• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.137-160
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• 2018

The present article reviews recent arguments on the moral-conventional distinction in moral judgment and discusses the implications for moral psychology research. Traditional research on moral judgment has considered both the evaluation of transgressive actions of others and the categorization of the norms on the moral-conventional dimension. Kohlberg, Piaget, and Turiel (1983) regard moral principles to be clearly distinguished from social-conventional norms and suggested criteria for the moral-conventional distinction. They assume that the moral domain should be specifically related to the value of care and justice, and the judgment for the moral transgression should be universal and objective. The cognitive developmental approach or social domain theory, which has been generally accepted by moral psychology researchers, is recently being challenged. In this article, we introduce three different approaches that criticize the assumptions for the moral-conventional distinction, namely, moral sentimentalism, moral parochialism, and moral pluralism. Moral sentimentalism emphasizes the role of emotion in moral judgment and suggests that moral and conventional norms can be continuously distributed on an affective-nonaffective dimension. Moral parochialism, based on the evidence from anthropology and cross-cultural psychology, asserts that norm transgression can be the object of moral judgment only when the action is relevant to the survival and reproduction of a group and the individuals within the group; judgment for moral transgression can be as relative as that for conventional transgression. Moral pluralism suggests multiple moral intuitions that vary with culture and individual, and questions the assumption of the social domain theory that morality is confined to care and justice. These new perspectives imply that the moral-conventional distinction may not properly tap into the nature of moral judgment and that further research is needed.