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Objective Responsibility: Clumsiness and Stealing

By JEAN PIAGET

We noted, in connection with the rules of a 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, one, entirely fortuitous or even the result of a well-intentioned 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 goes in, the door knocks against the tray, bang go the fifteen cups and they all get broken!

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 his 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 his father was away he thought of filling the ink-pot so as to help his 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 child pays more attention to motive or to material results, we have confined ourselves to the comparison of selfishly motivated acts of stealing with those that are well-intentioned.

IV. A. Alfred meets a little friend of his who is very poor. This friend tells him that he has had no dinner that day because there was nothing to eat in his 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 his friend.

B. Henriette goes into a shop. She sees a pretty piece of ribbon on a table and thinks to herself that it would look very nice on her dress. So while 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 questions: 1) Are these children equally guilty (or as the young Genevese say "la même chose vilain")? 2) Which 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 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 defined 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 question 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.

I. Stories of the Broken Cups

II. The Stories of the Ink-Stains

III. The Story of the Holes

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 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 significance?

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 disregarded, we shall endeavour to prove that the child’s judgments really do imply objective responsibility. An analogous conclusion may therefore be formulated concerning 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.)

II. Story of the Ink-Stains

III. The Story of the Holes

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 constraint 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 their 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, 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 his 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 subjective 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

V. The Story of the Cage and of the Sweets

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 subjective 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

V. Story of the Cage and the Sweets

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 speaking, 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 pilfering in terms of their material result, there can be no doubt that in most people’s eyes he is unjust. On the 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 clumsy 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 judgments 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. The rules imposed by the adult, whether verbally (not to steal, not to handle breakable objects carelessly, 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 systematic 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 concerned 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 anything 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 later-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 those connected with clumsiness and lying, the child has ever been dominated by the notion of objective responsibility.

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—7 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 suddenness 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. Although new material may since have enriched the child’s moral consciousness and enabled him to discern the nature of subjective responsibility, these earlier experiences are sufficient, it would seem, to constitute a permanent 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 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 all his values and experiencing feelings of which the novelty surprises him, will, if he is suddenly faced with the necessity of solving someone else’s problems, very probably appeal to moral principles which 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 which would be incomprehensible in view of his present deeper tendencies, but which effectively corresponds to his 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 within 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 this technique does not involve perpetually 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 him, 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 nothing 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 to remove all traces of moral realism, one must place oneself on the child’s own level, and give him 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 cleanliness, 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 difficulties, even one’s own blunders, and to point out their 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, obviously, 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 otherwise 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 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 unilateral 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.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion:

1. Piaget has been said to use the "clinical method" in his study of child development. Can you describe his method, as shown in the extract from The Moral Judgment of the Child?

2. Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory tends to put maturation (nature) at the core of development, yet it also acknowledges the role of experience (nurture). In the reading, what references do you find to (1) the idea that the child’s view of morality unfolds due to maturation, and (2) the recognition that experience plays a role?

3. Piaget’s work has been replicated and some researchers have found that children may develop intellectually somewhat faster than Piaget thought. More specifically, Piaget’s critics suggest that Piaget sometimes misinterpreted children’s limited memory ability as a lower level of intellectual development. What precautions did Piaget take to make certain that the children in his research remembered the stories he told them?

4. If you were going to replicate (repeat) Piaget’s research on clumsiness and stealing, can you think of ways in which you would more tightly "control" the research? (Hints: Would you limit the questioning to one interviewer? Would your interviewers know what they were looking for? Would you tell stories or show videos?)

5. Consider your own attitudes toward immoral behavior and crime. Although you are an adult, can you think of circumstances under which your moral judgments are based on, or at least influenced by, objective responsibility?

Source

Piaget, J. (1997 Edition). Objective responsibility. I. Clumsiness and stealing. In The moral judgment of the child. Trans. By Marjorie Gabain. New York: Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., pp. 121–138. Copyright © 1965 by The Free Press.

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