Question I am curious about the formation of the moral conscience and at what age a child should be held responsible for knowing the difference between right and wrong. And would the same criteria apply for acts of commission and acts of omission assuming that there are no "defenses", so to speak, like voluntary intoxication or organic brain damage. Thanks.

Accepted:
June 29, 2010

Comments

Great question. Probably one of the other panelists will do a better job than me on this one, but here goes: I suggest that the key to determining the age of responsibility comes down to measuring the development of cognitive power and control. You ask about "what age a child should be held responsible for knowing the difference between right and wrong," which suggests that there might be a time when a child might NOT know such moral differences but that at some point the child SHOULD have such knowledge. For this reason, the key is knowing when a child has sufficient cognitive power to know the moral consequences of her/his acts and omissions. If, for example, the child simply lacks the power to put himself in the position of others (and thus fails, for example, to be able to grasp that hitting his sister hurts her), then the child is not a moral agent. Moreover, if the child lacks sufficient bodily and mental powers to control her body and thought, moral agency would also not be achieved. In these respects, recognizing the presence of moral responsibility would, in principle, be akin to recognizing when an adult with organic brain damage or voluntary intoxication is responsible, though in the later case the fact that the intoxication is voluntary would be sufficient to assign blame for the person becoming in a state when he is no longer able to have sufficient knowledge and control to know and do right rather than wrong.

In terms of assessing a child's powers, we are up against what in philosophy is called the problem of other minds. We cannot directly know the child's mental states and so we must form some overall best understanding of them, supported by a variety of sources (behavior, etc). Some philosophers seem to put the presence of cognitive power that would form a basis for responsible agency way too late (Davidson held that pre-linguistic children lack beliefs) whereas others are perhaps too early in their estimation of cognitive power (Melanie Klien thought that very young, pre-linguistic infants have substantial moral knowledge). Perhaps we need three categories: clear cases of when there is no agency, clear cases when there is, and then a third category when we might treat a child as though she or he is morally accountable but we are doing so in order to help the child develop morally rather than this being a case of when we know the child has already achieved full moral accountability.

If some other panelist can do better, please do so!