MORALITY IN CONTEXT
ADVANCES IN PSYCHOLOGY 137 Editor:
G. E. STELMACH
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MORALITY IN CONTEXT
Edited by
Wolfgang EDELSTEIN Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin, Germany
Gertrud NUNNER-WINKLER Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences Munich, Germany
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Contents
List of Contributors 1
Introduction GertrudNunner-Winkler and Wolfgang Edelstein
vii 1
I. Constitutive Aspects of Morality (Philosophical Issues Defining the Moral Domain) 2
The Meaning of Moral Ought Jiirgen Habermas
27
3
Between Aristotle and Kant—Sketch of a Morality of Recognition Axel Honneth
41
4
Contexts of Recognition—Comments on Axel Honneth's Moral Perspective Beyond Aristotle and Kant Micha Brumlik
5
Emotions and the Origins of Morality Martha C. Nussbaum
6
What Should Count as Moral Behavior? The Nature of "Early Morality" in Children's Development
57 61
119
Augusto Blast
II. Issues of Application 7
Discourse in Context Vilhjdlmur Arnason
8
Moral Intimacy and Moral Judgment—Tailoring General Theories to Personal Contexts BillPuka
143
163
9 10
III. 11
Moral Resilience—The Unhappy Moralist Fritz K. Oser and Roland Reichenbach Do Concepts Matter? The Impact of a Justice Framing on Responses to a Moral Dilemma—A Research Note Rainer Do'bert and Natalie Juranek
The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices—It Depends on Where You Sit Elliot Turiel Changes in Moral Understanding—An Intergenerational Comparison Gertrud Nunner- Winkler
13
Is Community Compatible with Autonomy? Cultural Ideals Versus Empirical Realities Joan G. Miller
15
225
Morality in Sociocultural Context
12
14
203
Is Community Compatible with Autonomy? Some Comments to Joan Miller's Research on Differing Moralities in India and the United States Lothar Krappmann Reasoning About Moral Obligations and Interpersonal Responsibilities in Different Cultural Contexts
245 273
293
313
317
Monika Keller, Wolfgang Edelstein, Tobias Krettenauer, Fang Fu-xi, and Fang Ge
IV. Morality, Autonomy, Identity 16
17
18
Partiality and Identity—Psychological Research on Preferential Behavior Toward Group Members Mordecai Nisan
341
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts Larry Nucci
365
To Forgive and Forget Avishai Margalit
395
Contributors
Vilhjalmur Arnason, University of Iceland, Reykjavik Augusto Blasi, Rome Micha Brumlik, University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main Rainer Dobert, Center for Social Sciences, Berlin Wolfgang Edelstein, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin Fang Fu-xi, Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Fang Ge, Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Jiirgen Habermas, Starnberg, Germany Axel Honneth, University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main Natalie Juranek, Center for Social Sciences, Berlin Monika Keller, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin Lothar Krappmann, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin Tobias Krettenauer, Humboldt University, Berlin Joan G. Miller, New School University, New York Mordecai Nisan, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Mandel Institute Larry Nucci, College of Education, University of Illinois, Chicago Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Munich Martha C. Nussbaum, University of Chicago Avishai Margalit, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Fritz K. Oser, University ofFribourg, Switzerland Bill Puka, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY Roland Reichenbach, University ofMunster, Germany Elliot Turiel, University of California, Berkeley
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
1
Introduction Gertrud Nunner-Winkler and Wolfgang Edelstein
Morality in context is a timely topic. A debate between philosophers and social scientists is a good way to approach it. Why is there such a booming interest in morality and why does it focus on context? One starting point is the change in the sociostructural and sociocultural conditions of modern societies. This involves change in the empirical conditions of moral action and in the social demand on morality (1). As these changes are accounted for and analyzed in the social sciences, new perspectives emerge that give rise to new ways of framing issues and problems (2). These problems are best addressed by way of cooperation between philosophers and social scientists. As Habermas (1990) has pointed out in a much cited paper, philosophers depend on social science to fill in the data they require to answer the questions raised by philosophy in its "placeholder" function. The reverse also holds true: Social science needs the conceptual clarifications that philosophy can provide. With respect to morality, such mutual interchanges are of particular import (3)—as the contributions to this book show convincingly (4). 1. Sodo-Cultural Change In the wake of modernization, a number of social changes have emerged which increase the relevance of context for moral judgment. The following are core aspects of the process: Secularization. Confidence in a collectively shared interpretation of the world is eroding. With it vanishes a view of mankind as part of an encompassing unity that transcends the boundaries of individual lives and provides meaning and perspective to human striving, pain, and death. Increasingly, man is perceived as being left to himself—responsible for his actions and for their consequences. Kant's maxim never to transgress a negative duty, not even to prevent greater harm, has lost its persuasive
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power. No longer can the faithful commit themselves to an omniscient God whatever the consequence of following one's duties. Nietzsche proclaimed the death of the God who would provide for justice to reign in the long run. Thus, man is confronted with the consequences of his actions and feels compelled to take them into account when deciding upon a course of action. When rigid obedience to God's commands no longer appears as a plausible course of action, contextualizing moral thinking is more strictly required. This presupposes an understanding of more abstract principles, such as impartiality, minimization of harm, and respect for the dignity of the person which guide the decision whether or not to allow for an exception from a specific rule. Such, in each situation the application of norms requires not only an analysis of the likelihood of possible consequences of an action but also of the interests, desires, and evaluations of all concerned. Technological and Scientific Progress. The potential for human action has increased immensely. This raises many new questions for which traditional moral understandings no longer offer clear-cut answers (cf. Bohme, 1997). To mention only a few examples: Should one keep comatose patients alive? For how long? Who—if anybody—is entitled to decide when lifesaving machinery may be turned off? Are we allowed to tinker with the human genome? Under what conditions? Is it justifiable to use cloning techniques in order to develop therapies for serious diseases? Is it permissible to use atomic energy given the unsolved problem of depositing atomic waste? Or is it even advisable given the negative effects on the climate of using coal, wood, and gas? To what extent should available technologies be used to observe and control humans? Such issues require contextualized information concerning probable or possible costs or benefits for concrete individuals, their families, society, future generations, and for mankind as a whole. Globalization. The expansion of world trade, communication, and business networks presupposes that people reach agreements in spite of great differences between their living conditions, and despite cultural differences in customs, religious or ideological persuasions, and the conceptualization of a good life. Rules must evolve that build a normative framework for international trade as well as for international conflict. This leads to more clear-cut distinctions between universally valid rules to be followed with respect to all human beings (negative duties, e.g., human rights), and culture-specific rules (positive duties) that regulate relations between persons involved in a common cooperative enterprise and that claim validity only for the interaction with members of one's own group. Individualization. With the ongoing differentiation of social systems and facing migration and internationalization, a person's position no longer permits inferences
Introduction
3
about his or her origin or predictions about his or her future. Thus, no one can anticipate which values a person will apply when deciding on the preferability of different courses of action. Pluralization. The problem of individualization is aggravated by the fact that no institutional consensus obtains concerning the hierarchy of values. A standard evaluation of likely costs and benefits can no longer be assumed to be shared by all. Rather, it has become necessary to take a concrete perspective in any situation. In sum, context has become increasingly relevant to morality with modernization. The main reason is that with secularization consequences must be considered. Further changes accompanying modernization increase the amount and kind of context information needed. This concerns probable consequences arising from risky actions. It further concerns value orientations prevailing in other cultures as well as value preferences of different individuals within a society which must be taken into account in order to reach consensus on moral decisions, or at least a fair compromise.
2. Morality in Empirical Research and Philosophical Thinking Social changes affect philosophical and scientific thinking. Empirical approaches, research questions, the methodology and the interpretation of findings depend on global and frequently implicit assumptions about the nature of man, society, and science. These have undergone change concurrently with the sociocultural changes: Man is increasingly conceptualized not as passively subjected to social indoctrination and control, but as a competent actor who is able to shape his life freely. Thus, for example, moral research has highlighted norm conforming behavior, moral emotions and motives, and moral judgment, and focused on different learning mechanisms, such as conditioning; the development of superego controls or of need dispositions for conformity; an egosyntonic commitment to values. These mechanisms are based on widely differing beliefs concerning the existence of free will, the nature of values and human motives. In the following this will be illustrated briefly: To begin with behaviorism: In classical conditioning, norm conforming behavior is causally produced by immediately punishing deviant acts, thereby equating moral action with prudential behavior ("If you wish to avoid punishment, avoid steeling"; Skinner, 1971, p. 109). In contingent conditioning, behavioral tendencies are shaped by selectively rewarding spontaneously emitted reactions as they gradually approach desired ones, thus eliminating intentionality from moral behavior ("If we can arrange the circumstances we can control behavior"; Skinner, 1977, p. 277). However, there
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is also a learning theoretical model that allows for deliberate choice. It has been shown that children are guided not solely through punishments or rewards but also orient to exemplars. They imitate models that are powerful, interesting, or members of the same social category (e.g., same sex) based on curiosity or a competence motive (Bandura & Walters, 1963). Psychoanalytical theories explain conformity by learning mechanisms that can be read as internalized and generalized versions of classical and contingent conditioning. Thus, according to Freud's account, the superego arises from an identification with paternal norms triggered by fear of castration. Henceforth, norms are followed to avoid negative consequences—not external punishment as in classical condition, but inner sanctions (pangs of conscience). According to Parsons' theory, conformity develops very early as infants tend to comply (more or less unconsciously) with the expectations of their caretaker. Thereby, they avoid losing the love on which they have come to depend. Gradually, "to act in conformity becomes a need disposition in the actor's own personality structure" (Parsons, 1964, p. 32) which is experienced as an almost "natural" and "spontaneous" desire—an outcome that is comparable to the effect of contingent conditioning experiences. More recent theorizing allows some freedom: In self-theory (e.g., Jacobson, 1964), adolescents are assumed to be able to work through early interaction experiences and thus to free themselves from the deterministic grip of their socialization history. In attachment theory (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Bell, 1978; Bowlby, 1972), children, from the very beginning, may follow rules set by a sensitive mother. In cognitive theories, learning has always been conceptualized as an active process of reconstructing rules that regulate cooperative efforts. According to Kohlberg, moral development follows a developmental logic. On the preconventional level, children assume that moral norms are valid because they are set by authorities and backed by sanctions, and will be obeyed in order to avoid punishment or to gain rewards. On the conventional level, norms are judged to be valid because they hold in one's group or society, and they are followed to gain social acceptance or avoid a bad conscience. It is only at the postconventional level that moral principles are understood as intrinsically valid and followed because of their truth. However, recent research on children's moral understanding has shown that even young children are able to differentiate moral rules (that hold universally, unalterably, and independent of God's word) from conventional rules (that depend on authorities, hold only for specific groups and may be altered by agreement) as well as from religious rules (that hold for members only, depend on God's word and, therefore, are not alterable by men; cf. Nucci &Tunel, 1993; Tunel, 1983). Moral motivation, on the other hand, develops in a second differential learning process during which children come to make morality a more or less important personal concern. Those who do care about morality wish to follow norms because they judge them to be right (Nunner-Winkler, 1998).
Introduction
5
In all three approaches, man was originally seen as largely determined by his conditioning or socialization experiences, norms were understood as ordained by authority, and conformity was taken to be motivated by inner or external sanctions. In more recent theories and research, this understanding has been replaced—or at least supplemented—by assumptions that leave some room for free will, for the intrinsic value of moral norms, and for noninstrumentalistic moral motives. Thus, the infant is seen as an active organism from the very start, constructivist learning processes are taken to be truth oriented, and man is conceptualized as capable of adopting value commitments and deciding about actions deliberately and consciously. In line with the claim of the coevolution of societal and personality structure as formulated by Norbert Elias (1978), these socialization-theoretical reconceptualizations can be seen to reflect real changes in the psychological makeup of individuals. Given extensive processes of urbanization and rising rates of mobility with a concomitant increase in anonymity, social controls loose grip: Self-control becomes a necessary prerequisite for the functioning of social systems. At the same time, given rapid changes in knowledge systems, increasing differentiation of social systems and specific contexts, self-control requires reflexive flexibility to an extent that is incompatible with conditioned response tendencies and strict internalization models. Moral philosophy has changed under the impact of secularization. In traditional societies, religious and moral commands were confounded. Only gradually has morality become differentiated from religion. This implied change in the way moral rules were justified. Norms no longer derived from God. For some time "natural law" functioned as a kind of secular substitute for the wisdom of the divine creator. But increasingly, the persuasive power of this concept was deconstructed as historical studies disclosed the circular argumentation that projected into the very "nature" of blacks or of women, those attributes (e.g., inferiority, reproductive responsibility) that legitimized their unequal treatment (Alder, 1992; Meuschel, 1981). Rather than deriving moral rules from "givens," that is, from God's will or natural law, morality is taken to be founded in our "common will" (Tugendhat, 1993). The Golden Rule is the earliest formulation of this idea ("Don't do to others what you don't want to have done to you"). Kant's categorical imperative spells out that it is not any individual will, as chance would have it, but only rational will which counts ("what you can wish to become a general law"). Rawls' (1972) criterion of consensus under the veil of ignorance makes it clear that moral rules are not chosen by single minds. Rather, choice results from a collective discourse in which everybody is granted a veto right. In this model, two aspects function to substitute for God or nature as lawgiver: one is the idea of a contract between equals that is based on shared interest in avoiding harm; the other is the definition of harm and its avoidance in terms of universal conditions of human life (e.g., the vulnerability of man and his dependence on social cooperation). Philo-
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sophical approaches vary with regard to the predominance granted to either of these aspects. In this volume, Habermas focuses on the contract aspect (operationalized as agreement in real discourses); Honneth and Nussbaum focus on universal features of human life and human development. Accordingly, different procedures are proposed for justifying morality in secular terms—the categorical imperative, consensus under the veil of ignorance, real discourse, appeal to universal conditions of human life. For all of these, the importance of context is greatly increased. In traditional societies, God or nature were seen as having issued specific rules and demanded strict compliance. In contrast, in a secular understanding, morality is based on abstract principles. Thus, in moral dilemmas, minimizing harm impartially may be considered more important than strict obedience to preordained rules. Detailed information about context is needed to judge how harm is best minimized in view of objective consequences of actions and their differing subjective evaluations.
3. The Debate Between Philosophers and Social Scientists Empirical research and philosophical reflection on morality refer to each other and depend on each other. Empirical research requires theoretical clarification of underlying assumptions. Thus, researchers who wish to study moral judgment, moral feelings, moral behavior, or moral development must first know the boundaries of the moral realm—how "morality" is to be delimited in view of the realms of the religious or the law, customs and social conventions. Researchers may try to avoid the problem of defining morality by relying on the definitions offered by the subjects they study (bottom-up strategy). But they will encounter widely differing conceptions. Cultures, philosophers, and common people maintain different conceptions of the moral realm: Some include questions of the good life, others confine morality to the realm of the obligatory. Some individuals will include in morality duties to God, to the ancestors, to nature, to animals—others will restrict morality to interpersonal duties (cf. Edelstein & Nunner-Winkler, 1986). It follows that before meaningful questions can be asked and adequate operationalizations devised, one needs to settle philosophical questions about the very meaning of the core concepts. Conversely, moral philosophy is not satisfied by designing abstract theories, even when these fulfill formal criteria, such as stringency, elegance, and parsimony. Rather, moral philosophy must reflect, integrate, and systematize what Rawls (1972, p. 49) called "considered judgements." A judgment is "considered" if a person uses his or her "sense of justice" in judging the "formal correctness" of a moral philosophical reconstruction—free from self-interested motives and in full awareness of the solutions proposed for the problem at hand in
Introduction
7
moral philosophical debates. The judgment thus resembles the way native speakers use their "sense of grammar" when they judge whether a sentence is well-formed. Inasmuch as considered judgments function as controls for the theoretical design, moral philosophy must be informed about everyday moral understanding and thus depends on empirical research. This is why, surprising to some, analyses of children's judgments may play an important role even for the philosophical debate. Children read the moral rules that underlie social practices and institutions from their experiences in social interactions (cf. Nucci & Lee, 1993) and from the moral "language game" (cf. Wittgenstein, 1984). Thus, children may supply information about the actual workings of moral regulations more reliably than adults who may be misled by their ideological inclinations, or fall prey to a relativism more radical than is warranted by the lives they lead. The cooperation between social scientists in need of the philosophical clarification of core terms, and philosophers in need of controls in terms of everyday moral understanding is of even greater importance when the focus is on "morality in context," that is, when the development of morality itself is at stake. This is due to the traditional division of labor between philosophy and the social sciences. Whereas the hermeneutically-oriented enterprise of philosophy adopts the first person participant perspective, objectivist practicians of the social sciences adopt the third person observer's perspective. In everyday life, we can take both perspectives toward others: We can view them as objects and analyze how they function—either because as scientists we wish to explain their attitudes and behaviors in the context of their life histories and actual conditions, or because as actors we want to predict their behavior in order to maximize our benefits. Or else we can view the other on an equalitarian basis as an interaction partner who possesses some free will of his own, with whom we negotiate on the basis of shared understandings, and to whom we owe respect, that is, whom we must never treat solely as means but always also as an end in himself (cf. Strawson, 1962). Similarly, moral attitudes can be seen as causally produced by cultural traditions and individual socialization. However, they can also be understood as "considered judgments" which the subject believes can be justified. As philosophers insist on the first person perspective on morality, they compel social scientists to become aware of the reductionism and the performative self-contradictions that are implied in the observer position. And as research produces information about the contributions of context and social conditions to the content of moral judgments, philosophers become aware of possible ethnocentric biases in their thinking. The dialogue between perspectives discloses the socioculturally induced changes in the moral philosophical positions of our own cultures. At the same time, present persuasions may be seen as a stage reached in a directed learning process rather than as a result of causal determination. The criss-crossing of perspectives also
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helps us to view convictions held by others as an outgrowth of their persuasions which we need to deal with in dialogue as a refutation by argument or as acceptance as a legitimate correction of our own point of view. When Rawls (1985) acknowledged that the wars of religion in European history gave rise to the Western concept of religious tolerance, he demonstrated how both perspectives—the third person observer perspective applied in the analysis of historical determinants and the first person perspective from which persuasions are justified—can be integrated. The construct of a learning process permits to simultaneously accept historical contingency and universal justifiability. This model is quite familiar from the development of the natural sciences. We do not conceive of the earth as flat—after all, we were born after Ptolemy. Yet, we do not attribute our belief that the earth is a globe to this historical contingency, but to our well-tested scientific belief systems. At the same time, we consider our present state of knowledge as open for future learning. We are not accustomed to applying this conceptualization to our moral understanding. Instead, opposing camps have formed. Some claim universal validity even for details of positive (culture-specific) duties. Thus, in clear conflict with other cultures' ways of organizing reproduction (cf. Bujo, 1991) the Declaration of Human Rights (1949) postulates monogamy and an exclusive right of parents to decide on the education of their children. Others take a stance of complete cultural relativism and deny any claim to universal validity of any rule. "Morality in Context" is an evolving debate between philosophy and social science which aims at disentangling aspects of morality that can be justified on universal grounds from aspects in which cultures or individuals may legitimately differ.
4. The Design of This Book We now proceed to portray the design of the book. For a quick orientation, we first provide an overview over the main topics. In a second step, we will point out connections between the various contributions in greater detail. The first focus represents the debate about the general agenda of moral philosophy and its relevance for psychology: - the meaning of the categorical "ought" (Habermas), - the role of respect in morality (Honneth with comments by Brumlik), - the meaning of emotions for morality (Nussbaum), - the relation between everyday moral meanings and the behavioral definitions that underlie recent research on early morality (Blasi). The secondfocus deals with problems of norm applications: - applied ethics as a constructivist procedure (Puka),
Introduction
9
— everyday handling of conflicts between universal versus role-specific duties (Oser and Reichenbach), — framing of moral problems in justice terms (Dobert and Juranek). The thirdfocus is dedicated to important questions of political philosophy: — legitimate procedures in public controversies about disputed values (Arnason), — the extent of justified particularistic obligations of citizens toward their country (Nisan), — the kinds of commitment to memory (or other duties and obligations) concerning the collective processing of crimes against humanity (Margalit). The fourth focus is directed to empirical studies concerning universality claims of certain central norms: — the universality of claims to individual autonomy and a personal domain (Nucci), — the universality of claims to equality that in hierarchical societies can translate into subversive strategies (Turiel), — sociohistorical changes in moral beliefs with claims to equality seen as a correlate of secularization (Nunner-Winkler), — cultural differences in the degree to which interpersonal responsibilities are considered binding (Keller, Krettenauer, and Edelstein; Miller with comments by Krappmann). In the following, the core claims of the individual contributions and the interrelations between them are described.
Part One Part One is devoted to conceptual issues in defining morality. Jiirgen Habermas embraces a cognitive understanding of morality that owes its structure to reason rather than to either subjective feelings or sociohistorical contingency. He starts from the modern situation in which rules are no longer derived from God's commands or set by an unequivocal law of nature, but are seen to reside in man's will. Habermas operationalizes this postmetaphysical intuition applying the model of ideal discourse which substitutes for the monologic reasoning expressed in Kant's categorical imperative, and for the hypothetical discourse under the veil of ignorance proposed by Rawls. Core principles of modern moral understanding function as prerequisites for discourse: All men are to be treated as equals; discourse must include members of all cultures, that is, represent universal discourse; participants must be truthful and beware of rationalization and self-deception. Like Rawls, Habermas in requiring consensus treats equality as a procedural requirement. (The fact that equality is a substantive value remains hidden; cf. Dworkin, 1978.) Habermas differs from Rawls in the amount of information al-
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lowed participants in discourse. In the original position, Rawls does not grant participants any information about the particularities of their lives. He merely provides noncontroversial knowledge about universal features (such as man's vulnerability, social dependence, the desire not to suffer direct or indirect harm). On the basis of this minimal knowledge and the impartiality procedure, Rawls derives universally valid "natural duties" as well as a generalized duty to fulfill culture-specific role-dependent obligations (valid in any well-ordered society). Habermas, in contrast, fully contextualizes the discourse: Participants are given concretely situated understandings which they bring to the negotiations in view of an agreement. There are no data before or beyond the discourse—only needs that are publicly articulated can be taken into account when deciding on norms we wish to be universally valid. Habermas thus claims universality for the procedural prerequisites that reflect the conditions that must be met for communication to take place at all, while simultaneously situating discourse concretely so that any agreement on norms will be contextually valid. In contrast to the proceduralism of Habermas, in Martha Nussbaums view, morality is based in universally shared anthropological givens. Morality arises from the emotions experienced early in life. The first emotions—joy, hope, fear—represent reactions to the fact that significant others have, or have not, met the child's basic needs (for nourishment, comfort, or stimulation). Gradually, emotions come to be directed to the caretakers, and morality begins to enter the picture: Gratitude and love or anger respond not merely to gratification or frustration but to having one's "right" to need fulfillment respected, rejected, or ignored. Finally, through a developmental crisis, the child's emotions are turned back on the self. Children experience shame as they become aware of their lack of control, their imperfections and deficiencies, and they experience guilt when they become aware that their anger and their love are directed at the same object. The child may cope with the crisis by extending love to include recognition of, and respect for, the caretaker's independence and dignity. Moreover, children discover a repair strategy that involves accepting legitimate boundaries to their demands. Morality provides a safety structure for the child: It enables the child to consent to a world where people make legitimate demands, and ego's desires have appropriate boundaries. The moral safety structure serves to protect the child against internal aggression, and provides a road toforgivenessin face of imperfections. Healthy psychological development is made possible by a kind of morality that involves the capacity for reparation, respect for the humanity of others, and regard for their neediness. In contrast, a morality which insists on perfection will continue to generate shame and thus stifle development while keeping the child from respecting others as ends in their own right. Nussbaum grounds her ethical view in facts about constraints on human development: the dependence of the newborns; their propensity to react not merely to the ben-
Introduction
11
efit of being taken care of but also to the caretakers as persons (see also Parsons, 1964); their willingness to accept boundaries, provided that parents succeed in striking an adequate balance between reserve and intrusion and thus permit love to develop. Nussbaum thus holds a universalist moral theory inasmuch as the constitutive principles (respect for the person, justice, and compassion) are derived from basic facts that are taken to be true of everyone at all times and in all places. Contextual variations only concern individual development inasmuch as culturally prescribed or contingent differences in parental socialization styles are more or less conducive to a child's desire to lead a moral life. On the philosophical level, Nussbaum's analysis can be compared to the Habermasian proposal. For Habermas, morality can be justified only through and in discourse. Nussbaum, in contrast, assumes a basis for morality that is prior to discourse: Infants are born with basic needs and these give rise to universal moral obligations of caretakers and serve as objective constraints on moral discourse. On the psychological level, Nussbaum's analysis demonstrates with exceptional clarity the interrelatedness of moral philosophy and empirical data. For her, the origins of morality are in the infant's developing emotions of anger, love, and guilt, which under favorable conditions will give rise to moral commitment. However, the validity of these empirical conjectures is far from unequivocal. Augusto Blasi presents a critical review of recent theorizing and empirical research on the origin of children's morality. His argument develops the case for a philosophically enlightened conceptual clarification. Blasi reviews studies on infants' morality in a comprehensive and very informative manner and analyzes them with great theoretical acuity and insight. He contrasts our ordinary moral understanding with the implicit assumptions underlying the concepts and operationalizations used in psychological research on moral development. According to our ordinary intuitions, an act is considered moral only if it is intentional and if it is motivated by the right concern—namely, a desire to do what is right because it is understood to be right. In contrast, the "earlymorality-camp" take the following measures as indicators or precursors of morality: knowledge of social standards (e.g., knowledge of behavioral rules—analogous to the epistemic domain where the recognition of a flawed object is taken as proof of the child's understanding of the unimpaired object); compliance with parental commands (especially if shown in the absence of parents or other authority figures); emotions displayed (e.g., empathy with others in distress; guilt over misbehavior). Toddlers' conforming or empathic behavior is intentional. Yet, according to Blasi, they have no real understanding of morality: In distinguishing between conventional and moral rules, they judge the universal badness of an act by features that are inherent in the very nature of the act (e.g., they understand that hitting hurts at all times and places), yet they do not understand the categorical ought of a rule that forbids hitting. Blasi's interpretation is at variance with the reading Turiel and Nucci (Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Turiel,
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1983) give to their findings. For them, the fact that even young children judge hitting to be universally and unconditionally bad indicates true moral understanding—an assertion that receives some support by Dworkin's claim that it is a possible moral stance to believe "that the immorality of an act does not depend upon its social effects or its effects on the character of the actor or its proscription by a deity or anything else but follows from the act itself" (Dworkin in Beauchamp, 1982, p. 20). Also, one might argue that children from very early on may come to grasp the idea of a categorical ought by implicitly reading the rules of the moral language game in which the very meaning of the words denoting transgressions (such as lies, theft, murder) is irrevocably impregnated by moral condemnation (cf. Putnam, 1995). Yet even if the issue of children's cognitive moral understanding has not been definitively settled so far, it is nevertheless true—as Blasi contends—that young children lack proper moral motivation inasmuch as they tend to empathize or conform only when this is in accordance with their spontaneous needs and desires and not because they feel obliged. Thus, in Blasi's view, researchers are not justified to classify young children's conformity to a norm as a true indication of morality. How does Nussbaum's description of the origin of morality fit with Blasi's analysis? Looking at the age level under consideration, Nussbaum belongs to the early morality camp (in fact, very early indeed!). Yet, her position concerning morality differs from the scholars' whom Blasi discusses. Her description displays all the critical features Blasi calls for: Children are seen as developing intrinsic respect for others and to be motivated by the right concerns. Thus, their compliance is seen as based on insight and on voluntary acceptance of legitimate boundaries. In other words, there is agreement between Blasi and Nussbaum on the nature of morality. Yet, a discrepancy remains with respect to the empirical facts. Inasmuch as moral motivation is conceptualized as a second order desire (Frankfurt, 1988), it presupposes cognitive (Perner & Wimmer, 1985) and motivational (Mischel & Mischel, 1983) capabilities, which young children do not yet possess. (In fact, Nunner-Winkler's [1998] research has shown that children begin to display moral motivation no earlier than age 5 to 6 years.) A distinction introduced by Blasi may help to bridge the gap. Blasi distinguishes between a competence that is a prerequisite for morality without being part of morality (such as selfcontrol) and a competence that is intrinsically related to later moral capabilities. It may thus be the case—as Nussbaum assumes—that children begin very early to construct first intuitive concepts of persons and of respect that will support the later growth of true moral motivation. It may also be true that this process depends on the availability of caring parents who show respect for boundaries. Research based on the attachment paradigm has found a spontaneous willingness in young children to go along with rules in families with sensitive mothers. This confirms a speculation advanced years ago by Baumrind (1971). To test this hypothesis, longitudinal studies are needed that trace
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connections between early interaction experience and later growth of moral motivation. This leads to the following conclusion: Blasi and Nussbaum are in philosophical agreement on the meaning of morality; yet they differ markedly regarding empirical assumptions about children's development of morality. However, these can be tested. Similar to Nussbaum and in contrast with Habermas, Axel Honneth seeks to ground morality in empirical facts. His aim is to integrate moral principles which various ethical traditions have focused on to the exclusion of others. He does so by deriving different types of duties from morality's core function: to protect individuals from harm, and to warrant conditions that allow them to develop identity and personal integrity. A person is harmed by lack of recognition. This can occur in three ways that may be ordered as a developmental sequence: First, one's physical needs must be recognized. This implies the duty to love and to care for those who are close to you. This is the focus of an "ethics of care and responsibility." Second, there is the need to be respected as a person. The universal Kantian duty to never treat a person merely as a means toward an end corresponds to this need. Third, there is a need to be recognized as a unique individual with specific competencies and interests. The duty of solidarity, that is, the duty to be sympathetic with, and to support, other persons, their personal projects, and collectively shared visions of a good life follows from this need for individual recognition. This is the focus of the communitarian postulate of special obligations toward one's fellow citizens. Given that all three types of duties are rooted in universal needs, universal validity is claimed for them. Contextual variations may at best affect the kind of care demanded or the content of the projects pursued. In everyday life, these duties may collide. Conflicts are solved by deliberation, but we must never violate the respect we owe to all humans. Micha Brumlik disputes Honneth's claim to a new ethical approach achieved through the integration of different moral principles. Instead, he maintains, Honneth has substituted a functionalist explanation of morality for the justification of morality. Honneth—he concludes—presents an analysis of moral conflicts, not an ethical theory. In retrospect, the chapters assembled in Part I of this book contrast different ways of grounding morality and of balancing universalist claims against contextual contingencies. A brief summary of the main positions and how they relate to positions taken by authors of later chapters is in order. Habermas derives a small number of quasitranscendental universal moral principles (equality, truth) from the prerequisites of communication. Agreements regarding concrete norms and solutions to concrete moral problems are achieved in situated discourses, in which full use is made of all the information available. In contrast, Nussbaum and Honneth seek to derive morality from anthropological universals and nest it in psychological development: Universal needs of persons impose universal duties on others. Thus, contextual variations do not
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affect the content of moral norms, but influence how conditions that are conducive to the flourishing of individual morality are met. There is a tension here between a substantive and a procedural account of morality. In the substantive account, universal moral rules are derived from universal facts of human existence, while the context-dependence of morality is a matter of degree. In the procedural account, moral norms are agreed on in concretely situated discourses, and the context concerns the content of morality. This tension also runs through other parts of the book. Arnason adopts the discourse theory of Habermas directly to discuss problems of applied ethics. Oser and Reichenbach present an applied case. Their study of advocatory mediation makes a convincing case for the requirement formulated by Habermas that the needs of individuals must be explicitly represented in negotiations about conflicting interest. In contrast, Nucci and Turiel, referring to universal requirements for healthy psychological functioning (e.g., autonomy, equality), pursue a line that appears more closely related to the Nussbaum-Honneth approach. Miller, Keller and NunnerWinkler perceive the unfolding and shaping of the very needs that Nucci and Turiel take to be universal as embedded in social and cultural contexts. In the final chapter, Margalit, using a philosophical framework, develops a detailed account of changes that touch the very meaning of core concepts of morality as secular understanding gradually replaces the religious foundation of morality.
