressure
upon the individuals, M. Bovet is thinking only of the
relations existing between individuals. Moreover, it is
sufficient in his view that there should be contact between
two individuals for one to respect the other, and for those
moral values to appear which are born of this respect.
The analysis of the facts of conscience seems to him, there-
fore, to fulfil all the demands of moral psychology, without
involving the necessity for an initial sociological enquiry.
It is this difference of method rather than any diver-
gence of doctrine which seems to us best to define the
contrast between Durkheim's theory and that of M.
Bovet.
But if, in view of recent work done on the subject,
a sort of parallelism be allowed between the sociological
method, which describes facts from outside, and the psycho-
logical method, which still regards social facts as funda-
mental, even if they are interpreted in terms of conscious-
ness, the opposition between Durkheim and M. Bovet
reduces itself to very little. It is with those theories that
try to explain the moral law as something inborn, or as
due to the individual's own experience alone, that the
sociological point of view is incompatible. Once you
admit, with M. Bovet, the necessity for contact between
at least two individuals in order to constitute an obli-
gatory rule, questions of detail lose their importance.
Psychologists and sociologists can labour together in the
erection of a science of the facts of morality.
It is in this spirit of cooperation that we should like
to discuss the ideas of M. Bovet after those of Durkheim.
If the former seem to require the acceptance of the latter
or of as much as we have retained of the latter the
converse also seems to be true, and M. Bovet's method
seems to us to be indispensable to anyone who wishes to
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 377
formulate a problem of moral psychology in experimental
terms. The success that has attended sociological re-
search has no doubt very nearly stifled the interest that
was taken about twenty years ago in attempts made at
establishing a systematic analysis of the facts of will
and consciousness of rules, and this probably explains
why the new departure made by M. Bovet did not create
more of a sensation. But if one compares the conclusions
of a remarkable and too little quoted article of his 1 with
the poor and unreliable results of the deliberate intro-
spection then current in the study of will, one cannot
help thinking that here was a point of view which, except
that it was not worked out on a large scale, deserved to
be placed on the same level as Durkheim's. For our
part, if the observations contained in the present work
survive independently of the provisional interpretations
which have served as a framework for them, we do not
hesitate to declare that this article of M. Bovet's was the
true begetter of our results.
What are the conditions of the feeling of obligation
in the mind ? Limiting the question to the psycho-
logy of duty which he opposes to that of the feeling of
good, M. Bovet answers that two conditions are necessary
and their union sufficient for the fact of obligation to
take place : that on the one hand the individual should
receive commands, and on the other, that he should
respect the person who gives him these commands. No
commands, no rules, and consequently no duties ; but
without respect, the rules would not be accepted, and the
rules would have no power to compel the mind.
,We can deal briefly with the first point, since it
is, common to Durkheim and Bovet. Its significance
comes to this, that in a given individual there exist
no duties that emanate from himself. For in the
first place, moral rules or duties cannot be reduced to
factors of purely individual psychology. Habit, for
1 P. Bovet, "Les conditions de 1'obligation de la conscience/' Annie
psychoL, 1912.
378 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
example, does not suffice to explain duty, since it is not
accompanied by a feeling of obligation ; there are even
habits against which we feel it is our duty to struggle.
But in that case could not spontaneous duties and even
feelings of remorse arise that were free from all external
influence? The psychology of sexual phenomena has
given occasion for such hypotheses. But when one ex-
amines matters more closely one realizes that without
the commands coming from those around him and in
this domain no one can escape from innumerable explicit
and implicit commands the individual's mind would
never add any moral judgment to the purely physiological
impressions of pleasure or of depression. In the second
place, and resulting from this, we cannot regard as primitive
any lines of conduct which the individual imposes on him-
self, and which in reality take their rise in inter-individual
behaviour. Thus a command or a suggestion which one
gives oneself inwardly may be the starting-point of a
feeling of obligation. But these are either mere replicas
or based by more or less remote analogy on directions and
suggestions connected with commands that have been
received. For instance, I decide to start work at such
and such a time ; but where would the feeling of obliga-
tion, or, in case of default, the feeling of dissatisfaction
which accompany my actions come from if I had not
learnt in my childhood to work at fixed hours and to
keep rny engagements ?
As to the second point, this is where M. Bovet's
originality comes in. Commands given by those in the
child's immediate surroundings do not seem to him to
bring about of themselves any sense of obligation in the
child mind. The child as well as the adult sometimes
hears rules formulated at which he is content to smile,
or which even cause his moral judgment to revolt. How
is such a phenomenon, in which sociologists will claim to
see the clash of heterogeneous constraints, psychologic-
ally possible? Because, says M. Bovet, the command
does not compel of itself. If it is to arouse in the mind the
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 379
feeling of duty, the command must come from an
individual who is respected by the subject. It matters
not whether this individual has himself created the
contents of the command or whether he simply conveys
a command as he has received it. The main thing is
that he should be respected by the subject. Then, and
then only, will the command produce a sense of duty in
the latter's mind.
Thus the conception which M. Bovet has formed of
respect is equally removed from that urged by Kant
and that expounded by Durkheim, In Kant's view
respect is not an ordinary feeling arising like any other
under the influence of a person or a thing. Its appearance
is occasioned by the moral law in a manner which is
inexplicable, and if we feel respect for certain individuals,
we do so, in so far as they incarnate, as it were, this very
law. According to M. Bovet, on the contrary, the law
is not the source of respect. It is respect for persons
which causes the commands coming from these persons
to acquire the force of law in the spirit that feels respect.
Thus respect is the source of law. In Durkheim's view
as in Kant's there is no respect for individuals ; it is
in so far as the individual obeys the rule that he is
respected. But this rale, far from simply emanating from
reason, results as does respect itself, from the authority
of the group. In a sense, then, law is the daughter of
respect, but of the respect of the individual for the group.
To this M. Bovet answers that if in adult society respect
for the man and respect for the rule are in fact indis-
soluble, in the child the former can be seen to precede the
latter. It is a fact that the child in the presence of his
parents has the spontaneous feeling of something greater
than and superior to himself. Thus respect has its roots
deep down in certain inborn feelings and is due to a sui
generis mixture of fear and affection which develops as a
function of the child's relation to his adult environment.
It should be noted, in this connection, that this attitude
of the child towards his parents does not only in M.
38o THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
Bovet's opinion, explain the genesis of the sense of duty.
In filial piety we have the psychological source of the
religious sense *. For in virtue of Ms very respect, the
young child attributes to his parents the moral and
intellectual qualities which define his idea of perfection.
The adult is omniscient, omnipresent, just and good,
the source both of the uniformities of nature and of the
laws of morality. Naturally, the child does not give spon-
taneous expression to such a belief, for it is unnecessary
for him to formulate and impossible for him to codify the
" pre-notions " which are a matter of course to him and
which condition in all their detail his moral judgment and
his conception of the world. But, as M. Bovet has rightly
remarked, the intensity of certain crises in a child's life
is sufficient to show how firmly rooted were the implicit
attitudes which circumstances have thus undermined.
The discovery of a fault in the behaviour of his parents
will completely upset the child's confidence. The dis-
covery of an intellectual failing or of some unforeseen
limitation of the powers of the adult will jeopardize his
faith in a world order. It is then that the primitive
filial sentiments, and in particular the demand for in-
tellectual and moral perfection, may be transferred to the
ideal beings which the collective conceptions of the day
suggest to the religious consciousness of the individual.
But this is not the whole matter. If at first the adult
is a god for the child, and if the commands coming
from the parents suffice to establish that consciousness of
duty which most religions have identified with the divine
will, the fact remains that reason plays a part in the
constitution of the moral ideal. For how are we to explain
the genesis of personal conscience if originally everything
is heteronomous ? M. Bovet suggests the following solu-
tion. On the one hand, reason works over moral rules,
as she works over everything, generalizing them, making
them coherent with each other, and above all extending
them progressively to all individuals until universality
* P. Bovet, op. tit.. The Child's Religion.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 381
is reached. Thus, whoever receives a command draws from
it logical consequences which apply even to the person who
issues the command. On the other hand, there is bound
to be in the course of mental development a certain clash
between the various influences received. Commands
cut across and more or less contradict each other, and
the more numerous the individuals respected the more
divergent obligations will the respecter have to reconcile
with each other. In this way reason cannot choose but
introduce the necessary unity into the moral conscious-
ness. It is through this work of unification that the sense
of personal autonomy comes to be conquered.
It is by referring back to these same processes that
M, Bovet disposes of the objection which has been made
to Ms as to Durkheiin's theory. If, it has been said,
everything comes to the child from outside, and if moral
rules are at the start nothing but commands coming from
the surrounding authority, how does the " good " come
to free itself from mere custom, and how does " good "
respect come to be contrasted with " bad " respect ? So
long as the influences which the child is under are limited,
admits M, Bovet, it goes without saying that the subject's
ideal cannot go beyond that of those who inspire it. But
as soon as the influences begin to cut across each other,
reason establishes hierarchies and progress becomes pos-
sible in relation to the commands originally received.
Finally, it should be recalled that these developments
apply only to the consciousness of duty. Side by side
with the morality of duty M. Bovet upholds the claims
of the feeling of the good, though he does not attempt to
explain it. The existence of this inner ideal peculiar to
the idea of good is what in the last analysis guarantees
the endurance of the autonomy of conscience : " We shall
compel ourselves to see clearly the grounds of our respect ;
criticizing it in order to establish in ourselves orders of
value, and ranking our respects in accordance with these.
