We’ve talked about how moral development matters. It’s threatened by some powerful Americans who seek their own ends over the ends that benefit society. In order to enjoy the benefits of our Democratic Republic, We the People must fight to keep our democracy alive, healthy, and secure. We need tools to help us fight. Mature moral reasoning is one of the most important tools we have at our disposal. We must pursue it and use it and shame those who ignore or oppose it. But first, we must make sure we have it.
Lawrence Kohlberg described more levels of moral development than we need to concern ourselves with. Some are too immature, some are a bit out there, not practical as far as we are concerned. The stages can be described fairly simply, but what we know and are able to do within each stage can vary considerably. We’re using Kohlberg’s work, but not all of it, and we add to it.
We are interested in three of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and we refer to them with names that I have given them: tribal moral reasoning, institutional moral reasoning, and universal moral reasoning.
Tribal Moral Reasoning:
It is important for children to enter into the stage of tribal moral reasoning and it is important for children to mature out of it. All of the growth we talk about that occurs in tribal moral reasoning is important to a child’s development.
Heck, it is kinda fun to watch kids mature into tribal moral reasoning but it can also be maddening.
Tribal moral reasoning is enormously important in child development because children make a huge leap in social perspective. They move from thinking primarily about themselves to thinking about themselves as members of a group such as the family or the classroom.
Parents benefit from recognizing the growth and development that occur at this stage. They can encourage their children when they enter it and then help direct them through and out of it.
However, when thinking about our goal of healing our body politic, it is evident that this stage destroys public discourse for adults who operate in it. In order to conduct public discourse effectively, adults must outgrow tribalism.
The focus of adults who operate in tribes is easily understood as “Us vs. Them.” They think about and follow the norms their tribe sets for them.
Tribes have strong, domineering identities. Members know who belongs to their tribe and they know who is targeted by their tribe. Some are benign: football fans. Some are harmful, even malignant. When tribalism is malignant, the “We” are always more powerful than the “They:”
Think white racists who had all the power over black civil rights activists in the 1950s and early 1960s who had none.
How do tribe members think? It’s not complicated: “We” decide what is right and what is wrong and if the “they” attempt to challenge what is right or do what is wrong, our entire group retaliates. A tribe’s retaliation can have few boundaries. It can be mean, even violent.
Tribal adults can be mean and even violent in how they treat others while being enormously loyal within their groups. That’s why members of tribes invariably talk about each other in glowing terms: Great person, good person, sincere person, trustworthy person.
We need to stop and think and feel this point. Members of tribes treat each other well. They come to each others’ aid. They make great sacrifices and will even risk their lives and for each other . All of which contributes to their powerful group identify. At the same time, they are incapable of understanding and feeling the effects of the indefensible ways they treat others.
Racism depends on tribal moral reasoning and the profound social experiences that support the group. Those experiences unite the tribe both as a group and in their rejection of their targeted “others.”
Whole police forces can get stuck in tribalism and tribal moral reasoning.
Obviously, the military benefits from tribal moral reasoning, especially when soldiers face combat ― which is reason enough for the military to be subject to civilian control.
That’s the short of it. What we must remember is that these adults operate at a level of moral reasoning that children enter while in junior high school. It is immature and it that supports how its members think and behave.
Members of tribes hold dear their doctrines felt as facts. They work with inherited doctrines felt as facts that their whole group shares.
One can point out to Southern racists (not all Southerners are racist) that the North won the civil war and invite them to join the union, become part of Our Democratic Republic and adopt and adhere to its values. But to no avail.
Not just the North, We the People have still not won the argument. What racists do is justified by what they think and the fact that the only group they care about agrees with them. Their doctrines felt as facts are wrapped up in what they call the unique and special southern tradition and culture. They can’t think differently. They are rationally incapable of questioning each other.
We will talk about our fellow citizens who are stuck in tribal moral reasoning when we visit the civil rights movement and the Americans who brutally attacked peaceful activists.
We’ll also talk about it when we discuss radical capitalist and economic justice. That discussion will reveal American oligarches for what they are and the force they apply to their goal of controlling our Democratic Republic in order to increase their wealth and power.
We’ve got some serious tribes operating in and threatening our Democratic Republic.
