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Culture and Moral Development

 JOAN G. MILLER

No topic is more central to an understanding of culture than perhaps morality. In-

deed, it is often difficult to delineate where culture ends and morality begins as cul-ture and morality share an intricate and intimate relationship. In fact, an argumentcould be (and has been) made that much of culture’s contents and the goals of encul-turation are to ensure the inscription of culture-specific processes and understandingof morality, justice, and fairness in the individual.

In this chapter, Miller provides us with a comprehensive and excellent overviewof the literature in the area of culture and morality. She begins by describing the ma-jor mainstream approaches to moral development, including the cognitive develop-mental perspectives of Piaget and Kohlberg, the distinct domain perspective of Tu-riel, and the morality of caring perspective of Gilligan. Miller is deft at not onlydescribing in detail the basic tenets of each of the approaches, but also cleverly evalu-

ating each in terms of empirical and theoretical limitations. As Miller notes, each of the three approaches downplays the impact of cultural meanings and practices,shares the assumption that morality is self-constructed in the context of everydaysocialization experiences, and assumes fundamentally the same forms in all culturalsettings.

Miller then goes beyond the mainstream approaches in discussing cultural ap-proaches to moral development. Focusing on three key issues—culturally inclusivedefinitions of morality, the nature of cultural meanings, and the cultural grounding of developmental processes—Miller describes key empirical findings in the cross-cul-tural literature that demonstrate the close interrelationship between culture and mo-rality. The evidence reviewed spans all areas of morality research, including judg-

ments of justice morality, moralities of community and interpersonal relationships,and moralities related to divinity and spirituality and demonstrates convincingly thatcultural meanings and practices affect the application of moral codes in everyday situ-ations and also produce qualitative differences in moral reasoning.

Using this review as a platform, Miller argues convincingly for a future researchagenda that is well characterized by an integration with other psychological pro-cesses, an incorporation of areas of morality previously ignored by mainstream re-search, and a longitudinal approach to understanding the process of moral develop-

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