Part Two
Whereas the chapters in Part One deal with the meaning of morality, in Part Two the authors turn to the problem of application: Whatever the moral theory, it must be applied to concrete contexts. Bill Puka presents a theoretical exposition of the problem of application. He critiques the traditional mode of framing the problem in a two-step procedure: First, a unified ethical theory is formulated that is centered on one basic principle; then a theory of its application is developed. To replace this procedure, Puka proposes to study the actual processes of decision making empirically. This will show that most often decision making is based on an eclectic understanding or a mixed ethical view: Individuals take the different principles (that theorists focus on and ethical theories justify) and probe the adequacy of the solutions derived from these principles for the problem at hand. They use substantive criteria and check for coherence, allowing for piecemeal solutions or preferential rank ordering as the context requires. Going back and forth between abstract principles and concretely situated requirements, gradually domain-specific rules, models and techniques emerge. Puka does not derive domain-
Introduction
15
specific norms of application. Rather, he identifies applied ethics with the very procedure of finding solutions and specifying the steps that need to be taken in such processes. As these steps are followed through, norm application comes to be understood as a constructivist procedure in stark contrast with a process of deduction according to which a specific norm and a set of circumstances permit to derive unequivocal solutions. In this procedure, the very perception of situational detail is informed by the (possibly) relevant norms and, vice versa, moral principles are selected in accordance with the contextualized understandings of the problem at hand. Like Puka, Vilhjalmur Arnason argues against opposing abstract moral principles and contextual sensitivities and focuses on the actual process of solving moral dilemmas. In contrast to Puka, he goes on to derive domain-specific principles of application. His starting point is the assumption that moral decision making is best carried out in real discourses, provided participants possess the required virtues. These are a sense of justice that is especially needed in public discourse; truthfulness that is especially needed in professional discourse; love and care that are especially needed in private discourse. In the discourses, application and justification of norms are intertwined: Decisions are justified in light of relevant facts, which in turn are determined by norms that are judged appropriate. Other traditional dichotomies, such as the contrasts between justice and care or between duty and the good life, are also bridged in real discourses. Procedural requirements warrant impartiality and fairness, while all types of harmful experience can emerge in the discourse to be examined in light of concrete situational constraints. The same is true of the needs and desires of "concrete others" (cf. Benhabib, 1987). Arnason's model reflects Benhabib's approach in combining universalistic procedural norms with concretely contextualized inputs to the moral problem-solving processes. Whereas Arnason and Puka discuss the problem of norm application theoretically, detailing adequate principles and procedures in view of optimal problem solving. Fritz Oser and Roland Reichenbach treat the problem of applying norms to cases of conflicting interest empirically. They asked participants in a conflict mediation seminar to take the role of a lawyer representing either the husband or the wife in a hypothetical divorce case in which both parties claim custody of the children. The advocates of the mother are given secret information to the effect that she is less suited to care for the children than her husband. Thus, in the advocates' minds, a conflict arises whether to give priority in the negotiation to the children's welfare, or to their particular role obligation to defend their client's interests. The study analyzes real—albeit advocatory— moral discourses involving obligations to universal moral principles versus role-specific duties. The results disclose individual differences in the way the conflict is handled. Some of the wife's advocates put the children's well-being above their specific role obligations; these subjects, in spite of their more universalistic moral understanding, felt
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less satisfied with their own performance. At the same time, all advocates of the husband reacted with indignation when, after the settlement of the case, the secret information was disclosed. This testifies to a culturally shared understanding of a hierarchical order in which universal moral obligation ranks above specific role duties. (This leaves unsolved the problem that social reward structures may favor the successful over the moral player.) On a theoretical level, Rainer Dobertand Natalie Juranek, following Rawls, differentiate justice from morality proper. While according to this understanding justice concerns fair distributions of benefits and burdens, the redress of harm and procedural justice, morality addresses the issue of what constitutes goods and evils. Answers to this problem do not depend on comparing actors in similar positions, but involve the specification of universal natural duties and culture-specific obligations that are imposed upon all individual actors alike. Inasmuch as Kohlberg defined morality by a universalizing "fair procedure," in the view of the authors, he confounded these separable domains and thereby eliminated a set of meaningful research questions. Dobert and Juranek report results from an empirical study. Subjects were presented a partnership dilemma in which a rewarding but time-consuming commitment to human rights work collides with the partner's need for attention. The partner's expectation is grounded on the fact that he or she had recently lost his/her job. About 10 percent of the subjects—all of them female—were found to frame this dilemma in justice terms: They presented the refusal to specifically attend the needs of the partner as a strategy to redress previous imbalance between the sexes. Although on Kohlbergian terms this framing may be considered to represent structural progress inasmuch as it appeals "impartially" to universalizable rights rather than to particularistic duties, in fact it generates impaired moral judgment: The partner's claims are completely ignored. These claims, however, appear legitimate. While they are particularistic, they are nevertheless universalizable, as all partners in a similar situation would expect to be given special attention. The impairment is obvious once it is compared with postconventional individuals' ability to integrate the conflicting concerns conceptually. Dobert and Juranek's study illustrates the interconnections of private and public discourses as highlighted by Arnason's analysis. It has been a core strategy of the feminist movement to view any concrete conflict between partners as an instance of the larger struggle between the sexes, in which women's rights have traditionally been disregarded. In refusing to abide by the traditional expectations directed to women, namely sacrificing their own desires for the welfare of others, feminist subjects see themselves as contributing to the political task of changing culturally prescribed sex role norms. According to this understanding, the dilemma involves not merely justice concerns (e.g., it is unfair that women are always expected to give up their interests, while men are not) but also the question of loyalty. (Am I entitled to ignore the fern-
Introduction
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inist cause just because I happen to love my husband?) The study illustrates nicely how social roles or structurally defined inequalities between categories of members influence the way in which moral problems are perceived, framed, and solved. This idea is pursued further in other contributions.
Part Three Part One was designed to justify specific moral principles or procedures, and Part Two deals with the problem how such principles or procedures can, or should be, applied when solving concrete situated problems. Part Three presents evidence that the very conceptualization of morality depends on context: on culture, on status in a hierarchically ordered power structure, and on gender affiliation. Thus, it is Part Three which highlights the issue of universalism versus relativism most critically. Elliot Turiel starts his chapter by contrasting two different views of man. For Freud, culture implies discontent as it compels man to restrain his desire for instinctual gratification. For Durkheim, man has a natural propensity to be social—man could not exist without society. In fact, man "by nature" has egoistic as well as altruistic inclinations, and man needs society, while simultaneously feeling constrained by society. Within this general framework, Turiel analyzes one source of social constraint: Social structures distribute rights and power unequally and thus produce conflicting perspectives. What is seen as entitlement by those in superior positions will be experienced as a potentially unfair burden by those in subordinate positions. Where equality is denied, subversive acts may arise that are motivated not only by the need to alleviate one's burdens but also to respond to a sense of justice. Turiel supports this claim by data collected in Druze communities in Israel. In his studies, women in the harem were found to invent various ways to secretly circumvent strict prohibitions issued by men in power, and to feel fully justified to do so. Turiel sees this behavior as based on a universally shared minimal understanding of what constitutes personal rights, justice, and fairness. This—to Turiel—is the basis of a universal claim for equality. GertrudNunner-Winklertakes a different track. She treats equality as a specifically modern value that arises with secularization along with a commitment to avoid harm and an expectation to be sensitive to context. A comparison of three birth cohorts (old, middle-aged, young adults) is designed to test this hypothesis. Results show that younger generations have a more contextualized moral understanding and are more critical of ascriptive categorical inequalities, such as unequal treatment of women or unjustified infractions of children's rights. Between generations, a change has occurred that has modified the demarcation of the personal and the moral domains, with sexual
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behavior shifting from the moral to the personal, whereas the reverse is true for political behavior. These changes in moral understanding also lead to confusion about the semantic extension of the term "morality" and even about some of its core characteristics (such as prescriptivity). Differences in moral understanding between generations resemble those found by Miller and Luthar (1989) between modern and traditional cultures. For example, there is agreement between senior German and traditional Hindu-Indian subjects about viewing "care" as a culturally prescribed duty. In her chapter, Joan Miller critiques as Utopian attempts to integrate community orientation and an ethics of care with individual autonomy and justice orientations. She bases her argument on empirical grounds. Comparing helping behavior in India and in the US, she finds differences which, in her view, prove that there is a trade-off between individualistic and collectivist orientations. Western subjects delimit interpersonal obligations more narrowly and thus leave more room for personal autonomy, yet hold individuals more strictly responsible for keeping contracts. Indians, on the other hand, attribute obligatoriness to positive duties toward a wider range of recipients, yet find more excuses for transgression of a negative duty (such as breaking a contract). Miller's chapter is relevant to the issue of gender. Caring is not an expression of women's natural inclinations (Gilligan, 1982) nor of their "relational self" (Gilligan & Wiggins, 1988). Rather, culture is the decisive context variable which determines whether self-reliance or helping is expected. According to Miller's description, Indians experience little conflict between cultural role expectations and personal desires. This finding is in line with recent theorizing on traditional cultures' "collectivist" orientation (Triandis, 1989) and in agreement with the results reported in the contribution by Keller et al. In his comments on Miller's paper, Lothar Krappmann pleads for a different view of cultural differences regarding the obligation to help. He suggests that the differences reported by Miller relate to social structure rather than to moral norms. In Western societies, insurance systems, welfare regulations, and pension schemes ascertain that people survive. In contrast to such socially organized assistance systems, Indians depend on private support and therefore provide help mainly to ensure future reciprocity. Thus, the differences may reflect nonmoral conditions of welfare societies as compared with exchange societies. Krappmann challenges Miller's basic assumption of a trade-off between autonomy and community orientation by reference to observations of children's spontaneous helping behavior (see Krappmann & Oswald, 1995): The authors found that children tended to engage in moral reflection rather than helping on an impulse motivated by internalized social expectations. Children tended to decide autonomously whether to help or not to help in view of long-term welfare consequences for the recipient. In consequence, there may be an agreement rather than a trade-off between autonomy and community orientation.
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Monika Keller, Tobias Krettenauer and Wolfgang Edelstein begin their chapter with a conceptual clarification of the difference between moral obligation and interpersonal responsibility. They present a careful review of research on the development of both kinds of moral expectations, accounting for contextual variations relative to type of culture and type of relationship. In their study, they presented hypothetical conflicts concerning authority versus peer (friendship) relationships to children and adolescents from 7 through 15 years in Iceland (a modern Western culture) and mainland China (a traditional non-Western society). They found that younger Chinese children tended to read the scenario that was presented to them as a moral dilemma in which an explicit norm to take care of a new child collided with the norm to keep a promise given to one's friend, and clearly ascribed greater obligatoriness to the first norm. Icelandic children, in contrast, read the same story as a moral conflict, in which the moral norm of promise-keeping to a friend conflicted with the protagonist's (hedonistic) desire to take part in a highly attractive pastime with the new child, and most children preferred personal satisfaction over moral action. In the authority dilemma, Chinese children were more likely than Icelandic children to give priority to obligations owed to their parents over those owed to their sibling. The results clearly testify to the higher value ascribed to interpersonal obligations over and against concerns about individual autonomy in traditional societies. The results also point to differences in the ways cultures socialize morality and anchor it in the personality structure: As noted above (see Part Two), cultures may proceed through shaping need dispositions early in life or through generating an ego-syntonic commitment to norms on which persons may freely agree. In sum, the chapters of Part Three describe variations in moral understanding as they are shaped by sociostructural and cultural differences from an observer s point of view. The contributions in Part Four again highlight the perspective of the first person. They attempt to carve out a place for universalist claims or to justify particularism by reasons that relate to personal identity or to conceptions of the good life and thus return to questions that were left unanswered by the contributions to Part One of this book.
Part Four Pursuing earlier work on "moral balance" and obligation to one's group, Mordecai Nisan discusses the conflict between the moral demand for impartiality and the special concern individuals feel for those with whom they stand in a close relationship. Nisan reports data showing that when asked about who should be given scarce resources, 50 percent of the subjects opt for an in-group rather than an out-group person. This preference does not result from ethnocentric bias, but is experienced as
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"morally right" for various reasons: Some individuals claim the right to decide autonomously on supererogatory acts; some feel greater obligation toward persons who are close to the actor; some express a wish for authenticity based on loyalty to their own group as an important aspect of their identity. Nisan's analysis is important because it documents a positive side of partiality and points to its connection with the good life. It is open to doubt, however, whether the problems portrayed are true moral dilemmas. They present conflicts involving positive and supererogatory duties which in Kantian terms can be solved only by using one's power of reason. Nisan did not present strict dilemmas in which positive and negative duties conflict, such as the problem posed by loyalty to one's nation when involved in an unjust war. Nisan's paper joins Nunner-Winkler's and Nucci's in drawing attention to the (modern) claim to personal autonomy including the definition of one's relationship with one's fellow citizens. Larry Nucci's chapter is situated by reference to the current debate over the "embedded" versus the "individuated" self (Triandis, 1989). In Nucci's view, there is a universal psychological basis for the claim for individual freedom within a "personal domain." A realm of behavioral discretion and privacy represents a universal prerequisite for psychological integrity, even though there may be cultural variation in the content and delimitation of the personal domain. At the outset, Nucci presents empirical findings that document the universal aspect. Children across various Western and non-Western societies lay claim to a personal domain that parents are willing to respect. Moreover, parental overcontrol results in psychological disorder. Nucci then demonstrates contextual variation in the content and range of the personal domain. He distinguishes between surface variations (such as dress, conventions, manners), variations due to (assumed) age dependent competencies, variations due to differences of hierarchical position, and context-specific variations between institutional settings. In conclusion, he notes that conflict over the adequate balance between individual claims to freedom and the concern for social welfare is universal. These conflicts have merely been ignored by the culturalists' harmonizing depictions of the meaning of "duties" in traditional societies, in particular the duties of members in subordinate positions. Nucci's chapter concurs with Krappmann's in questioning Miller's description of the contrast between autonomy and relatedness. He agrees with Turiel in assuming an anthropological, thus universal foundation of the core moral value of equal respect for individual autonomy. But it may prove necessary to engage in struggle for this value, given cultural and sociostructural differences in the distribution of rights and duties. In a final chapter, Avishai Margalit takes up Anscombe's thesis that core concepts of our moral understanding cannot be justified on the basis of secular reasons alone. Forgiveness is an exceptionally suitable test case. At the outset, Margalit admits that
Introduction
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—however secularized—we remain in the grip of pictures or models that are taken from the Bible and handed down across centuries of religious tradition. Some of these models, however, are bad myths—misleadingly insinuating the efficacy of specific causal mechanisms. For forgiveness, the Bible offers two main models: "blotting out," that is, completely deleting the record and "crossing over," that is, intentionally not taking the wrong that was committed into account. Blotting out—desirable as it may appear to the sinner—is the wrong model for human forgiveness: Forgetting cannot be generated intentionally. It is true that it could be the end product of a deliberate process of averting attention. But this is not a desirable strategy because it implies loss of identity: What we remember is constitutive of who we are. In secular terms, forgiving cannot be accepted as a duty toward others that is imposed on us by God, who has promised to forgive our own sins in return. If it is a duty at all to forgive—and in fact it is possible that there are wrongs too terrible to be forgiven—it can only be understood as a duty which we owe to ourselves. It involves intentionally disregarding certain reasons (i.e., the fact of having been wronged) as a justification for one's behavior toward a remorseful wrongdoer, and developing in oneself a second-order desire not to act on one's first order feelings of resentment and anger. Margalit maintains that this conceptualization of forgiveness can be explicated without recourse to religious convictions and as conceptually, psychologically, and morally appropriate for an autonomous morality.
Conclusion In conclusion, a brief assessment of the book's import appears in order. Underlying the philosophical debate in Part One is the cleavage between a minimalist and proceduralist understanding of morality, and a more encompassing substantialist concept of morality based on anthropological assumptions and including questions of the good life. For Habermas, universal moral principles are confined to very few maxims, such as equality and truthfulness. Concrete solutions to moral dilemmas as well as conceptions of the good life are left to be decided autonomously in contextualized discourses between participants who are fully informed about prevailing knowledge systems and sociohistorical contingencies. Such discourses are analyzed in greater detail by Puka and Arnason. Nussbaum and Honneth, in contrast, attempt to derive a wider set of universal (substantive, positive) moral duties regulating social life from anthropological assumptions of universal needs. Thus, whereas for Habermas contextual variations concern the very content and substance of moral norms and conflict solutions, for Nussbaum and Honneth context determines the extent to which ethical conceptions of interpersonal responsibilities can in fact be realized.
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This unresolved philosophical dispute about the demarcation between individual autonomy and interpersonal responsibility returns on the empirical level. It is treated as a contextualized moral dilemma (in Western societies) involving the tension between universal moral obligations and specific duties arising from concrete relationships (Dobert and Juranek), from specific occupational roles (Oser and Reichenbach), or from membership roles (Nisan). It is treated as a question of degree of modernization by authors who view individual autonomy as culture dependent (Miller; Keller et al.), while others claim autonomy to be universal as it functions as a prerequisite for psychological health (Nucci). A similar contrast emerges in the interpretation of equality. On the one hand, equality is considered a universal value variously voiced by the oppressed through subversive maneuvers (Turiel); on the other hand, equality is seen to arise as a core value only in the modern secularized moral understanding (Nunner-Winkler). The function of context in morality differs widely between these approaches. On the one hand, context (e.g., type of culture, degree of modernization) determines the very principles of morality, such as autonomy and equality. On the other hand, context merely specifies the conditions of application of universal moral principles. It may be an undue simplification to contrast the context dependence of the very constitution of the moral principles with the context dependence of their application. It may be reasonable to acknowledge that the meaning of core terms, such as the concept of self, moral obligation, and relationship, changes as societies develop and social institutions are transformed (cf. Elias, 1978) and the relationship of man to the transcendental is redefined. Most convincingly, such processes are elucidated in Margalit's analysis of the change in the moral meaning of the concept of forgiveness in the wake of secularization.
References Ainsworth, M. D., Blehar, M. C , Waters, E., & Bell, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Alder, D. (1992). Die Wurzel der Polaritaten. Geschlechtertheorie zwischen Naturrecht undNatur der Frau [The origin of polarities: Gender theories between natural law and the nature of women]. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1963). Social learning and personality development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Baumrind, D. (1971). Current patterns of parental authority. Developmental Psychology Monograph, 4 (Part 2), 1-103. Beauchamp, T. L. (1982). Philosophical ethics: An introduction to moral philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Benhabib, S. (1987). The generalized and the concrete other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan controversy and feminist theory. In S. Benhabib & D. Cornell (Eds.), Feminism as critique: Essays on the politics of gender in late-capitalist societies (pp 77-95). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bohme, G. (1997). Ethik im Kontext. Uber den Umgang mit ernsten Fragen [Ethic in context: Dealing with serious questions]. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Bowlby, J. (1972). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation. New York: Basic Books. Bujo, B. (1991). Afrikanische Anfrage an das europaische Menschenrechtsdenken [African questions about European human rights thinking]. In J. Hoffmann (Ed.), Begrundung von Menschenrechten aus der Sicht unterschiedlicher Kulturen [The justification of human rights in different cultures] (Vol. 1, pp. 211-224). Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag fiir Interkulturelle Kommunikation. Dworkin, R. (1978). Taking rights seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edelstein, W., & Nunner-Winkler, G. (1986). Einleitung. In W. Edelstein & G. NunnerWinkler (Eds.), Zur Bestimmung der Moral [Introduction: Defining morality] (pp. 7—21). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Elias, N. (1978). Uber den Prozefi der Zivilisation [The process of civilization] (Vols. 1 and 2). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Frankfurt, H. (1988). The importance of what we care about: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C , & Wiggins, G. (1988). The origins of morality in early childhood relationships. In C. Gilligan, J. V. Ward, & J. M. Taylor (Eds.), Mapping the moral domain: A contribution of women's thinking to psychological theory and education (pp. 110—138). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Habermas, J. (1990). Philosophy as stand-in and interpreter. In J. Habermas, Moral consciousness and communicative action (pp. 1—2). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacobson, E. (1964). The selfand the object world. NewYork: International Universities Press. Krappmann, L., & Oswald, H. (1995). Alltagder Schulkinder: Beobachtungen undAnalysen von Interaktionen und Sozialbeziehungen [Everyday life of school children: Obervations and analyses of interactions and relationships]. Weinheim: Juventa. Meuschel, S. (1981), Kapitalismus oder Sklaverei: Die langwierige Durchsetzungder burgerlichen Gesellschaft in den USA [Capitalism or slavery: The gradual emergence of civic society in the USA]. Frankfurt a.M.: Europaische Verlagsanstalt. Miller, J. G., & Luthar, S. (1989). Issues of interpersonal responsibility and accountability: A comparison of Hindu-Indians' and Americans' moral judgments. Social Cognition, 3, 237-261. Mischel, N. H., & Mischel, W (1983). The development of children's knowledge of self-control strategies. Child Development, 54, 603-619. Nucci, L., & Lee, J. (1993). Morality and personal autonomy. In G. G. Noam & T. E. Wren (in cooperation with G. Nunner-Winkler & W. Edelstein), The moral self (pp. 123—148). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nucci, L., & Turiel, E. (1993). God's word, religious rules, and their relation to Christian and Jewish children's concepts of morality. Child Development, 64, 1475—1491. Nunner-Winkler, G. (1998). The development of moral understanding and moral motivation. InternationalJournal of Educational Research, 27, 587-603.