When the question of respect presents itself to us, we will
survey critically our sentiments, instinctive or habitual, in
382 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
the name of our ideal ; asking ourselves what it is that we
respect in the object of our respect, and repudiating the
lower forms of respect/' (The Child's Religion, p. 155).
Such, in broad outline, is M. Bovet's theory. Before
placing it alongside of the results of our enquiries, let
us try to state more precisely wherein it completes and
wherein it corrects the doctrine advanced by Durkheim.
It will be well, in this connection, to introduce into
sociology the luminous distinction made by F. de Saus-
sure in linguistics between the static or synchronistic
point of view and the genetic or diachronistic point of
view. For from the static point of view the Durkheimian
theory of duty is unassailable, and to describe the facts
in terms of inter-individual psychology would only com-
plete the sociological description without altering it.
More exactly, these two descriptions are parallel, or
imply one another. As against this, however, Durkheim
has drawn from his profound static analyses a genetic
sociology that was bound to be hypothetical, and it is
on this point that psychologists and sociologists risk
having to part company.
Moral authority and respect, claims Durkheim, can
exist only in so far as the whole of a group exercises
pressure on the individual minds. Society, as such, is
therefore the origin of respect and obligation, and the
relation between two individuals is insufficient to explain
the genesis of any of the facts of duty. When, therefore,
one individual respects another he does so only in so far
as the other is invested with social authority. Parents
and teachers have power over the child because they
embody the morality of the group. Against this rather
hazardous genetic theory M. Bovet sets up the facts of
child psychology : it is man as such that the child respects
in his parents, and if the child accepts the morality of
the group, he does so in so far as it becomes embodied
in respected beings.
From the static point of view, the point of view of the
pennanence and functioning of social phenomena, this
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 383
problem, which recalls that of the river and its banks,
is of no importance whatsoever. The great majority of
the commands prescribed by the adult for the child are
the actual rules of the morality of the group, and as these
rules have fashioned the personalities of the parents
before being handed on to the children it is idle to ask
whether the child respects the persons in so far as they
are subject to the rules, or the rules in so far as they are
incarnated in these persons.
But from the genetic point of view it is very im-
portant to determine whether one can speak of a social
relation where only two are involved, or whether an
organized group is necessary to the constitution of the
elementary moral feelings. Now on this point M. Bovet's
argument seems to us conclusive. In the first place, there
seems to be no doubt that the feelings of authority and
respect appear during the first two years, before language,
as soon as the little creature has discovered in the big
person someone like himself and yet infinitely greater than
himself. The feelings compounded of sympathy and fear
resulting from this situation explain why the child accepts
the examples and, as soon as he has mastered language,
the commands coming from his parents, and why, to the
simple fact -of imitation, there comes so early to be added
the feeling of rules and obligation. Since all the writers
on the subject have thought of respect as connected with
rules, the early impressions we have just mentioned cannot
be classed anywhere except among the facts of respect.
Now, as far as the earliest of all rules are concerned, those,
namely, that relate to eating, to sleeping, to cleanliness,
and other activities of the infant, there is no room for any
doubt. It is not because they are current in the social
group and in all civilized families that the baby accepts
them, it is because they are imposed upon him by grown-
ups who are both attractive and formidable. In the second
place, during the years that follow, the most superficial
observation will show that the child obeys particular
as well as general commands. If Durkheim were right,
384 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
only the rules observed by the parents themselves and
thus emanating from the group before being transmitted
to the children would be respected by the latter. Now,
this is simply not the case. When I ask my children not
to touch my work-table, this rule becomes one of the laws
of their universe without my being subject to it myself
or appearing before them as the priest of society. They
respect this command simply because I am their daddy.
We have laid some stress upon these genetic con-
siderations not, we repeat, because they have great im-
portance for the mechanism of duty in a given society
that is already completely organized, but because they
justify the method we have adopted throughout this
book. Society begins with two individuals, as soon as
the relation between these two individuals modifies the
nature of their behaviour, and all the resulting phenomena
can be described just as well in terms of inter-individual
consciousness as in the general terms of sociology proper.
For, apart from the special question of the genesis of
respect, the parallelism between the ideas of M. Bo vet and
those of Durkheim seems to us to be complete. Durkheim
explains duty under its heteronomous form by means of
the social constraint of conformist communities, whereas
he a.ccounts for the development of personal conscience
by social condensation and differentiation and the result-
ing individualism. In the same way, Bovet explains ele-
mentary duties by the respect felt by the little for the big,
and the progressive autonomy of conscience by the fact of
the clash of the influences received. Thus the two authors
use different languages to describe the same mechanisms.
But if the languages adopted are parallel and not contra-
dictory to each other, it should be added that psychological
explanation cannot account for all aspects of moral develop-
ment without taking into consideration the general shape
of different societies as a whole. It seems to us that two
problems in particular must be dealt with in connection
with M. Bovet's theory the problem of filial respect and
the problem of the liberation of individual minds.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 385
We can certainly say, in spite of Durkheim's objec-
tions, that in a little child's respect for his parents and in
filial piety in its simplest form we have psychological
data that are independent of the structure of the sur-
rounding society. But if the parents are really gods for
the child, and the rules of primitive morality can all be
reduced to the parents' commands, one may wonder how
progress is possible, not so much in the individual in our
society but in the actual history of moral ideas. In our
modern communities an individual has only to discover
other points of view than those to which he is accustomed
and thus to become conscious of a moral ideal that is
superior to persons, and he will soon be capable of judging
his parents, he will cease to deify them and will thus liberate
his mind and make it accessible to innovations. But in
primitive gerontocratic communities (and if M. Bovet
is right the more primitive a community, the more geron-
tocratic it must be), how will the mind ever come to con-
ceive of a moral ideal that is superior to accepted custom ?
Even where the filial feelings are transferred to the col-
lective religious symbols, the gods can hardly be better
than men, and mystical rules than the dictates of common
use. In point of fact, not till the advent of the most
developed religions have men conferred upon the gods a
moral purity that was without alloy. However desirous
elementary religions may often appear of attaining this
purity, the morals and wishes of primitive deities are
singularly like the prevailing customs and rules of the
community in question. How are we to explain the fact
that humanity ever emerged from this state of affairs ?
It is at this point that it seems to us all-important to
consider the general form or shape of societies. In order
to raise the moral level of the gods and to leave behind
one the morality of obligatory commands for the sake of
the morality of an autonomous conscience, a dual process
is necessary : there must be a spiritualization of filial
respect and a liberation of individual minds. Such
processes can be accounted for, according to M. Bovet,
2 B
386 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
by the fact that the influences brought to bear cut across
each other ; and the first condition for this to take place
effectively is that the social environment should be
sufficiently dense and sufficiently differentiated. As
Durkheim has shown in a passage that has become classical,
social condensation alone and the resulting differentiation
are capable of explaining the liberation of individual
minds. Thus, and thus only, will the individual be capable
of judging the commands he has received from earlier
generations. Then only will filial respect submit to the
control of reason, and moral consciousness place above
and beyond persons an ideal of good that transcends all
duties and all commands.
But in thus completing M. Bovet's point of view with
that of Durkheim have we really disposed of all our
difficulties ? The moment has come for us to return to
the child and to compare the theories we have been dis-
cussing with the result of our previous enquiries. We can
put the matter in a nutshell by saying that M. Bovet's
doctrine seems to us completely to conform to the facts
concerning the starting-point of child morality, but
when it comes to the evolution of conscience in the child,
the only way to be faithful to the spirit of this doctrine
is to extend it and to distinguish two types of respect.
We are faced here with a difficulty that is exactly
analogous to that which was raised by Durkheim's point
of view a circumstance sufficient in itself to confirm the
parallelism between the two points of view. How, we
may ask, if all his duties come from personalities that
are superior to him, will the child ever acquire an auto-
nomous conscience ? Unless we assume something more
than the morality of pure duty, such a development seems
to us quite inexplicable. Since tfie content of these
duties conforms by definition to the rules accepted by
the parents themselves, it is impossible to see how the
morality of duty would ever authorize the child to modify
these rules and to criticize his parents : the formation
of an inner ideal, that is to say, the morality of good,
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 387
seems to be the only thing that will account for this
phenomenon. Now, does the clash of influences received
suffice, together with the intervention of reason, to ex-
plain the appearance of this ideal ? It would seem that
it does not. It is easy to see how under the influence of
contradictions due to commands interfering with each
other reason will assume the right to define its duties
more clearly, to generalize their contents, in a word, to
polish and codify the material of morality. But according
to M. Bovet's hypotheses, reason can prescribe nothing.
It speaks in the indicative mood, not in the imperative.
In short, there is no way out of the heteronomy that
belongs to the play of commands, even if this play be
indefinitely complicated ; only by attributing legislative
power to reason can we account for autonomy.
But M. Bovet, differing in this from Durkheim, who
did everything to make his system a self-contained whole,
has left the road open, and even invites us to extend his
analyses. Not only has he always drawn a distinction
between the sense of duty and the feeling for good, with-
out subsequently trying to identify these two irreducible
realities, but in addition to this, by representing respect
to us as a relation between one person and another that
is capable of various possible combinations, he invites
us to think of respect as itself becoming differentiated in
the context of concrete psychological states.
