Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development are Balderdash
by tdaxp ~ November 18th, 2006
“Reason” hardly matters. As I wrote before:
Rationality may be overrated. Lieberman, Schreiber, and Ochsner noted that “Because behavior is often driven by automatic mechanisms, self-reports of mental processes are notoriously unreliable and susceptible to many forms of contamination” (2003, 682)
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Confusing morality with rationalization is insane.
For quite a while I’ve felt that Kohlberg’s stages of moral development are balderdash. The more I learn, the more skeptical i become. Kohlbergism is the bastard offspring of a rape of naive Piagetianism by blithering Vygotskianism.
Kohlberg claimed that morality, which he believed to be essentially the same thing as moral reasoning, proceeded through six stages that are in three levels.
First Level
First a focus on loss-aversion, and
Then a focus on income-maximization
Second Level
First a focus on conforming to norms, and
Then a focus on obeying the law
Third Level
First a focus on the Social Contract, and
Then a focus on Universal Principles
One way to attack Kohlberg is to argue him to absurdity by demonstrating situations where a higher “moral” stage of development leads to actions considered immoral. (That we even have to confuse normative ideals and substantive facts like this is demonstrates another Kohlbergian absurdity, but that would be a post for another time).
Considering that “First Level” descriptions are used only by socially naive participants (that is, small children), nearly all the human variation in “morality” is in the second and third level.
I have a strong intuition that if you measured “moral reasoning,” it would correlate with betrayal and selfish play in the ultimatum game.
I haven’t settled on a reason for that yet.
But does it matter?
November 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Left a comment. Sent to 'verification page.' Entered code. Told comment would appear in a few moments. Comment has not appeared. Question: Do I react rationally or smash my monitor with my fist…Hmmmm.
November 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Curtis,
That has happened to me TWICE now. I'll add your complaint to blogspirit's admin/help page.
GRRR
November 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I've left a trackback to the comment posted on Phatic Communion, with additional comments…
November 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
“Because behavior is often driven by automatic mechanisms, self-reports of mental processes are notoriously unreliable and susceptible to many forms of contamination”
I suppose I should weigh in… of course, I hope I do so with reason and not merely as a gene-driven & history-driven automaton!
The latter half of the quote is true of about 99% of people, I'd guess, but not necessarily for about 1%. My experience is that most people are indeed 'cognition automatons' and that though this may be an evolutionary plus, the benefits were far more apparent in a less-dynamic or 'simpler' social milieu. Fact is, with complexity brought on by more fluid and more numerous interactions, the automatic responses may either be 1) quite detrimental because they are often counterproductive or 2) quite dangerous because the 1% are freer and more able to consciously shape environments to produce expected automatic responses from the other 99%. [Hint: 5GW implications.] The advertising industry depends upon this disparity — although I would also say that many within that industry create their programs in an automated way!
In fact, with regard to the first half of the quote, I'd say that though gaining mastery over every personal behavior (which requires conscious focus) may be beyond the capabilities of any person: some have succeeded far more than most and many others have at least been able to detect their own incomprehensible and automatic behaviors well enough to respond to their personal activity in a conscious manner. The poet W.H.Auden, in his essay “Hic Et Ille”, likened this to persons holding quite personal mirrors:
“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
“A parlor game for a wet afternoon — imagining the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever on looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.
“Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, though to varying degrees and in various ways. Some magnify, some diminish, others return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images.
“But the properties of our own particular mirror are not so important as we sometimes like to think. We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection.”
[Heh, okay, so that's an 'Auden Interlude' to your post!]
November 19th, 2006 at 12:00 am
“Rationality may be overrated. Lieberman, Schreiber, and Ochsner noted that “Because behavior is often driven by automatic mechanisms, self-reports of mental processes are notoriously unreliable and susceptible to many forms of contamination” (2003, 682)”
All true but that it is difficult to see through a fog does not mean that the fog itself is the actual reality, just that it is hard to discern the reality through the fog. ;o)
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November 19th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Mark, I agree.
The mental processes by which we make decisions are obscured from our conscious vision. But this seems to be a good thing.