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Parsons, T. (1964). The social system. London: The Free Press of Glencoe. Perner, J., & Wimmer, H. (1985). "John thinks that Mary thinks that ...": Attribution of second-order beliefs by 5- to 10-year-old children. Journal of 'Experimental Child Psychology, 39, 437-447. Putnam, H. (1995). Words and life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1972). A theory of justice. London: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1985). Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical. Philosophy and Public Affiars, 3, 223-251. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York: Bantam. Skinner, B. F. (1977). [Interview]. In D. Cohen Psychologists on Psychology (pp. 89—100). London: ARK. Strawson, P. F. (1962). Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 187— 211. Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behaviour in differing cultural contexts. Psychological
Review, 96, 506-520. Tugendhat, E. (1993). Vorlesungen u'ber Ethik [Lectures on ethics]. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1984). Tractatus logico-philosophicus: Vol. 1. Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical investigations]. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
PART ONE
Constitutive Aspects of Morality (Philosophical Issues Defining the Moral Domain)
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 1999 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
2
The Meaning of Moral Ought Jurgen Habermas
There is an essential connection between freedom and truth, and any misconception of truth is, at the same time, a misconception of freedom. Herbert Marcuse (1939, from his unpublished works)
From its first platonic beginnings, philosophical idealism has held the tenet that people can recognize and know the "good." Debate about the form of this knowledge is almost as old. Ever since Aristotle distinguished between theoretical and pragmatic philosophies, arguments about the determination of moral "knowledge" and debates over the relation between theoretical and practical reason have been connected. Kant retained the distinction between practical and theoretical reason, but did not accept Aristotle's view that practical reason represents a lower order of knowledge. Two intuitions argue persuasively against this position. First, expectations about moral behavior are different from those for other social norms, such as customs and conventions, because they allow an action to be classified not only according to whether it conforms to a rule but also according to whether it is "right" or "wrong" with respect to that rule. The prescriptive sense of the terms "commanded" and "prohibited" is combined with the epistemological sense of "justified" or "unjustified." Norms that allow such a cognitive evaluation of individual actions must also be valid in a cognitively relevant way. Thus, moral norms are usually embedded in a broad context of "teachings," which explains why they merit recognition. All higher cultures have been molded by teachings of this type, for example, through universal religions. Because this type of teaching has lost its obligatory nature and its public credibility in modern times, a need for justification has arisen that can, if at all, be satisfied only by "reason," that is, on generally or publicly recognized grounds. This short genealogy provides a cognitive analogy for the understanding of moral knowledge (see Habermas, 1996b). The analogy appears even closer than that between the Aristotelian concepts of Phronesis and Episteme. Because Aristotle related sensible
The original text on which this chapter is based was delivered at the Ringberg Conference on Morality in Context (1997), and first published by MIT Press in Habermas, J. (2003), Truth and Justification — originally under the chapter title of "Rightness vs. Truth" - a publication in the Studies in Contemporary German Thought Series. The editors thank Jurgen Habermas and MIT Press for the permission to reprint the chapter in the present publication.
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knowledge that arises from practical judgment with nothing more than plausibility, the obligatoriness of moral duties cannot be seamlessly translated into the categorical validity of moral judgments. Only a conception of the moral, generated through a cognitive analogy, seems to allow a cognitive interpretation of the "moral ought" of obligatory norms that accounts for the irrefutable feeling of "respect for the law" as a "fact of reason." But talk of moral "knowledge" is imprecise because this cannot, on the face of it, mean factual knowledge. The obvious difference between moral convictions and opinions about empirical facts provides an argument against equating the two. Factual assertions state what is the case. Commands or prohibitions state what ought or ought not be the case. To know how things "really" are is different from demanding what "ought" be done, or from knowing how our behaviors "must" connect to allow a correct or just social life. Moral knowledge differs from empirical knowledge because it refers to action. Moral knowledge specifies how people ought to behave and not how things do behave. For a descriptive proposition to be "true," its stated contents must, in fact, be true; in contrast, the "validity" of a normative proposition reflects the obligatoriness of a behavior that is commanded or forbidden. Kant justified this difference between practical and epistemic knowledge by differentiating between the application of theoretical and practical reason in view of the knowledge and the capacity for desire. Although theoretical reason is productive in a transcendental sense, practical reason has legislative power in another "constructive" sense, as Rawls would say. Whereas the supposed unity of the spontaneously generated world of objects of possible experience brings about coherence in the varieties of empirical knowledge, the "empire of ends" of practical reason specifies how an acting subject ought to produce or construct, through a comprehensible commitment of the will, a world of well-ordered interpersonal relations in a "general republic according to the laws of virtue." The Kantian definition of the relationship between theoretical and practical reason, on which I cannot elaborate here, relies on a base of metaphysical premises that underlie the general architecture of transcendental idealism. They are not directly relevant to the present discussion concerning moral theory. But the problem remains. I would now like to show why the status and sense of moral knowledge nonetheless merit philosophical attention (I). I shall then, based on the psychological discussion, attempt to develop a perspective enabling me to return to the classical questions (II).
I
The issue of the relation between theoretical and practical reason is relevant only for those approaches that attribute cognitive content to morality and that grant practical
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reason more than the rationality of means-ends considerations. The well-known noncognitive approaches trace the content of moral judgment directly to the feelings, dispositions, or decisions of subjects taking a stand. This version of ethical subjectivism makes a clear-cut distinction between facts and value judgments, but cannot explain why normative and evaluative sentences are grammatically different from first person sentences, except by recourse to a theoretical postulate of "error." Statements about feelings, preferences, and decisions lack the broad claims to justification that we associate with "strong" valuations (in the sense of Charles Taylor) or, more strongly still, with moral judgments. The noncognitivist description of the moral language game is revisionist in that even the participants assume that moral conflicts can be resolved rationally on the basis of intersubjectively recognized normative expectations for behavior. These reasons, on the basis of which the conflicting parties wish to employ to achieve agreement in a noncognitive description, are reduced to so many errors. Contractualism must not go so far. By reducing the validity of moral norms to an agreement between rational egoists, that is, to a fortunate congruence of interests, moral conflict preserves a cognitive content. But the sum of rational motives that move each participant to agreement in the light of his or her own preferences will not explain the obligatory force of consensual norms—that is, the deontic obligations on which we base our mutual behavioral expectations as members of a moral community. Kant suggested a reasonable translation of the categorical sense of normative validity that is reflected in the phenomenon of "respect for the law." However, in the revisionist description of contractualism, the unconditional validity of maxims that can be justified under the perspective of universalism has disappeared. At first glance, it appears that the constitutive role played by feelings in moral conflicts seems difficult to reconcile with a cognitivistic position. In essence, the moral language game consists of three grammatically related statements: judgments about how we ought to behave (or are allowed or not allowed to behave); consenting or dissenting reactions, and, above all, reasons the conflicting partners can use to justify their consenting or dissenting position. However, positive and negative statements are double-edged in this regard. On the one hand, they express a rationally motivated "yes" or "no" that in response to statements that in loose analogy to factual truth can be true or false. On the other hand, they take the form of emotional reactions to behavior that is evaluated as either right or wrong. When there is violation of a norm, the wounded, insulted, or humiliated victim's feelings of resentment and pain; the perpetrator's feelings of defiance, shame, guilt, or remorse; and indignation or outrage from the near and dear who call for the perpetrator's disgrace are all equally involved. When behavior shows integrity or courageous support, there are feelings of gratitude, admiration, and respect.
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Because these feelings have a propositional content that goes hand in hand with the moral judgment of the types of behavior in question, we can understand that behind them lie perceptions as implicit judgments. Negative feelings, in particular, have a cognitive content that can be made explicit through value judgments, much as perceptions can be made explicit through observation statements. Brought into explicit verbal form, feelings can serve as reasons in practical discourse, much as observations function in empirical discourse. Feelings of insult, guilt, and outrage serve as evidence that an action has disturbed the underlying moral order of reciprocal respect. They are warning signals that constitute an intuitive experiential field on which we base our reflected justifications for actions and normatively guided behaviors. Such an understanding of morality contradicts the position that moral feelings are simply rewards or punishments that a community bestows for obeying the established normative consensus or for reproducing a current form of life. This interpretation arises from an empirical understanding of the validity of norms. On this reading, norms determine strictly what members of a community may demand from each other in such a way that the prescriptive sense of the norms consists in their enforceability. Norms are valid inasmuch as they can be imposed through the threat of external or internal sanctions. This conception, however, does not fit the intrinsic validity or necessity for justifying moral norms. Indeed, an empiricist description cannot even capture the complex mode of validity of the legal norms that tacitly serve as their models. It is part of the conditions of legitimacy underlying modern law that "respect for the law" may be sufficient to motivate obedience to the law (Habermas, 1996a). Even the psychological observation that moral understanding obliges us to "do what is right simply because it is right" (Nunner-Winkler, 1992, p. 266) suggests a truth-analogous interpretation of the claim to validity inherent in moral norms. Psychological research has shown that young children learn to differentiate between unconditional moral prohibitions and other social rules and conventions (Turiel, 1983). Kant understood "free will" as the ability to bind one's will to the norms accepted on the basis of moral insight. Interestingly, in motivation research, it is precisely this conception that provides an alternative to the conventional explanatory model. On this basis, Nunner-Winkler (1992, p. 266) proposed a model of self-obligation enabling the child to separate formal motives from judgment. In this way, Nunner-Winkler preserves the substance of morality—that moral behavior does not represent a conditioned response, but a conscious realization of grounded and justifiable moral judgments. In sum, the ability to differentiate true judgments from judgments merely believed to be true corresponds to the ability to differentiate valid moral judgments from currently accepted ones.
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Cognitive developmental psychology, which applies an epistemological conception of learning to the development of moral consciousness also uses such a truth-analogous conception of correct moral judgment. Here, the venerable problem of the relation of theoretical and practical reason that first appeared in German Idealism returns in a less virulent form. Persons have "learned" something when they can retrospectively justify the new insight in light of a correction of an earlier belief, now revealed as error. If this phenomenology of learning also applies to the acquisition of moral beliefs, we must assume that moral judgments can be true or false—or can at least claim a similarity or binary-coded justification. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether there are "facts" to which moral statements "fit" or "correspond" in the same way as descriptive statements. Lawrence Kohlberg spoke of an "isomorphism" between the forms of "logical" and "moral" judgments. He took the development of cognitive operations as a necessary condition for acquiring corresponding levels of moral judgment. This does not, however, mean that "moral judgment is simply an application of a level of intelligence to moral problems. I believe moral development is its own sequential process rather than the reflection of cognitive development in a slightly different content area." (Kohlberg, 1981) Regardless of the unity of reason in which the analogy between knowledge and moral insight is grounded, Kohlberg maintained a differentiation between theoretical and practical reason. But it remains unclear in what way the two are different. Piaget focused on the similarities that appear when the development of cognitive abilities are explained with the same general learning mechanisms. He referred to a "parallelism" between the development of cognitive categories and logical rules and the development of basic concepts and norms of justice and morality. Piaget found that neither moral learning nor cognitive development depend on the specific content that adolescents learn in everyday life or in school. "When the child in each stage chooses particular elements and assimilates them to his or her intellect in a particular structure, she is as far from experiencing the pressures of social reality as is the case with physical reality; rather, the child actively separates what is offered from that which she can reconstruct in her own way." (Piaget, 1950) Thus, Piaget believed that the social world plays a role in the development of moral consciousness similar to the role played by the physical world in the development of cognitive operations. Through practical interactions with the physical environment and by reflective abstraction, the child develops the basic concepts and operations that are appropriate for understanding the physical world. In the same way, the child acquires the basic concepts and perspectives that are necessary for appropriate moral judgments in conflicts of action.
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Thus, the genetic theory of intelligence maintains a realistic core despite its constructivistic approach. This is because mature forms of knowledge mirror the invariant constraints imposed on our active minds as they engage in practical attempts to master an objective world presupposed as independent. In a similar way, the invariant features of the social world are reflected in mature forms of moral consciousness, explaining the universal validity of moral judgments. This understanding, in terms of an analogy to knowledge, certainly has an advantage in that it accounts for the intrinsic validity of moral judgments, and the differentiation between the acceptability and the factual recognition of moral norms. But if the social world plays a similar role in the development of moral consciousness as the objective world plays in cognitive development, the question arises whether we can then avoid a moral realism of this, or another, sort. The doubt can be intuitively formulated as follows: Can a social world that we cannot assume to exist independently in the same way as the objective world of knowledge impose the same constraints on our sociomoral cognitions as the objective world imposes on the recognition of facts? How can the symbolically structured world of interpersonal relations that we somehow construct ourselves help us decide whether moral judgments are valid or not? Moral knowledge is apparently determined by history and by the historical constitution of the social world in ways that are different from the determination of empirical knowledge. This is precisely the reason for the typically two-level justifications of actions. Here, I refer to the well-known fact that well-grounded moral norms can only claim "prima facie" validity. Ex ante, we only consider those consequences and repercussions of typical'cases that we can predict at any given time. Unanticipated constellations of subsequent conflicts give rise to further needs for interpretation that must be satisfied from the different viewpoint of applied discourse. Only those justified norms that qualify as "appropriate" to a given case will be selected in the process of application. Here, the hermeneutic insight that the appropriate norm is made explicit in light of the specific situation and, conversely, that the situation must be described in light of the relevant normative rules comes into play. In any case, moral knowledge differs from empirical knowledge in that it internally refers to the solution of problems of application. This notable asymmetry between the justification of actions and the explanations of events cannot be resolved with the reservations of fallibility that apply to ^/knowledge. The reservation that even well-founded moral norms always depend on further elaboration to be accepted as valid is not due to the general cognitive limitations of a finite mind in face of better knowledge in the future. Rather, it is due to existential limitations in face of the historical variability of the contexts of action. The understanding of a symbolically structured world of legitimately ordered interpersonal relations and interactions is constituted in a different manner than the objective world
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of observable events and objects. Therefore, general norms can determine future actions only insofar as we can anticipate typical probabilities. In other words, norms remain incomplete in principle. Such differences between moral and empirical knowledge come close to a culturalist interpretation that basically questions the analogy between truth and Tightness. Thus, neo-Aristotelian and post-Wittgensteinian approaches explain truth-analogous grammaticality of form and the cognitive appeal of value judgments on the basis of an underlying consensus regarding forms of life and commonly practiced language games. In light of their evaluative vocabulary, members of the same linguistic community not only develop normative ideas about the form of life but discover positive and negative traits in everyday life that they are unable to comprehend unless they "know" how to react. Derived from a common form of life, a "thick ethical description" of "perceived" cruelty, love, or humiliation and the unconstrained acceptance of inveterate language games attain objectivity. But this objectivity rising from the "objective spirit" of the social milieu taken as widespread acceptance should not be confused with truth-analogous validity in the sense of rational acceptability. In cultural anthropology and in historicism, the dominant approach has always been that moral judgments merely reflect the value standards and interpretations of shared world views; that they mirror culture-specific historical constructions. This represents a second-order empiricism where values are not grounded on mental entities, such as feelings and attitudes, but rather in cultural contexts. For example, Shweder criticized Kohlberg's moral universalism from this relativistic perspective. Cultural constructivism, it is true, does not stop at questions of truth; it tends toward a radical historicism where different traditions, forms of life, and cultures not only express different moralities and values but also standards of rationality that are specific to them. The current influential contextualism questions the categorical meaning of truth no less than it questions claims to Tightness and justice. My intuition can be characterized as follows. On the one hand, the validity of a moral judgment is proven in the same way as the truth of a descriptive statement— through discussion. We do not have a direct grasp of truth conditions, independent of reasons, nor do we have access to conditions underlying the general recognition of moral norms. In each case, the validity of statements is ascertained only by applying the test of discourse to all accessible reasons. Claims to moral validity, on the other hand, lack the grounding in the world underlying claims of truth. "Truth" is an idea that transcends justification irreducible to the notion of ideally justified claims. It refers to truth conditions that must, to some extent, be fulfilled by reality itself. In contrast "rightness" is identical with ideally justified acceptability. To meet the validity conditions of moral judgments and norms, we contribute ourselves by constructing a world of well-ordered interpersonal relations.
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Moral beliefs guide normatively ordered social interactions similarly to the way that empirical beliefs guide goal-directed interventions in the physical world. But they are tested against different criteria: It is not the successful manipulation of independent processes, but the consensual resolution of action conflicts that is successful only on a background of intersubjectively shared normative beliefs. The test does not occur in practices independent of discourse, but in the medium of verbal communication. Failure of the certainties that guide action is not decided by the uncontrolled contingencies of disappointing conditions, but by conflicts with social opponents professing discordant value orientations. The conflict does not stem from objective facts beyond control, but from the lack of normative consensus with others. The "objectivity" of a different mind is made of a different stuff than the objectivity of surprising reality. The resistence of conflict with the "objective spirit" is overcome by moral learning processes that force the warring parties to broaden their own social world and to embed themselves in a jointly constructed world so that they can judge and resolve their conflicts in the light of consensual standards of evaluation. The regulative idea of the mutual inclusion of the other in a world of well-ordered interpersonal relationships substitute for the relation to an objective world that transcends justification (III). This framework has its roots in the conditions of communication inherent in rational discourse.
Ill The claim to moral validity lacks the relation to the external world that is typical of truth claims. Thus, it is denied a point of reference that transcends justification. For moral validity claims, ties to the objective world are replaced by a will to extend the social community and its value consensus. If we wish to characterize the differences between truth and Tightness more precisely, we must ask whether and, if so, how the orientation toward extensive inclusion of others and their claims can compensate for the lack of a relation to an objective world. Rational discourse always moves within a recursive closed cycle of arguments. To decide controversial questions of validity, we must be satisfied with the rational acceptability of statements for both descriptive and moral questions. But consensus achieved through discourse has different connotations for the truth of statements than for the Tightness of moral judgments and moral norms. This is because, under ideal conditions where all available arguments are considered and all relevant objections are accounted for, we are justified to consider a statement as true once we have reached agreement about it in discourse. The truth of a statement, given a relation with the external world, also represents the existence of a fact. Its factual nature is rooted in a world of things independent of descriptive statements about objects. This ontological
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interpretation implies that however carefully crafted our consensus about a wellfounded statement, it may be shown to be false in light of new evidence. For moral claims, it is just this difference between truth and ideally justified acceptability that is blurred because there is no equivalent on the side of moral validity for the ontological interpretation of truth conditions. Whereas success in learning relative to factual problems may result in consensus, success in moral learning is gauged againstthe inclusive nature of a well-grounded consensus. When all concerned reach agreement in practical discourse that a certain course of action is equally good for everyone in a situation requiring regulation, they perceive this practice as binding. The consensus achieved through discourse is perceived as comparatively definitive by all involved. It does not ascertain a fact, but establishes a norm that can consist of nothing else than the fact of meriting intersubjective agreement—and the participants in the discourse assume that this is precisely what they can determine under approximately ideal conditions of rational discourse. We understand the validity of a normative statement not in the sense of the existence ofa fact, but as the acceptability of: the corresponding norm. An acceptable norm cannot be refuted by a world that refuses "to go along." A norm whose acceptability is ideally justified can, of course, fail to be accepted factually—or it can be revoked in a society establishing other practices or world views. But, for claims to moral validity, there is no instance in the relation with the world that transcends discourse and the participants' reasonable commitment of the will. A consensus about norms or actions obtained through discourse under ideal conditions has more than the mere power of authorization—it is a warrant of the Tightness of moral judgments. Ideally justified assertability is what we mean by moral validity. It means not just that we have exhausted the pros and cons in a controversial discussion of validity but that normative validity is contained in normative Tightness as acceptability. The ideally justified assertability of a norm does not—as in the case of a truth claim transcending justification—indicate something beyond the boundaries of discourse that is valid independent of its acceptability. The immanent justification of "validity" is based on a critical argument: Because the "rightness" consists in its acceptability under ideal conditions of justification, "rightness" is an epistemological concept. This conception does not at all imply that each of our best possible moral insights deserve infallibility. The consensus reached in the two-level procedure of moral justification and application discourse must be seen under two separate fallibilistic reservations. Retrospectively, we may learn that we were wrong about the conditions of discourse; prospectively, we may discover that we failed to foresee relevant conditions. The idealization of the justification conditions generated in rational discourse provides a standard for the potential reservation in view of the present level of decentration of the justification community. As will be shown for moral problems, this can
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raise difficulties of a special (but not exclusively cognitive) kind. When members of the community are excluded from participation, themes are suppressed, relevant contributions repressed, relevant interests not articulated sincerely or formulated convincingly, and the uniqueness of others is not respected, then one must expect that rationally motivated positions will be stifled or never emerge in the first place. This sort of fallibility is consistent with the, fir us, definitive character of a consent that we, accurately or not, assume has emerged under satisfying conditions of ideal justification. We can only correct errors when we assume the possibility of a justified choice between "right" and "wrong," and orient ourselves toward the "only right answer" on the basis of the bivalence principle. Another type of fallibility derives from the fact that all norms recognized as valid, however well-founded, must be complemented in application discourses. Unexpected circumstances or innovations may require revision that in turn retrospectively raise questions concerning the justification of a norm. However, conscious awareness of our existential limitations with respect to the future need not disturb our moral convictions as long as the circumstances we assumed in the justification discourse are not recognizably refuted by history. It is clearly not certain whether (and how) the constructive sense of the development of moral views and moral will can balance the lack of a criterion for "correct" moral judgments that transcends justification. Kant translated the absolute obligatoriness of moral duties into the categorical validity of moral judgments. When the concept of "rightness" loses that certainty beyond justification, to which the concept of truth owes its ontological connotations, then the question arises of how the claim of rightness can conserve this element of absoluteness. For a valid statement, we claim universal validity, that is, recognition not only in a local context but in all. We usually read a truth statement 'p' realistically from left to right. When 'p' is true, the statement is unconditionally true and deserves to be recognized as true by everyone. For 'p' to actually find this universal acceptance, everyone must be able to be convinced of the truth of the statement and know that 'p'. Such knowledge can then be supported by the truth of'p' because (and inasmuch as) true statements are well-founded. This consideration takes us back to the well-known relation between truth and knowledge: A person knows that 'p' if she (a) believes 'p', (b) has sufficient grounds to do so, and (c) if'p' is true. Moral knowledge cannot satisfy these conditions if we take "rightness" to mean an epistemological requirement of validity because then the non-epistemological criterion (c) cannot be satisfied. How can normative rightness be understood in the sense of an unconditional validity claim in a binary code if moral judgments can no longer be founded on non-epistemological conditions of validity? Here, we can mention the observation already noted above that moral judgments are validated by the inclusive nature of the normative consensus between conflicting
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parties. Insofar as we also commit ourselves to a "single correct answer" even in moral controversies, we assume that valid morality extends to a single social world including all demands and all persons equally. This world, like Kant's "realm of goals," is admittedly set as a task rather than given. With the concept of an objective world that is "not made by us" and that is "the same for all," the project of a completely inclusive world of well-ordered interpersonal relations shares only one of the two requirements— identity, but not unavailability. But this is not modeled after the "sameness" of a formally regulated objective world. If the moral world is "the same for all," it is not because different observer perspectives are coordinated through a uniformly ordered relation to the world that is also reflected in an orientation to truth transcending justification. Rather, participants, through reciprocal perspective taking, construct an inclusive perspective on the social dimension that is oriented to the first person plural ("we"). G. H. Mead described this process as a stepwise expansion of a reversible exchange of perspectives. Piaget spoke of progressive decentration in which one's own perspective becomes more "decentered" as the process of reciprocal assimilation of the others' perspectives approaches the limit of complete inclusion. Continuing on this constructivist path (see Rawls, 1980, p. 515, "Kantian constructivism in moral theory"), the absolute validity claims of moral judgments can be explained through the universality of a domain of validity to be constructed: Only those judgments and norms are valid that each participant can accept on the basis of an inclusive perspective of fair and equal consideration of the relevant claims of all people. A universe in which free and equal persons legislate their own laws imposes the constraints of such a perspective on the justification of moral statements. Inasmuch as we test the Tightness of moral statements from a universalistic perspective, the viewpoint of an ideally ordered social world of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations can construct an equivalent of the missing constraints of an objective world through the assumedly rational solutions of moral action conflicts. Adopting this ideal point of reference, moral requirements for validity are assured their independence from context and their universality thanks to the ontological connotations of truth demands and their transcendence beyond justification. In this respect, the construct of a moral world and the assumption of an objective world are functional equivalents. However, this must not lead us to assimilate the moral world to the objective world. The world of legitimately ordered interpersonal relations can only be reconstructed from the perspective of those who adopt a performative stance—just as valid norms are recognized merely by the second person as entities, against which contravention is possible. An interest evoked with normative intentions is not a fact for which individuals can claim epistemic authority on the basis of privileged access. The interpretation of needs must be carried out in public language, for which there is no private owner-
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ship. It represents a cooperative task of discursive argument as does the evaluation of conflicting interests (that need to be ranked with respect to possible consequences and side effects). Common or congruent interests only emerge in the light of those practices and norms in which they are embodied. An ontological view of generalizable interests lacks the element of the construction of a world of norms that merit recognition. Insight and construction are combined when interests are generalized in discussion. Norms merit recognition not because there is an objectively determined agreement about existing interests, but because participants interpret and evaluate interests from the perspective of the first person plural. Participants can develop norms that embody common interests only from a common world view that is constructed on the basis of reciprocal exchange of the perspectives of all involved. This does not contradict the assumption of deep needs rooted in human evolution, such as freedom from bodily harm, health, freedom of movement; and protection from deceit, illness, and loneliness (Nussbaum, 1992). The core set of self-evident moral rules that we find in all cultures hark back to such interests which any participant can easily recognize as his or her own. But any interest that is to "count" from a moral perspective can be considered a general interest only if it is convincingly interpreted and justified and translated into relevant demands in public discourse. Finally, ontological assimilation of the moral world to the objective world hides from view those functions that rational discourse about practical issues must also address— the reciprocal sensitizing of participants for each others' world views and views of the self. Among the necessary prerequisites for such critical analysis is a complete inclusion of all participants, equal distribution of rights and duties to engage in discourse, freedom from restrictions in communication, and the intention to reach agreement. Within these demanding communication conditions, available proposals, information, reasons, evidence, and objections that are relevant for the choice, including the specification and the solution of the relevant problem, must come into play so that the best arguments can compete and the better arguments can decide. This epistemological function concerns sorting possible themes and bringing the relevant contributions to the fore. Participants are expected to examine the contributions honestly and impartially. The prerequisite of truthfulness and impartiality in discussions among people who wish to convince each other of something is unproblematic only when the discussion concerns questions of fact. Disagreement about practical questions touches on the interests of the self and of others; it thus demands from every participant honesty in view of the self as well as impartiality toward the interpretations of the self and of the situation entertained by others. Because participants in practical discourse are simultaneously those who are affected by the issue in question, the comparatively harmless prerequisite of honest and impartial examination of arguments changes into the more demanding expectation to be honest with the self and impartial with the
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other. Given that each and everyone is involved in the moral matters at stake in a discussion, "honesty" requires distancing from the self and the courage to criticize selfdeception. With respect to the existential relevance of these questions, "impartiality" toward arguments means a demanding sort of neutrality: Each participant must place him- or herself in the position of all others and take the others' views of the world and the self just as seriously as they take their own. Thus, the general prerequisites for communication of moral questions are broader in moral questions than in epistemic ones. Beyond the epistemic condition to ascertain that all relevant contributions are considered and passed through the correct channels of argumentation, the self-related conditions of communication fulfill a practical function that however indirectly has an epistemic meaning of its own. The structure of rational discourse that warrants openness and equal access, freedom from restrictions, and transparency after due assessment of the contributions to the discussion should help the better arguments gain ascendancy. This structure functions as a design to foster a more self-critical approach among those participating in the discussion and an empathic exchange of perspectives. In this regard, the communication form of practical discourse can be understood as a liberating arrangement. It should help decenter the perception of the self and others and enable participants to be moved by reasons—the rational motives of others—independent of their person. The idealizing anticipation not only generates the space for free play of relevant reasons and information that produces insight but also provides leeway for the provisional liberation of the will from heteronomous qualifications. Moral insight allows an autonomy that Kant defined as rational commitment of the will. But, at the same time, the ever so transitory overcoming of heteronomy in practical discourse is a necessary condition for the acquisition of moral insight: "There is an essential connection between freedom and truth." (Herbert Marcuse) This makes clear why the assumed impartialty underlying discourse has both a motivational and a cognitive aspect. Participants in a discussion are encouraged to anticipate in thought the cooperative self-governance that would be imposed on them as actors in the "empire of freedom." This structural anticipation explains why we may nonetheless understand the "rightness" embodied in ideally justified acceptability as unconditional validity—analogous to a truth transcending justification. Due to its normatively rich communication prerequisites, discourse can generate from itself 'the very constraints that the construction of a moral universe imposes on the practice of justification. We do not need to make contact with a world beyond the horizon of our justifications to ascertain the categorical obligatonness of moral laws. It is enough to accommodate the "worldless" space of discourse because, in adopting the participant perspective, we can direct our steps according to the criterion of inclusiveness of a society of well-ordered interpersonal relations—a criterion that as soon as we engage in discussion is no longer at our disposal.
