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30-01-2018 | Open Forum

An agent-oriented account of Piaget’s theory of interactional morality

Author: Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa

Published in: AI & SOCIETY | Issue 3/2019

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a formal interpretive account of Jean Piaget’s theory of the morality that regulates social exchanges, which we call interactional morality. First, we place Piaget’s conception in the context of his epistemological and sociological works. Then, we review the core of that conception: the two types of interactional moralities (autonomous and heteronomous) that Piaget identified to be usual in social exchanges, and the role that the notion of respect-for-the-other plays in their definition. Next, we analyze the main features of social exchanges that are subject to each of those two types of interactional moralities. Following, we formalize Piaget’s account of how the two types of interactional moralities can be put to regulate social exchanges in which values, norms, beliefs, and goals are exchanged (besides objects and services), so that interactional commitments can be established among the participants. Then, we sketch a moral reasoning system able to support formal reasonings about interactional moralities. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the overall formal model of interactional moralities that resulted from our study by applying it to the explication of some of the conclusions achieved by Piaget in his moral studies about children games.

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For instance, in the important and voluminous collection Gruber and Vonche (1977) of excerpts of books and papers by Piaget, his sociology is clearly put as non-essential: it simply got no space there.

For ease of reading, we denote in this one-word form of “respect-for-the-other” the conceptual construct that Piaget implies when saying that a certain person has a certain type of respect for another.

Interestingly enough, the categories whose development in children Piaget studied were precisely the a priori categories that Kant considered indispensable to the production of human experience, in general, and to the production of scientific knowledge, in particular. In fact, one can say that, in a sense, Piaget realized what Kant himself considered a task well assignable to empirical psychology, namely to determine how empirical subjects manage to access those a priori categories Kant (1991).

Piaget adopted and justified Piaget (1950) the idea that the development process of the logical structures of knowledge has to follow a characteristic path, with a characteristic series of stages that both humanity (collectively) and children (individually) have to go through.

Note that we are radically simplifying Piaget’s detailed account of this process, which is clearly of a developmental nature, and from which we are considering only the two most typical stages Piaget (1962), and the stages more relevant for our purposes here. In particular, note that we are considering only interactions where the participants agree about their respective qualification as superior or inferior and, thus, agree on the type of respect-for-the-other they establish among them. Those are the only types of interactions which are stable, i.e., capable of long-term moral regulation. Interactions where the agents disagree about their equality or inequality are unstable, and are, thus, capable only of short-term moral regulation: sooner or later the agents enter in conflict about the type of respect-for-the-other they should have in common, and solve the conflict either by terminating the interaction or by changing the interactional morality that regulates it.

In fact, Piaget’s proposal aims to serve as a foundation for, and to encompass as particular instances, the other two main alternative approaches to morality: those based on the respect for the whole group, that is, for the whole society (as proposed, e.g., by Durkheim 1997), and those based on the respect for the norm itself (as proposed, e.g., by Kant 2012). By the way, in the case of the heteronomous interactional morality, Piaget’s proposal of finding morality on the respect-for-the-other is close to Kelsen’s idea, that the source of the legitimacy of a normative system, moral or legal, as expressed by the system’s fundamental norm, is the respect for the issuer of the norm Kelsen (2009). In the case of the autonomous interactional morality, it seems to coincide with the foundation of what is usually called the ethics of care (see, e.g., Held 2007).

Clearly, for Piaget, non-interested exchanges are the exchanges that agents perform when they follow Kant’s categorical imperative Kant (2012).

Note that the dual of Fig. 1, with \(\beta\) in the place of \(\alpha\), and vice-versa, is also valid. It characterizes exchanges where \(\beta\) first performs services for \(\alpha\), and then charges for them. Besides, both \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) may initiate a new step of exchange by performing a type II step, in which case the charging of the credit occurs before the delivering of a service, and corresponds, thus, to the formation of a debt, in anticipation of a future return, which may happen spontaneously, through a step of type I, or charged, through a reciprocal type II step.

We analyze these and other conclusions, in more detail, and in a formalized way, in Sect 5. Note that, a full table would have to include a row characterizing what Piaget calls “sensory-motor” interactions, which we omit here, given that they are typically “a-social”, that is, they involve no social exchanges, in the strict sense of the term.

\(\wp (X)\) is the powerset of the set X.

See Castelfranchi et al. (1992) and Conte and Castelfranchi (1995) for a general theory of the relation of social dependence, and Costa and Dimuro (2007) for a quantitative treatment of the relation of objective social dependence.

Since Prop.2(b) is, in fact, the relational property of symmetry.

For instance, among children of the same age, when seeing each other as equally capable of playing a certain game Piaget (1962).

Notice that we are assuming here that exchange processes are stable, regarding the type of respect-for-the-other involved in them, as stipulated in Footnote 5.

Note that the criterion of “imprecision” adopted in the definition is essentially quantitative. Improved definitions could be given, by modulating the quantitative criterion with qualitative features (e.g., the relative relevance of each of the elements of the sets being compared). The given definition should be enough, however, for this extension of the concept.

We omit the reference to the marble game as the exchange process e, in the formulas.

Note that we have made use of the concept (applied, however, to the specific case of interactional norms): \(adoptici ( group ) = \cap \{ adoptici (ag) \mid ag \in group \}\), which extends the concept of set of asserted interactional cognitive items, from agents to sets of agents.

Note how the contraposition of a categorical moral reasoning rule may result in a tendential moral reasoning rule.

For instance, acknowledging, at the same time, the conventionality of the rules of the game and the supremacy of a conception of justice that is, in fact, unrelated to the rules of the game.

See Costa et al. (2009) for a quantitative concept of degree of objective expectation.

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Title: An agent-oriented account of Piaget’s theory of interactional morality
Author: Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa
Publication date: 30-01-2018
Publisher: Springer London
Published in: AI & SOCIETY / Issue 3/2019
Print ISSN: 0951-5666
Electronic ISSN: 1435-5655
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0804-1

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