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The age at which young children begin to make moral discriminations about harmful actions committed against themselves or others

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问题     The age at which young children begin to make moral discriminations about harmful actions committed against themselves or others has been the focus of recent research into the moral development of children. Piaget in his hypothesis stated that because of their immaturity, children under age seven do not take into account the intentions of a person committing accidental or deliberate harm, but rather simply assign punishment for on the basis of the magnitude of the negative consequences caused. According to Piaget, children under age seven occupy the first stage of moral development, which is characterized by moral absolutism (rules made by authorities must be obeyed) and imminent justice (if rules are broken, punishment will be meted out). Until young children mature, their moral judgments are based entirely on the effect rather than the cause of a transgression. However, in recent research, Keasey found that six-year-old children not only distinguish between accidental and intentional harm, but also judge intentional harm as haughtier, regardless of the amount of damage produced. Both of these findings seem to indicate that children, at an earlier age than Piaget claimed, advance into the second stage of moral development, moral autonomy, in which they accept social rules but view them as more arbitrary than do children in the first stage.
    Keasey’s research raises two key questions for developmental psychologists about children under age seven: do they recognize justifications for harmful actions, and do they make distinctions between harmful acts that are preventable and those acts that have unforeseen harmful consequences? Studies indicate that justifications excusing harmful actions might include public duty, self defense, and provocation. For example, Nesdale and Rule concluded that children were capable of considering whether or not an aggressor’s action was justified by public duty: five year olds reacted very differently to "Bonnie wrecks Ann’s pretend house" depending on whether Bonnie did it "so somebody won’t fall over it" or because Bonnie wanted "to make Ann fell bad. " Thus, a child of five begins to understand that certain harmful actions, though intentional, can be justified; the constraints of moral absolutism no longer solely guide their judgments.
    Psychologists have determined that during kindergarten children learn to make distinctions involving harm. Darley observed that among acts involving unintentional harm, six-year-old children just entering kindergarten could not differentiate between foreseeable, and thus preventable, harm and unforeseeable harm for which the perpetrator cannot be blamed. Seven months later, however, Darley found that these same children could make both distinctions, thus demonstrating that they had become morally autonomous.
What’s the passage mainly about?
选项 A、An outline for future research.
B、An analysis of a dispute between two theorists.
C、An expanded definition of commonly misunderstood terms.
D、A discussion of research findings in an ongoing inquiry.
答案D
解析 本文开篇指出研究内容是the age at which young children begin to make moral discriminations 并讲述了Keasey的新发现，因此本文是对一个尚在研究的问题的一种讨论。[A]项“对未来的研究的一个大纲”不正确。因为这个研究正在进行；[B]项“两个理论家之间争端的分析”，文章主要介绍的是有关研究的两种不同理论，而不是对两者之间争端的分析；[C]项“对普遍误解术语的扩展定义”与题意相差甚远。
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