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References Habermas,J. (1996a). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1996b). Eine genealogische Betrachtung zum kognitiven Gehalt der Moral. In J. Habermas, Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (pp. 11—64). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. [A disquisition concerning the cognitive content of morality] Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol. I. The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Nunner-Winkler, G. (1992). Zur moralischen Sozialisation. Kb'lnerZeitschriftfur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 44, 252-272. [Moral socialization] Nussbaum, M. (1992). Human functioning and social justice. Political Theory, 20, 202—246. Piaget.J. (1950). Introduction a I'epistemologiegenetique: Vol. II. La pensee physique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rawls, J. (1980). Kantian constructivism in moral theory. Journal of Philosophy, 77, p. 515. Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
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Between Aristotle and Kant— Sketch of a Morality of Recognition Axel Honneth
Insight into the complexity of what we call morality has again grown considerably in recent years. The simple alternative between a Kantian position—according to which moral demands emerge from the impartial perspective of checking the universalizability of our principles of action—and an Aristotelian position—according to which moral demands emerge only indirectly as a by-product of an ethical search for the life that is good for us—is scarcely convincing today. Neither side, it seems, can make clear, in a satisfactory manner, what it means for our everyday action to take its orientation from principles of morality. It is above all the tradition going back to Kant that is now exposed to a multitude of convincing objections that jointly insist that the one-sided focus on a universalist procedure of justification does not do justice to the complex motivational structure of human action: First, it is not really plausible to expect that such a concept of morality should ever have practical relevance if, as is the case, the individual actor always acts by reason of a whole series of personal intentions, feelings, and interpersonal bonds, in view of which impartial principles are motivationally ineffective. Second, our everyday action also shows us that we are generally confronted by so many different expectations, commitments, and wishes that the standard case is constituted not by the coherent application of a moral principle, but by the conflictridden integration of different moral points of view. Third, and finally, it is easy to see that some of our personal bonds are of such central significance to our lives that the demand to be morally impartial toward these bonds is not without an element of absurdity (Williams, 1973, 1981). But, of course, the tradition going back to Aristotle is also confronted by a whole series of plausible objections that suggest it is incorrect to comprehend the moral point of view simply as the integral viewpoint of a search for
Translated by John M. M. Farrell.
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the good life: First, after the disappearance of a metaphysical teleology, the question arises as to how general statements about what is objectively desirable are still possible—statements, that is to say, which go beyond the assertion of a few minimal presuppositions. But, more importantly, in such an ethical orientation, it is entirely unclear to what extent we have to include moral responsibilities and duties that are concerned with consideration or respect for the well-being of other people (Tugendhat, 1984). Moral theory today thus finds itself in a situation that is markedly similar to the one in which the moral actor is invariably entangled when engaging in everyday action: on the one hand, feelings of guilt or remorse when neglecting duties that prove to be morally compelling and, on the other hand, feelings of despair or protest when relinquishing important aims in life that are not compatible with the moral demands of impartial reason. Just as the Kantian position seems to contain a point of view we cannot do without completely when explicating morality, the Aristotelian position also seems to adopt a perspective that is indispensable to an elucidation of what we call morality. I consider the central task of a theory of morality today to be the discovery of an alternative in which both points of view are integrated in such a way that we can be somewhat less divided on the matter. In my view, a first step in the direction thus indicated has to consist in attempting to locate the position that morality assumes in the ethical search for the presuppositions of a good life. In this way, the Aristotelian link to a teleological concept of the good is maintained from the outset—a link that serves to ensure that, at least from a generalized perspective, moral attitudes are ascribed a positive function with regard to our life conditions. This formulation does, of course, make clear that such an ethical determination of morality today can no longer assume the classical form of an explication of the contribution made by morally good actions or attitudes in reaching the goal of a good life. Since we have abandoned the daring notion of being able to specify a telos that is of value to all human beings equally, morality can, at best, be just one of the presuppositions we believe to be indispensable in the individual search for what is good for me. To my mind, such an indirect function for morality becomes apparent once we see how closely moral attitudes and norms are connected to forms of intersubjective recognition: On the basis of this connection, it can be made clear that, by way of assuming moral duties, we mutually secure the intersubjective conditions of our identity formation. To that extent, morality—viewed at first from the objectifying perspective of an analysis of our species' social conditions of life—would serve the protection of the presuppositions of a good life. Of course, it is not possible to clarify at all satisfactorily the questions connected to this hypothesis in the first sketch of a theoretical program; for that reason, I shall restrict myself in what follows to elucidating in broad strokes the steps whose correct elaboration could perhaps justify a morality of recognition. Useful access to the topic
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is provided by briefly recollecting the circumstances under which the concept of "recognition" has again become the reference point of discussions in moral philosophy in recent years; here, it will be seen to what degree today such diverse moral perspectives are included in an understanding or a standpoint of "recognition" that their internal connection cannot be identified at first glance (I). On the other hand, the brief recollection of Hegel's concept of recognition, which I shall undertake in a second step, will serve to indicate a possible way out of this perplexing discussion; for it is the case that already the young Hegel introduced—with practical-philosophical intent—differentiations into the concept of recognition that reveal both the unity and the differences in the various understandings of recognition (II). In a third step, I shall then attempt to establish the systematic relationship between morality and recognition by unearthing, phenomenologically, the special character of moral injuries (III). Initially outlining the phenomenon of the moral in this negative manner facilitates the attempt, in a further step, to work out the positive meaning of recognition for morality. Here, it will become evident that it still makes sense today to link up with the three-part division introduced by Hegel (IV). The conclusion, finally, will consist of a brief survey of the consequences for current issues in moral philosophy that follow from the concept of recognition developed here (V).
I It is indeed the case that in one form or another the concept of "recognition" has always played an essential role in practical philosophy. Thus, in the ethics of classical antiquity, the conviction was prevalent that only that person whose modes of action could enjoy social esteem in the polis was able to lead a good life; the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is guided by the idea that public recognition or disapproval represents the social mechanism by means of which the individual is prompted to acquire desirable virtues; and in Kant, finally, the concept of "respect" assumes the function of a highest moral principle in the sense that it incorporates the core of the categorical imperative to treat every other person only as an end in himor herself. However, in none of the classical writers—of course, with the major exception of Hegel who in this respect was the solitary standard-setting thinker—was the principle of recognition as such made the cornerstone of ethics; for all the indirect importance it enjoyed in the specifics of these models, the concept was always outshone by other conceptual determinations, ones considered more fundamental. This constellation did not change significantly until the emergence, in the course of the last twenty years, of a number of political debates and social movements that call for a greater consideration of the idea of recognition; whether in the discussions on
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multiculturalism or in the theoretical self-understanding of feminism, it quickly became evident that what constituted a common exemplar was the normative idea that individuals or social groups have to gain recognition or respect in their "difference" (Taylor, 1992). From here, it was only a small step to the generalized insight that the moral quality of social relations can be measured not solely in terms of the fair or just distribution of material goods; rather, our notion of justice is also very closely linked to how, and as what, subjects mutually recognize each other. Thus, from political questions, there gradually emerged the substance for a moral-philosophical discussion whose starting point is the notion that it must be possible to elaborate the normative content of morality on the basis of specific forms of reciprocal recognition: What we mean when we speak of the "moral point of view" refers primarily to desirable features or ones that may be legitimately expected of relationships that subjects enjoy with one another. With such a proposal, however, only the basis is laid for the attempt to evince principles of a theory of morality directly from the normative implications of the concept of recognition; for as soon as this path has been opened, it quickly becomes evident how numerous the problems are that are connected to the draft of such a model. Today, the discussion on a morality of recognition is largely determined by efforts to at least tackle these difficulties systematically. A first problem presented by such an approach is the semantic diversity of the key category itself. In contrast to the concept of "respect," which since Kant has had relatively clear contours in moral philosophy, the concept of "recognition" is not determined in any definitive way, neither in philosophy nor in ordinary language. Thus, in the context of justifying feminist ethics, the concept is currently used above all to characterize the type of loving concern and care empirically exemplified in the mother-child relationship (cf. Hirschmann, 1989); within the context of discourse ethics, on the other hand, "recognition" serves to designate the mutual respect for both the particularity and the equality of all other persons, whereby the discursive conduct of participants in argumentation presents the paradigmatic case of this form of respect (Habermas, 1990; Wingert, 1993); and, finally, within the setting of attempts to further develop communitarianism, the category of recognition is used today to characterize the ways in which unfamiliar modes of life are esteemed and how this process typically unfolds within the framework of societal solidarity (Taylor, 1992). From these numerous applications of the concept there follows, as a second problem, the circumstance that the moral content of the concept of recognition also seems to change with the imputed meaning. Thus, it may indeed be plausible to speak of universal rights and duties with regard to the recognition of the moral autonomy of all human beings, whereas such a formulation would hardly be appropriate for the forms of recognition associated with care and esteem; for here, we seem to have duties
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toward or a special kind of responsibility only for those people with whom we have a specific form of relationship. To that extent, it may be assumed that the various meanings of "recognition" are linked in each case to specific moral perspectives. From this plurality, finally, there follows the question as to whether the various moral points of view imply a single root in the sense that they can be normatively justified together; hence, we touch upon the problem of justifying the moral implications underlying each of the various forms of recognition. The numerous theoretical difficulties associated today with the draft of a morality of recognition can be reduced somewhat by reflecting briefly on the typology of recognition developed by the young Hegel. In his early writings, we find the explicit proposal to distinguish three different patterns of recognition determined according to the particular kind of relation-to-self (Selbstverhdltnis) they can help an individual to achieve.
II When Hegel, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, set to work on reconstructing the developmental history of human ethical life (Sittlichkeit)wixh the help of the concept of "recognition," he could reflect back on a whole series of philosophical projects in which related concepts and notions had taken on leading roles. For instance, Hobbes, influenced by Machiavelli, proceeded on the anthropological assumption that human beings are dominated primarily by the need to attain a constantly increasing degree of "respect" and "honour" (Hobbes, 1973, chap. 10); in his critical depiction of the civilization process, Rousseau went so far as to defend the thesis that it was not until human beings started striving for social esteem that they began to lose the calm self-certainty by means of which peaceable life was said to be secured in the state of nature (Rousseau, 1973); and finally, in contrast to such a negativism, Fichte came to the conviction in his foundation of natural law that subjects can develop consciousness of their freedom only if they call upon one another to make use of their autonomy and, accordingly, recognize each other as free beings (Fichte, 1971; cf. Honneth, 1998). As heterogeneous, indeed as contradictory as these thought fragments may be, taken together they were able, in the early Hegel, to bring the idea to fruition that the self-consciousness of the human being is dependant upon the experience of social recognition: A certain tendency toward pessimism did indeed pervade Hobbes' and Rousseau's political anthropology to the extent that a danger to political order or personal authority was perceived in the striving for recognition; but it was possible to infer indirectly from these conceptions that, in leading their lives, human subjects have to rely upon the respect or esteem of their partners in interaction.
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The mere claim of a necessary connection between self-consciousness and intersubjective recognition could not, of course, be sufficient for the ends Hegel pursued in his early writings; if the task was to explain how the experience of recognition could bring about progress in the relations of ethical life, then a further explanation was required for the dynamic relationship that had to obtain between the intersubjective acquisition of self-consciousness and the moral development of entire societies. The answers Hegel found to these complex questions in the course of working out his first system drafts (Hegel, 1979, 1983) constitute the core of his model of a "struggle for recognition"; it includes the venturesome, but challenging idea that ethical progress unfolds in a series of three levels of increasingly more demanding patterns of recognition, and an intersubjective struggle mediates between each of these levels, a struggle that subjects conduct in order to have their identity claims confirmed. What is special about this model consists first of all in the thesis that goes way beyond Fichte, namely, that three forms of mutual recognition have to be distinguished as soon as the intersubjective presuppositions for the development of self-consciousness have been uncovered; the mechanism of reciprocally granting a sphere of individual freedom—the one Fichte had in mind in his justification of natural law—does, indeed, explain the formation of a subjective legal consciousness, but this does not at all imply that the positive self-understanding of a free person has been grasped in its entirety. For that reason, Hegel adds to legal (rights-based) recognition, which was meant to include roughly what Kant understood by moral respect, two more forms of reciprocal recognition to which particular levels of the individual relation-to-self had to correspond: In love, which Hegel in his early work understands in the very emphatic sense of Holderlin's philosophy of unity, subjects recognize each other in the unique nature of their needs, so that they can attain emotional security in the articulation of the claims raised by their drives; and, finally, in the state's sphere of ethical life, there obtains a form of recognition that serves to allow subjects to esteem one another in the attributes which contribute to the reproduction of the societal order. In his early writings, Hegel seems to have been convinced that the transition from one sphere of recognition to another is generated in each particular case by a struggle conducted by subjects among themselves for respect for their self-comprehension as it grows in stages: The demand to be recognized in newer and newer dimensions of one's own person leads, so to speak, to an intersubjective conflict whose resolution can only consist in establishing a further sphere of recognition (Honneth, 1995, chap. 1). Of course Hegel is not a sufficiently advanced theorist of society to be able to actually conceive of this process as a step in the constitution of modern societies. Rather, still very much bounded by the parameters set by German idealism, what he sees in this process is the totality of mental acts that subjects have to perform with one another in order to be able to construct a common world of "objective spirit." Never-
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theless, his early model of a struggle for recognition is so complex and multilayered that up until today it has triggered numerous innovative approaches in moral philosophy and the theory of society (Siep, 1979; Wildt, 1982; Honneth, 1995). It was, indeed, already in the Phenomenology of Spirit that Hegel replaced his original program with a conception in which the presuppositions of the later system take greater effect; from now on, the constitution of social reality is no longer explained by an intersubjective process of conflict formation, rather it is understood as the outcome of the dialectical self-enhancement of spirit. But in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel introduced a differentiation between the family, civil society, and the state, one that again reflects the early distinction between three forms of recognition; and it is this division into three parts that allows us today to further develop Hegel's mature system in the sense of a practical philosophy (Hardimon, 1994).
Ill If today, after a period of almost two hundred years, we connect up with the concept of "recognition" in order to introduce a conception of morality, then the starting point is usually a phenomenological analysis of moral injuries (Honneth, 1995; Margalit, 1996, for the concept of "respect"; Tugendhat, 1993, p. 304f.; Wingert, 1993, II.5). A central part in this negativist procedure is played by the notion that the circumstances experienced as "unjust" provide the appropriate key for an initial anticipatory elucidation of the internal connection between morality and recognition. On the basis of the criteria that those affected use to distinguish between a moral misdeed, on the one hand, and mere ill luck or constraint, on the other, one can easily show that in the moral misdeed there must always be the aspect of recognition being withheld or denied, whereas in the latter case such a reference is, of course, omitted. Thus, a physical injury becomes a moral injustice whenever the subject affected has no choice but to view it as an action that intentionally disregards it (the subject) in an essential aspect of its well-being; it is not solely the bodily pain as such, but the accompanying consciousness of not being recognized in one's own self-understanding that constitutes the condition for moral injury here. It is no different in the case of deception (Betrug), which acquires the specific quality of a moral injustice only because, due to it, a subject is not taken seriously in a central aspect of its relation-to-self, as in the case of symbolic offending or humiliation, here it is the disrespect of personal integrity that transforms an action or utterance into a moral injury. If conclusions are drawn, with generalizing intent, from these examples, there emerges the premises that, taken together, clarify the constitutive connection between moral injury and the form of recognition withheld:
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(a) Only those living beings are morally vulnerable who can relate reflexively to their own lives in the sense of being volitionally concerned about their own well-being; for without reference to the qualitative standards of one's own life, it is not at all possible to explain what constituent of a person is actually injured or encroached upon whenever we speak of moral injuries and not merely damage, ill luck, or constraint. (b) If the "what" of moral injury has been explained by this reference to the practical relation-to-self, the same does not yet apply to the condition of its possibility. That human subjects are at all vulnerable in their conduct with one another follows from the fact that they can construct and maintain a positive self-relation (Selbstbeziehung) only with the help of agreeing or affirmative reactions on the part of other subjects; without the reference to these intersubjective presuppositions it is completely impossible to explain why a person is at all injured when a specific aspect of his or her self-understanding is destroyed by certain actions, utterances, or circumstances. (c) If the characteristic feature of moral injuries consists in persons being disregarded in aspects of their positive self-relation—whose intersubjective acknowledgment they are fundamentally dependent upon—then this also clarifies the link to a psychological fact: The experience of a moral injustice is necessarily accompanied by a mental shock, insofar as an expectation of the subject affected is disappointed, one whose fulfillment is among the conditions of the subject's own identity. Because it destroys an essential presupposition of the individual's capability to act, every moral injury represents an act of personal harm. If, with the aid of these premises, we have roughly clarified the extent to which the characteristic feature of moral injuries consists in the withdrawal or refusal of recognition, then the chosen path of a negative procedure of explication permits yet another step in the argumentation. On the basis of the context presented, we can undertake the attempt to distinguish various forms of injustice in such a way that an initial perspective on the division of the domain of moral phenomena in toto can emerge. Of course, to this end, it is necessary to make a preliminary decision about the particular aspects that serve as a benchmark in executing such a differentiation. Among the various alternatives on offer here, the most appropriate seems to be the one that locates the criteria of differentiation in closest proximity to individual experiences; in this way, it is secured from the outset that the categorial disclosure of the moral sphere is conducted from the perspective of the subjects affected. A criterion that satisfies this requirement follows from reflections on levels in the individual relation-to-self. Moral injuries are experienced as being all the more serious, the more fundamental the type of self-relation is that they encroach upon or destroy. If the connection established in this way is plausible, then a quasi-empirical typology can be drafted, one that divides
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the spectrum of moral injuries according to the particular level affected in the selfrelation: To each level in the practical relationship to the self, there then corresponds a separate type of injustice, which in turn corresponds to a specific degree of mental harm. These few reflections alone are sufficient to show that a negative proof procedure cannot manage without anticipating those structures upon which the object domain in question has to be presumptively based. In the case of the project undertaken here, there is evidently a need for preknowledge about the stages or levels that the practical relation-to-self encompasses; for without knowledge of this kind it is not possible to specify what and how many aspects of the self-relation are to be meaningfully distinguished in order to tie the distinction in forms of moral injury to them. The disciplines from which we may most probably expect clarification in this respect advance, in the area of philosophy, various models of a theory of the person; in psychology, on the other hand, they contribute diverse theories on infant development. That is why it makes sense to gather arguments developed there in order to gain reference points for differentiating aspects of the self-relation. By way of a somewhat bold synopsis of the relevant research literature, it can be claimed that there obtains a certain agreement between the two research areas today, insofar as three levels of the practical self-relation are distinguished from one another— whereby "self-relation" refers to the consciousness or feeling that a person has of himor herself with regard to the capabilities and rights this person enjoys (see comparable proposals in Habermas, 1992; Tugendhat, 1986). Undisputed is a first, at least genetically primary, level at which subjects relate to themselves in such a way that they conceive of their physical needs and desires as a part of their own person that can be articulated; with a concept made productive for psychoanalysis by E. H. Erikson, this kind of elementary certainty about the value of one's own needs can be called "selfconfidence" (Erikson, 1980). Furthermore, with only minor differences in the details, it is assumed today that a second form of the practical self-relation consists in the awareness of being a morally accountable subject; with recourse to the Kantian tradition, such a type of certainty about the value of one's own judgment can be called "selfrespect" (Dillon, 1995). Finally, there is also agreement about a third form of selfrelation which takes effect in the awareness of having good or valuable capabilities; for this kind of certainty about the value of one's own capabilities, the concept of "selfworth" is an obvious choice (Tugendhat, 1993, p. 57f). If these forms of self-relation are conceived of as stages in the sense that under normal conditions they form a sequence of necessary presuppositions, then they can each be related to types of moral injury that correspond to degrees of mental harm. Here, it is easy to see that each class of injustice derived in this way owes its character to the value in respect of which a subject is disregarded or not recognized:
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(a) From what has been said so far, the moral injuries that rob a person of the certainty of being able to enjoy physical well-being have to be considered elementary; for what is destroyed by an act of that kind is confidence in the value that one's own needs enjoy in others' eyes. Besides murder, which disregards the condition of all physical well-being, typical cases of this class are physical abuse, torture, and rape. (b) Innumerable are, of course, the cases of moral injuries whose characteristic feature is disregarding the moral accountability of persons. What is harmed or even destroyed by such acts is the self-respect we acquire in seeing the value of our judgment recognized by other persons. The spectrum of typical examples range here from individual cases of deceit and deception to the case of the discrimination of whole groups in a legal system. (c) Finally, a third class of moral injuries is represented by those cases in which it is made known to one or more persons through humiliation and disrespect that their capabilities do not enjoy any recognition; what such acts harm is the feeling of being socially significant within a concrete community. Here, the continuum of examples ranges from the harmless case of not greeting (Tugendhat, 1993, p. 305) to the serious case of stigmatization. Proceeding on the basis of these provisional differentiations, there would be a number of possibilities to further differentiate and clarify the field of moral injuries; in addition to the important question of the relations of inclusion obtaining between the various classes (Wingert, 1993, p. 167f.)> it would be of primary interest to examine closely, in each individual case, the stature of the recognition withheld. However, the reflections presented so far only have the function of providing a first proof for the internal link between morality and recognition, and doing so in a negative manner: If it is correct to say that the core of moral injuries is located in the refusal of recognition, then that suggests, inversely, that moral attitudes are connected with the exercise of recognition. From this close connection, furthermore, one could draw the additional conclusion that, in a positive respect, just as many forms of recognition have to correspond to the various types of moral injuries.
