Abstract: Human moral agency requires the development of reasoning about welfare and rights. If people routinely harmed others without cause, or lacked the ability to explain why violence is wrong, human societies would be unrecognizable. Yet, over the past 20 years, some findings from developmental, cognitive, and social psychology appeared to cast doubt on the centrality of reasoning for moral agency. For instance, researchers have concluded that infants make moral judgments before they can reason and that adults rarely use reasoning to form moral judgments. In this talk, I will discuss research with infants, children, and adults that supports an alternative perspective on the development of moral reasoning. I propose that moral reasoning and judgments about welfare emerge gradually over the first three years. Once acquired, moral reasoning constrains acceptable actions and guides emotional reactions. Hence, far from undermining the claim that reasoning is central to morality, a synthesis of recent research evidences how moral reasoning makes several indispensable contributions across the lifespan.

Bio: Audun Dahl is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. He has published articles in the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Psychological Science, Child Development, and Developmental Science and has received funding from the National Institutes of Health. His research investigates how children and adults develop concerns with matters of right and wrong, and how those concerns guide judgments and decisions.