And this is why, alongside of the primitive respect
felt by the inferior for the superior, or, as we have called
it, " unilateral respect ", we have claimed to distinguish
a " mutual " respect towards which the individual tends
when he enters into relation with his equals, or when his
superiors tend to become his equals. The quasi physical
element of fear which plays a part in unilateral respect then
gradually begins to disappear in favour of the purely moral
fear of falling in the esteem of the respected person. The
need to be respected thus balances that of respecting,
and the reciprocity resulting from this new relation is
sufficient to abolish all element of constraint. At the
388 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
same time, the commands vanish and turn into mutual
agreement, and rules that have been freely consented to
lose their character of external obligation. Nor is this
all. For since the rule is now subjected to the laws of
reciprocity, it is these same rules, rational in their essence,
that will become the true norms of morality. Hence-
forward reason will be free to lay down its plan of action
in so far as it remains rational, that is to say, in so far
as its inner and outer coherence is safeguarded, i.e.
in so far as the individual can adopt a perspective such
that other perspectives will accord with it. Thus out of
anomy and heteronomy, autonomy emerges victorious.
But need we make things so complicated, and would
not M. Bovet's language suffice to describe the same
facts ? Let us try to translate our observations into terms
of simple (unilateral) respect and see whether our own
dualistic terminology is an advantage or a disadvantage.
Let us imagine the case of two children of the same age
and both belonging to that stage of codification of rules
the characteristics of which we observed most clearly
round about the age of n. It is perfectly true that
while respecting the personality of the other, each child
may in turn outstrip his playmate if, indeed, his
prestige does not eclipse the latter's once and for all.
Thus there is never complete equality, except in theory
and as an ideal. We might therefore describe the facts
of mutual respect as follows : i A gives a command
to B. 2 B accepts this command because he respects
A (unilateral respect). 3 But A puts himself mentally
in B's place (this would be the new fact marking a
departure from the egocentrism of the initial stages).
4 A therefore feels bound himself by the command he
has given B. Moreover, just as one's duties towards
oneself are the result, thanks to a sort of transference,
of one's duties towards others, so every kind of mutual
respect could also be regarded as due to a series of trans-
ferences of unilateral respect. Respect, limited in the first
instance to the parents only, would be transferred by the
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 389
child to adults in general, then to older children, and finally
to his contemporaries, so that the contents of duty would
be progressively extended to include all individuals,
including oneself. Thus all forms of respect would, in
so far as they were sources of moral obligation, derive
from unilateral respect, and their common character
would find an explanation in the original object of this
primitive respect.
This terminology would certainly have the advantage
of emphasizing the functional unity of the phenomenon
of respect. In addition, and for this very reason, it would
tend to bring closer together, but without confusing them,
the morality of good and that of duty. Duty would
occur whenever and wherever there was respect, com-
mands, and therefore rules. On the other hand, the
sense of the " good " would be the result of the self-
same tendency which urges individuals to respect each
other and to place themselves inwardly in each other's
minds. We distinguished, in connection with cooperation
and mutual respect, " constituted " rules resulting from
reciprocal agreements, and " constitutive " standards, or
norms serving to define the actual laws of reciprocity.
In M. Bovet's language constituted rules, at whatever
level in the development of respect they found them-
selves, would be nothing but duties, and constitutive
norms would define the good.
This translation of our results into the language of
M. Bovet will be sufficient to show how largely our own
researches have merely been an extension of his, and
the apparent divergences between us simply a matter of
language. But this translation, by the mere fact of being
possible, brings out the conclusion we particularly wished
to emphasize, namely, the relative heterogeneity of duty
and good. For, as M. Bovet has himself constantly
recognized, there is nothing in the actual form of duty that
forces its contents to conform with good. Duties are not
obligatory because of their contents but because of the fact
that they emanate from respected individuals. There
390 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
may therefore be duties that have nothing to do with
morality (M. Bovet mentions the obligations of custom)
and duties that are immoral (in so far as they are con-
trary to the morality of reciprocity). The individual who
obeys such commands no doubt experiences a feeling of
doing what is good in so far as he is respecting someone else
and submitting to someone else out of respect, but this does
not establish the value of the commands coming from the
respected individual. Now, if we have thus to distinguish
on the one hand a unilateral respect as the source of
duties whose contents are in principle extraneous to the
good (though in actual fact they may, of course, coincide),
and on the other, an ideal of reciprocity which defines
the good itself, such as it will sooner or later appear to the
moral consciousness, would there not be a certain advan-
tage in isolating under the name of mutual (respect)
the special type of respect whose peculiar characteristic
it is to constitute the feeling of good ? If the good is
taken, not as a Platonic ideal, which could be unintelli-
gible from a psychological standpoint, but as a form of
equilibrium immanent in the mind, it is desirable, so it
seems to us, to establish a difference in kind between
unilateral respect, which leads to the recognition of hetero-
nomous norms, and mutual respect, which recognizes no
law but its own mutualness and which thus leads to the
formation of norms that function within itself. We can
say, of course, that if A respects B, and vice versa, this
is because A was first respected by B and then placed
himself at the same point of view as B. But this is a
completely new operation in relation to respect pure and
simple ; for if B simply respects A without the feeling
being returned, he will regard as duties all the commands
laid upon him by A, however arbitrary they may be and
however foreign to the laws of reciprocity. But -as soon
as A identifies himself morally with B, and thus submits
his own point of view to the laws of reciprocity, the
product of this mutual respect is bound to be some-
thing new, because the norms admitted from now
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 391
onwards will necessarily be contained within this very
reciprocity.
We grant, of course, that in point of fact traces of
unilateral respect and of inter-individual constraint are
to be found everywhere. Equality exists in theory only. 1
It may therefore very well be the case that mutual respect
is never to be found pure and unadulterated, but is only
an ideal form of equilibrium towards which unilateral
respect is guided as the inequalities of age and of social
authority tend to disappear. From this point of view
M. Bovet's language is no doubt more accurate than
ours, but this seems to us to be at the cost of certain
difficulties on other points. For what, after all, is a
" transference " ? Can we really say that a feeling re-
mains identical with itself when its object is changed ?
Are we not the victims of a genetic illusion when we
postulate the permanence of a tendency throughout its
history and transformations ? Would it not be better
to define psychic realities in terms of the system in which
they are involved at a given moment of their develop-
ment ? To see the exact proportion in which the syn-
chronistic and the diachronistic factors are distributed,
fine shades must be distinguished and minute differences
taken into account. According to M. Bovet mutual
respect, having been derived from unilateral respect,
remains in a sense identical with it or, at any fate, is still
based upon it. In our view, mutual respect, being in-
volved in a different system of equilibria, deserves to be
distinguished from the unilateral variety.
The only essential point in this whole debate is the
following. It matters very little whether mutual respect
and cooperation are real states or limiting forms of equili-
brium. The unique contribution of cooperation to the
development of the moral consciousness is precisely that it
implies the distinction between what is and what ought to be,
1 On this point we may refer the reader to the discussion which
we entered upon with M. Blonde! before the Societ6 fra^aise de
Philosophic (see Bulletin Soc. franf. Phil., pp. 120-3, 1928).
392 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
between effective obedience and an ideal independent of any
real command. If unilateral respect and social constraint
were alone at work, moral good would be given once and
for all under the imperfect and often grotesque forms
assigned to it by the duties and regulations of existing
society. But cooperation and mutual respect, in so far
as they involve indwelling norms that are never ex-
hausted by "constituted" rules, play an irreplaceable
part as catalytic agents and give a definite direction to
moral evolution. From this point of view, it is unnecessary
to try and determine up to what point these new realities
diverge from constraint and unilateral respect in the world
of fact. The one thing we have to remember is that in
the psychology of norms the successive stages are not
everything : the direction itself, the vector, as M. Lalande
would say, counts for more than anything else. And in
this matter the terminological differences which separate us
from M. Bovet in nowise bar the way to our fundamental
agreement as to methods and results.
5. THE POINT OF VIEW OF J. M. BALDWIN. If we had
been treating the subject in chronological order, we ought
to have dealt with Baldwin before discussing M. Bovet's
theories. But though the theory he puts forward is closely
analogous to that of Bovet, Baldwin's manner of formu-
lating the problems is far less precise, and it was therefore
necessary to study M. Bovet's doctrine first in order to
elucidate that of his predecessor. Moreover, as Baldwin
stands almost exactly half-way between Durkheim and
Bovet, we shall be able to deal with him more briefly than
if we had had to follow step by step the actual development
of the various theories relating to child morality.
Baldwin, it will be remembered, claimed that psycho-
logical and sociological research must work on parallel
lines because the individual and the communal minds are
interdependent. Collective consciousness is nothing more
than " the generalization " of the contents of individual
consciousness. But conversely (and this is where Baldwin
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 393
seems to be on the side of the sociologists) there is nothing
present in individual consciousness which is not the result
of continuous collective elaboration. 1
The most familiar, and from the point of view of
Baldwin's moral psychology, the most fundamental ex-
ample of this solidarity between the social and the
individual is that of the consciousness of self. What
could be more intimate and more strictly *' individual "
in appearance than the feeling of being oneself and dif-
ferent from others ? Now, in a famous analysis, Baldwin
has shown that this feeling is really the result of inter-
individual actions and of imitation in particular. Far
from starting from any consciousness of self, the baby is
ignorant of himself as a subject and locates his subjective
states on the same plane as physical images : this is the
" projective " stage. How then does the child ever come
to discover himself ? As far as his own body is concerned
it is easy enough to see that he does so thanks to a pro-
gressive comparison of it with other people's bodies, a
process that is part and parcel of that of learning to
imitate. It is because it has a visual perception of another
person's mouth and imitates the movements of this mouth
that the baby of 10 to 12 months learns to give its various
buccal sensations an analogous form ; and so on. In the
same way, with regard to psychical qualities, it is by
imitating other people's behaviour that the child will
discover his own. In this way the individual passes to
the " subjective " stage in which he is conscious of pos-
sessing an " I " that is identical with that of others. But
once his attention has been directed upon himself in this
way, the child becomes capable of the converse process.