IV The negative procedure of explication applied so far has led to a series of specifications that provisionally have only a moral-psychological or anthropological character. As it was to a certain extent the case in Hegel, the first step in developing a morality of recognition consists in the essential proof that the possibility of moral injuries follows from the intersubjectivity of the human life form: Human beings are vulnerable in the
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specific manner we call "moral" because they owe their identity to the construction of a practical self-relation that is, from the beginning, dependent upon the help and affirmation of other human beings (Habermas, 1990, pp. 43—57). If a positive concept of morality is to be drawn from this anthropological premise, then it is obvious to assign this concept the purpose of protecting against the dangers referred to: What is understood by the "moral point of view" is the network of attitudes we have to adopt to protect human beings from injuries that spring from the communicative presuppositions of their self-relation. Shorn of all negative determinations, the appropriate formulation now runs: Morality is the quintessence of attitudes we are mutually obligated to adopt in order to secure jointly the conditions of our personal integrity. This specification of the concept serves to take an Aristotelian reservation into account insofar as our notion of morality obtains a teleological character. The various attitudes, which together serve to constitute the moral point of view, are introduced with reference to a state that, from an objectifying perspective, is considered desirable because it indirectly serves human well-being. In the first step, it is thus—in contrast to the Kantian requirement of abstracting from all happiness (Gliickseligkeit)—a conception of the good that, though minimal, is clearly ethical, and it is according to this conception that the meaning and scope of the morally right can be ascertained (this being comparable to Seel, 1995, pp. 191 ff). The dangers of consequentialism or utilitarianism that accompany such a dedifferentiation of morality and ethics can, however, be controlled by, in a second step, facilitating the Kantian position a little more. Here, the basic idea is that it makes sense to distinguish between the objective function of moral attitudes as a whole and their practical justification in a specific case: True, a common understanding of morality follows for us from the radically external perspective from which we learn to conceive of it as a collective institution for securing our personal integrity. However, the justification of moral rights and duties in everyday action comes about with the help of universalizable "reasons" that refer to the claims or the well-being of other persons. What reasons we consider to be "good" when arguing with ourselves or with others for the purpose of resolving a moral conflict is determined according to the kind of relationship we enjoy with those concerned; and we are, as it were, continually informed of the "cognitive" latitude provided by the various kinds of relationships in rational weighing (Abwdgung) by the change to the objectifying perspective from which the "ethical" function of the particular relation of recognition becomes evident. To that extent, the moral modes that allow us to perceive people's claims as justified or unjustified do actually follow first from the anthropological determination of the function of morality. This determination circumscribes "externally," as it were, the various attitudes with regard to which we can mobilize "internally" normative reasons in order to justify, to ourselves or our partners in interaction, our conduct toward
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other people. To that extent, the notion that adopting the moral perspective serves to protect against moral injuries indicates the particular character and number of corresponding attitudes: Because, with these attitudes, the intersubjective conditions are to be secured under which human subjects can preserve their integrity, they have to consist in as many forms of recognition as there are types of morally injurious disrespect. That, in the process, moral attitudes themselves have to assume the character of forms of recognition depends upon the property of the conditions that are, as it were, to be created by them: Human subjects can develop an intact self-relation only by virtue of the fact that they see themselves affirmed or recognized according to the value of certain capabilities and rights. And that the number of modes of recognition corresponds to the number of forms of moral injuries previously distinguished follows from the common reference to the integrity requirements of human subjects: It is the same levels of the practical relation-to-self that can be injured by practices of disrespect, while they themselves are to be constituted by corresponding forms of recognition. If consequences are drawn from this line of thought, then it becomes evident that the moral point of view has to encompass not just one, but three independent modes of recognition: (a) With reference to the first level of its practical relation-to-self the individual is recognized as precisely this, as an individual whose needs and desires are of unique value to another person; for this kind of recognition, which has the character of affective concern (Zuwendung), concepts, such as "care" or "love," can be found in the tradition of moral philosophy—whereby these imply a conditional (because an emotionally bound) care for the well-being of the other for his or her sake. (b) With reference to the second level of its practical relation-to-self, the individual is recognized as a person who is ascribed the same moral accountability as every other human being; for this kind of recognition, which has the character of universal equal treatment, the concept of "moral respect" has meanwhile established itself in deference to the Kantian tradition—whereby this implies the categorical duty to recognize the accountability of all. (c) With reference to the third level of its practical relation-to-self, finally, the individual is recognized as a person whose capabilities are of constitutive value to a concrete community; for this kind of recognition, which has the character of a particular esteem, there are no corresponding moral concepts in the philosophical tradition, but it may well be a good idea to refer here to concepts such as "solidarity" or "loyalty"—whereby these imply here the conditional (because value-bound) care for the well-being of the other for the sake of our common goals. With these three forms of recognition, we have identified the moral attitudes that, taken together, constitute the standpoint whose adoption secures the conditions of
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our personal integrity. But the asymmetries obtaining between the individual forms, in respect of the scope of the relation of recognition, draw attention to a further difficulty: What in terms of moral action is demanded or expected here relates to a circle of subjects whose size varies with the type of recognition. Thus, the "conditionality" of the first attitude makes it clear that moral deeds of care may be legitimately expected of subjects only in those cases in which mutual bonds rest on an affective foundation; moral respect, on the other hand, designates a form of recognition that can be expected of all subjects equally; and in the case of esteem, finally, it seems to be the case that the moral action corresponding to it possesses an obligating character only within the framework of concrete communities. From this qualification, however, we can draw the paradoxical conclusion that the moral point of view describes a perspective that obligates the subjects to actions that differ according to the kind of intersubjective relationship. How the result, hinted at here, is to be understood more precisely will not, of course, become evident until the moral content of the individual forms of recognition are briefly considered in the final section.
V
The moral rights and duties that correspond to each of the three circumscribed forms of recognition follow from the specific structure of the relation-to-self which is, as it were, first to be created or strengthened by these forms: To recognize a subject in a certain aspect of its personal integrity cannot mean anything but carrying out those actions or adopting those attitudes which allow this subject to reach the appropriate understanding of its own person. By "duties" here we are to understand tentatively just that which—in terms of an internally sensed demand—we become aware of as a neglected part of our own personality when an already existing, or a potentially new, social relation experiences a crisis. However, what then the concrete duties are that I actually neglected in my interactive conduct follows only as the outcome of the moral deliberation in which I weigh "good" reasons in respect of a possible solution to the crisis. It is this internal link to particular duties or rights that make it at all possible to speak of a "morality" of recognition: The relations of recognition, which we have so far viewed in terms of the functional aspect of the constitution of practical relations to the self, are, by their very nature, so formed that they incorporate moral actions (Leistungen). From this vantage point, we can now see what the obligations representing the moral side of the individual relation of recognition have to consist in. Where it is that form of recognition through which the value of individual needs is affirmed, there are duties to care emotionally, that is, ones which apply in a symmetrical or an asymmet-
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rical manner to all partners in such a primary relationship; the typical case of an asymmetrical obligation here is the relationship of parents to their children; the typical case of a reciprocal obligation is represented by the relationship in a friendship. If it is, on the other hand, that form of recognition through which the moral autonomy of the individual is strengthened, then there exist reciprocal obligations of universal equal treatment; all subjects have the duty to respect and treat each other as persons to whom the same moral accountability is attributed. And where, finally, it is that form of recognition through which the value of individual capabilities is strengthened, there are reciprocal duties to demonstrate solidarity (solidarische Anteilnahme), ones which apply to all members of the corresponding value community; here, one may think of that kind of special consideration we owe to each other insofar as we participate jointly in the realization of a project. As is already becoming evident in this brief synopsis, the consequence of the moral theory developed here presents a notion that deviates from all traditional conceptions in one crucial point: Between the three modes of recognition, which taken together are to constitute the moral point of view, there cannot be a harmonious relation, rather, a relation of constant tension must obtain. True, according to what has been stated so far, the three patterns of recognition do indeed designate moral attitudes that cannot come into conflict with one another, insofar as they possess an obligating character solely within the framework of disparate forms of social relationships. But which of the various relations of recognition is to be preferred when they simultaneously raise conflicting claims—this cannot, from the perspective of the moral conception developed here, in any way be decided in advance. The moral point of view comprises of three moral attitudes which cannot, in turn, be ranked from some superior vantage point. To that extent, the entire domain of the moral is pervaded by a tension that can be resolved only in individual deliberation: In concrete situations, we are obligated to accord recognition in a mode that follows from the kind of social relationship, but in the case of conflict we have to decide according to different guidelines which of our bonds is to be granted priority. Of course, here, there is a normative restriction placed on such decisions, following from the universal character that the recognition mode of respect possesses; because we have to recognize all human beings as persons who enjoy equal rights to autonomy, for moral reasons we may not decide for social relationships whose realization would require a violation of those rights. This last reference indicates that, in two respects, a morality of recognition also follows the intuitions that have always prevailed in the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy: First, in the case of a moral conflict, the rights all subjects have to equal respect for their individual autonomy enjoy absolute priority. Second, however, in the case of such a conflict, a theory of morality can only describe the aspects that have to be considered in a rational procedure of moral deliberation—to that extent, even a
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theory of morality guided principally by Aristotle is basically proceduralist. However, with regard to the description of what constitutes the relevant aspects of such a conflict, the conception developed here differs considerably from all Kantian premises: It is not duty and inclination that normally confront one another, but rather various obligations, which without exception possess moral character because they lend expression to a different relation of recognition in each particular case. With this insight, it becomes evident that, in addition to the Kantian conception, the tradition of an ethics of care as well as communitarian models may claim a legitimate place in a morality of recognition: Each of these three traditions articulates one of the moral attitudes corresponding to the three forms of recognition with which we protect our personal integrity as human beings.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Alessandro Ferrara and Charles Larmore for valuable suggestions and criticisms, which I have not at all been able to take into account fully. Furthermore, I am grateful to Hilal Sezgin who helped me greatly while stylistically reworking the manuscript.
References Dillon, R. S. (Ed.). (1995). Dignity, character and self-respect. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Erikson, E. H. (1980). Identity and life-cycle. New York: Norton. Fichte, J. G. (1971). Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre. In I. H. Fichte (Ed.), Fichtes WerkeIII. Zur Rechts- undSittenlehre I. Berlin: de Gruyter. Habermas, J. (1990). Discourse ethics: Notes on a program of philosophical justification. In J. Habermas, Moral consciousness and communicative action (pp. 43—115). Cambridge, MA: M I T Press. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: M I T Press. Hardimon, M. O. (1994). Hegel's social philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1967). Hegel's philosophy of right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Hegel's phenomenology of spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1979). System of ethical life and first philosophy of spirit. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1983). Hegel and the human spirit: A translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6) with commentary. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
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Hirschmann, N. (1989). Freedom, recognition and obligation: A feminist approach to political theory. American Political Science Review, 83, 1227-1244. Hobbes, T. (1973). Leviathan. London: Dent. Honneth, A. (1995). The strugglefor recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Honneth, A. (1998). Die transzendentale Notwendigkeit von Intersubjektivita't. Zum Zweiten Lehrsatz in Fichtes Naturrechtsabhandlung. Unpublished manuscript. Margalit, A. (1996). The decent society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1973). A discourse on the origin of inequality. In J. J. Rousseau, The social contract and discourses {pp. 27-113). London: Dent. Seel, M. (1995). Versuch iiber die Form des Gliicks. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Siep, L. (1979). Anerkennung als Prinzip derpraktischen Philosophie. Untersuchungen zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des Geistes. Freiburg: Alber. Taylor, C. (1992). Multiculturalism and "The politics of difference." Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tugendhat, E. (1984). Antike und moderne Ethik. In E. Tugendhat, Probleme der Ethik (pp. 33-56). Stuttgart: Reclam. Tugendhat, E. (1986). Self-consciousness and self determination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tugendhat, E. (1993). Vorlesungen iiber Ethik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Williams, B. (1973). Morality and the emotions. In B. Williams, Problems of the self: Philosophical papers 1956-1972 (pp. 207-229). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981). Persons, character and morality. In B. Williams, Moral luck: Philosophical papers 1973-1980 (pp. 1-19). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wildt, A. (1982). Autonomie und Anerkennung. Hegels Moralita'tskritik im Lichte seiner FichteRezeption. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Wingert, L. (1993). Gemeinsinn und Moral. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.
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Contexts of Recognition—Comments on Axel Honneth's Moral Perspective Beyond Aristotle and Kant Micha Brumlik
The supposedly complete disjunction, familiar to us from the history of moral philosophy right up to the present time, of teleological (material) ethics and deontological (duty) ethics is—and this is Honneth's initial hypothesis—inadequate when we wish to explain everyday actions of people, insofar as they see these actions as bearing an obligation to a moral code. In particular, the Kantian ethic of duty is inappropriate to the complexity due to the extreme variation in people's expectations, obligations, and desires. Honneth draws attention to an ethical code of differing material values taken from, and operating in, people's ways of life. Disregarding this, it was possible to start with Aristotle from a concept of the greatest good acknowledged by everyone. The object of the author's endeavor, therefore, is the discovery of an alternative to teleology and deontology which integrates both of these most important standpoints. Before I elaborate on the exposition of this program, I would like to emphasize that Axel Honneth's methodical approach is anything but trivial, and what is more, that the conclusiveness of his program depends on the persuasiveness of his initial question. For this reason the alternative in question in "Beyond Kant and Aristotle" is necessary because Kantian moral theory does not adequately elucidate the moral code effective in normal life or—put more strongly—cannot explain its motivational force. The formulation of this question may well be particularly meaningful in face of empirically working moral psychologists—but it is another question whether it is indeed adequate to a theory of morality that can be justified as a norm. At the start of Honneth's reorientation there is an initialchange of perspective: Justification is replaced by explanation. This has to do with an "anthropological functional determination of the moral code." According to Honneth, "this outlines to a certain extent 'externally' the different respects, in view of which we are able to mobilize 'internally' normative reasons." Consequently, the task of justification of the moral code
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is replaced by a program of explanation. Thus, the "moral point of view" as such is abandoned. Of course, the program of explanation should not be worked out from a viewpoint of causality, but rather from a viewpoint of functionality, which makes it possible to fall into line with a material code of ethics—if only with respect to methodology. In so doing, Axel Honneth implements a second possibly more conclusive change of perspective than replacing the program of justification by the program of explanation. Whilst traditional—teleological and deontological—ethics raises the question, according to what duty or with respect to which good we are to act (a problem viewed within the scope of concerned and morally informed actors), what is of concern here is the question of the interest-guided ethical experience of the addressees of actions. "The discovery of an alternative in which both, that is, the Kantian and Aristotelian, are integrated into one way, with which we are able to live less divided is, in my opinion, the central task of a moral code." The situation addressed here is one of the interested participant and addressee who, in one point at least, is clear on what is good for him. With this, a third point of perspectival change is implemented: An functionalistic explanation takes the place of justification; an experience takes the place of a regulation of action; and the subjective experience of good takes the place of general experiences. A fourth point of change completes the transformation: The assumed connection between morality and acknowledgment, which indicates a broad consensus in the intellectual debate, articulated in the assertion that "what would matter is to secure the formal preconditions of individual striving for a good life, namely the multiple facets of personal identity." Stripped of all negative conditions, the corresponding formulation is, then, that "the moral code portrays the embodiment of the attitudes which we are mutually obliged to accept, in order to secure together the conditions of our personal identity." With this statement, the original task to explain morality would be solved. But are the four transformations comprehensible? Doubts remain. (1) The replacement of justification by explanation, whether causal or functional, cannot resolve problems of orientation. Further, it is not even necessary to point to the wrong naturalistic conclusion. Explanations refer to the past, whilst moral indicators refer to the present and future. (2) The replacement of a rule of action by an interested experience (something is good for me) must be understood within the framework of this program of explanation. If I know that something is good for me and if, from this experience, I may inductively conclude what may be considered good for others, I derive a hypothesis about a generalized motivational basis of basic expectations in social behavior. What is good for me should arise from an insight into the actual self-
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relationships regarding my body, my consciousness, and my social community. Morality is explained, when on the basis of these insights, I can produce the expectations that will motivate people to demand certain behaviors from others. The conventional question of the moral code (i.e., why we entertain the expectation that the behavior of others should correspond to our own behavior) remains unanswered. (3) However, it is exactly the empirical slant of this argument that impedes the desired generalization. Pursuing this line of argument, Honneth has the same difficulty arising from a prudential interpretation of Rawls' Theory of the Original Position. Even if it would actually be in my interest to be acknowledged by all others in my integrity on the basis of an insight into my self-relationships—how can it be guaranteed that this interest is also the interest of all others? (4) This objection can apparently be avoided by directing the view not to the interests themselves, but rather to their materially-formal prerequisites—that is, on the three forms of respect concerning body, soul, and community. These forms of respect are—as Axel Honneth finally concludes—anthropological determinants of the function of morality. The first thing that strikes me as debatable is whether a strict division between ideas of the good life and conditions of the good life can be upheld on this basis. Are the assumed conditions of the good life—recognition of the body, the soul, and the community of persons—just formal, or do they rather represent an expression of the conditions of a good life? Further, a second question arises: With what validity can we speak of an "anthropological" determinant of morality? What does "anthropological" mean here? The theories best confirmed by natural science on the function of moral-analogous behavior in higher primates—including the species of Homo sapiens—have been developed by sociobiologists, such as Richard Dawkins. They reach the conclusion that, from the viewpoint of spreading their own genotype, codes of behavior generally viewed as immoral are particularly functional. If this is not intended, then a theory that is just as rich, equally decontextualized, and just as amoral, must be formulated, for example, a sociological theory. In Honneth's proposal, such a theory is not presented. E. H. Erikson's psychoanalytic theory, shown to be highly dependent on culture, cannot fill this gap. Therefore, the required program could only be represented by a theory of moral knowledge that is both independent of culture and non-Darwinian, a theory corresponding to its behavioral disposition. However, the sceptical research presented in this volume regarding Kohlberg's theory has rocked the foundations of this very postulate. Referring to the organization of the content of the program—the differentiation of the three modes of acknowledgment and the obligations resulting from them, together with the proof of three practices, namely, love between parents and children,
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the practice of reciprocal respect in friendship, and the solidarity of members of a (moral) community, leave questions regarding their exclusivity and selectivity open. An anthropologically founded theory of recognition must first of all do without any further empirical saturation and differentiation of these types of relationships. However, we must ask the following questions: Can friendships not be asymmetrical in nature? How are we to understand erotic love? Should not increasing reciprocation be considered in parent-child relationships? What role do sibling relationships play? And, above all: Can it actually be shown for historical property-based communities that all members were linked by solidarity? If so, by mechanical or by real solidarity? An anthropological theory of recognition obviously operates on the variability of social reality with extreme idealizations, without making them particularly plausible. Finally, this theory seems to speak in favor of a juxtaposition of love, acknowledgment, and solidarity as components of the "moral point of view" with almost equal weights making it a refined instrument for the solution of various kinds of conflicts. However, concerning the ethical decision of the individual in possible conflicts, it seems that once again universal esteem derives neither from love nor from solidarity, but from respect for the autonomy of each individual as the decisive factor. Thus, the program delivers less an integration of teleological and deontological moralities than a phenomenology of moral conflicts, whose normative resolution will finally rest on the reciprocity-based acknowledgment of an autonomous individual. Love and solidarity may promote the development and the existence of the autonomous individual, but, normatively, Axel Honneth has considerably less confidence in these moral feelings than his theory suggests.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.
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Emotions and the Origins of Morality* Martha C. Nussbaum
I. The Shadow of the Object1 That night in Trinity College, when I dreamed about my mother, I saw her looking as she did when I was a child of two or three. In the intensity of my anxiety and love, I called her Mommy, a name I had not used since childhood. When, later, I saw her lying dead in the hospital bed, I saw, too, the many times that I had seen her lying asleep at home, in just that position, with just that lace collar around her neck. And even as my dream of her contained a desperate wish for her life and health, it also contained an anguished wish that I might give her some special happiness (in the dream, by saying something to please her that no one else had thought to say)—perhaps because that memory of her youthful face lay very close to two other memories, my earliest persisting memories from childhood. In one, I am playing with some older children, who are experimenting by poking a stick into a hole in the ground into which some insects have been flying. Suddenly
* This chapter is an extended version of Martha Nussbaum's original contribution to the Ringberg Conference on Morality in Context (1997). It was first published under the title "Emotions and Infancy" in Nussbaum, M. C. (2001), Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions (pp. 174-237), Cambridge University Press. Cross-references to other chapters in Nussbaum's book have been deleted in the present text. The editors are grateful to Martha Nussbaum and to Cambridge University Press for the permission to reprint the revised text in the present publication. 1 This phrase originates in Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" ("Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego ..."). It is taken as the title of Bollas (1987), to be discussed later in this chapter. This perception is shaped, in turn, by the emotional impact of Dickens's description of Steerforth in David Copperfield, as David "saw him lying with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school"—a description of the corpse that quotes an earlier description of the living man. When I saw how my mother's posture in death was so like her characteristic posture in life, that sentence came into my mind, and I could describe the scene in no other way.
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a fierce cloud of wasps swarms up out of the ground. The older children vanish. Terrified and totally bewildered, too small to run, I wail as loudly as I can, as the wasps sting me again and again. My mother runs to me from the garden, where she has been working, sweeps me up in her arms, and carries me home. I recall the feeling of rescue and comfort that came over me as she ran with me in her arms and I clung to her neck like a small monkey. This feeling of holding is with me at many times, especially when I am working by myself and when I am with someone I love. In the other picture, I am in the garden with her. I am very angry with her—I think because she is working and not paying attention to me. As she bends over to dig around a marigold, I bite her on the thigh. What I remember is the horrible black and bitter sensation of my own internal badness, of powers of destruction surging out of me that I had not known were there, a cauldron of corrosive liquid. I wept for my own blackness, my imperfect love. In my Trinity College dream, she looked just as she had looked that day in the garden—she was even wearing her gardening shorts; and I tried to please her. Then, when I awoke, I began to interrogate myself, asking whether my absence that day in Dublin was not at some level a kind of retribution for her early separateness in the garden. My grief therefore contained, as well, an anxious dialogue between the defense and the prosecution, between rational arguments assuring me that I had had no reason to expect a sudden complication, and voices of guilt, which accused me. Emotions, in short, have a history. In this case, it would not be possible to have an adequate understanding of my grief without grasping it as one strand in a history of deep love, of longing for protection and comfort, of anger at the separate and uncontrolled existence of the source of comfort, of fear of one's own aggression, of guilt and the desire to make reparations. The grief itself bears the traces of that entire history; those other emotions, lurking in the background, give it its specific content and cognitive specificity. And this is true not only of the later history of an early childhood relationship. For new objects of love and anger and fear bear the traces of earlier objects; one's emotions toward them are frequently therefore also, in both intensity and configuration, emotions toward one's own past. Proust's narrator, waking up in the night, feels a primitive longing for comfort that derives from his early childhood. In an attempt to mother himself, he presses his cheeks "tenderly" against the "comfortable cheeks" of his pillow, "as round and rosy as the cheeks of our childhood"—and thinks that it will soon be morning. "Soon someone will come to his aid. The hope of being comforted gives him the courage to suffer."
Proust, Du cote de chez Sivann (Paris; 1954 Gallimard edition), p. 10. The translations are my own. The Moncrieff/Kilmartin version oddly mutes the theme of comfort, rendering "lui porter secours" by "look after him."
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He now has a dream: sexually aroused, he sees a woman before him, and imagines that it is she who has caused his pleasure and his desire. He feels the warmth of his body mingle with hers; he feels the warmth of her kiss on his cheek, he feels his body pressed down by her weight. As he attempts to "become one with her," he awakes. By placing this dream near the opening of the Recherche, Proust draws our attention to what will be one of the narrative's central themes: the continuity of later loves with a childhood history of need and longing. The woman seen by Marcel is an adult woman, as he, both as dreamer and in the dream, is an adult man. And yet, even as his attempt to comfort himself before sleep contained images of childhood comfort, so here his longing bears the trace of a small child's longing: the strange woman kisses him on the cheek like a mother, and her posture, weighing him down, combines sexuality with the solidity and comfort of a maternal embrace. His ardent desire is for his body to "meet up with" the warmth of hers, to become fused with her. We know from this point on that what he will later call the "general form" of his loves points backwards toward the past, toward the solitary anxieties of the child who longs passionately for his mother's goodnight kiss, that "concession to my misery and my agitation"— and views her arrival with "utmost pain," since it is a sign that she will soon be departing. His insecurity and longing for comfort, his greedy desire to be held and immobilized—all this will mark his relationship with Albertine as surely as it here marks his dream of the unknown woman. Years later, needing Albertine's comfort and reassurance, he accuses her of lesbianism and tells her that he can no longer love her— all in order to bring about the tender scene that ensues, so deeply desired, so unsatisfactory, in which she holds him still in her arms, and licks slowly with her tongue the lips that refuse to open. Albertine is the victim of this history; for it is thanks to his past insecurity, as he here acknowledges, that he can never really attend to her as a person in her own right and can therefore never really love her.
Strictly speaking, the entire narrative is in the imparfait, and the experience of waking in the night is said to be followed sometimes by sound sleep, sometimes by nightmares of "childish terrors," and sometimes by this dream of erotic tenderness. Here I follow Moncrieff/Kilmartin rendering of "mon corps ... voulait s'y rejoindre." Du cote, p. 21, my translations. One of the desired effects of the mother's embrace is to blot out disturbing stimuli from the world around him; I go on to discuss this further. 8 Proust (Moncrieff/Kilmartin), 11.863. See Sodome et Gomorrhe (II.857-8 in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation), where the narrator ascribes to himself (in my own translation) "that binary rhythm that love adopts in all those who lack sufficient confidence in themselves to believe that a woman could ever love them, and also that they could really love her. They know themselves well enough to be aware that in the presence of the most varied women they would experience the same hopes, the
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The Stoics, categorizing emotions, omitted the past as a temporal category. Their taxonomy made no place for emotions directed at past events. More important, they also failed to give prominence to the way in which past events, especially events in infancy and childhood, influence present emotions. Here their too-intellectual brand of cognitivism prevented them from fully comprehending the specific cognitive content of the emotions. Much the same is true, I believe, of some prominent recent attempts to defend a cognitive account of emotion in philosophy, which sever emotions from their past and depict them as fully and reliably determined by present input about one's current situation. I shall argue, by contrast, that in a deep sense all human emotions are in part about the past, and bear the traces of a history that is at once commonly human, socially constructed, and idiosyncratic. I have spoken of emotions as urgent transactions with a changing environment. I have argued that we can understand both human and animal emotions to involve such transactions, mediated by a value-laden intentionality. Chapter 3 of my book a has added a social dimension to the account, while acknowledging that the social is always mediated by complex and highly varied personal processes. I shall now turn to those processes, focusing on human development. Understanding emotions developmentally will help us to complete the description of the revised neo-Stoic view. At that point, we will be in a position, too, to understand why some objections to cognitive views of emotion have force, and to argue that the
same fears, would invent the same stories, would say the same words; and thus they know that their emotions and actions are not in a close and necessary relation to the loved woman, but pass by her side, brush up against her, surround her like the tide that crashes along the rocks— and this awareness of their own instability increases still further their conviction that this woman, whose love they so much desire, does not love them ... [T]his fear, this shame, bring about the counter-rhythm, the ebb tide, the need ... to take back the offensive and to regain esteem and control." Some forms of modern cognitivism do include emotions, such as guilt and regret, which take a past object; my objection is to their failure to consider how present emotions are colored by the past. This dimension of emotions is omitted by both Lyons and Gordon, though not by de Sousa, whose account of "paradigm" scenarios leaves room for the introduction of the complexities of an individual history, though his book (1987) does not focus on that issue in the way I shall here. The absence of the past in Gordon's account is one reason why he has such difficulty distinguishing his computer from a person. Similarly Solomon, in thinking of the emotions in terms of existential value-positing, omits the past as a determinant of the present personality. (Sartre would surely have rejected the ideas I am developing as a form of bad faith that masks from us the extent of our freedom to posit value.) In another area of the subject, Pinker (1997) also has difficulty distinguishing the human being from a computer. See the similar observation in de Sousa (1987). lla SeeFn. * on p. 61.