Institutional Moral Reasoning:
Unlike tribal moral reasoning, institutional moral reasoning has significant strengths in adult society, but it is experienced first in young adulthood.
When young adults achieve institutional moral reasoning, they know that family and school rules are important ― indeed, more important than the norms set by friends and peers.
Almost shockingly, these young adults can call out other students or friends for doing something they know is wrong. How’s that possible? That shift in loyalty?
Young people who have matured into institutional moral reasoning evaluate family and school and social norms in ways that go far beyond their earlier sense of fair ― “what my friends and I want.” Instead, they focus on whether or not these norms work or don’t work for the institution that has adopted them. This represents a huge change, among high school students and adults.
We need to take a deep breath. Maybe get up and walk around. We have just moved from the moral reasoning that supports tribes that aren’t capable of questioning each other even when they are engaged in mean or violent behavior, to moral reasoning that allows members of groups to call each other out if they have violated the norms of the institution to which they belong. That development can occur while students are in high school, in less than four years from their begin operating in tribal thinking.
Armed with institutional moral reasoning, adults follow the rules made by the institution, not by themselves. They can also question the rules made by the institution.
Leaders of institutions must be careful. These adults don’t reject rules because they aren’t what “we want.” They reject them because they are stupid. Why are they stupid? Because they don’t support, or even undermine, the institution’s goals.
By fairly obvious logical extension, we realize that laws made in the public square must have a rational connection to the public’s goals.
However, what are the public’s goals? Just the goals of institutions? Here we run into the limits of institutional moral reasoning.
The goals of different institutions can be great for the institutions, but may not be great for other institutions or for the local community or for the country. It’s great for a corporation to set cities in competition to win their new factory or corporate headquarters. They use the competition to get leverage when negotiating taxes and the acquisition of land.
However, that’s not so clearly in the interest of the city. It can be, but questioning the norms of the corporation doesn’t shed light on the benefits to the city. Kohlberg’s universal moral reasoning allows us to think about goals and norms that are even larger than institutional goals?
Universal Moral Reasoning
Kohlberg admitted that he had trouble conducting research on this level of moral development because so few adults operate at it with enough consistency to be studied.
In my opinion, the problem he faced is that universal moral reasoning is the first of his stages that requires formal operations, formal reasoning.
As I will discuss later, that was a problem for Kohlberg because he did not fully understand the nature of formal operations and its impact on moral reasoning.
As we have seen, when young adults begin to think formally, they venture into a whole new structure of reasoning,
New forms: syllogisms, formal conceptual frameworks, and theoretical models and paradigms.
Kohlberg did not fully understand formal reasoning which is why he had trouble understanding why adults could not operate at it consistently.
However, he did capture the key elements of universal moral reasoning.
With universal moral reasoning, adults take a social perspective that’s larger than my tribe or my institution.
They take the perspective of a rational individual who is aware of the values and rights of individuals prior to tribal attachments or institutional attachments. Prior to, we give priority to rational standards over tribal or institutional standards.
Everyone is treated the same. There is no “we versus them,” no “others.” There are no tribes. There are no institutions. There is only, We the People.
If We the People don’t operate with universal moral reasoning, we can’t complete the sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .,”
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that if We the People operate with universal moral reasoning, we can complete the sentence, “We hold these truths to be self evident. . . “ We can agree on and list those truths.
We will talk a lot about universal moral reasoning and we will do the work that needs to be done in moral philosophy to develop the intellectual tools we need to function consistently within it.
That work will represent a major intellectual achievement that will impact how we think about the nature of inquiry in the social sciences as well as how We the People conduct discourse in the public square. We will teach the public mind what it must know to develop and use universal moral reasoning.
I have referred to Kohlberg’s blind spot regarding formal reasoning and how it limited his understanding of his work on moral development. Now we can give it our attention.
Elliot Turiel on Learning and Moral Development:
Elliot Turiel was one of Kohlberg’s doctoral students. He wanted to confirm that children move sequentially through Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, that they are actually developmental stages that all children must pass through and not just various ways of thinking about different children.
In order to conduct his project in a reasonable time frame and not have to wait for all of his subjects to develop on their own, he provided instruction to aid their development.
