Moral Development: Change in Modern Approaches

The present paper investigates and criticizes old and modern approaches to moral development and change in main orientations towards scientific study on it. The subject is studied through content analysis and its aim is to provide a framework for future comparative studies, specially in the field of religious ethics. Studies conducted in the past emphasize on the formation of superego and identification with the same-sex parent, trends based on individual's environmental influences, specially external reinforcements, child's dependency drive, observational learning process, self-organization trend, and reasoning system to understand social relations. Substitute conceptualizations have provided new insights as to the formation of the Four Component Model of Morality, the issue of procedural justice, considering other's view, self-perception, social reasoning, contractualism, and moral identity. The most important achievements of these orientations are as follows: emphasis on developmental-substitutional model versus phased-cumulative model, focus on trivial structures in ethics versus hierarchical cohesion and structural unity, emphasis on moral schema instead of stages, treatment of other domains of social-cognitive development versus neglecting them, focus on moral personality as the aim.