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality present view is not vulnerable to such objections, precisely because of the way in which it incorporates a developmental dimension. I shall argue, then, that adult human emotions cannot be understood without understanding their history in infancy and childhood. For this history will bring to light both the responsiveness of the emotions—their appropriateness to the life of an incomplete creature in a world of significant accidents, their connections to the development of practical reason and a sense of self—and their frequent lack of responsiveness, their rigidity before present objects as they project the images of the past upon them. The child Marcel, in his mother's absence, amuses himself with a magic lantern that projects onto his wall images of his favorite stories, so that he sees his room as if illuminated by the presence of Golo and Bluebeard. Emotions are often like that magic lantern, coloring the room one is actually in with the intense images of other objects, other stories. This feature of emotion can lead into insight and deep love, as when childhood thoughts about the feelings of one's parents enable a person to understand the needs and wishes of an adult love, and childhood confidence in the parents' reciprocating love enables her to love an adult partner without suspicion. Not all failures to respond to the present evidence are normatively bad: no adult love would be possible without a degree of trust that goes beyond the evidence. But the same feature of emotion can also lead, as it does in the adult Marcel, to the absence of particular perception and love—or to a love that is the mask for a profound egoism, turned in on its own insecurities. When he sees the present through the lens of the past, he proves unable to accept any love that he cannot control. Clearly, then, any assessment of the emotions that intends to raise normative questions must investigate these developmental issues. We must ask, first, whether there are features of the typical human child's history that make its emotions intrinsically problematic from the ethical viewpoint, and, more generally, from the point of view of practical rationality. Second, we must ask whether there are other features of typical emotional development that offer assistance to ethics. Finally, we must examine sources of variation in development, individual and social, asking how and to what extent it is possible to encourage developmental patterns that are more supportive and less subversive of ethical norms. Investigating these issues will also help us to refine further the account of emotions, revising further the simple Stoic cognitive analysis of emotion. I shall argue that the cognitive content of emotions arrives embedded in a complex narrative history, without mentioning which one frequently cannot give an account of the full specificity of the emotion itself. I shall try to articulate these complexities here, sketching a general account of the roots of emotion in infancy and childhood that should also help us in analyzing particular emotion histories and understanding their variety. I shall put forward both a genetic thesis and a causal thesis: both that the emotions of later life make
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their first appearances in infancy, as cognitive relations to objects important for one's well-being, and also that this history informs the later experience of emotion in various specific ways. I shall then argue that these findings explain why emotions, though in their origin and in many ongoing functions adaptively rational, may frequently also be irrational in the sense that they fail to match their present objects, as they project the images of the past upon them. This rigidity has consequences, as well, for any attempt to become ethical or to produce children who are ethical; and I shall examine contrasting developmental patterns with a view to a set of highly general ethical aims. An investigation of these normative issues will suggest an important role for the imagination, and thence for narrative art, in the understanding of emotion, and in emotional development itself. My account of the development of emotion will be a philosophical account; I am neither an empirical psychologist nor a psychoanalyst. But the developmental aspects of the emotional life have been little treated by the philosophical tradition (although there are passages of deep insight in both Lucretius and Spinoza, on which I shall draw). Literature and psychology contain much that illuminates a philosophical account. Proust, here as elsewhere, will therefore play a major role in my account. Among the modern psychoanalysts I am most influenced by Donald Winnicott and the earlier theorists of the "object-relations" school, whose concerns complement and flesh out a neo-Stoic theory. Psychoanalysis has recently become more closely allied to experimental work than it was in its early years; two eclectic figures provide valuable links between clinical data and experimental studies: John Bowlby, with his insightful studies of attachment and loss, and Daniel Stern, with his experimentally
Among the object-relations theorists, I have been especially influenced by the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn (1952), as well as by Winnicott (1965,1986). Among more recent writers, I find valuable the account of the inchoate and archaic content of early cognitions, and of the longing for wholeness, in Christopher Bollas (1987); and the account of the questionable results of the pursuit of control and completeness in Nancy Chodorow (1978). Finally, concerns about the role of shame and its relationship to infantile narcissism are persuasively developed in Andrew Morrison (1989); although Morrison follows the self-psychology school of Heinz Kohut, rather than the object-relations school, in this case the two schools are very close in emphasis, and complement one another. Bowlby (1982, 1973, 1980). Bowlby s attachment theory is now supplemented and confirmed by Sarah Hrdy's work with primates; see Hrdy (1999). Bowlby s work is, like Fairbairn s, of considerable importance for Chodorows account; and Bowlby, unlike the more orthodox psychoanalysts, has been influential in cognitive psychology—especially in the work of Lazarus and Seligman; Oatley is unusual in cognitive psychology insofar as he draws on both Fairbairn and Bowlby—and also on the related anthropological work of Lutz. Bowlby's attachment perspective has continued to be fruitful in contemporary experimental work: see the very interesting defense of the perspective, and review of the literature, in Lopez and Brennan (2000).
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality informed reconstructions of the earliest stages of infancy and the infant's object world.14 The narrative I shall construct, focused on themes of ambivalence and omnipotence, is informed by the work of all of these thinkers, especially by Proust and Winnicott, but it is essentially an attempt to complete the articulation and revision of the neo-Stoic theory, before making the transition to normative analysis. Its aim is both to show how thinking about infant development helps us to construct a more complex and subtle view than is sometimes found in cognitive/evaluative accounts of emotion, and also, at the same time, to show how starting from a cognitive account gives us an illuminating angle from which to view some of the traditional concerns of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. It has become fashionable in the United States to sneer at psychoanalysis. In part this dismissive attitude results from the fact that Americans are generally impatient with complexity and sadness, and tend to want a quick chemical fix for deep human problems. There are, however, people who admire humanistic approaches to life when they are presented in literary or philosophical form (Proust, Plato), but who still react with suspicion to any mention of the names of Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott. In part, I believe, their skepticism stems from a view that these figures are pretend scientists, and simply don't measure up to a model of science set by the natural sciences. To them I simply want to say that I myself treat these figures as humanistic interpretive thinkers, very closely related to Proust and Plato, whose work gains texture and depth through having a clinical dimension—and, in the case of Daniel Stern and Bowlby, also an experimental dimension. And I would ask them to consider the possibility that Winnicott's perspective on human beings may be even more illuminating, ultimately, than that of Proust, whatever his genius, because Winnicott is simply a saner and more responsive person, more genuinely interested in human variety and interaction.
II. The Golden Age: Helplessness, Omnipotence, Basic Needs Human beings, like the other animals, are born into a world that they have not made and do not control. After a time in the womb, during which needs were automatically met, they enter the world, making, as Freud put it, "the step from an absolutely self-
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Stern (1977, 1985, 1990). It is important that Winnicott, unlike most other analysts, saw healthy children most of the time, since he was a pediatrician; so his sample is not skewed by the self-selection of patients who turn to psychoanalysis for treatment.
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sufficient narcissism to the perception of a changing external world and the beginnings of the discovery of objects." Human infants arrive in the world in a condition of needy helplessness more or less unparalleled in any other animal species. What they encounter is both alarming and delightful. As Lucretius puts it: the infant, helpless and weeping from the disturbance of birth, like a sailor cast forth from the fierce waves, lies naked on the ground, without speech, in need of every sort of life-sustaining help, when first nature casts it forth with birth contractions from its mother's womb into the shores of light. And it fills the whole place with mournful weeping, as is right for someone to whom such troubles remain in life. (5.222-7) A "gentle nurse" now calms the child with calm talk and caresses—as well as nourishment. The poet bleakly remarks that the rougher, better-equipped wild animals have no need of such soothing (229—30)—a claim not altogether true, as we have seen and shall see, but relatively true. The prolonged helplessness of the human infant marks its history; and the early drama of its infancy is the drama of helplessness before a world of objects—a world that contains both threatening things and good things, the things it wants and needs. The infant's central perception of itself, Lucretius suggests profoundly, is as an entity very weak and very powerless toward things of the greatest importance. Freud, noting the same facts, comments that "we cannot endure the new state of things for long, [so] that we periodically revert from it, in our sleep, to our former condition of absence of stimulation and avoidance of objects." But the infant is not altogether helpless. For from the first there are agencies in the environment that minister to its needs, supplying what it cannot supply for itself. These agencies therefore take on an intense importance in the infant's inchoate and as yet undemarcated awareness of the world. Its relationship to them focuses, from the first, on its passionate wish to secure what the world of nature does not supply by itself—comfort, nourishment, protection.
Some of the cultural biases of psychoanalysis are shown here: for Lucretius, with his own Roman upper-class bias, never supposes that the comforting and nourishing figure will be the infant's own mother, whereas all psychoanalysts with the exception of Chodorow—and Bowlby in some later work—simply assume that it will be. Recent thinkers in the attachments-tradition are much more flexible, taking cognizance of the findings in evolutionary biology that show that a certain degree of flexibility in attachment relations (an ability, for example, to thrive in day care) is crucial for a species that is going to survive. If human infants were hardwired to require a single mother attending them at all times, they acknowledge, the human species would not have survived (personal communication, Kelly Brennan; see also Hrdy [1999]).
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Lucretius presents a picture, not a theoretical account. But we may extrapolate an account from it. The resulting picture will differ in several ways from classic Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalytic accounts. The central difference is that the Lucretian picture makes the drama of infancy have little to do with sexuality per se, little even with pleasure per se, and nothing at all to do with innate aggression, as Klein would hold. (I shall return to this important issue later.) Instead, the drama has everything to do with what the ancient world called "external goods"—with the infant's relationship to objects of high importance. As we have seen, this is just the account of emotional development in animals on which cognitive psychologists have been converging. Both experimental and psychoanalytical work, as we shall see, gives it further support. Now, therefore, as I focus more closely on several aspects of the Lucretian infant, I shall begin to draw on some of this modern material. Lucretius' description points to three distinct facets of the infant's neediness, each of which appears to be irreducible to any of the others. If we consider these in turn, we will have a starting point for talking about the infant's emotions, which will be its recognitions of the importance of these external items. First and most obvious is the "need of every life-sustaining help," the basic bodily need for nourishment and care, communicated to the infant through its appetites of hunger and thirst. This has been emphasized in all discussions of infancy, and needs little further comment here. If we focus on the infant's evolving perceptions, we will see this need as both Lucretius and the modern psychologists present it—as a felt need for the removal of painful or invasive stimuli, and for the restoration of a blissful or undisturbed condition. The connection of this restoration with survival is important to the evolutionary account of the infant's development, and thus to the evolutionary significance of its developing emotions—as we have seen in reflecting about animal emotions. But this connection is not part of the infants own subjective awareness. The infants subjective perception of hunger is well captured by Daniel Stern in his metaphorical reconstruction of the "hunger storm" at the center of the child's being, which explodes within, giving rise to pulsing currents of pain, until the arrival of food calms the storm. It is fascinating to see Stern, in his effort to capture in words the quality of the preverbal child's experience, drawn to the very images of "storm" and "calm" that Epicureans characteristically use to capture the ways in which we are troubled by hunger and relieved by its gratification. 17
Stern (1990), pp. 23-43. See, for example, Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 128: as soon as a creature achieves a state free of disturbance or pain, "the entire storm of the soul is undone." Cf. Lucretius II. Iff.: happy is the person who watches others storm-tossed on the waves, while he himself is safe on the shore.
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These felt needs, as the infant's ability to perceive definite objects and to become aware of its own boundaries develops—and it is now clear that it begins to develop remarkably early in the first months of life —gives a central importance in the infant's "object world" to that or those object(s) who are perceived as the agents of this restoration of the world. Whether it is mother, father, nurse, or some other caretaker or caretakers who plays or play the primary role here, this restorative agency will at first be experienced by the infant not so much as a distinct object, but as a process of transformation through which the infant's own state of being is altered. For this reason Bollas speaks of the caretaker as a "transformational object," and perceptively remarks that much of a human being's subsequent history bears the imprint of early longing for this object, in the form of a desire for a "second coming" of that shift toward bliss, and for an object that can be its vehicle. Still in a state of "infantile dependence," the infant can do little to control the arrival of the transformational process, and its sudden arrivals and disappearances mark the infant's world as a chancy and unpredictable one, in which the best things arrive as if by lightning, in sudden penetrations of light and joy. Consider a myth that plays a central role in ancient accounts of emotion. It is, I think, best seen as an imaginative attempt to recreate this world of infancy. This is the well-known story of the Golden Age—an age in which people do not have to do anything for themselves, to labor, to act, to move here and there. For the earth itself brings forth nourishment exactly where they are. Rivers of milk and honey spring up out of the ground; in the mild climate there is no need for shelter. The people of this age, Hesiod remarks, lack prudential rationality—presumably because they have no need of thought. They live in a state of blissful totality. Stoics who repeat the story add that in this age "crime is far off": there is no aggression, because
See Stern (1985), Chapter 3; (1990), pp. 23-43. Stern's vivid depiction of the infant of six weeks, an attempt to encapsulate the current state of research in developmental psychology, ascribes to the infant perceptions of definite forms in space that stand out from others, and of patterns of sound, touch, and light that mark off one region from another. Between eight and twelve weeks, the infant becomes aware of the face, and begins to make eye-to-eye contact, treating eyes as "windows" to events of crucial significance for its world. By four months, the infant has highly complex social interactions with the closest people in its world, and has begun to be able, in part through awareness of its own voluntary responses, to demarcate self from nonself in a reliable way. 20 Bollas (1987), pp. 13-29. Fairbairn (1952) uses this term by way of contrast with "mature dependence," in which one acknowledges one's need of others but also recognizes and accepts their separateness; I shall return to this topic, and to the way in which Fairbairn connects it with a bold social-political thesis. 22 See Seneca, Medea, 329-30.
Emotions and the Origins of Morality everything is complete. What this myth describes is the omnipotence of the infant, its sense that the world revolves around its needs, and is fully arranged to meet its needs. But of course, as our Lucretian image lets us see, the infant's experiential world is from the very start unlike the world of the Golden Age. Perhaps, as Freud observes in our epigraph, rudimentary prebirth experiences give the infant a true Golden Age: hooked up securely to the sources of nourishment and comfort, the infant is indeed in a state of blissful totality. But birth disrupts all that, as Freud says, bringing the infant into a world of objects, in which it must depend on external things and persons for its survival. Thus, although at times the infant's world is a Golden Age world, these times alternate with times when the world is hungry, distressed, and in discomfort. The Earth does not give everything automatically, and the infant's world of sudden transformations is felt from the start as chancy, porous, full of uncertainty and danger. For this reason, the infant has a sense of its own helplessness, which gives rise to a need for comfort and reassurance that is not reducible to its basic bodily needs. Lucretius' image suggests this already, with its account of the nurse, who both feeds the child and calms it with soothing words and caresses. Early psychoanalytic accounts of infancy reduced all needs to needs for bodily gratification. A fairly early exception was Winnicott, whose concept of "holding" incorporates nutrition, sensitive care, and the creation of a "facilitating environment." As Winnicott remarks, a reasonably supportive "facilitating environment" is one in which the omnipotence of the infant (which is also to say, its total helplessness, which explains its demand to be at the center of attention) is met and acknowledged. Through an identification with the infant, the caretaker or caretakers know what it needs, and supply those things: not only food, but also sensitive interaction and comfort. Bowlby shows, similarly, that we should think of the need for security as a distinct need, and think of the infant's attachment to its caretaker or caretakers as having these two distinct aspects, which may in principle be separated. Experiments with monkeys suggest, he argues, that animals who are well fed from a hard prickly mechanical device still need to cling to something soft and comforting and to be caressed. If this need is not met, the infant grows up with severe behavioral disabilities; it fails to develop the kind of confidence in its environment that makes normal cogI choose these odd locutions—making the subject the infant's experience-world rather than the infant—to remind the reader that the infant does not yet, in the first eight weeks of life, begin to experience itself as a definite subject. Compare Stern (1990), Chapter 3. See the summary in Bowlby (1973); Chodorow (1978), p. 72ff., contains a good account of the issue.
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nitive functioning and acting possible. A n d if this need is met, b u t by a figure w h o is n o t identical with the source of nourishment, the m o n k e y will attach itself far more firmly to t h e comfort source than to the nourishment source. Given the choice between a hard mechanical food source and a soft cuddly non-nourishing object, t h e monkeys spend a very short time getting t h e necessary food from t h e food source, t h e rest of the time clinging fast to t h e soft cuddly object. Bowlby makes a very convincing case for seeing t h e need to be held and comforted as a part of our c o m m o n primate heritage, highly adaptive in evolutionary terms as a source of protection from danger. Clinging is a pervasive feature of infant primate life; the main difference in t h e h u m a n case is that the h u m a n infant is so physically immature at birth that it cannot initiate contact o n its o w n , b u t must rely on the agency of its sources of transformation. As Winnicott says, " T h e infant w h o is being held ... is n o t aware of being preserved from infinitely falling. A slight failure of holding, however, brings to the infant a sensation of infinite falling." This acute helplessness makes m u c h room in its life for uncertainty, anxiety, a n d rage. T h u s Proust's narrative of the self-comforting that precedes sleep gets at something that is deep n o t just in h u m a n life b u t in t h e development of animals as well. T h e need for "soulagement" against the painful intrusive stimuli of a strange world is an independent a n d very powerful need, in some ways even more powerful, as a b o n d between infant a n d adult, than the b o n d of nourishment. As biologist Sarah H r d y puts it, " H u m a n infants have a nearly insatiable desire to be held a n d to bask in the sense that they are loved." T h r o u g h holding, the infant becomes willing to live in the world, develops the conviction that the world is sufficiently benign, despite its dangers, to support its o w n active efforts. T h e idea that o n e is n o t completely helpless, that one's demands will meet some response from the environment, is an essential foundation of all learning. In early infancy, when action is more or less impossible, the passive experience of receiving comfort removes the incipient sense of helplessness. In the light of this, Bollas's picture of the "transformational object" acquires n e w depth a n d corn-
Again, I note that these experiments are morally controversial, since some of them did produce psychotic monkeys who were unable to lead a normal life. Bowlby (1982); and on attachment as a basic element in primate behavior, see Hrdy (1999). 27 Winnicott (1965), p. 113. 28 Hrdy (1999), p. 493. Bowlby persistently downplays the dangers, suggesting that an infant who is properly cared for by its mother will see the world as perfectly benign and have no anxiety. This is implausible—and, as I shall argue, it would also mean disaster for the child, who needs to learn how to get around in the actual world.
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality plexity: for this object now does far more than minister to bodily need. It makes a world worth living in. Many accounts, whether experimental or clinical, assume that care will be given primarily by a single figure, who is assumed to be the mother (although Winnicott stresses that this is a generic term, intended to include fathers as well, insofar as they play the standard maternal role). Experimental evidence shows that infants can recognize a particular caretaker almost immediately: at only three days, an infant is already able to discriminate the smell of its own mother's milk on a breast pad from the smell of another mother's milk, and will turn to its own mother. In general, the ability to recognize a particular caretaker and to develop a strong and exclusive attachment is a surprisingly early and pervasive feature of primate life. But the object of the infant ape's affections may be its mother, or a male, or another female, or even a human researcher—who may be either female or male. Bowlby speaks at times as if the reliable presence of the child's own mother is essential for good emotional health, and he seems to suggest that any other child care arrangement is a dangerous thing for very young children. But his data show something much weaker: that human infants, like those of other primates, need security and stability in their environment, and need, for this purpose, the ability to recognize and enjoy the comfort of one or a small number of reliably caring individuals. As our knowledge both of primate cultures and of other human cultures expands, Sarah Hrdy points out, we have come to see that secure attachments may be nourished in many different ways; children raised by multiple
30
Stern (1985), p. 39. Bowlby (1982); he observes that this ability is also evident in birds, but that here it has no evolutionary significance for the human case, since birds and humans diverged at the point of common reptile ancestry, where there seems to have been no such ability. See in this connection Bowlby's story of Dr. Z, who, during the absence of the researcher originally in charge of a young chimpanzee, became that ape's favored and beloved object from then on. 33 See Chodorow (1978); Hrdy (1999), pp. 485-581; Lopez and Brennan (2000). Hrdy points out that the idea of a "critical period" of bonding immediately after birth has long since been revised: data show that such "imprinting" occurs in sheep, but that primates are far more flexible. In human subjects, where the mother is not already at risk for abandoning her child, a period of separation after birth does no harm (pp. 486—8). The mother-separated children studied by Bowlby are of three sorts: children displaced to the country because of the war, children who suffered an early bereavement, and children of poor families who were in institutions because of the mother's need to work. All three situations deprived the children of stable and constant care. Surprisingly, Bowlby never considers the fact that in the England of his time, privileged children were rarely raised by their own mothers—and yet presumably the constancy of the nursery relationship led to an outcome different (torn those he describes.
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caretakers can be just as secure, or "if anything more so," than children raised by a single mother. As the relationship between child and caretaker(s) develops, it is important that the caretaker(s) show sensitivity to the child's particular rhythm and personal style, which Stern calls a "dance." The balance between indifference and intrusiveness, attention and the giving of space, must be struck in the right way, or the result will be an inability to trust. Winnicott plausibly argues that this balance can be best struck by a person who has a good imagination and who is able to identify with the child in fantasy. Stern's photographic studies of mother-child interactions reveal the subtle interplay of eyes and face that characterize most such relationships—and also show how the relationship can go awry, through excessive intrusiveness, overstimulation, or depressive neglect. I now turn to the third aspect of the Lucretian child's experience. It is introduced by the beautiful phrase "into the shores of light," in luminis oras. This phrase lets us see that the world into which the child arrives is radiant and wonderful, claims its attention as an object of interest and pleasure in its own right. (Later on, in the context of describing our fear of death, Lucretius speaks of the pain with which people leave "the sweet light of life," dulcia lumina vitae.) The wonder and interest of the world are too little stressed by psychoanalysts, who are usually stricter Epicureans than Lucretius himself, portraying the infant's basic tendencies as directed toward the removal of pain and disturbance alone. But Aristotle got it right: the interest in cognitive mastery is a part of human infants from the start of life. Thus Stern, drawing on recent experimental work, stresses the infant's intense interest in cognitive stimulation and its surprisingly mature early ability to make distinctions. It is now clear, for example, that extremely young infants seek out intensity of light, and turn their attention to the brightest or most intense stimulation in their world that is not actu-
Hrdy (1999), p. 495, speaking of the Aka and the Efe, "where infants from birth are passed among multiple caregivers with whom they become very familiar and are quite at ease." Stern (1977); see especially the chapter "Missteps in the Dance." Kurtz's account of large Indian working families reminds us, however, that a familiar middle-class American norm, where the mother spends much of the day cooing to her baby, is not necessary for psychic health, and may even at times conduce to excessive intrusiveness: see Kurtz (1992). (On the cover of the book is a photograph, taken by Kurtz, of a mother sitting on the ground cleaning lentils, while her baby, on her back, looks over her shoulder and another young child plays on the ground at her feet.) 37 Stern (1977). Lear (1990) appears to be an exception, since he speaks often of the sufficient lovability of the world, and even argues that there are signs of this view in later writings of Freud. 39 Stern (1985, 1990).
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality ally painful. This tendency is extremely valuable in helping it begin to sort out the world. In a related way, Winnicott draws attention to the importance of the child's creative impulse, its delight in initiating imaginative activity. Indeed, quite apart from this evidence, we need to posit an original need for cognitive distinction-making, and an original joy in sorting out the world, in order to explain why infants get going and pursue projects of their own in the uncertain world. For if the only positive value with which they invest items in their environment is instrumental value toward the removal of some negative condition, then it should be as Epicurus says: when once pain and disturbance is undone, "the animal has no need to go off anywhere." But animals initiate projects of their own. In human animals the independence from mere self-protection of curiosity, cognitive interest, and wonder is especially apparent, and essential to explain initiative and creativity.
III. Early Emotions: "Holding," Love, Primitive Shame Where in all of this do we find emotions? At first, as I have said, the infant has no clear sense of the boundaries of self and other. It experiences mysterious transformations, and it does not yet trace them to a distinct external origin. We have the roots of the emotions already, in the inchoate sense that some processes of profound importance to one's being are arriving and departing in a way that eludes control. Emotions are recognitions of that importance coupled with that lack of full control. This means that they develop gradually, as the infant becomes more and more cognizant of the importance of the transformations to its being, and of the fact that they arrive, so to speak, from outside. When they are traced to a definite agency, and when that agency is to some extent distinguished from the self, the emotions will be provided with an object. The earliest emotions are likely to be fear and anxiety, when the transformation is temporarily withheld, joy when it is present, and increasingly, as time goes on, a kind of hope for its blissful arrival. Love is not yet fully present, insofar as the infant is as yet
See Stern (1990), p. 17ff., where the infant stares with fascination at a patch of sunlight on the wall, and, in Stern's metaphorical recreation, the sunlight is a moving, dancing magnet drawing the child's attention—until the child, seeking new stimulation, turns to the exploration of the adjacent patch of wall. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 128, on which see Nussbaum (1994), Chapter 4. Cf. Wittgenstein (1967), p. 469: "One might observe a child and wait until one day he manifests hope; and then one could say 'Today he hoped for the first time'. But surely that sounds queer! ... And why queer? ... Well, bit by bit daily life becomes such that there is a place for hope in it."
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unable to conceive of the caretaker as a whole person with a separate career in space and time. But a kind of rudimentary love and gratitude are involved in the awareness that others aid it in its attempts to live (Spinoza's definition of love). At the same time the infant has an incipient kind of wonder and delight at parts of the world that are not related to its own states. These parts of the world include persons and parts of persons, toward whom wonder and gratitude may be profoundly interwoven. At this point (in the first few months of life) the infant has no clear sense of external objects as persisting continuous wholes, nor of itself as a distinct whole and persisting substance; its thoughts about objects and about self are less definite. Insofar as emotion has an object it may be a region of the world, or, a bit later, a part or stage of the caregiver, not the caregiver as a complete person. How are these emotions connected to the child's appetites? The fact that an infant is a needy appetitive creature, whose earliest and most intense news of the world comes in part from its own appetites, is a central part of the story of its developing emotions. Many of its most intense concerns revolve around getting fed, and at first its anxiety and its hunger are hard to distinguish, a general turbulence that seeks pleasure in the Epicurean sense, an absence of disturbance and pain. On the other hand, the need for security and holding is distinct from the need for appetitive gratification; this distinctness manifests itself increasingly, as the child becomes increasingly aware of sources of comfort in its world. Nor, I have argued, is the pursuit of cognitive mastery reducible to appetite satisfaction. But this pursuit provides the child's inner life with emotions, such as wonder, that are nonegoistic and even, to some degree, non-eudaimonistic; it also infuses the structure of the other emotions, giving object relations a noninstrumental and even non-eudaimonistic aspect from the start, and allowing the child to take its own emotional states as objects of curiosity. If gratitude is present in a rudimentary form, in the thought that others aid it in its efforts to live, then, by the same token, anger should be present in a rudimentary form, in the thought that others sometimes fail it in its efforts to live. As Spinoza stresses, a dependent being who sees itself as such will experience both love and anger toward the agencies on which it depends. The infant does not yet understand, however, that love and anger are directed toward the same source. Indeed, its uncertainty about the boundaries of self and other may make it unclear about whether the source of frustration is in or outside of itself. It may develop a vague sense that there are bad and good agencies that are somehow parts of its own self, and it may confusedly direct anger against these parts as well as outward, or fail to make this distinction. Such
This is the basic idea behind the elaborate accounts of "introjection" and "splitting" in Kleinian psychoanalysis; the basic idea, if not all of the elaborate superstructure, is endorsed by
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ambivalence may possibly arise in the lives of some nonhuman animals; but the human child's unique combination of cognitive capacity and bodily incapacity gives rise to an equally unique emotional complexity. Anger understood in this way is not an innate instinct of destruction: it is a reaction to one's life situation. As Fairbairn, Bowlby, and other object-relations theorists argue, we have no need to introduce a de-structive instinct to explain infant behavior, and much reason, in the infant's primary clinging and comfort-seeking behavior, to refuse to introduce it. On the other hand, the process of development entails many moments of discomfort and frustration. Indeed, some frustration of the infant's wants by the caretaker's separate comings and goings is essential to development—for if everything were always simply given in advance of discomfort, the child would never try out its own projects of control. On the other hand, the infant can hardly be in a position to comprehend this grand design. Its posture is one of infantile omnipotence, in which the entire world revolves around its wants. Any failure on the part of the caretaker to fulfill those wants will lead to reactive anger, as if (to put it in prematurely complex terms) some right of its own had been slighted. Another way of putting this point is Seneca's: in the Golden Age "crime is far off," and greed and anger are absent—because the world operates to fulfill people's every want in advance. But, as we have insisted, our world is not and never was that world. The child's evolving recognition that the caretaker sometimes fails to bring it what it wants gives rise to an anger that is closely linked to its emerging love. Indeed, the very recognition that both good things and their absence have an external source guarantees the presence of both of these emotions —although the infant has not yet recognized that both take a single person as their object. This anger will soon produce a crisis in the infant's life. But we can already observe that the nature of parental holding itself affects the child's situation as the crisis
Fairbairn as a reasonable way of making sense of the rudimentary nature of emotions at this stage. Contrast Klein (1984, 1985) on the death instinct; she derives this idea from Freud (1920). See also Bollas (1987), p. 29: "Transformation does not mean gratification. Growth is only partially promoted by gratification, and one of the mother's transformative functions must be to frustrate the infant." Compare Seligman (1975) on the importance of learning that voluntary responding can control the environment. This is well captured in Freud's famous (if sexist) phrase, "his majesty the baby"—endorsed minus the gender narrowness by both Fairbairn and Bollas. 47 Fairbairn (1952), p. 171 ff. See Spinoza's account of love and hatred. Here and elsewhere I will sometimes use this term without qualification, but it should be understood that I refer to the child's primary caregivers, whether or not they are its parents.
