Dave's 10th Post

February 16, 2011

At a comedy awards celebration a few years ago, the late great comedian, George Carlin, began his acceptance speech by commenting that his mother told him that whatever he did, “don’t become a comedian.” George said that, that was all the encouragement he ever needed. Jean and Linda told me at lunch today that two people, Becky and Judy Laughton, are actually reading and enjoying my blogs. One should be careful whom they discourage or encourage.

Today we are idling back and forth off shore from Cape Town. It is too windy to get into the bay to anchor so we are doing a drive-by until further notice. It sure looks good from a distance. We may not dock until tomorrow and perhaps not even then if the wind does not abate. I didn’t intend to write my next blog until after leaving SA, but because of all this extra time and the bit of encouragement I received, I feel it would be a sin of omission not to share my wisdom with others. I’m assuming that where there are two there might be more.

Yesterday afternoon during the hour we seniors sailors get together, Dean Dan Garvey spoke to us and the main topic was the research he has been doing for years on his pet subject, trying to understand how people justify their ethical behavior. He has been a college dean for decades and he became interested in this topic years ago after summoning students to his office after their misdeeds. He said their responses fell into two basic categories. They were either very remorseful and apologetic or they excused themselves with rationalizations and didn’t assume full responsibility for their bad behavior. This led him into the work of Lawrence Kohlberg at Carnegie Mellon on ethical behavior. Surprisingly, I was very familiar with Kohlberg and had published probably the first book on his work, Moral Reasoning, in the 1970s, the first decade of Greenhaven Press, the publishing company I founded. Two CM graduate students and Kohlberg’s assistants approached me at a teacher’s conference where I was exhibiting my Opposing Viewpoints Series books and asked if GP would be interested in publishing the findings. I jumped at the opportunity and took their untitled manuscript and polished it into the finished book that Greenhaven published. I don’t want to mislead. I added nothing substantive to the book. I just made it flow and readable. The research was all theirs and Kohlberg’s.

It’s been decades but as I remember Kohlberg’s work in the 1970s, it described the six following stages of moral development built on research in three societies. Memory tells me they were America, Mexico, and Taiwan. As I can recall, to the best of my ability, the six stages of moral maturity were:

1.Reward and Punishment - One behaves based on the promise of reward or fear of punishment. For example, a child would or would not get into the cookie jar based on perceived consequences.
2.Reciprocity - You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
3.Law & Order - It’s the law or accepted custom. I need to be a good citizen or I’ll be singled out or maybe arrested.
4.Community Consensus - I’m fuzzy here. It may be something like going along for the good of the community.
5.Acceptance of a Universal Principal - Acting on principals like “love your neighbor as yourself” or the basic principles stated in our Declaration of Independence on the equality of all.
6.Christ-like or Bodhisattva Altruism - Self sacrifice in the service of other.

Cut me some slack here. It’s been about 30 years since I was involved with this material. I didn’t even save a copy of the book. In fact I saved little of the work and books I created during my Greenhaven years. I do have a number of titles as bookshelf fillers on our condo living room bookshelf. They have pretty spines. An interesting tidbit from my involvement in Kohlberg’s findings is the observation that most Americans (and other societies’ citizens I suspect) fall into levels 2 to 4. Unfortunately our Declaration of Independence is anchored in level 5 and concepts like universal equality and brotherhood. Most Americans really don’t buy into or at least behave at the moral level that our basic document is anchored in. I remember during the national Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, the state of Pennsylvania posted replicas of the Declaration around the state for people to sign. People refused to sign them because they found the ideas too radical. I remember thinking at the time that our democracy is very tenuous if citizens don’t really believe what our civil scriptures proclaim.

Dean Garvey said Kohlberg’s work has progressed since my involvement but I’m not familiar with the advancements. I am familiar however with the more recent work of the University of Virginia moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt. I find his work in Moral Foundations Theory fascinating. See his book The Happiness Hypothesis or visit his website www.edge.org. He has a number of papers on the site including The New Science of Morality: An Edge Conference. Haidt posits that societies create their moral systems based on the following five foundations listed below. Liberals are anchored in primarily the first two and conservatives are more evenly rooted in all five. As I understand his work, we seem to come out of the womb with a basic moral grounding. Biology is therefore very important but culture can affect change in one’s moral stance. The five foundations are:

1.Harm/care: basic concerns for the suffering of others, including virtues of caring and compassion.
2.Fairness/reciprocity: concerns about unfair treatment, inequality, and more abstract notions of justice.
3.In-group/loyalty: concerns related to obligations of group membership, such as loyalty, self-sacrifice and vigilance against betrayal
4.Authority/respect: concerns related to social order and the obligations of hierarchical relationships.
5.Purity/sanctity: concerns about physical and spiritual contagion, including virtues of chastity, wholesomeness and control of desires.

If you would like to take the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to identify your moral position as either a liberal or a conservative, complete the questionnaire online. It doesn’t take long but unfortunately I don’t have the exact web address and I don’t have good internet access here on the ship to direct you. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.

That’s enough for today class. Besides, I have social obligations to my travel mates to tend to and wine to drink.