Having little by little come to assign to himself all the forms
of conduct he has observed ip others, he learns simul-
taneously to ascribe to others the feelings and motives of
which he is conscious in himself. In this way there is
constituted an " ejective " process which in its alternations
with the other two constitutes the whole of personal life.
1 See especially J, M. Baldwin *s Psychology and Sociology.
394 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
For, as the shuttle flies backward and forward between
ejection and imitation, equilibrium is maintained between
consciousness of self and awareness of others, just as their
mutual elaboration had been previously ensured by the
same process.
After this it will be easy to understand what is Baldwin's
idea of moral consciousness. Moral consciousness appears
when the self is no longer in a state of harmony, when
there is opposition between the various tendencies that
constitute it (tendencies which, as we have just seen, are
themselves of external origin). Whence comes this lack of
harmony ? From the fact that sooner or later the child is
compelled to obey the adult, and that in obeying he ex-
periences something quite new. For obedience is neither
mere imitation nor ej ection. Obedience creates a new self, a
fraction of the self that dominates the rest. The truth is that
in the very act of learning to obey the child builds up for
himself what Baldwin calls an " ideal self ", a self that is
submissive to the dictates of adults, a self, that is to say,
traced on the pattern of their superior self. Obedience is
thus a sort of transcendent imitation accompanied by
a sui generis subjectivity and ejection, which in fact
constitute nothing more nor less than moral conscious-
ness itself and the evaluation of acts in terms of this
consciousness. This amounts, therefore, to practically
the same thing as Bovet's idea, according to which
commands received create a sense of inner obligation.
Like Bovet, Baldwin lays stress upon the fact that there
are no innate duties : every obligation is the result of the
pressure exercised by the social environment. But, adds
Baldwin, once the words of command have been received,
they become so thoroughly incorporated that they create
a new self. " And the sense of this my self of conformity
to what he teaches and would have me do this is, once
for all, my conscience." l This ideal self is thus simply the
self of the father or of any other " copy for imitation ".
1 J. M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Develop-
ment, p. 51, Macmillan, 1897.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 395
" It is not I, but I am to become it. Here is my ideal self,
my final pattern, my ' ought ' set before me." *
This explains the striking resemblance which exists
between the contents of individual consciences and the
exigencies of society. The moral sentiment " is in society
because it is in all the individuals; but it is in each
individual because it is already in society. It is one of
these * arguments in a circle ' with which nature so often
reasons out the development problem " (p. 299). Such a
proposition seems either a truism or a superficial account
of the matter. But if we remember Baldwin's profound
treatment of the development of the self as bound up
with life in common, we cannot but recognize the value
of the above formula. For in the adult's own life the moral
sentiments remain closely dependent upon the opinions of
others. " Even the more subtle and intimate judgments
which we pass upon ourselves are liable to the same
influence : we judge ourselves in some degree by the meed
of reproach or commendation which we receive from
others" (p. 312).
Here, then, is the refutation of those theories which
attempted to reduce the facts of inner obligation to the
facts belonging to the psychology of the individual as
such, as, for example, the facts of habit or sympathy.
Duty cannot be reduced to our spontaneous habits, says
Baldwin ; it is a " habit of violating habit " (p. 55). As
for sympathy, it has of itself nothing moral in the eyes of
conscience. To be sensitive alone is not to be good ;
sympathy must be canalized and steadied. Thanks to
imitation and to " ejection ", sympathy is natural to the
self. But before this sympathy can acquire a moral
character there must be a common law, a system of rules.
How does the individual attain to the consciousness
of this rule or common norm which defines the good ?
The starting-point is that the child should become
accustomed "to the presence of something in him that
represents his father, mother, or in general the law-giving
1 J. M. Baldwin, he. cit. p. 36.
396 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
personality ". Moreover, " obligations instead of diminish-
ing only increase " with age, because the examples to be
followed grow more and more in number (p. 300).
During a second phase, the child applies to everyone
else the moral laws elaborated in this way. For every
characteristic acquired by imitation gives rise to an
" ejection ". " After the child has obeyed and learned by
obedience he himself sets the law of the house for the
other members of it. And the law then becomes ' common
law ' " (p. 54). This common law is absolute for -two
reasons. On the one hand, thanks to the commands
received or, as Baldwin puts it, to the " words of command "
coming from the environment, this law is imperative. On
the other hand, in applying the law to everyone else the
child discovers that in actual practice no one, not even
" the persons who make the law ", yield it strict obedi-
ence. And this discovery, instead of weakening the
child's belief in the law, leads him on the contrary to place
the moral law above particular individuals.
Thanks to this process the nature of the ideal changes.
Up till now the moral " good " had been tied to con-
crete examples. " Law, in the child, is personal in all
his transition period to a true ethical self ; it is an em-
bodiment, a self which is essentially ' projective ', which
he cannot represent nor anticipate in detail " (p. 323).
But in so far as the child realizes that no one in actual
fact obeys the law, he learns to place the law above
individual wills and to conceive of it as an absolute
transcending the whims or the authority of the parents
themselves.
Whence a third and final stage, during which the notion
of an ideal good comes to give a content to the law itself.
For up till now the law consisted only in a sort of gener-
alization or rather sublimation of the orders received. But
once detached from persons, the " words of command " are
raised to the rank of something absolute. Henceforward,
thanks to the work of practical intelligence, the actual
content of the law is elaborated along autonomous lines.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 397
" When the child reflects on his social relationships and
arrives at the beginning of a habit of intelligent submission,
which he then in turn prescribes to others also, he shows a
new sort of end not before found in Mm. None of the
partial thoughts none of his private schemes is now Ms
end ; no person completely fulfils his new ideal, Ms ideal
of personality, long or very well " (p. 326). In this way
we can explain both the possibility of moral progress and
the inner liberty of conscience. The individual " is now
launched on a sea of intellectual turmoil and endeavour,
which by its very restlessness and change, its setting of
ideals and its violation of them, make social life and
progress possible " (p. 326).
Such are the main ideas of Baldwin's moral psychology.
Is this interpretation of the relation between the conscious-
ness of duty and the morality of good entirely satis-
factory ? That is what we have now to examine, and in
doing so we shall try as far as possible to bring back
the discussion to the ground covered by the concrete
observations given in the present volume.
It should be noted in the first place that without the
intervention of reason, wMch Baldwin particularly stresses,
the social processes invoked by our author are not suffi-
cient to explain the development of the autonomy of
conscience. It is easy enough to see how the child,
starting from imitation and ejection, will incorporate in
his self the " words of command " issuing from Ms social
environment and finally conceive of the law as superior
to individuals. But without the intervention which Bald-
win attributes to practical reason, tMs law will never be
more than a simple generalization of the commands the child
has received. How does Baldwin escape this conclusion ?
By bringing in as a sort of adventitious factor the child's
actual intelligence, which is supposed to remould the
contents of the commands and build up a personal ideal.
But presented in this way the reasons Baldwin invokes
in his explanation of moral development ran the risk of
appearing heterogeneous to one another. On one side we
398 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
should have the play of social relations, the source of
conformity and duty, on the other individual intelligence,
the source of autonomy and the morality of the good. As a
matter of fact, every reader of Genetic Logic knows what
pains Baldwin took to account for the evolution of
childish reason by means of the social factors spoken of
just now in connection with morality. Thus logic, like
duty, he tells us, seems at first to be simply the reflection
of the pressure exercised by those around the child : this is
the " syndoxic" phase, corresponding to simple obedience
in the moral sphere. Then through a play of " ejections "
and of generalizations characterizing discussion, reflec-
tion, and discursive logic, the rules of logic end, like
the rules of morality, by becoming superior to individuals :
this is the " synnomic " phase, corresponding to the inner
ideal of the morality of the good.
But thus in invoking, as Baldwin does, childish intelligence
to explain the liberation of the mind from imperatives of
external origin, one cannot escape the following contra-
diction namely that rational logic is itself derived from
social processes from which it is supposed to free itself
in matters of moral psychology. In reality, logic and
morality are entirely parallel, and if one agrees with Baldwin
that both develop as a function of a collective elaboration,
one has no right to appeal to the one in order to explain
the transformations of the other. Both logic and morality
begin with conformity and end in autonomy. If we
wish to account for this evolution, we must do so by
changes that are inherent in social behaviour itself.
It is a question, therefore, whether Baldwin's social
psychology really suffices to make us understand why
constraint gives way to cooperation, or whether Baldwin,
like so many others, does not in the last analysis tend to
give priority to the relation of constraint over against
the relation of cooperation.
The two chief difficulties of Baldwin's doctrine on this
point seem to be the following. Baldwin explains the
early stages of the child's mentality by imitation and
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 399
pressure of the social environment, but he does not take
sufficient account of the egocentrism inherent in the
elementary level of consciousness. In dealing with the
later stages he therefore fails to make the social factor
sufficiently interior to consciousness, and to see in the
laws of reciprocity the rational norm that will confer
upon the common rules the autonomy necessary to this
interiorization.
