This blog has promoted a mental construct that reintroduces,
in a serious and thought-out way, the whole subject of morality to civics
instruction. If the call is at all
successful, this would call for teachers to be at least familiar with the
psychological standing of moral thinking.
What do we know about moral thinking; what is its function; how innate
or enculturated is moral thinking and a person’s concern for it? Are we all wired to think morally or is it
totally learned? Is it a product of
rational thought or is it a reflection of our emotions? These are questions a teacher who is about to
engage in lessons where student beliefs and feelings will be engaged, should
know about and accommodate so as to have any chance at success.
Jonathan Haidt[1] has
reported, both his and others’ research and theorizing, on these very
questions. He points out that the lineage
of this research has gone through an evolution.
Tracing this history reveals what probably constitutes our intuitive
notions about moral thinking. To begin,
is morality and our concern over it something we are born with, a nature thing,
or is it something we learn, a nurture thing?
The first is known as a nativist notion and the latter is an empiricist
notion. He dismisses either one of these
choices as being a “false choice” between them.
Since the 1980s, the field of psychology that studies this has favored a
third option: rationalism. Rationalism grows from the developmental work
of Jean Piaget. This line of research
and theorizing was later picked up by Lawrence Kohlberg and later still by Elliot
Turiel. Simplified, the explanation is
that moral thinking is the product of individuals figuring out moral situations
as they grow through childhood and then into their post puberty years. Apparently, according to this view, a person’s
ability and need to develop a moral understanding are highly dependent on the
person’s level of abstract thinking.
Kohlberg offered, and I was taught in my teacher preparation training, a
model of moral development. The three scholars
are known as developmental psychologists, and the Kohlberg model traces a
person’s march through stages of moral thinking. There are six individual steps, through three
stages, of moral commitments. Not
everyone goes through all six; actually most people get “stuck” at stage three
or four. In general, the stages have a
person committing moral allegiance to ever larger levels of moral fidelity to
larger and even abstract populations:
from self to immediate groups (family) to large abstract groups (nation)
to abstract ideals (equality of human kind).
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were given as examples of
individuals who went all the way to the sixth stage. Whether you agree with this designation or
not, they were two individuals who gave up their lives for “the cause.” The fact that all of us are prone to this
development, at all, suggests a level of nature having a role in our moral
development. But given that this process
is not at all automatic in terms of how far a given individual develops,
indicates that nurture also has a role.
Haidt reports that he was not satisfied with this model; that
it did not, for him, answer all aspects of moral thinking. He cites the work of psychological anthropologists. In order to understand Haidt’s concern, we
have to keep in mind that the developmentalists put large stock in individuals “figuring
out” what is moral based on the universal disdain for hurting others. The reasoned basis for such disdain is the
simple fact that a person doesn’t want to be hurt and so the likelihood of
being hurt is greatly diminished by not hurting others, in that there is
universal agreement based on simple human relations. But that simple notion does not explain the
variations that exist among societies over what is moral and what is not. And here the study becomes more
complicated: there are developed and
lesser-developed societies; there are traditional and modern societies; there
are literate and non-literate societies.
And sure enough, there are patterns one can detect among societies that
fall on either side of each of these divides.
Not only that, but within each society, there are divides among
classifications such as class and age.
So there seems to be more going on than stages of development or the
ability to think abstractly.
Haidt, using the research of Richard Shweder, began testing the
opposing models of moral thinking against that of the developmentalists. Borrowing Turiel’s and Shweder’s research
techniques, giving subjects short moral “stories” and asking subjects from
different societal, class, and age designations what they thought was moral or
immoral, Haidt was able to make distinctions between what was considered immoral
or just offensive behavior that transgressed social conventions. For example:
While walking, a man saw a dog
sleeping on the road. He walked up to it
and kicked it. …
A young married woman went alone to
see a movie without informing her husband.
When she returned home her husband said, “If you do it again, I will
beat you black and blue.” She did it
again; he beat her black and blue.
(Judge the husband.) …
In a family, a twenty-five-year-old
son addressed his father by his first name.[2]
Haidt found that in the first story, both Americans and
members of traditional, non-Western, society saw kicking the dog as
immoral. The Americans found beating the
wife as immoral, but not so among the traditional subjects. And the traditional subjects saw as immoral
the familiarity expressed by the son toward his father, but Americans did
not. Here were cases (the first and the third
case) that harm was not inflicted to another human, but immorality was deemed
to characterize all three situations by at least some of the subjects and a
distinction arose over conventional views regarding respect and conventional
roles. Along with questions of respect,
there are also, the research shows, concerns over what is considered
disgusting. What the research seems to
indicate is that there are cultural factors at work, most notably differences
between societies that are individualistic – such as Western countries in the
more extreme levels – where the interests of the individual most likely will
trump the interests of the group/society and sociocentric societies – such as
traditional societies – where the interests of the group trump the interests of
the individual. In general, groups
lacking in Western educational backgrounds tend to make clear distinctions
between conventional concerns and moral ones; that among the social factors
that contribute to this first distinction is class; and, very important, these
distinctions held up when researchers controlled for perceptions of what caused
harm – that is, when compared, members of lower classes seemed more readily to
conflate conventional taboos with moral dictums even when the situations clearly
did not cause anyone harm.
So, in summary, culture does have a role in determining
morality. At times, people have gut
feelings about what is disgusting or disrespectful and this, in turn, will
affect what is seen as immoral, and while self-construction of what is moral
has a role, it doesn’t explain all of what is seen as moral or immoral. And with that complex cauldron, I still want
teachers to delve into what is moral and immoral when teaching civics and
government!