It worked. His subjects moved sequentially through the stages. He noticed that offering instruction at one stage above their actual development was more effective than reviewing previous stages or instructing at two stages above their current level.
His findings were important: children develop sequentially through all stages, in order.
But he didn’t follow up on his other important finding ― that instruction aids development, that learning leads development.
Kohlberg had known that learning aids development, that when children encounter moral crises they are forced to think differently about morals. Differently. Their current level of moral development does not work and therefore they often advance their thinking. They learn to think at a higher level. But that interpretation of events left Kohlberg in the behaviorist theory of learning, for behaviorists acknowledge the role of experience in learning.
However, behaviorist think in terms of stimulus and response. In this example, the inability of their current way of thinking to work caused problems which became a stimulus to find a better way. That gives us: stimulus leads development.
Turiel seems to have overlooked the important new information he verified: it was instruction that aided his students’ development.
He assumed that it fit in his old schema that said learning through experience aids development, but just as stimulus and response. He assumed that in providing instruction, he had just provided a stimulus.
He remained stuck in the behaviorist theory of learning, that learning is a natural process of stimulus and response. It was not that the fact that instruction aided the development of his subjects’ capacity to reason was not interesting to him. Rather, the way he already thought made it impossible for him to notice this new, conflicting insight. This is an example of what we have talked about with paradigms: If one operates in one paradigm it is impossible even to think about or investigate a concept that exists is a different paradigm.
This is important for us to understand. His instruction aided his subjects’ development because he influenced how they think. He did not just offer rewards. He did not threaten grounding or offer trips to the ice cream store.
He engaged how they thought. The fact that instruction in how to think at a higher level of reasoning than they currently used impacted their development did not register with him.
Turiel did not recognize two of our fundamental assumptions:
He had provided intellectual leadership without noticing.
And,. he had proven that learning leads development.
Since many adults operate with institutional moral reasoning, many adults can help young people and other adults learn to operate effectively within institutions. Virtually every institution has norms and people learn to follow those norms, work for the good of the institution. Institutions can include training in institutional moral reasoning as part of their personnel development programs.
However, universal moral reasoning requires that we think beyond institutions,. As common as institutional moral reasoning is, it does not lead naturally to universal moral reasoning.
Indeed, one might argue that most institutions have a vested interest in keeping everyone focused on the needs of their institution and not the needs of the larger society.
Setting aside that rather interesting argument, the question at hand is:
“Who cares enough about developing a system of universal moral reasoning to do the work required to develop it?”
“Who cares enough about teaching universal moral reasoning to do the work required to teach it?”
Turns out, no one. We will, which is interesting and exciting, but obviously insufficient. What do we need?
A critical mass of Americans to show up in the public square and support our arguments. Americans who believe that they are members of and responsible for our community and our Democratic Republic.
We have talked about cognitive and moral development, their stages and even how to aid their development. But that does not tell the whole story of human development. Before we leave this topic, we must build a stronger foundation in moral reasoning by thinking about what it means to be fully developed human beings.
The Domains of Full Human Development:
I must begin this discussion with a fervent mea culpa. I found this information writing Let’s Get Civil. I used Goggle to investigate some questions I had about social science. What if found provided this information without attributing it to anyone. I concluded that it is the way social scientists think about humans.
Big mistake. It’s not how social scientist think. It belongs to someone I knew nothing about. That’s why I failed to acknowledge her and her work in Let’s Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. With a public apology, let me acknowledge her now: Grace Gredys Harris, 1926—2011, University of Rochester Department of Anthropology. Professor Harris was an anthropologist.
I may make more use of her work than anyone outside the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. She had died before Let’s Get Civil was published and no one complained. Her work is enormously important to mine and I should have acknowledge it.
Now, let’s get on with the work of Grace Gredys Harris.
Each of us lives our lives in at least three domains: that of the individual, the person, and the self. We’re fully developed human beings to the extent to which each of these domains is fully developed and properly ordered within us.
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Individual: The biological human, the DNA and physical makeup which is unique to each human and distinct from all other species.
Person: The individual in society, all of the commitments and relationships the individual has developed living in society, in the family, with friends, at work, in school, and so on.