We shall deal quite shortly with the first point, as it
touches more upon the psychology of intelligence than
upon the theory of the facts of morality. In a famous
passage Baldwin has admirably shown how " adualistic "
consciousness is originally, placing as it does on one and the
same plane what is internal and external, subjective and
objective, even psychical and physical. But he has not
noticed, at least so it seems to us, that to such an adualism
there necessarily corresponds an illusion of viewpoint such
that the individual places himself at the centre of every-
thing and explains all things in terms of this ego-
centric perspective. In the psychology of the intellect it
is this egocentrism that seems to us to explain the logic
and the causality peculiar to the child : his difficulty in
handling relations and in forming objective causal series,
etc. From the social and moral point of view, it is this
egocentrism that explains why, though he is so absorbed
in others that he conforms to examples and commands
received from without, the child yet introduces into every
piece of collective behaviour an irreducible element of
individual interpretation and unconscious deformation.
Hence the sui generis attitude found among the smaller
children with regard both to rules of games and to their
parents' commands an attitude of respect for the letter
of the law and of waywardness in its application.
While, therefore, we are in agreement with Baldwin's
very profound theory relating to the genesis of conscious-
ness of self, we wish, nevertheless, to add a remark to
what he says on the rfile of imitation. One can hardly
deny, indeed, after reading our author's analyses, that the
400 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
self can only know itself in reference to other selves. But
imitation will never enable us to perceive in ourselves any-
thing but what we have in common with others. In order to
discover oneself as a particular individual, what is needed
is a continuous comparison, the outcome of opposition, of
discussion, and of mutual control ; and indeed conscious-
jiess of the individual self appears far later than conscious-
ness of the more general features in our psychological
make-up. This is why a child can remain egocentric for a
very long time (through lack of consciousness of self),
while participating on all points in the minds of others.
It is only by knowing our individual nature with its
limitations as well as its resources that we grow capable
of coming out of ourselves and collaborating with other
individual natures. Consciousness of self is therefore both
a product and a condition of cooperation.
This has brought us to the second question that of the
later stages and the autonomy of conscience. Are the
logical " synnomic " rules and the corresponding moral rules
as well fitted as Baldwin thinks them to secure the liberty
of reason ? If we accept the definitions he gives, they
undoubtedly are. " At the logical stages of social culture
the individual sooner or later comes to criticize in a
measure the social formulae and to reject them in such
and such of their details by making use of his in-
dividual judgment. In this way the syndoxic becomes
personal and synnomic" (Thoughts and Things,). But
if we consider the way in which Baldwin explains the
genesis and functioning of this social " synnomic " states
we feel less certain that the processes he invokes are
really sufficient to account for the contrast existing
between the results of cooperation and those of con-
straint. For, suppose we take a command and impose
it upon a few individuals who, in their turn, will
impose it upon others, thanks to the mechanism of
" ejection ". Even if it irradiates the whole of the social
group and is elevated to the dignity of absolute law
superior to the individuals, such a rule can acquire no
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 401
new value from the mere fact of its generality. There
are in every social group usages accepted by all but which
are none the less irrational or even immoral. How will
individual criticism, by means of which Baldwin defines
the " synnomic ", succeed in really transforming the
content of the " syndoxic " rules into a content that is
rational and in conformity with the moral ideal ? Only
on condition that under the " constituted " rules there
should be at work a system of " constitutive " norms.
For a set of customs to acquire a new value in the eyes of
autonomous conscience, it is not enough that these cus-
toms should have been ratified after discussion by the
majority or the sum total of the individuals ; this ratifi-
cation must result from a genuine agreement founded on
the laws of reciprocity which constitute reason. Of course,
when Baldwin speaks of individual criticism, of reflection,
and of discussion, he certainly means reason itself. But
it would be an illusion to suppose that the play of imita-
tions and ejections which develop the self and ensure a
balance between the individual and the social group is
sufficient to explain the development of these rational
norms. These mechanisms account for one fact alone
(incidentally one of fundamental importance), namely, that
the individual, in spite of his egocentrism, finds himself
dominated in his earliest years by a system of rules that
are external to him and imperative in nature. But to
pass from this to the rational law internal to the mind
something more is wanted than a mere ratification on the
part of individual intelligence ; there must be relations
of a new type between individuals who meet as equals,
relations founded on reciprocity, relations that will sup-
press egocentrism and suggest to the intellectual and
moral consciousness norms capable of purifying the con-
tents of the common laws themselves.
6. CONCLUSIONS. The analysis of the child's moral
judgments has led us perforce to the discussion of the
great problem of the relations of social life to the rational
2 c
402 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
consciousness. The conclusion we came to was that the
morality prescribed for the individual by society is not
homogeneous because society itself is not just one thing.
Society is the sum of social relations, and among these
relations we can distinguish two extreme types : relations
of constraint, whose characteristic is to impose upon the
individual from outside a system of rules with obligatory
content, and relations of cooperation whose characteristic
is to create within people's minds the consciousness of
ideal norms at the back of all rules. Arising from the ties
of authority and unilateral respect, the relations of con-
straint therefore characterize most of the features of
society as it exists, and in particular the relations of the
child to its adult surrounding. Defined by equality and
mutual respect, the relations of cooperation, on the
contrary, constitute an equilibrial limit rather than a
static system. Constraint, the source of duty and heter-
onomy, cannot, therefore, be reduced to the good and to
autonomous rationality, which are the fruits of reciprocity,
although the actual evolution of the relations of constraint
tends to bring these nearer to cooperation.
In spite of our wish to confine the discussion to the
problems connected with child psychology, the reader will
not have failed to recognize the affinity of these results
with those of the historical or logico-sociological analyses
carried out by M. Brunschvicg and M. Lalande. Le
Progr&s de la Conscience dans la Philosophie occidentale is
the widest and the most subtle demonstration of the fact
that there exists in European thought a law in the
evolution of moral judgments which is analogous to the
law of which psychology watches the effects throughout
the development of the individual. Now to indulge in
philosophic enquiry is simply to take increasing cog-
nizance of the currents of thought which enter into and
sustain the states of society itself. What the philosopher
does is not so much to create something new as to reflect
the elaborations of the human mind. It is therefore
of the utmost significance that the critical analysis of
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 403
history of which M. Brunschvicg has put to fresh use
should have succeeded in bringing to light in the
evolution of Western philosophic thought the gradual
victory of the norms of reciprocity over those of social
conformism.
As to M. Lalande, what he says on " la Dissolution "
as also on the social character of logical norms, has shown
more than any other work on the subject the duality that
"lies hidden in the word " social ". There are, M. Lalande
tells us, two societies : existing or organized society, whose
constant feature is the constraint which it exercises
upon individual minds, and there is the ideal or assimi-
lative society, which is defined by the progressive identifi-
cation of people's minds with one another. The reader
will recognize here the same distinction as we have been
led to observe between the relations of authority and the
relations of equality.
Some of M. Lalande's minor contentions would, indeed,
stand in the way of our complete agreement with his
ideas taken as a whole. It does not seem to us at all
certain, for example, that " evolution " in the sense of
progressive organization is necessarily bound up with a
society based on constraint. The passage from the homo-
geneous to the heterogeneous which M. Lalande agrees
with Spencer in taking as the mark of evolution leads no
doubt to social differentiation. But this differentiation is
precisely, as the sociologists have pointed out, the con-
dition of a break with the conformity due to constraint,
and consequently the condition of personal liberation.
Moral equality is not the result of an advance towards
homogeneity, assuming that agreement can be reached on
the meaning of this word, but of a mobility which is a
function of differentiation. The more differentiated the
society, the better can its members alter their situation in
accordance with their aptitudes, the greater will be the
opportunity for intellectual and moral cooperation. We
cannot, therefore, take the identification of minds, which,
for M, Lalande, is the supreme norm, to be the same thing
2C*
404 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
as cooperation. Without attempting to evaluate this
" vector ", and limiting ourselves to the mere description
of psychological facts, what the morality of the good
seems to us to achieve is reciprocity rather than iden-
tification. The morality of the autonomous conscience
does not tend to subject each personality to rules that
have a common content : it simply obliges individuals
to " place themselves in reciprocal relationship with each
other without letting the laws of perspective resultant
upon this reciprocity destroy their individual points of
view.
But what do these minor discrepancies matter since it
.is thanks to M. Lalande's teaching that we are able to
dissociate what the sociologists have so often tended to
confuse ? And above all, what do the concepts that are
used in the interpretation of the facts matter, so long as
the method employed is the same ? For in the work of
M. Lalande we have an example of that rare thing
research on the evolution of norms conducted well within
the limits of the psycho-sociological method. Without in
any way neglecting the demands of rationality, this great
logician has been able to discern in intellectual and moral
assimilation processes admitting of analysis in terms
of social psychology while implying by their very
"direction" the existence of ideal norms immanent in
the human spirit.
This concordance of our results with those of historico-
critical or logico-sociological analysis brings us to a second
point : the parallelism existing between moral and intel-
lectual development. Everyone is aware of the kinship
between logical and ethical norms. Logic is the morality
of thought just as morality is the logic of action. Nearly
all contemporary theories agree in recognizing the exist-
ence of this parallelism from the a priori view which
regards pure reason as the arbiter both of theoretical
reflection and daily practice, to the sociological theories of
knowledge and of ethical values. It is therefore in no way
surprising that the analysis of child thought should bring
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 405
to the fore certain particular aspects of this general
phenomenon. 1
One may say, to begin with, that in a certain sense
neither logical nor moral norms are innate in the
individual mind. We can find, no doubt, even before
language, all the elements of rationality and morality.