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approaches. Winnicott draws attention to the way in which holding that is "good enough" permits the child to be at one and the same time omnipotent and utterly dependent, both the center of the world and utterly reliant on another. The parents' (or other caregivers') ability to meet the child's omnipotence with suitably responsive and stable care creates a framework within which trust and interdependence may thus gradually grow: the child will gradually relax its omnipotence, its demand to be attended to constantly, once it understands that others can be relied on and it will not be left in a state of utter helplessness. This early framework of steadiness and continuity will provide a valuable resource in the later crisis of ambivalence. On the other hand, to the extent that a child does not receive sufficiently stable holding, or receives holding that is excessively controlling or intrusive, without space for it to relax into a relationship of trust, it will cling, in later life, to its own omnipotence, demanding perfection in the self and refusing to tolerate imperfection either in object relations or in the inner world. These ideas receive a fascinating development in the fragment of a lengthy analysis by Winnicott posthumously published under the title Holding and Interpretation. The patient B, a young male medical student, suffered from an inability to be spontaneous or to express any personal thought. In the presence of others, he could not initiate either conversation or activity, and he was found extremely boring. The petrified and lifeless persona he presented to others was an attempt to maintain omnipotent control over his inner world, by constant vigilance over language and thought. During the analysis, it emerged that B had suffered from rigidly anxious and unresponsive parenting in early life. His mother required perfection of herself, and in-
See Lopez and Brennan (2000) and Hrdy (1999) for the same points established experimentally, using a Bowlby-inspired attachments theory. Winnicott (1986), with a piece of the early part of the analysis, published as an article in 1972, appended to the text. The patient was nineteen at the time of the beginning of his first analysis; he was referred by his mother, herself in analysis with Winnicott. He made a good recovery. Eight years later Winnicott wrote to the mother to inquire about B's progress; he interviewed her, and she described the pathologies in her own maternal care that she had by then discovered in her own analysis. Some time later the young man, now a medical intern, had a breakdown and was hospitalized. Winnicott looked him up, and the patient began analysis a week later. During the last six months of the analysis, Winnicott wrote down his extensive notes after five crucial sessions, stating that, though difficult, it was not impossible to remember what had transpired. Fourteen years after the completion of the second analysis, Winnicott wrote to B to ask how he was doing; he had done well in both life and work. Winnicott (1986), p. 10: the patient's symptom was a fear of annihilation as a result of satisfaction itself, as if, once he finished feeding, he had no way of knowing that the good things
Emotions and the Origins of Morality terpreted any neediness on the part of the infant as a signal that she had not achieved the desired perfection (which she saw as commanded by a quasi-paternal idealized husband). (Winnicott notes that the mother's tendency to idealize her husband implied that she did not love him. "[N]ot being concerned with a real person, she emphasized the quality of perfection.") As B makes contact with these memories of a holding that was stifling, the patient gradually becomes aware of his own demand for perfection in everything—as the corollary of his inability to permit himself to be a needy child. Because his mother wanted perfection (which he felt as a demand for immobility and even death), he could not allow himself to be dependent on, or to trust, anyone. "Imperfect for me means being rejected," he finally tells Winnicott. And then: "I feel that you are introducing a big problem. I never became human. I have missed it." Signs of humanness were rejected by his mother, who, because of her own anxiety, was pleased only by a quiet perfect baby. Already in the first months, then, the character of parental care and "holding" shapes the child's attitude toward its own human neediness—either creating the sense that human neediness is all right, and that its helpless body is a source of pleasure and concern—or, on the other hand, sending the message that perfection is the only tolerable state and that anything else will be repudiated. In our terms, what has happened to the early emotions of this unfortunate man? First, the dynamics of both love/gratitude and anger have been thrown off by his inability to trust that he is being held, that his mother wants to hold and care for a dependent needy baby. A feeling of "infinitely falling" lurks in the background. This feeling gives rise to an especially intense anger, and a possessive love that brooks no human reality. (In this the patient resembles Proust's narrator.) The patient so fears his own anger that he frequently makes himself fall asleep. As Winnicott says to him, "there is very great hostility wrapped up in this sleepiness." Second, for this reason
would ever come again. The interpretation of B's early life that was developing in the analysis was confirmed by Winnicott's interview with his mother, during which she told Winnicott about material she had discovered in analysis with another analyst. As she reported to Winnicott during their interview, she became aware of a rigid demand for perfection in her maternal role and of a refusal to tolerate the separate life of the child: she understood perfection as a kind of death of the child, in which he would have nothing more to demand. Notice that B's mother is in many ways similar to George Pitcher's mother, as he describes her in Pitcher (1995), and produces some of the same emotional problems in her son. The mother emerges as an anxious but by no means passive figure: one gets the impression that she is flamboyant. In his last letter to B, responding to the news of the mother's death, Winnicott writes, "She was indeed a personality." 54 Winnicott (1986), p. 96. Ibid., p. 172. See also p. 163: "The difficulty is the fear of the anger."
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the play of wonder and curiosity has been arrested: the creativity that grows in a context of trust and holding has never matured, and the patient's way of presenting himself is stilted, rigid, entirely impersonal. In a personal relationship, imperfect things might happen, but the patient's way "makes it all impersonal, and there is no excitement or anger or elation, and I do not want to get up and hit you." This rigid impersonality, in turn, marks his relations to other people: one constant feature of the analysis is the patient's inability to describe his wife or any other person, and his frequent inability to use people's Christian names. Winnicott tells the patient that in a real personal relationship there is an element of "subtle interchange": this was lacking in his early relationship with his mother, and his sleepiness expresses hopelessness about finding such a relationship anywhere. The patient responds with real excitement: "I must have been aware of the idea of a subtle interchange because I recognize that I have been looking for just something like that, without really knowing it." Winnicott points out that he has just been achieving it: "We are both engaged in this matter of subtle interplay. I think that the experience of subtle interplay is pleasurable to you because you are so vividly aware of hopelessness in this respect." The patient responds: "I would go so far as to say that it is exciting." Love, concludes Winnicott, means many things, "but it has to include this experience of subtle interplay, and we could say that you are experiencing love and loving in this situation." Finally, we notice that there is another primitive emotion that dominates this patients entire existence: it is the emotion of shame, connected to the very fact of his own humanness. All infant omnipotence is coupled with helplessness. When an infant realizes that it is dependent on others, we can therefore expect a primitive and rudimentary emotion of shame to ensue. For shame involves the realization that one is weak and inadequate in some way in which one expects oneself to be adequate. Its reflex is to hide from the eyes of those who will see one's deficiency, to cover it. If the infant expects to control the world, as to some extent all infants do, it will have shame, as well as anger, at its own inability to control. Notice, then, that shame is far from requiring diminished self-regard. In a sense, it requires self-regard as its essential backdrop. It is only because one expects oneself to have worth or even perfection that one will shrink from or cover the evidence of
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Ibid., p. 123. See ibid., p. 96: "I do not know if I could describe her. I have tended to assume you are not interested in her as a woman. Also I always have a difficulty in describing people. I never can describe a personality, the colour of people's hair, and all that sort of thing ... I am always reluctant to use Christian names ..." For fundamental discussions of shame, see Morrison (1989), Piers and Singer (1953). See the perceptive discussion in Deigh (1996), pp. 226-47.
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one's nonworth or imperfection. To the extent that all infants enjoy a sense of omnipotence, all infants experience shame at the recognition of their human imperfection: a universal experience underlying the biblical story of our shame at our nakedness. But a good development will allow the gradual relaxing of omnipotence in favor of trust, as the infant learns not to be ashamed of neediness and to take a positive delight in the playful and creative "subtle interplay" of two imperfect beings. Winnicott's patient's mother, instead, believed that all that was not perfect was worthless, and that her child was worthless just by virtue of being a child and wanting to be held and comforted. "Imperfect for me means being rejected." His crying, his demands to be fed, all these signs of his human nakedness were so many signs of worthlessness in her own eyes. The good feeding, as he understood, would be one that blotted him out completely. (Thus he dreams of being smothered by his mother's hair.) "There is only one way of achieving anything," he concludes, "and that is by perfection." B therefore becomes obsessed with the way in which others will look at him, wanting them to see him as perfect, and knowing that if they see the real him they will not see perfection. His rigidity, his unwillingness to express himself, are attempts to maintain omnipotent control over his inner reality, so that he need not feel the shame of allowing his needy dependent self to emerge. Sleep is a defense against anger—but it is also the reflex chosen by his shame lest some human part of himself be revealed. A baby asleep is a good and perfect baby, and this is what his mother had wanted. Shame, then, causes the real vulnerable self to hide, the robotic and inauthentic "false self" to come to the fore. Recognizing that he had also expected perfection in Winnicott, and prompted by the analyst's gentle reminder that this idea is a defense against anxiety, the patient remarkably states, "The alarming thing about equality is that we are then both children and the question is, where is father?" Here he arrives momentarily at a position of trust and playful holding that many children attain in infancy.63 This case shows us the extent to which the infant's ambivalent relation to its own lack of omnipotence can be shaped for better or worse by interactions that either exacerbate primitive shame or reduce it. A primitive shame at one's weakness and impotence is probably a basic and universal feature of the emotional life. But a parent who
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Winnicott (1986), p. 97. See ibid., where he describes wanting women to look at him as a perfect lover, and giving up in despair when he realizes that he is seen as human. 62 Ibid., p. 95. ' Compare ibid., p. 147, where the patient gets angry at Winnicott and says he is like "the ogre of childhood play." Winnicott expresses pleasure: "So you have been able to reach play with me, and in the playing I am an ogre."
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takes delight in having a child who is a child, and who reveals in interacting with the child that it is all right to be human, eases the ambivalence of later object relations; B's mother so exacerbated primitive shame that the real man was obliged to go underground, his place to be taken by a simulacrum, or by prudent sleep. "A feature of excitement," says B, "is irritation that it is not private ... I have always had a difficulty that in sexual relationship with a girl there is no privacy, because there are two people. It is undesirable.' (Proust would, perhaps, agree.) Shame, of course, comes in many forms. Any ideal to which one holds oneself has shame as its permanent possibility. What I have termed "primitive shame"—the demand for perfection and the consequent inability to tolerate any lack of control or imperfection—is a specific type of shame, closely connected with narcissism, or infantile omnipotence. I have said that all human beings very likely have this emotion in some form. Doubtless, too, it is renewed and deepened by awareness of one's own mortality, when that awareness comes. Nobody wants to be condemned to die, and everyone would like to exert control over death; yet, of course, we are all powerless to do that. In that way the body may come to be a primary focus of primitive shame, as the seat of our inability to master the world and to go on living. But if these developments are in some form universal, B's history shows an exaggerated and paralyzing hypertrophy of both shame and the narcissism (demand for omnipotence, grandiosity) that is its counterpart. As Morrison nicely expresses the point, "Thus, shame and narcissism inform each other, as the self is experienced, first, alone, separate and small, and, again, grandiosely, striving to be perfect and reunited with its ideal." By focusing on B, whose shame was closely related to his mother's demand for perfection, we have so far concealed other sources of individual and social variation in primitive shame. Psychoanalytic accounts of these issues typically focus on the role of parents, although they do not always exclude other variables. But we can easily see that there are many issues that might contribute to a hypertrophy of the sense of shame. One issue is physical disability. C, a child of my acquaintance, combined precocious cognitive gifts with a right hemisphere dysfunction that affected spatial perception, motor coordination, and the ability to adjust to new physical surroundings. We might say that C is doubly human: more cognitively able at an early age than most humans,
Ibid., p. 166. Compare the experimental data in Lopez and Brennan (2000), concerning the relationship between early attachment problems and inability to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, particularly in romantic life. Morrison (1989), p. 66. See also Wurmser (1981) with numerous detailed clinical studies; Chapter 1 has the title, "Shame, the Veiled Companion of Narcissism." Compare Lopez and Brennan (2000) on the influence of a variety of life events on the development of secure attachments.
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and much more physically helpless. The extent of this discrepancy was striking: C learned to read before the age of two, and learned to tie her shoelaces at the age of eight. I Q tests showed, similarly, off-the-chart gifts in verbal and conceptual skills, mild retardation in spatial and physical skills. To the infant C, the world is more than typically alarming; it impinges on her in ways that she cannot control, and, with her highly acute cognitive capacities, she is especially keenly aware of these impingements. This is a set-up ripe for the development of an unusual degree of shame about one's capacity for mastery. Cognitive gifts help, and the drive to cognitive mastety was unusually strong in C. One day Henny Wenkart, an authority on the teaching of reading who knew C's mother, gave the mother a copy of a reading instruction manual she had just published. On its cover was a picture of the author, sitting and reading with a young child. C, just under two, already fluent in the alphabet, kept coming to her mother with this book, which clearly fascinated her. "Teach me, Mommy, she kept nagging,"—and then, when her mother capitulated—"I'll be Henny Wenkart, and you be the child." This game continued until, after a very short time, C could carry on reading on her own. Notice the significance of C's choice of roles: she wanted to be the teaching adult, in control of the cognitive process, rather than the vulnerable child she felt herself to be. Reading was for her a passport to that ideal of control. When asked, at age six, to make up a story about the creation of the world, she wrote that the world was created from a book. And indeed, for her, this was so. But all that cognition can do is insufficient to dispel the accurate perception that one cannot move the way other people move, cannot find one's way from here to there the way other people do, cannot learn to ride a bicycle, and so forth. All human bodies are limited, and all give rise, in that sense, to some shame. But a body that is relatively so much more limited than others disproportionately gives rise to shame. So shame, present for C already, grew in her life in a virtually unavoidable way. The fact that peers tease uncoordinated children only exacerbated her problem. Thus, as with any disability, the biological and the socially constructed interact in an extremely complex way. 67 In C's case, then, we see an etiology of shame different from that of B. Nor did it lead to the same result, since C had many more emotional resources than B, formed richly loving relationships, and had a rich inner world of imagination and creativity. Nonetheless, exaggerated shame caused her pain. More generally, in a world made for the normal, any child who is in any way non-normal is at risk for shame hypertrophy,
See the excellent account of this interaction in Berube (1996), a moving account by a social constructionist literary critic, of the life of his son, born with Down Syndrome.
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particularly if the culture is intolerant of difference, as most cultures, especially child cultures, are. Another source of difference in shame may come from the fact that cultures impose different ideals on different children. In some cultures, for example, males may be expected to show perfect control and mastery to a greater extent than females—in a way that produces at least some of B's rigidity and inability to play or engage in "subtle interplay." Elsewhere, little boys may be encouraged to play and explore the environment while little girls are treated as future brides and carefully guarded as they lead an indoor life. (When I encountered such girls in rural Rajasthan, India, they proved rigid in their attitude toward schooling, and had a very hard time learning to tell stories and engage in imaginative play.) Thus we need to think resourcefully about the issue of primitive shame, seeing the many different types of influences that may combine to augment it. So far, then, we see emotions—not formal acceptances of propositions, but inchoate cognitive appraisals—arising out of the infant's developing awareness of the uncertainty of the good and its own lack of omnipotence. Now I shall argue that emotions, so construed, are essential to the development of practical reason and the sense of self; that they bring problems to the moral life, but also substantial resources without which that life would be drastically incomplete.
IV. Disgust and the Borders of the Body There is another related emotion that we must now consider: the emotion of disgust. Disgust arrives somewhat later than primitive shame; it seems to be absent from children until the time of toilet training; so in considering it we are to some extent getting ahead of our developmental account, which is still focused on the first two years of life. But because disgust has a close relationship to shame's concerns about bodily insufficiency, and because these links are important, we must introduce it here. Disgust appears to be an especially visceral emotion. It involves strong bodily reactions to stimuli that often have marked bodily characteristics. Its classic expression is vomiting; its classic stimulants are vile odors and other objects whose very appearance seems loathsome. Nonetheless, important research by psychologist Paul 68
See Nussbaum (2000), Chapter 1. See Nussbaum (1999) for a more extended analysis, and related social/legal reflections. By "classic," Rozin and I mean both that these are ubiquitous occasions of disgust and also that these are the central paradigm cases to which people typically turn in explaining disgust or why a particular thing is disgusting.
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Rozin has made it evident that disgust has a complex cognitive content, which focuses on the idea of incorporation of a contaminant. His core definition of disgust is "[r] evulsion at the prospect of (oral) incorporation of an offensive object. The offensive objects are contaminants; that is, if they even briefly contact an acceptable food, they tend to render that food unacceptable." Rozin does not dispute the idea that disgust may well have an underlying evolutionary basis; but he shows that it is distinct from both distaste, a negative reaction motivated by sensory factors, and (a sense of) danger, a rejection motivated by anticipated harmful consequences. Disgust is not simple distaste, because the very same smell elicits different disgust reactions depending on the subjects conception of the object. Subjects sniff decay odor from two different vials, both of which in reality contain the same substance; they are told that one vial contains feces and the other contains cheese. (The real smells are confusable.) Those who think that they are sniffing cheese usually like the smell; those who think they are sniffing feces find it repellant and unpleasant. "It is the subject's conception of the object, rather than the sensory properties of the object, that primarily determines the hedonic value.' In general, disgust is motivated primarily by ideational factors: the nature or origin of the item and its social history (e.g., who has touched it). Even if subjects are convinced that ground dried cockroach tastes like sugar, they still refuse to eat it, or say it tastes revolting if they do. Nor is disgust the same as (perceived) danger. Dangerous items (e.g., poisonous mushrooms) are tolerated in the environment, so long as they will not be ingested; disgusting items are not so tolerated. When danger is removed, the dangerous item will be ingested: detoxified poisonous mushrooms are acceptable. But disgusting items remain disgusting even when all danger is removed. People refuse to eat sterilized cockroaches; many object even to swallowing a cockroach inside an indigestible plastic capsule that would emerge undigested in the subject's feces. Disgust concerns the borders of the body: it focuses on the prospect that a problematic substance may be incorporated into the self. For many items and many people, the mouth is an especially charged border. The disgusting has to be seen as alien: one's own bodily products are not viewed as disgusting so long as they are inside one's own body, although they become disgusting when they leave it. Most people are disgusted by drinking from a glass into which they themselves have spit, although they are not sensitive to saliva in their own mouths. The ideational content of disgust is that the self will become base or contaminated by ingestion of the substance that is viewed as
Rozin has published many articles on aspects of disgust, but a comprehensive account of his views is in Rozin and Fallon (1987). 72 Ibid., p. 24, n. 1.
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offensive. Several experiments done by Rozin and colleagues indicate that the idea involved is that "you are what you eat": if you ingest what is base, this debases you. The objects of disgust range widely, but Rozin has confirmed experimentally that "all disgust objects are animals or animal products," or objects that have had contact with animals or animal products—a major source being contact with "people who are disliked or viewed as unsavory." It is difficult to explain why plant products (apart from decayed or moldy specimens) are not disgusting, but research suggests that the movitating ideas have to do with our interest in policing the boundary between ourselves and nonhuman animals, or our own animality. Hence tears are the one human bodily secretion that is not found disgusting, presumably because they are thought to be uniquely human, and hence do not remind us of what we have in common with animals. Feces, snot, semen, and other animal bodily secretions, by contrast, are found contaminating: we do not want to ingest them, and we view as contaminated those who have regular contact with them. (Thus "untouchables," in the Indian caste system, were those whose daily function was to clean latrines; oral or anal reception of semen, in many cultures, is held to be a contamination and a mark of low or base status.) Insofar as we eat meat without finding it disgusting, we typically disguise its animal origin, cutting off skin and head, cutting the meat into small pieces. Rozin tentatively concludes that the core idea in disgust is a belief that if we take in the animalness of animal secretions we will ourselves be reduced to the status of animals. We can extend this thought by adding, along lines suggested by Rozin's research, that we also have disgust reactions to the spoiled or decaying, which, on this picture, would make us mortal and decaying if ingested. Disgust thus wards off both animality in general and the mortality that is so prominent in our loathing of our animality. Indeed, we need to add this restriction in order to explain why some aspects of our animality—for example, strength, agility—are not found disgusting. The products that are the ones that we connect with our vulnerability to decay and to becoming
Some people find okra disgusting, and it has been suggested that this may be because it has what seems like a mucuus membrane and thus strikes them as animal-like. This reaction seems less prevalent in cultures where okra is typically stir-fried so as to lose its mucosity (it is, for example, a staple, in this form, of Indian cuisine). Rozin and Fallon (1987), p. 28, citing Sherry Ortner. Ibid., citing research by A. Angyal. When we do not disguise the meat—roasting a whole lamb, eyes and all, on a spit, or serving a pig with the head intact and an apple in its mouth— there is typically an air of macho bravado attaching to the gesture, as when hunters display the head of a quarry as a trophy, expecting to shock and a little disgust the faint-hearted. (In that sense, the famous and much-discussed Playboy "beaver hunters" cartoon strikes deep to the roots of misogyny, with its picture of a woman splayed across the roof of the hunters' car in the manner of a deer.)
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waste products ourselves. Thus in all cultures an essential mark of human dignity is the ability to wash and to dispose of wastes. (Rozin points to analyses of conditions in prisons and concentration camps that show that people who are forbidden to clean themselves or to use the toilet are soon perceived as subhuman by others, thus as easier to torture or kill. They have become animals.) A prominent feature of disgust is the idea of "psychological contamination." The basic idea is that past contact between an innocuous substance and a disgust substance causes rejection of the acceptable substance. This contamination is mediated by what Rozin, plausibly enough, calls laws of "sympathetic magic." One such law is the law of contagion: things that have been in contact continue ever afterwards to act on one another. 77 Thus, after a dead cockroach is dropped into a glass of juice, people refuse to drink that kind of juice afterwards. A second is "similarity": if two things are alike, action taken on one (e.g., contaminating it) is taken to have affected the other. Thus, a piece of chocolate fudge made into a dog-feces shape is rejected, even though subjects know its real origin; subjects also refuse to eat soup served in a (sterile) bedpan, or to eat soup stirred with a (sterile) flyswatter. These reactions are at one level irrational; and they display an error that mars many emotions: the object is identified, it would seem, at the wrong level of generality, and thence linked with objects from which it is crucially different. But while we can call this tendency irrational if we like, we must recognize that it is in two ways quite functional. In evolutionary terms, overgeneralization about what objects to avoid no doubt served to steer our ancestors more successfully away from truly dangerous items. As Nietzsche long ago said, a species that refused to overgeneralize, investigating each particular object precisely before any generalization, would probably have perished long since. And even in contemporary terms, it appears that a firm and overgeneral bounding off of the self from the disgusting serves to reassure the self about its own solidity and power. That is why disgust tends to spread itself so promiscuously over people and groups, as we shall see. Disgust appears not to be present in infants during the first three years of life. It is taught by parents and society. This does not show that it does not have an evolutionary origin; many traits based on innate equipment take time to mature. But it does show that with disgust, as with language, social teaching plays a large role in shaping the form that the innate equipment takes. Usually this teaching begins during toilet train-
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Rozin and Fallon (1987), citing T. Despres. This law has a positive side, in our eagerness to possess or even just to touch objects that have been the property of celebrities, to sleep where they have slept, etc. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 111-12.
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ing; ideas of indirect and psychological contamination are usually not firm until much later. Both parental and social teaching are involved in these developments. (The disgust levels of children correlate strongly with those of their parents, and disgust objects vary considerably across cultures.) Disgust, as Rozin says, is an especially powerful vehicle of social teaching. Through teaching regarding disgust and its objects, societies potently convey attitudes toward animality, mortality, and related aspects of gender and sexuality. Although the cognitive content and aetiology of disgust suggest that in all societies there are likely to be certain primary objects of disgust—feces and other bodily fluids—societies have considerable latitude in how they extend disgust reactions to other objects, which objects they deem to be relevantly similar to the primary objects. Thus, although it seems right in a sense to say that there are some "natural" objects of disgust, in the sense that some broadly shared and deeply rooted forms of human thinking are involved in the experience of disgust toward primary objects, many objects become objects of disgust as a result of highly variable forms of social teaching and tradition. In all societies, however, disgust expresses a refusal to ingest and thus to be contaminated by a potent reminder of one's own mortality and animality. Our child, then, absorbs from toilet training and related social teaching some definite attitudes toward her own bodily wastes and toward other related substances. Disgust plays a valuable role in motivating the avoidance of genuinely harmful substances, and it does appear to have an evolutionary basis: so it would not be wise or perhaps even possible to bring up a child to lack it altogether, although both parents and societies can surely exercise great influence over its intensity and its manifestations. In this way, another root of conflict arises in the child's life: for her own body now seems to her problematic, the source of vile substances. She learns to some extent, in some way, to cordon herself off against the decaying and the sticky in herself, and she comes to see herself in a new way as a result. A ubiquitous reaction to this sense of one's own disgustingness is to project the disgust reaction outward, so that it is not really oneself, but some other group of people, who are seen as vile and viscous, sources of a contamination that we might possibly keep at bay. Misogyny has been an especially potent instance of these projection reactions, as have anti-Semitism and loathing of homosexuals. For now, however, our child, as she becomes toilet trained and moves into her peer group, will start thinking about cooties, and who has them. By the age of six or so, she will target other children who are in some way different, saying that they have cooties. She will make paper cootie-catchers, and pretend to catch disgusting bugs on the bodies of these children. In that way, she will create an in-group
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See Rozin, Fallon, & Mandel (1984).