Self: The interior life of a human, the psychological, intellectual, moral, emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual inner life of the human, all that the human has become through intent and accident, how we have internalized our life’s experiences. This is the location of our reason and will.
We can express this as a major principle, an a priori assumption, an axiom:
Full human development occurs in three domains: the individual, the person, and the self.
The individual is tied to the biological, physical nature of humans. It is important. A strong, healthy body is a sine qua non to everything else.
The older I get, the more I understand that health is everything. However, our bodies are meant to be lived in and to make everything else possible. They don’t provide us with what we think of as the fullness of our humanity. The history of humans has played out most obviously in our families and social/political activity and engagements.
The person is our domain that engages other persons in society. To achieve full development as a person, we and our society must develop.
It is difficult for any human to be better than his or her society. It is not at all difficult to be unworthy of one’s society, one’s family or friends or craft or profession or community or state or nation.
Each of us must learn the virtues that make us worthy, responsible, contributing members of our society. We must build social relationships and commit to them.
We also must learn the vices that undermine us as members of our society and participants in social relationships, and commit to not do them.
Merely acting in society does not reveal virtues and vices. The capacity to discern virtues and vices resides in our selves, our reason and will.
Our reason reveals virtues and vices, our will allows us to control our instincts and do what is right and not do what is wrong.
But of course our inner lives have to do with far more than controlling our social behaviors. Our inner lives have a whole wonderful world of their own. The self is the deepest domain of our humanity.
We have talked about cognitive and moral development. Both are huge parts of our selves, our inner lives, and the full development of our human capacity and must be a major interest for each of us. We will return to this topic often as we use mature cognitive and moral development as criteria for our evaluation of how we speak and act in the public square.
Each of us has enormous capacity to develop as human beings, but most of us have limited capacity to pursue that development alone. Just as most of us benefit from assistance when learning anything, we benefit from assistance in learning to develop our full humanity.
Parents and teachers are obvious mediators for children, but so are coaches, other children, relatives, and other influential adults.
That’s important to mention so that we understand how children develop their humanity.
But more important to this discussion is to identify the mediators, the intellectual leaders, who influence the full development of adults when they act in the public square.
Intellectual leaders help shape the public square, for good or ill. Which takes us back to our primary concern, our fractured body politic.
We will look at religion, moral philosophy, and social science. All three have contributed to the fracturing of our body politic and public square and all three can help heal it.
Readers and viewers may find all this interesting but doubt that most Americans are capable of full cognitive or moral development. In the chapter Education Justice I discuss learning theory and demonstrate that students and adults are capable of learning far more than they do.
That is why I wrote a chapter on education justice: to relieve the viewers’ concern, doubt.
Now, let me just say that when we establish an education or training program we have to decide if we are going to ask people to change what they do as a way of getting them to change how they think or are we going to ask people to change how they think as a way of getting them to change what they do.
The first is called behavior modification, the second, cognitive modification, and they represent the two competing theories of learning.
In education justice, I explain that behavior modification works both to change what people do and what they think when what we want them to think is concrete and simple.
However, if we want them to think and act with formal operations, we must help them change how they think. We must use cognitive modification, and to do that we must use the learning theories of Vygotsky and Feuerstein.
So yes, virtually all students and adults can learn to reason formally and to operate with universal moral reasoning, but not if our instructional methods are grounded in behaviorism.
In this episode, we identify a lot of things in our society that we have to fix. But some of them we must fix in the university in order to fix them in society.
Fixing how we educate and train students and adults is just one of them. When we learn how to fix education we see that once we institutionalize those solutions, educating our students and adults becomes a realistic goal. It is not simple and it is not easy, but it becomes realistic, and I should add, affordable.
Not only is doing it affordable, not doing constitutes a vast and tragic waste of human capacity and capital.
However, we need:
A critical mass of Americans to show up in the public square and support our arguments. Americans who believe that they are members of and responsible for our community and our democratic republic.
This entire blog is based on my book Let's Get Civil: Healing Our Fractured Body Politic. Some viewers may want to read it. You can order it from Amazon. be sure to use my full name: Patrick Conroy.
Website: Intellectual Leadership in the Public Square.
Email: Patrickconroy61@gmail.com.
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