Thus sensori-motor intelligence gives rise to operations of
assimilation and construction, in which it is not hard to
see the functional equivalent of the logic of classes and of
relations. Similarly the child's behaviour towards persons
shows signs from the first of those sympathetic tendencies
and affective reactions in which one can easily see the
raw material of all subsequent moral behaviour. But an
intelligent act can only be called logical and a good-
hearted impulse moral from the moment that certain
norms impress a given structure and rules of equilibrium
upon this material. Logic is not co-extensive with in-
telligence, but consists of the sum-total of rules of control
which intelligence makes use of for its own direction.
Morality plays a similar part with regard to the affective
life. Now there is nothing that allows us to affirm the
existence of such norms in the pre-social behaviour occur-
ring before the appearance of language. The control
characteristic of sensori-motof intelligence is of external
origin : it is things themselves that constrain the organism
to select which steps it will take ; the initial intellectual
activity does actively seek for truth. Similarly, it is
persons external to him who canalize the child's elemen-
tary feelings, those feelings do not tend to regulate them-
selves from within.
This does not mean that everything in the a priori view
is to be rejected. Of course the a priori never manifests
itself in the form of ready-made innate mechanisms. The
a priori is the obligatory element, and the necessary
connections only impose themselves little by little, as
1 We have further developed this point at the Ninth International
Congress of Psychology which met at New Haven (U.S.A.). See Ninth
International Congress of Psychology, Proceedings and Papers, p. 339
406 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
evolution proceeds. It is at the end of knowledge and not
in its beginnings that the mind becomes conscious of the
laws immanent to it. Yet to speak of directed evolu-
tion and asymptotic advance towards a necessary ideal
is to recognize the existence of a something which
acts from the first in the direction of this evolution.
But under what form does this "something" present
itself ? Under the form of a structure that straightway
organizes the contents of consciousness, or under the form
of a functional law of equilibrium, unconscious as yet be-
cause the mind has not yet achieved this equilibrium, and
to be manifested only in and through the multitudinous
structures that are to appear later ? There seems to us
to be no doubt about the answer. There is in the very
functioning of sensori-motoi; operations a search for co-
herence and organization. Alongside, therefore, of the
incoherence that characterizes the successive steps taken
by elementary intelligence we must admit the existence
of an ideal equilibrium, indefinable as structure but implied
in the functioning that is at work. Such is the a priori :
it is neither a principle from which concrete actions can
be deduced nor a structure of which the mind can become
conscious as such, but it is a sum-total of functional rela-
tions implying the distinction between the existing states of
disequilibrium and an ideal equilibrium yet to be realized.
How then will the mind extract norms in the true sense
from this functional equilibrium ? It will form structures
by means of an adequate conscious realization (prise de
conscience). To ensure that the functional search for
organization exhibited by the initial sensori-motor and
affective activity give rise to rules of organization properly
so called, it is sufficient that the mind should become con-
scious of this search and of the laws governing it, thus
translating into structure what till then had been function
and nothing more.
But this coming into consciousness or conscious realiza-
tion is not a simple operation and is bound up with a
whole set of psychological conditions. It is here that
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 407
psycho-sociological research "becomes indispensable to the
theory of norms and that the genetic parallelism existing
between the formation of the logical and of the moral
consciousness can be observed.
In the first place it should be noticed that the individual
is not capable of achieving this conscious realization by
himself, and consequently does not straight away succeed
in establishing norms properly so-called. It is in this sense
that reason in its double aspect, both logical and moral,
is a collective product. This does not mean that society
has conjured up rationality out of the void, nor that there
does not exist a spirit of humanity that is superior to
society because dwelling both within the individual and
the social group. It means that social life is necessary if
the individual is to become conscious of the functioning of
his own mind and thus to transform into norms properly
so called the simple functional equilibria immanent to all
mental and even all vital activity.
For the individual, left to himself, remains egocentric.
By which we mean simply this Just as at first the mind,
before it can dissociate what belongs to objective laws
from what is bound up with the sum of subjective con-
ditions, confuses itself with the universe, so does the
individual begin by understanding and feeling everything
through the medium of himself before distinguishing what
belongs to things and other people from what is the result
of his own particular intellectual and affective perspective.
At this stage, therefore, the individual cannot be conscious
of his own thought, since consciousness of self implies a
perpetual comparison of the self with other people. Thus
from the logical point of view egocentrism would seem
to involve a sort of alogicality, such that sometimes
affectivity gains the ascendant over objectivity, and
sometimes the relations arising from personal activity
prove stronger than the relations that are independent of
the self. And from the moral point of view, egocentrism
involves a sort of anomy such that tenderness and dis-
interestedness can go hand in hand with a naive selfishness,
408 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD 8
and yet the child not feel spontaneously himself to be
better in one case than the other. Just as the ideas which
enter his mind appear from the first in the form of beliefs
and not of hypotheses requiring verification, so do the
feelings that arise in the child's consciousness appear
to him from the first as having value and not as having
to be submitted to some ulterior evaluation. It is only
through contact with the judgments and evaluations of
others that this intellectual and affective anomy will
gradually yield to the pressure of collective logical and
moral laws.
In the second place, the relations of constraint and
unilateral respect which are spontaneously established
between child and adult contribute to the formation
of a first type of logical and moral control. But this
control is insufficient of itself to eliminate childish ego-
centrism. From the intellectual point of view this respect
of the child for the adult gives rise to an " annunciatory "
'conception of truth : the mind stops affirming what it
likes to affirm and falls in with the opinion of those around
it. This gives birth to a distinction which is equivalent to
that of truth and falsehood : some affirmations are recog-
nized as valid while others are not. But it goes without
saying that although this distinction marks an important
advance as compared to the anomy of egocentric thought,
it is none the less irrational in principle. For if we are to
speak of truth as rational, it is not sufficient that the
contents of one's statements should conform with reality :
reason must have taken active steps to obtain these
contents and reason must be in a position to control the
agreement or disagreement of these statements with
reality. Now, in the case under discussion, reason is still
very far removed from this autonomy : truth means
whatever conforms with the spoken word of the adult.
Whether the child has himself discovered the propositions
which he asks the adult to sanction with his authority, or
whether he merely repeats what the adult has said, in both
cases there is intellectual constraint put upon an inferior
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 409
by a superior, and therefore heteronomy. Thus, far from
checking childish egocentrism at its source, such a sub-
mission tends on the contrary partly to consolidate the
mental habits characteristic of egocentrism. Just as, if left
to himself, the child believes every idea that enters his head
instead of regarding it as a hypothesis to be verified, so
the child who is submissive to the word of his parents
believes without question everything he is told, instead of
perceiving the element of uncertainty and search in adult
thought. The self's good pleasure is simply replaced by
the good pleasure of a supreme authority. There is
progress here, no doubt, since such a transference ac-
customs the mind to look for a common truth, but this
progress is big with danger if the supreme authority be not
in its turn criticized in the name of reason. Now, criticism
is born of discussion, and discussion is only possible
among equals : cooperation alone will therefore accomplish
what intellectual constraint failed to bring about. And
indeed we constantly have occasion throughout our
schools to notice the combined effects of this constraint
and of intellectual egocentrism. What is " verbalism ",
for example, if not the joint result of oral authority and
the syncretism peculiar to the egocentric language of the
child ? In short, in order to really socialize the child, co-
operation is necessary, for it alone will succeed in deliver-
ing him from the mystical power of the word of the adult.
An exact counterpart of these findings about intellectual
constraint is supplied by the observations on the effect of
moral constraint contained in the present book. Just as
the child believes in the adult's omniscience so also does
he unquestioningly believe in the absolute value of the
imperatives he receives. This result of unilateral respect
is of great practical value, for it is in this way that there
is formed an elementary sense of duty and the first
normative control of which the child is capable. But it
seemed to us clear thafc this acquisition was not sufficient
to form true morality. For conduct to be characterized
as moral there must be something more than an outward
410 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
agreement between its content and that of the commonly
accepted rules : it is also requisite that the mind should
tend towards morality as to an autonomous good and
should itself be capable of appreciating the value of the
rules that are proposed to it. Now in the case under
discussion, the good is simply what is in conformity with
heteronomous commands. And as in the case of intellect-
ual development, moral constraint has the effect of partly
consolidating the habits characteristic of egocentrism.
Even when the child's behaviour is not just a calculated
attempt to reconcile his individual interest with the letter
of the law, one can observe (as we had occasion to do
in the game of marbles) a curious mixture of respect
for the law and of caprice in its application. The law
is still external to the mind, which cannot therefore be
transformed by it. Besides, since he regards the adult as
the source of the law, the child is only raising up the will
of the adult to the rank of the supreme good after having
previously accorded this rank to the various dictates of
his own desires. An advance, no doubt, but again an
advance charged with doubtful consequences if coopera-
tion does not come and establish norms sufficiently inde-
pendent to subject even the respect due to the adult to
this inner ideal. And indeed so long as unilateral respect
is alone at work, we see a " moral realism " developing
which is the equivalent of " verbal realism ". Resting in
part on the externality of rules, such a realism is also kept
going by all the other forms of realism peculiar to the
egocentric mentality of the child. Only cooperation will
correct this attitude, thus showing that in the moral
sphere, as in matters of intelligence, it plays a liberating
and a constructive r61e.