Not even counting the incredibly large set of automatic processes we have “ready to roll,” our brains are adept at automatizing things so that we can do important tasks without thinking — or, at least, with fingertip-feeling.
That our consciousness is largely reactive to our decisions does not make it unimportant. Our consciousness seems to be awakened by anxiety — a mechanism designed to tell us that something is not working. Very Management-By-Exception. And (judging from our species' conquest of the world) very effective.
November 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
“It's not our type of mirrors — or “rationality” or “rationalizations” — that matter. “
I.e., I think that the mirrors are not so much the rationalization as the Abstract Observation (within Concrete Orient of the Revised OODA [1]), and that reasoning about ourselves is what we may do by observing these programmed responses and information in light of new information. So I disagree with your conflation of the mirrors themselves, and only themselves, with rationality or rationalization.
Of course, some people are far more enamored of their reflections — primarily focus on them without trying much to incorporate new information as well — and so reason in a limited manner by believing, as Mark put it, that the fog is reality. Elsewhere in his essay, Auden introduces the subject/concept of Narcissus.
[1] http://www.phaticcommunion.com/archives/2006/06/rethinking_the.php
November 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
I'm not quite ready to abandon Kohlberg yet. Like any taxonomy, it's only useful when you add context. Does morality necessarily equate to rationality? Probably not, but if you want to be a functioning cog in society (a society based, like any system, on rules), then there is a mandate of obeisance to society's ordering principles.
Kohlberg's “Universal Principles” is not unlike Aristotle's “fifth essence” or “Unmoved Mover” — showing that any theory will show its gaps once you get to the boundary conditions.
November 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
Curtis,
So the mirrors represent conscious thinking generally? I can see that…
Shane,
Excellent comment (and cool blog, too)!
Last year I was in a class whose text was by one of the leading authors in the field of moral development — a noted & well respected author of Kohlberg. Here are some of my notes from last year: [1]
“genuine morality comes not from parents or other agents of culture but rather is constructed in the context of peer interaction… morality, then is not a matter of culturally specific rules learned from parents or other agents of society… [but rather] has a rational basis, and develops through an internally directed process of constructing increasingly sophisticated understandings about the inherent logic of social relationships.”
I agree with your contextual take on morality and agree that the “gaps” begin to show in Kohlberg's Third Stage of Morality… but I'm not sure that Kohlberg sees that.
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2006/02/09/questioning-moshman-on-moral-and-advanced-psychological-deve.html
November 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Curtis,
Even thought it turned out that “moments” meant “hours,” the gods of blogspirit have sent your comment through. Hurrah!
I commented more on your blog [1], but a quick word on the Auden poem… In it, Auden seems to view rationality and self-understanding as just as limited as I do. It's not our type of mirrors — or “rationality” or “rationalizations” — that matter. It's our actions.
However, I disagree with him though. While Rational Developmentalists focus on Decision, and Auden focus on Action, I focus on Orientation.
[1] http://www.phaticcommunion.com/archives/2006/11/reflecting_on_r.php
November 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
Action flows from Orientation. I think that Auden's addressing more an orientation (from which the action will flow) by suggesting that there is an anti-automaton, or a feature of human cognition capable of standing back and making a riposte to the inaccurate mirrors.
I've said recently (on a forum that now has only two members!) that we are all inescapably trapped by our own personal OODAs and have suggested that being able to discern the full scope of our personal OODA process is therefore probably impossible. The part that would discern is also trapped within the OODA cycle.
BTW, Auden began as a somewhat radical semi-Catholic but went through a transformation later in his life to being a conservative Catholic — and even revised some of his earlier poems to reflect his latter conservatism. I'd bet you'd greatly enjoy his collection of essays in The Dyer's Hand:
http://www.amazon.com/Dyers-Hand-W-H-Auden/dp/0679724842/sr=8-1/qid=1164103635/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0436266-1736721?ie=UTF8&s=books
I previously quoted from it on Phatic Communion in a post you might remember, addressing the idea of Kin and Folk:
http://www.phaticcommunion.com/archives/2006/03/time_a_hypothet.php