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The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict by Elliot Turiel
Few questions are more persistent than ones that focus on the development and enculturation of morality. Since ancient Greece, the study of what it means to be moral and how social groups should transmit their values to others has been a vital contribution to a better understanding of the human condition. Today, mere is a renewed appreciation for the diverse moral traditions of societies that were previously excluded from this conversation. In Elliot Turiel's The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict, the reader is provided with a comprehensive treatment of how groups choose the best ways to live and how this moral knowledge is communicated. Drawing on a wide range of literatures and fields, Turiel weaves a narrative that connects advances in political theory to the work of psychology.
Turiel describes his approach in the following manner.
The approach I present in this book is based on the proposition that individuals construct judgments through their social interactions and that they form several different kinds of judgments about a multifaceted social world. . . . The approach I present is grounded in analyses of the psychology of the development of moral and social judgments of individuals, and how those judgments are applied to societal arrangements and cultural practices and can result in harmony, conflict, and opposition in people's social lives. (p. 2)
The key as I see it is in Turiel's attempt to understand the enduring question of the individual and society especially as it...