Hence a third analogy between moral and intellectual
evolution : cooperation alone leads to autonomy. With
regard to logic, cooperation is at first a source of criticism ;
thanks to the mutual control which it introduces, it
suppresses both the spontaneous conviction that charac-
terizes egocentrism and the blind faith in adult authority.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 411
Thus, discussion gives rise to reflection and objective
verification. But through, this very fact cooperation be-
comes the source of constructive values. It leads to the
recognition of the principles of formal logic in so far as
these normative laws are necessary to common search for
truth. It leads, above all, to a conscious realization of the
logic of relations, since reciprocity on the intellectual plane
necessarily involves the elaboration of those laws of
perspective which we find in the operations distinctive of
systems of relations.
In the same way, with regard to moral realities, coopera-
tion is at first the source of criticism and individualism.
For by comparing his own private motives with the rules
adopted by each and sundry, the individual is led to
judge objectively the acts and commands of other people,
including adults. Whence the decline of unilateral respect
and the primacy of personal judgment. But in consequence
of this, cooperation suppresses both egocentrism and
moral realism, and thus achieves an interiorization of
rules. A new morality follows upon that of pure duty,
Heteronomy steps aside to make way for a consciousness
of good, of which the autonomy results from the acceptance
of the norms of reciprocity. Obedience withdraws in
favour of the idea of justice and of mutual service, now
the source of all the obligations which till then had been
imposed as incomprehensible commands. In a word,
cooperation on the moral plane brings about transforma-
tions exactly parallel to those of which we have just been
recalling the existence in the intellectual domain.
Is there any need, by way of conclusion, to point to
the educational consequences of such observations ? If
education claims to be the direct application of what
we know about Child Psychology, it would not be neces-
sary. It is obvious that our results are as unfavourable
to the method of authority as to purely individualistic
methods. It is, as we said in connection with Durkheim,
absurd and even immoral to wish to impose upon the
child a fully worked-out system of discipline when the
412 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
social life of children amongst themselves is sufficiently
developed to give rise to a discipline infinitely nearer to
that inner submission which is the mark of adult morality.
It is idle, again, to try and transform the child's mind
from outside, when his own taste for active research and
his desire for cooperation suffice to ensure a normal
intellectual development. The adult must therefore be
a collaborator and not a master, .from this double point
of view, moral and rational. But conversely, it would
be unwise to rely upon biological " nature " alone to
ensure the dual progress of conscience and intelligence,
when we realize to what extent all moral as all logical
norms are the result of cooperation. Let us therefore
try to create in the school a place where individual experi-
mentation and reflection carried out in common come
to each other's aid and balance one another.
If, then, we had to choose from among the totality of
existing educational systems those which would best
correspond with our psychological results, we would
turn our methods in the direction of what has been called
" Group Work " and " Self-government/ 1 1 Advocated by
Dewey, Sanderson, Cousinet, and by most of the pro-
moters of the " Activity School ", the method of work by
groups consists in allowing the children to follow their
pursuits in common, either in organized " teams " or
simply according to their spontaneous groupings. Tradi-
tional schools, whose ideal has gradually come to be the
preparation of pupils for competitive examinations
rather than for life, have found themselves obliged to
shut the child up in work that is strictly individual :
the class listens in common, but the pupils do their home
work separately. This procedure, which helps more than
all the family situations put together to reinforce the
child's spontaneous egocentrism, seems to be jeontrary
to the most obvious requirements of intellectual and moral
1 We refer the reader, on this point, to our " Rapport sur les procMes
de 1'Education morale ", read at the Fifth International Congress on
Moral Education in Paris, 1930.
THE TWO MORALITIES OF THE CHILD 413
development. This is the state of things which the method
of work in groups is intended to correct. Cooperation is
promoted to the rank of a factor essential to intellectual
progress. It need hardly be said that this innovation
assumes value only to the extent that the initiative is
left to the children in the actual conduct of their work.
Social life is here a complement of individual " activity "
(in contrast to the passive repetition which characterizes
the method of teaching by books), and it would have no
meaning in the school except in relation to the renovation
of the teaching itself.
As for self-government, the fine works of F. W. Foer^ter
(op. cit.) and Ad. Ferri&re l have rendered unnecessary
the task of reminding our readers of its principles. M.
Feni&re in particular, has described with great care and
with that proselytizing fervour which characterizes all
his educational works the various modes of govern-
ment of children by themselves. It is hard to read his
book without being filled both with the hope of seeing
the experiments he analyses carried out more generally,
and with the satisfaction at finding in the principles that
characterize children's republics what we already know,
thanks to the psycho-sociological study of the moral life.
As to F. W. Foerster, his moral pedagogy is still in
our opinion too much tinged with the cult of autho-
rity or unilateral respect, and, above all, too much
attached to the idea of expiatory punishment. But this
makes the preoccupation with autonomy and self-govern-
ment, which appears in the rest of his work, the more
significant.
But pedagogy is very far from being a mere application
of psychological knowledge. Apart from the question of
the aims of education, it is obvious that even with regard
to technical methods it is for experiment alone and not
deduction to show us whether methods such as that of work
in groups and of self-government are of any real value. For,
1 Ad. Ferri&re, L'Autonomie des colier$, Coll. des Actualit6s pdag.
Delachaux et Niestl.
414 THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD
after all, it is one thing to prove that cooperation in the
play and spontaneous social life of children brings about
certain moral effects, and another to establish the fact that
this cooperation can be universally applied as a method
of education. This last point is one which only experi-
mental education can settle. Educational experiment, on
condition that it be scientifically controlled, is certainly
more instructive for psychology than any amount of
laboratory experiments, and because of this experimental
pedagogy might perhaps be incorporated into the body of
the psycho-sociological disciplines. But the type of ex-
periment which such research would require can only be
conducted by teachers or by the combined efforts of
practical workers and educational psychologists. And it is
not in our power to deduce the results to which this would
lead.
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 1
Activity Schools, 286, 360, 367, 368,
412
Aflection, desire for reciprocal, 172,
the starting-point of the good, 193
Ambivalence, 190
Animism, 141, 142, 187, 256, 257
A priori, 316, 317, 320, 404, 405 ;
as an ideal equilibrium, 406
Artificialism. 141, 142, 187, 254, 255,
256, 257
Auto-punishment, 258
Categorical Imperative, 344
Cheating, at games, 295, 305 ff.,
322 ; at lessons, 285 ff.
Compassion, 227, 228, 229
Constraint, adult moral, as a
socializing factor, 82 ; founded on
unilateral respect, 79, 95, 103, 315,
335 349* 3^5> 366, 402 ; cause of
belief in expiatory punishment,
227, 230, 297, 340, 341, and in
immanent justice, 258, 259, 260 ;
cause of lying, 135, of moral
realism, 131, 159, 170, 173, 183,
188, and of revolt, 134, 191 ;
consolidates egocentrism, 53, 61,
62, 84-87, 105, 159, 184, 188, 192,
372, 409, 410 ; inevitable in
matters of food, sleep, cleanliness,
etc., 45, 82, 175, 177, 179, 188,
384 ; parallelism with intellectual
constraint, 105, 192, 409, 412 ;
perhaps a secondary growth, 173 ;
of groups, 96, 102, 187, 202, 203
Constraint, social, not identical with
cooperation, 340 ; cause of primi-
tive ways of thought, 340 ff. ;
consolidates egocentrism, 350, 402
Cooperation, as a socializing factor,
36. 58, 86 ; founded on mutual
respect, 79, 89, 103, 170, 227, 315,
335 337 ' 402 ; necessary for
autonomy, 61, 62, 68, 89, 90, 105,
335. 337 34, 355* 3^5, 375. *<*
truthfulness, 161, 164, 168, 171,
and for personality, 90 ; as a
rationalizing factor, 85, 103, 184,
374, 407 ; anti-mystical in ten-
dency, 54, 56, 76, 95 ; destroys
egocentrism, 184, 372, 411 ff. ;
as a state of equilibrium, 26, 84,
90, 99> 34*> 348, 35> 375, 391,
402 ; never pure, 79, 84 ; never
completely realized, 90, 91 ; the
source of good, 194, 353 ; as a
method of education, 286 (fpot^
note), 412, 413 ; wrongly assimi-
lated to constraint by Durkheim,
343
Democracy, and democratic ideal,
57, 63, 66, 68, 325, 347, 366 ; in
schools, 366, 370, 372
Difficult children, 107, 189
Discipline, external and internal,
366, 367, 411
Education, 40, 41, 80, 165, 192,
412 ; punishment in, 212, 216,
231 ; democracy in, 366, 367 ;
experiment in, 216, 367, 412, 413
Effort, not identical with obligation,
352, 369
Ego, consciousness of, 86, 87, 89,
90, 249, 393-395* 399, 4, 4*
Egocentrism, definition of, 26, 249 ,*
dual character of in practice of
rules, 16, 18, 19, 24, 26, 27, 31,
3^. 45. 54* 87, 94, 97 399. 4* ;
compared to personality, 90 ;
compared to consciousness of self,
87. 89, 90, 249, 399, 400. 47 I in
children's conversations, 32, 76,
1 This index does not claim to be exhaustive, either in its references or
in its headings, these being supplementary to those in the Table of Contents.
It is meant, primarily, to point to the way in which the author has connected
some of the leading ideas in his book. [Trans.].
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Egocentrism continued
85 ; as an intermediate stage, 79,
85. 94 ; the mark of primitive
mentality, 26, 77 ; the result of
constraint, 53, 61, 62, 84-7, 105,
159, 184, 350, 372, 410, and of
unilateral respect, 79, 89 ; de-
stroyed by cooperation, 184, 372,
410 ff.
