Urban America as a context for the development of moral identity in adolescence

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1998 by Daniel Hart, Robert Atkins, Debra Ford

Adolescent morality is a topic that has long been at the forefront of social policy debate in the United States. In recent years, the perceived lack of morality in the teen years has resulted in a groundswell of support for harsh sanctions against adolescents judged deficient in moral character. To give only two examples of this trend, expenditures have increased dramatically for the incarceration of adolescents and young adults convicted of crimes (Skolnick, 1994) and financial support for teenaged mothers has been restricted (Jencks & Edin, 1995), with both trends reflecting societal judgments that crime and pregnancy among teenagers reflect deep ethical flaws. Because teenage fertility and crime rates are higher among urban, minority populations than among suburban populations, these sanctions affect urban minority adolescents to a much greater degree than those living in majority, middle-class homes.

The urge to punish harshly adolescents who exhibit these types of supposed character flaws has many sources. One of these is a growing tendency in the general public to believe that socially important patterns of behavior are resistant to change because they are determined either by early parental influence or biology. For example, in a recent Newsweek article, Samuelson (1998) suggested that the failure of a government intervention program to enhance the development of low-income children reflected the domination of poor parenting over all other sources of influence on development. Biological explanations for human behavior are increasingly popular as well. Recent books highlighting the genetic underpinnings of individual differences in personality (e.g., Harris, 1998; Wright, 1998) reflect what has been called "perhaps this century's most profound shift in thought . . . [that] - the genetic heritage of both species and individuals - began to be perceived as a guiding if not controlling force, first in animal behavior and then increasingly in different kinds of human conduct" (Bickerton, 1998). The popularity among many in the United States of the argument for the heritability and immutability of IQ presented in The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) is another of the more public indicators of the ascendance of biological determinism as a worldview on social behavior. Although scientists know that findings from behavioral genetic research have few implications for social policy, the general public and government officials do not always understand this fact (for a review, see Tucker, 1994). Together these two trends - the responsibility of parents and biological determinism - encourage the public to withdraw from troubled adolescents.

In our view, the emphasis of current social policy on isolating, segregating, and punishing adolescent transgressors obscures from the public view both the genuine moral strengths of adolescents and the opportunities that the developmental process offers for fruitful intervention with youth. To provide for the political and civic development of youth, social policy must be formulated on the basis of knowledge of the strengths and opportunities of adolescents rather than upon the graphic portrayals of antisocial teenagers that gain media coverage. Our goal in this article is to describe the nature of moral identity, a particular type of moral strength that often binds the adolescent to facets of the public community. We shall suggest that moral identity in this sense is of fundamental importance for political socialization in the United States. We shall also describe the factors that influence the development of moral identity in urban adolescents. We shall suggest that (1) moral identities are commonly found among urban adolescents, (2) urban adolescents have an interest in constructing and enacting moral identities, (3) environmental support for the development of moral identities is lacking for urban adolescents, and (4) it is imperative that more be done to foster the development of moral identities among America's urban youth. In marshaling support for our model of moral identity and its development, we shall draw upon our own work in Camden, New Jersey, the work of others, and new analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY).

Moral Identity

Moral identity can be described as a commitment consistent with one's sense of self to lines of action that promote or protect the welfare of others.(1) Moral identity is related to, but distinct from, domains of psychological functioning that are implicated in moral life. For example, moral identity cannot be reduced to sophisticated moral reasoning, because there are many people capable of the latter whose lives show little evidence of commitment to, or action toward, moral goals. Nor can moral identity be reduced to personality traits linked to prosocial behavior such as resilience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or generativity. This is because the relations of these traits to specific lines of action and to the sense of self are indirect and weak. We believe that the emphasis on the binding of self to specific moral pursuits characteristic of our notion of moral identity - and absent in notions like moral judgment and personality traits - is necessary for a full accounting of moral life.