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Piaget mentions "goodness" in The Moral Judgment of the Child

a.m. / 2022-08-15


At the end of chapter 1:

How this morality of duty will allow for the appearance of the morality of goodness (p.101).

In the second place, alongside of the sense of duty we must, according to M. Bovet, distinguish a sense of goodness, a consciousness of something attractive and not merely obligatory, a consciousness that is fully autonomous (p.102).

At the end of chapter 2:

[In heteronomous morality] There is no room in such an ethic for what moralists have called the good, in contrast to the right or pure duty, since the good is a more spontaneous ideal and one that attracts rather than coerces mind (p.193).

The good is a product of cooperation. But the relation of moral constraint which begets duty can of itself lead to nothing but heteronomy. In its extreme forms it leads to moral realism (p.193).

When he’s specifically talking about Durkheim

Just as the sacred is what inspires both a respectful fear and a feeling of attraction, so do moral conceptions present two irreducible, but inseparable aspects–obligation and duty on the one hand, and one the other, the sense of the good or of a desirable ideal(p.344).

“The theory of duty or of moral obligation, and the theory of good or autonomy of conscience…” (p.350)

This unity of discipline and attachment to groups also explains the profound identity of duty and good…(p.357)

The enormity of such a solution is obvious. Because Durkheim seeks to assimilate to one another constraint and cooperation, duty and good, he actually comes to identify the two most antithetical conceptions of obligation–the heteronomous submission of reason to the “higher entity” and the necessity residing within reason herself (p.373).

It (Durkheim’s view) overlooks the essential difference existing between cooperation and constraint. Hence Durkheim’s illusion that an education which makes use only of unilateral respect can lead to the results that are peculiar to the morality of mutual respect. Hence, in moral psychology, his confusion between the heteronomous character peculiar to pure duty and the quality of fundamental autonomy which belongs to the good as such. Finally, in his general sociology the unwarranted identification of the equilibrium of fact constituted by constraint and that other, ideal equilibrium–still social though in another sense of the term–which is constituted by cooperation, the limit and norm of every human group that has ever come into being (p.375).