Egocentrism, intellectual, 37, 56,
160, 161, 162, 399
Equality, and distributive justice,
196, 197 ; based on reciprocity,
198, 273, on cooperation, 274,
315, and on mutual respect, 279,
317
Equilibrium, ideal, consciousness of,
318 ; a priori as, 316, 405 ; con-
science as, 341 ; cooperation as,
26, 84, 90, 99* 34i> 34 8 35<>;
good as, 355, 390 ; mutual
respect as, 90, 324, 335, 391
Equity, as distinguished from
equality, 216, 271, 282, 283, 310,
311, 314, 316
Father, child's ideas about, 47, 48,
49
Filial piety, 384, 385
Finalism, 141, 255, 257
Generations, pressure of, 68, 100,
337, 349, 350
Gerontocracy, 57, 63, 78, 249, 325,
33^, 385
Girls, deficient in legal sense, 70, 72,
75 I greater tolerance of, 73,
75 ; on " hitting back," 302
Good, the, xox, 102, 106, 173, 193,
339, 351-5, 402 ; as an ideal
equilibrium, 355, 390 ; versus
duty, 194, 376, 387, 389 ; due to
reciprocity, 404 ; due to mutual
respect, 324, 354
Guilt, sense of, 132, 162, 177
Hitting back, 297, 301 ff., 322
Imitation, as socializing factor, 26,
27 ; in egocentric practice of
rules, 16, 41, 45, 54, 72, 87, 94, 97
Inferiority, feelings of, 275
Initiation, in primitive communities,
99
Intelligence, Motor, 21, 22, 79, 81,
93 ; how related to Rational, 91,
93, 405 4.06
Interiorization, of morality, 19, 170,
182, 193, 332, 399
Invention, confused with reminis-
cence, 48, 49, 51, and with divine
inspiration, 49, 51, 53
Jealousy, 317
Judgment, theoretical and practical,
relations between, 56, 78, 79, 109,
112-115, 132, 142, 171, 172, 173,
181, 273
Legal element, in children's games,
33, 37 I analogy with formal
reasoning, 38, 42 ; deficient in
girls (see Girls)
Mana, 256
Mysticism, 49, 78, 95
Myths, 162, 256
Oaths, identified with lies, 136 fL,
164
Obligation, feeling of, 23, 43, 44 fL,
81, 100; 193, 354, 373, 375, 377 ;
founded on respect and com-
mands, 372, 375, 377
Onanism, 258
Parallelism, between moral and
intellectual facts, 32, 33, 38, 183,
192, 404, 409, 410
Parents, early rules imposed by, 2,
43, 48, 49 ; all rules ascribed to,
52, 54, 87 ; mistakes of, 130, 134,
162, 188, 189, 190, 254, 261, 274 ;
prestige of, 133
Participation, feeling of, 54, 72,
249
Perception, nature of, 186
Personality, 90 ; distinguished from
ego, 92, 94
Physical law, confused with moral,
82, 83, 185, 187, 188, 189, 255,
257, 339, 340, 399 ; owing to social
constraint, 340 ff.
Primitive mentality, 20, 187, 240,
339, 349 ; societies, 77, 99, 182,
240, 249, 340, 365
Psittacism, 48, no, 172
Psycho-analysis, 189
Punishment, arbitrary element in,
203, 209, 212, 217, 226 ; corporal,
362, 367, 371 ; as criterion of
guilt in lying, 165, 168, 187, in
revenge, 299, in cheating at
school, 287 ; danger of incon-
sistent, 134, 266 ; instinctive
elements in, 227-230, 321 ; as
marking breach in bond of
solidarity, 203 fL, as natural
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
417
Punishment continued
consequence of the act, 205, 206,
361, 362, 370, 371 ; preventive
aspect of, 212, 216, 226, 245, 247,
360 ; vindictive aspect of, 212,
215 ; whether necessary at all,
199, 217, 219, 247, 248, 265,
267 ff., 370
Punishment, two fundamental types
of, 198, 207 fi. ; connected with
two types of morality and respect,
226 ; law of evolution between,
224, 225, 230, 261, 262
Punishment, expiatory, due to
adult constraint (q.v.), 226, 227,
230, 273, 297, 321, 324, and adult
anger, 294, 321 ; related to
unilateral respect, 322
Realism, general, 106, 163, 184 ; in
primitives, 339, 340 ; due to
unilateral respect, 163, 410
Realism, moral, definition of, 100 ;
due to constraint, 179, 188, 193 ;
due to constraint and unilateral
respect, 131, 135, 193, 349 ; due
to constraint and egocentrism,
I59 170* 182, 192 ; due to verbal
commands, 17 ; parallelism with
verbalism, 183, 192, 410
Realization, conscious (prise de
conscience), 56, 78, 79, 109, 112,
173, 181, 406, 411
Reason and rationality, 95, 102, 103,
183, 185, 397 ; due to mutual
respect, 89, 388 ; due to co-
operation, 103 ; due to re-
ciprocity, 81, 94, 103, 388, 401,
402, 407
Reciprocity, 36, 63-65, 89, 94, 103,
135, 161, 167, 168, 189, 194, 237,
294, 387, 390. 399. 4 OI 43 I a
form of equality, 320 ; based on
sympathy, 229
Regelbewusstsein, 23, So
Regularities of behaviour, in motor
stage, 20-24, 4 2 * 43* 8* 81, 10*
Reification, 184, 186
Religion, 88, 96, 100, 380, 385 ;
filial origin of, 88, 380
Respect, sui generis nature of, 379,
383
Revenge, 299, 300, 301, 304
Revolt, 134, 190, 324, 369
Romancing, 16, 46, 48, 138, 151,
1 60, 161
Rewards and punishment, irre-
levance of to morality, 273, 339
Sadism, 190
Schemas, motor, 20, 21, 22, 43, 80,
8 1 ; ritual, 16, 2026, 42, 43, 44,
80, 81, 82, 93, 94
Self, feeling of (see Ego)
Self-government, 365, 366, 370, 412,
413
Sex, 258, 378
Solidarity between children, 138,
176, 196, 197, 237, 238, 242,
. 247, 250, 288, 292, 295, 319
Spirit of the game, 65, 92
Symbolism, 21-25, 42
Sympathy, necessity for in co-
operation, 133, 134, 1 80, 189,
344 ; as an instinctive foundation
for morality, 228-230, 317, 321,
395, 405 ; lack of in moral
realism, 182
Syncretism, 86, 191
Taboo, 138, 258, 338, 354
Telling tales, 113, 196, 235 ff., 285,
288 ff,, 299 ff.
Time-lag, between thought and
action, see Judgment and Re-
alization.
Transference, 391 ; of responsibility,
248, 260 ; of crime, 329
Verbalism, 106, 191, 192, 410
Vindictiveness, 227, 228, 229
" Whys," 180, 187
INDEX OF NAMES
Adler, 275
Antipoff, Mme, 228, 229
Baechler, Mile, 195, 207
Baldwin, G. M., 65, 184, 194, 326,
392 ff-
Bergson, 77
Blondel, 85, 391
Bovet, M., i, 23, 44, 47, 81, 95, 100,
101, 102, 103, 162, 166, 183, 193,
194, 261, 279, 318, 321, 326, 351,
365, 375 ff-
Brunschwiog, 402, 403
Biihler, 23
Biihler, Mme Ch., 82
Claparede, 56, 173, 184, 191, 355,
369
Comte, Auguste, 69, 336
Cousinet, 9, 412
Decroly, 191 e
de Maistre, J., 208
Descartes, 91
Descoeudres, Mile, in, 115, 144
D'Essertier, 100
Dewey, 355, 367, 412
Durkheim, i, 13, 23, 49, 81, 95, 96,
97, 99, 100, 102, 103, no, 183,
198, 202, 205, 295, 325, 326 &,,
341 ff., 355 ff., 375 ff., 411
Fauconnet, 232, 248, 326 ff.
Feldweg, Mile, 194, 244
Fernald, 115
Fernandez, Ramon, 90
Ferriere, 365, 413
Foerster, F. W., 366, 413
Freud, 21, 177
Gosse, Edmund, 189
Guyau, 208, 339
Hall, Stanley, 355
Ihering, 330
James, W., 259
Janet, 161, 166
Kant, i, 95, 101, no, 340, 357, 374,
375. 379
Knapp, 209
Lacombe, R., 100
Lalande, 65, 402, 403, 404
Lambercier, i
Levy-Bruhl, 260
Luquet, 185
Maison des Petits, 226
Martinez, i
Maso, N., 104
Monnier, P., i
Montaigne, 360, 367
Pareto, 17, 68, no, 115
Parodi, 346, 374
Piaget, J., 37, 41, 49, 5<5, 65, 87,
116, 141, 176, 186, 187, 259, 404,
412
Piaget, Jacqueline, 19, 20, 22, 25,
71, 73, 175-180
Piaget, Mme J. V., i
Rambert, Mile, 195, 251, 263, 284,
297, 301* 3 8
Rauh, F., 340, 347,
Reynier, Mme, 86
Rousseau, 205
Sanderson, 367, 412
Saussure, 21, 383
Socrates, 346
Spencer, Herbert, 205, 361, 403
Stern, 27, 135, 160, 174
Tolstoi, 368
Wells, H. G., 367
Westermark, 328
Weissfeller, Mme, 180
4*8
631