Emotions and the Origins of Morality and an out-group, the out-group serving to reassure the in-group that they are one step further away from being disgusting (oozy, sticky, decaying) themselves. With disgust as with primitive shame, our ambivalence about our bodily makeup, its helplessness and its connection to mortality and decay, color the emotions of the child's developing social life, sowing the seeds of some tenacious moral and social problems.
V. Playing Alone, the Ambivalence Crisis, and the Moral Defense We now return, however, to our somewhat younger child. The people of the Golden Age were, as Hesiod puts it, nepioi-'mfantile, lacking speech and reason. This condition fit their blissful environment. For they did not need to learn to protect themselves, to farm or search for food, to form societies, even to speak. They did not even need to learn to move from here to there: for just as they were, they were complete. Closely connected to this is the fact that they are without the emotions of the ordinary infant. It is not only anger that they lack, lacking frustration; they also fail to have that infant's joy, insofar as they fail to conceive of the objects that fulfill their needs as external, and the transformations as taking place from outside their own wishes. And of course fear and anxiety will be absent from a life that knows no threat of pain. It was all right for the people of the Golden Age to be emotionless, since that condition was suited to the world in which they lived. But in our world emotions are needed to provide the developing child with a map of the world. The child's emotions are recognitions of where important good and bad things are to be found—and also of the externality of these good and bad things, therefore also of the boundaries of its own secure control. Fear and joy and love and even anger demarcate the world, and at the same time map the self in the world, as the child's initial appraisals, prompted by its own inner needs for security and well-being, become more refined in connection with its own active attempts at control and manipulation, through which it learns what good and bad things are parts of its self, or under its control, and what are not. Among these external good and bad things it also learns that some are inert objects and some are endowed with their own agency. A child who does not learn fear is a child at risk; even anger is, I have suggested, a valuable effort to seize control and to
Ages given for the recognition of ambivalence vary widely, from the second half of the first year to several years later; I shall be thinking of the crisis as occurring when the child is around two, but I don't think that the precise age is very important for the overall account.
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assert the integrity of damaged selfhood. This emotional demarcation is adaptively valuable, teaching the child the importance of its boundaries, and rescuing it from a sense of helpless passivity before the world. The infant we imagined had an inchoate awareness of self as various transforming processes, of others as parts or agents of such processes. As emotions and efforts at voluntary control develop in tandem, the picture of a substantial self develops more and more, as that of a container with boundaries, fortified against but also seeking the aid of the external world. Of course the self never is self-sufficient; and the images that the Stoics like to use—images of roundness, hardness, impermeability—are not only inaccurate images but also quite dangerous images for someone whose life is carried on in a world full of actual dangers and urgent needs for goods. Winnicott's patient B learned such ideas of the self: the tightly controlled impermeable persona, the body asleep. One task of this phase of development will be to accept images that permit trust and vulnerability. On the other hand, it seems to be essential to the child's growing ability to think and to act that it think of itself as a relatively enduring and stable thing in a not-toohostile world, and that it become confident that it can achieve things on its own. It is at this stage that Winnicott revealingly introduces the concept of the child's ability to "be alone in the presence of mother," occupying itself with its own projects rather than constantly seeking comfort. His idea is that the sense of the self, and especially any inner depth or creativity in the self, require a sense of safety that is not always being reinforced by the physical holding of a caretaker. In order for this sense of safety to emerge, the child must be able to feel held even when not being physically held: she must come to feel that the environment itself holds her. At first, this environment is supplied by the presence of the parent, available in case of need but not making demands. Secure in that presence, the infant can relax and turn inward, discovering her own personal life. As time goes on, real physical aloneness is increasingly possible: but, as Winnicott stresses, physical aloneness is not sufficient for "the capacity to be alone," which requires trust and confidence, and the ability to be preoccupied with one's own
In this connection, Aristotle's insistence that anger is not over just any damage, but always over something felt as a "slighting," begins to seem deep rather than narrow. For anger is not a reaction to just any bad event, but to one touching on what the person perceives as his or her sphere of value, things she would like to have go well and to some degree control. Thus the prompting event always has an aspect of invasion, the response an aspect of self-vindication and the affirmation of one's own boundaries. 82 Winnicott (1965), pp. 29-36. At this point, it seems neccessary to supply the child with a gender since I shall go on to mention gender differences in development.
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality thoughts and one's inner life. (Only in analysis did B acquire the sense that he could be alone, since previously his inner world had been an object of shame.) The personal kind of aloneness is always inherently relational: someone else is always there, and it is from the shadow of the early holding object that creative aloneness derives its richness. "A large number of such experiences form the basis for a life that has reality in it instead of futility." This is the basis of the memory I recorded at the opening of this chapter, in which the thought of my mother holding me was continuous with later feelings of personal joy and reflection. Another valuable concept Winnicott introduces is that of the "transitional object," such as a blanket or stuffed animal, through which the child assuages her need for reassurance without needing to seek the presence of the parent. She thus increasingly becomes—as in Proust's narrative of adult sleep—her own parent and her own reassurance. Both the concept of playing alone and the concept of the transitional object give a crucial role to imagination. Just as the parent exercises imagination in responsively meeting the child's needs, so now the child plays at being her own solace, imagining a safe world in the absence of visible sources of safety. To a certain extent, then, the child's emotions, if things go well, evolve in relation to an environment that is relatively stable, which provides spaces for the development of wonder and joy, as well as stable love and gratitude. But of course no such environment is completely stable, nor can it be, if the child is to learn to be active and independent. Caretakers must come and go, support the child and allow her to fend for herself, so that, through her evolving emotions of fear and joy, she will learn how to get around in the world. So the child is always inhabiting a world that is both safe and dangerous, aware of herself as both hard and terribly soft, both able and unable to rely on receiving nourishment and security from her caretakers. This intermittance of care, and the intermittance of safety that results, is an essential part of becoming able to live. Before long a time comes when the child, further cultivating her imagination of absent possibilities, recognizes that the very same objects who love and care for her also go away at times and attend to other projects, heedless of her demands. Even as she gradually forms the conception of herself as a definite persisting substance, so she realizes that her caretakers or parents are such substances, that she depends on them, and that they are not in her control. This means that love and anger come to be
Winnicott (1965), p. 126: the patient says that he feels that "the barrier" is "almost broken through," and that this means that he is no longer so worried about how to occupy the time, he doesn't feel the same pressure to fill it up by "idle chat," and he is more willing to sit with nothing to do. Winnicott replies: "You are telling me that for the first time you might be able to be alone, which is the only satisfactory basis for making relationships." 85 Winnicott (1965), p. 34.
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directed to one and the same source. As Bowlby puts it: "Thus love, anxiety, and anger, and sometimes hatred, come to be aroused by one and the same person. As a result painful conflicts are inevitable." This is a pivotal stage in the child's emotions. For she now really has love for the first time—if we think of a recognition of the separateness and independence of the object as a requirement of real love. But this love is colored in its very genesis by a profound ambivalence. (This ambivalence seems not to be present in the attachments of young animals of other species, who are far less physically helpless and also far less capable of these integrative perceptions.) Still unable to accept the separate life of the caretaker, still intensely needy even while more cognitively mature, the child feels that very separateness as a cause for furious anger. Anger, which previously was inchoate rage directed at the frustrating processes or parts of the world, now becomes fullfledged and takes a person as its object, seeing the person as a blameworthy agent of damage. This anger, as Bowlby correctly emphasizes, is itself ambivalent, for it is mixed up with the wish of love to incorporate and possess the needed object, and the anger itself may be used as a device of control. In consequence, next to anger we now also have on our hands the emotion of jealousy—the wish to possess the good object more completely by getting rid of competing influences, the judgment that it is very bad that there should be these competing influences and that it would be good for them to vanish from the earth. And jealousy, which has the caretaker as its focus, is next-door to envy, which takes as its focus the competing objects who for a time enjoy the caretaker s favor—especially other siblings, and the lover or spouse of the primary caretaker—or their love for one another, if both are primary. In envy the child judges that it would be a good thing for her to displace the competing objects from their favored position. It is here, as Fairbairn convincingly argues, that we should locate the Oedipus complex. For at this early stage, rather than finding an emotional drama that revolves altogether around specifically sexual needs and aims, we seem to find instead a more inclusive family of emotions connected with the child's desire to possess and control,
Bowlby (1973), p. 253. This stage is a central focus of object-relations psychoanalysts, including Fairbairn and Bollas. Klein already gave a good account of this phase, although she was, I think, in error to explain it with reference to an innate "death instinct" of aggression. 9.7
See especially Fairbairn (1952), p. 175, where he notes that the child may have ambivalent relationships of love with both parents, and then may "constitute] the Oedipus situation for himself" by focusing on the exciting aspects of one parent and the rejecting aspects of the other. In drawing this constructed situation together with other forms of envy and jealousy, I am, however, going well beyond Fairbairn, who still stays more or less within orthodox psychoanalytic confines in his account.
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality her inability to renounce omnipotence. We find jealous hatred of those who compete with her for the attention of the one(s) she loves, and whom she wishes to possess completely; and we also find the envious wish to displace those competitors from their favored positions. Rather than being abour sex per se, this drama is about the infant's object relations more generally—her need for sustenance, security, and love, her unwillingness to accept the separateness of the source of these good things, and her primitive shame at the fact of her own needy incompleteness. It is difficult to say precisely where sexuality itself fits into this drama, and I believe it is not possible to make convincing arguments on this score in universal terms. In all cultures, of course, sex can figure as an element in the competition, as sexual needs and sexual intimacy remove the beloved object from the infant's control. And the infant's own nascent sexuality can become a device through which she seeks to compete with her rival or rivals. Beyond this, however, a great deal depends upon culture: on the degree to which dwelling patterns have made the infant aware of sexual activity, on the intensity of the bonds within the family unit, and on the degree to which culture and the individual family have saturated the child's experience with intimations of sexuality. We should not assume that the intense and often highly eroticized bonds of the Western nuclear family are ubiquitous, and Stanley Kurtz's work on India has given us at least some reason to think that they are not. Similarly, the fact that ancient Greece knew nothing of the Oedipus complex is best interpreted not as a failure to grasp what lay at the roots of their own experience, but as a sign that they had different patterns of emotional development (almost never seeing their fathers, for example), in which jealousy and envy took slightly different forms. In the case I have described, my intense and eroticized love for my father was an extremely important part of the picture somewhere along the line. It would be difficult to say (and certainly memory does not say) whether my anger at my mother in the particular case was occasioned by competition for her attention against other distractions (her gardening, my father), or whether it also involved an element of competition with her for the
Proust draws our attention to these facts by pointing out that Marcel's mother's idea of a good bedtime story for an anxious boy of around twelve is George Sand's Francois le champi, a sentimentalized tale of virtual incest in which a foundling infant is raised by a young wife whose boorish husband he later displaces. The novel contains scenes that closely resemble scenes that Marcel enacts with his mother or other women; and it ends with an incestuous triumph, as Francois actually marries the woman who raised him. Just as Francois, at age twelve, implores his guardian for a goodnight kiss and, receiving it, weeps tears of bliss, so too Marcel learns to demand a maternal kiss, and to experience a temporary cessation of anxiety. 89 Kurtz (1992). 90 See Nussbaum (1993).
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attention of my father. But both sorts of anger could certainly be found in my childhood. What I am claiming, however, is that the most powerful and to some degree universal element in this phase of development is ambivalent love/anger, attended by shame and envy. Whether and to what extent these emotions are sexual in the narrow sense, or involve a specifically sexual jealousy, will vary across societies and individual cases. 91 This jealousy and anger grow out of the asymmetry of need that characterizes the child's relationship with her caretakers: for the child now realizes that she depends almost totally upon a person or persons who do not need her at all, who can walk away at any time, leaving her immobilized and helpless, and who indeed at times choose other relationships. The object of Oedipal envy is, then, anything that competes with her own need. Very often this may indeed be the other parent, but it may equally well be siblings, or any person or activity to which the caretaker is passionately devoted. The object of Oedipal shame will be the child's own needy self, seen as insufficient for the omnipotent control of the object. Shame and envy are closely connected, since primitive shame involves the judgment that anything short of perfection is hideous, and this entails that any life in which the child shares the good object with others is unacceptable. The child can renounce envy only if she is able to tolerate living in a world in which others make demands on the good object, and these demands are granted legitimacy. But these demands will not be given legitimacy if the situation of being partial and incomplete is itself felt as shameful, and perfect control is the only acceptable goal. Another way of putting this is to say that the "subtle interplay" characteristic of mature love permits the other to be independent, and takes delight in that independence; it thus works in favor of the renouncing of envy. But "subtle interplay" will be rejected by the child who is profoundly in the grip of the demand for perfection, since only a complete manipulation of the object will stave off shame. (Proust's narrator is never so happy as when he has turned real people into literary characters, thus succeeding in the primitive wish to incorporate and control the good objects. It is only toward literary characters, he tells us, that we can have love without jealousy and envy. He can love real people without jealousy only when they are asleep.)
There is also the issue of age: object-relations theory posits ambivalence at an earlier stage of development than the original Freudian Oedipus complex; one will then have to ask what the child could be aware of, and how. Winnicott recognizes both a two-person relation of ambivalence at a very early age, and a triangular relationship of jealousy/ambivalence at a later age. On the asymmetry of need, see Bowlby (1982), p. 196, and Chodorow (1978).
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Before we describe the "ambivalence crisis," let us recall some resources the child has by now acquired to meet it. First, she has nascent love and gratitude, now directed toward a whole object. If early holding has been successful, she has developed an increasingly subtle interplay with the object, which contains elements of trust and willing self-exposure. Second, she has curiosity about the world, combined with wonder and love of what is seen. Third, through her capacity to be alone and her play with transitional objects, combined with the subtle interplay she has developed with her caretaker, she has a nascent ability to imagine. In particular, by this time she is likely to be able to imagine the suffering of the good object. I knew that my bite had hurt my mother; I learned this by the kind of exercise my capacities got in periods of both solitary and interactive play, as I sang songs and told stories involving the experiences of others. (The impulse of wonder and the ability to imagine another's pain work closely together, since wonder turns the child outside herself to involve her with lives she doesn't know.) This development of imagination requires that the child not be unduly focused on primitive shame, an emotion that paralyzes play and cultivates rigidity. Consider again Winnicott's patient B. He had to make himself sleep so that he would not show any playfulness, or weakness, or anger. This pathological situation resulted from his inability to be imperfect, which paralyzed all three of the resources I have just described. He could not be alone or play. Preoccupied with being seen as imperfect, he had to go into hiding. Nor did he have much wonder and delight at the world: he could not attend to people as interesting in their own right, because he was so busy hiding his true self from discovery. Finally, his nascent capacities for love and gratitude were also stifled, since he could not trust another to see him, and therefore could not develop with them the subtle interplay that is characteristic of love. As we shall see, this meant that he lacked resources for an adequate confrontation with the ambivalence crisis. Let us now describe the crisis, as it might occur in a child who has had a more fortunate development. It is nonetheless a painful and terrifying crisis. First, the child feels the pain of frustrated need itself, and the corrosiveness of the accompanying anger. But, given that the child now knows that the object of her anger and the object of her love are one and the same, awareness of her angry wishes will also bring the pain of guilt, an emotion that is now felt for the first time. My memory of biting my mother is as vivid as it is because of the tremendous upheaval occasioned by this early experience of guilt—which involves the judgment that there are parts of oneself that are very bad, and have done bad things. My horrible feelings arose out of the awareness that the very person who had saved me from the wasps was the one whom I had bitten; this meant
Disgust also inhibits empathetic imagining: not in general, but in relation to the experience of any person who becomes its object.
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that my own love was tainted with badness. Finally, there will also be a powerful emotion of primitive shame, reflecting the fact that one has been imperfect, and thus fallen short of one's aims and wishes, which continue to retain traces of infantile omnipotence. The degree and nature of this shame will vary with the extent to which the child's first relationships have prepared her to take delight in her own humanness. At first it may be impossible for the child to accept the co-presence of goodness and badness in herself, or to conceive of any way in which the badness can be discharged. This complex situation leads to grief, and to what Klein revealingly calls "the depressive position," a position that is at least temporarily that of psychological helplessness. For the child has in a very real sense experienced a profound loss—of the totality of its world of bliss, of the pure goodness of the object of its love, of the full attention and love of that object, and, finally, of its own full goodness and purity. The world is no longer a golden world punctuated by moments of external danger. Danger is now seated at the heart of love, and of oneself. At first, it would seem that there is nothing to be done about this situation; one is, quite literally, helpless before the nature of one's wishes. On the other hand, the child now has resources to meet this crisis. She has gratitude and love, which involve wishing well to the parent who cares for her and holds her, and a subtle interplay with the parent's expressions of concern. She has wonder and curiosity about the parent as an independent part of the world, which already renders her love partly noninstrumental and even, to some extent, non-eudaimonistic. And she has the ability to imagine the parent's pain (indeed, this ability explains why her suffering and guilt are so intense). These capacities suggest a strategy, which she will increasingly follow: to wipe out bad things with good things, damage with loving deeds. A crucial part of this strategy of "reparation" is the acceptance of proper boundaries to one's demands, as the child understands, and shows increasingly in her acts, the fact that she lives in a world in which people other than herself have legitimate demands, in which her own needs are not the center of the universe. In other words, catapulted into a kind of rudimentary thought by the pain of having injured someone she loves, the child comes up with the ideas of justice and reparation. Gratitude and wonder already turn the child outward to some extent. But it seems plausible to suppose that much of the intensity and urgency of its transactions with others is fueled by the sense that something very bad must be atoned for; and this means that the very badness itself can be made a source of good.
On this stage the observations of Klein (1984, 1985) are especially valuable. This is a very important contribution of Klein (1984, 1985), whose powerful intuitive grasp of human situations here goes beyond the limitations imposed by some aspects of her theoretical structure.
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What is remarkably suggestive about this line of thought is that it shows that the ambivalence of human love—which might at first be thought to be a bad feature of our difference from the animals—may also be an important source of the intensity and creativity of human love, the terrifying moment of discovering one's own impurity the source of a genuine turning outward toward the recognition of another person's needs. As Fairbairn perceptively notes, this rudimentary moral idea that one can pay back the bad with the good comes as an enormous relief to the child, who would otherwise be condemned to live with the awareness of a kind of limitless badness in herself. He speaks of the so-called moral defense as follows: It is obviously preferable to be conditionally good than conditionally bad; but, in default of conditional goodness, it is preferable to be conditionally bad than unconditionally bad. If it be asked how it comes about that conditional badness is preferred to unconditional badness, the cogency of the answer may best be appreciated if the answer is framed in religious terms; for such terms provide the best representation for the adult mind of the situation as it presents itself to the child. Framed in such terms the answer is that it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil. A sinner in a world ruled by God may be bad; but there is always a certain sense of security to be derived from the fact that the world around is good ... and in any case there is always a hope of redemption. In a world ruled by the Devil the individual may escape the badness of being a sinner; but he is bad because the world around him is bad. Further, he can have no sense of security and no hope of redemption. The only prospect is one of death and destruction. In other words, morality, by limiting a child's badness, defends the child against being devoured by it. It makes the child have a feeling of safety and protection from harm, and permits the child to renounce wishes for complete control of the object, and the envy and jealousy that attend those wishes. From this point on, the child agrees to live in a world in which others make legitimate demands and one's own desires have appropriate boundaries. If one oversteps those boundaries, one must pay a penalty; and insofar as one forms aggressive wishes toward others, one must struggle to limit the damage these wishes do, and to repay the objects of aggression by creative and benevolent efforts. But because those moral demands rescue the child from helplessness and depression, they are at the same time welcome demands. Moral guilt is so much better than shame, because it can be atoned for, it does not sully the entirety of one's being. It is a dignified emotion compatible with optimism about one's own prospects. The structure of morality thus performs a "holding" function for the child, giving her a
See Fairbairn (1952), pp. 65—7, esp. pp. 66—7. Winnicott has a similar account of the origins of morality, which also invokes, as has mine, the trust occasioned by early "holding": see Winnicott (1965), pp. 73-82, 93-105.
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feeling of safety. In this sheltering structure she can play and exert herself. Unlike Winnicott's patient, she need not put herself to sleep for fear of murdering someone. Indeed, a good cycle now ensues: because she has accepted moral demands, she agrees to renounce envy and jealousy; but to the extent that she is able to renounce these, she has less ambivalence and less occasion for guilt. Notice that this story of the origin of morality gives morality itself a particular character. Morality protects the intrinsic worth of persons and their dignity, at risk from the damaging effects of the child's internal aggression. It is nonegoistic and focused on the intrinsic worth of objects outside the self; it sets limits to self-interest and enjoins respect for the legitimate activities of others. But it is also infused by love and wonder, and thus it is not a gloomy authoritarian morality. Indeed, morality performs the holding function of a loving mother (if we may use Winnicott's proviso, that this "mother" may also be the father playing a "maternal" role). Rather than making a forbidding and stifling demand for perfection, it holds the child in her imperfection, telling her that the world contains possibilities of forgiveness and mercy, and that she is loved as a person of interest and worth in her own right. She therefore need not fear that her human imperfection will cause the world's destruction. And because she is not stricken by annihilating shame at her imperfection, she will have less need for envy and jealousy, emotions that express her desire for omnipotent control of the sources of good: in this way, too, a benign cycle is established. The "moral defense" does not always take this form, as we have seen. In Winnicott's patient, morality had the visage of an ideally perfect father in whose eyes his mother and he both judged themselves to be shamefully imperfect. The perfection of the imagined father strengthened primitive shame, and prevented the child from understanding the potential for "holding" and mercy inherent in human love. Because nobody in the environment had any capacity for flexibility or mercy toward human frailty, and because nobody had the slightest interest in imagining the experiences of another, the child's ambivalent feelings became a source of unbearable anxiety, which never quite metamorphosed into a guilt that could be atoned for. Because he had to be perfect, he could not see his imperfection as anything that might be forgiven; he probably didn't even see it as a bad deed that he had done, but instead as an inexorable badness covering his whole self. Shame, not guilt, was thus his primitive response: hiding, and shutting down. He had no way of coping with his own anger, and so he simply
Winnicott (1965), notes that this idea of a good and merciful parent can frequently be associated with a corresponding idea of God: "Man continues to create and re-create God as a place to put that which is good in himself, and which he might spoil if he kept it in himself along with all the hate and destructiveness which is also to be found there." (p. 94)
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality refused to go through the struggle most children fight with their anger and envy. "I see now," B concludes, "that there can be value in a struggle later when things have gone well at the beginning ... To sum up, my own problem is how to find a struggle that never was." The moral crisis felt like a death sentence, and he made himself die. Winnicott says he is "cluttered up with reparation capacity" because he has not yet found the anger "that would indicate the use of the reparation phenomenon." In consequence, he of course became utterly incapable of morality, since morality involves the use of reparation capacities, respect for the humanity of another person, and regard for the other's neediness. Notice that my account gives an important role to both shame and guilt; but it sees guilt as potentially creative, connected with reparation and the acceptance of limits to aggression, whereas shame, at least shame of the primitive sort, is a threat to all possibility of morality and community, and indeed to a creative inner life. Guilt can, of course, be excessive and oppressive, and there can be a corresponding excessive focus on reparation, one that is unhealthily self-tormenting. On the other side, shame of a specific and limited sort can be constructive, motivating a pursuit of valuable ideals. But in their role at this pivotal stage of a child's life, shame, with its connection to narcissism, would appear to be the emotion, of these two, that poses the bigger danger to development. I connect this suggestion with the idea that one of development's central tasks is the renunciation of infantile omnipotence and the willingness to live in a world of objects. Guilt is a great aid in this task, whereas shame threatens to undermine it entirely. In a lecture on "Morals and Education," Winnicott suggests that religious systems of morality harm development if their central focus is on original sin rather than on goodness, and if they neglect the human conditions for the growth of trust and "belief in," which include a central role for love and holding. "Actually moral education does not work," he concludes, "unless the infant or child has developed in himself or herself by natural developmental process the stuff that, when it is placed up in the sky, is called God." (Winnicott's criticism does not pertain to one religious system rather than another, or lead us to prefer one religion to another. The contrast he makes is
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internal to all of the major religions, in all of which we find interpretations that emphasize perfect obedience, and versions that emphasize flexibility and mercy.) In the light of our account we can flesh out this suggestion further. Any strong emphasis on the badness of human imperfection, any strengthening of primitive shame through the image of a perfect and intolerant parent, may exacerbate the child's moral crisis to the point of producing moral death. On the other hand, a merciful "holding" encourages the child to combat her aggression with reparative efforts. For this to happen, it seems important that the parent understand herself as imperfect, and nourish in the child a sense of delight in the sort of "subtle interplay" that two equally human figures can have. This can be done, for example, by showing delight in the child's playfulness and creative efforts. But creating a relationship that builds the child's love of the human in herself and in others requires giving up a certain type of safety, namely, that to be found in the type of rigid system in which a perfect and merciless father prescribes all duties from on high. As B says: "The alarming thing about equality is that we are then both children, and the question is, where is father?" B's is an extreme case. But we should note that many familial and cultural norms contain elements of the demand made by B's mother, the demand to be without need, the demand not to be a child. Such a demand, Nancy Chodorow argues, is implicit in the developmental history of males in many cultures of the world. Taught that dependence on mother is bad and that maturity requires separation and self-sufficiency, males frequently learn to have shame about their own human capacities for receptivity and play, whereas females are more likely to get the message from their parents that maturity involves a continued relation of interdependence, and that emotions expressing need are appropriate. In the light of our discussion of B, we can now see that the males Chodorow describes will frequently, like B, though less extremely, both hide their need for others and avert their gaze from their own inner world, not mapping it with care. This can become a vicious bad cycle, as unscrutinized and undeveloped emotions remain at an infantile level and are therefore felt to be all the more shameful, all the more out of step with the controlling adult self who appears. Winnicott's theory of the "false self" and Bollas's related account of the "normotic personality" inform us that such people may function well up to a point, frequently using intellectual competence to conceal neediness, while the needy emotional elements lie dormant, lack-
But note that, insofar as some cultures treat girls as marriage material from an early age and carefully guard their purity, they may also be deprived of the ability to play and be interdependent—albeit in a quite different way, with afocuson renunciation of their own agency: see my earlier remarks about girls in Rajasthan.
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ing love and cultivation. This can lead to a situation of helplessness like, though less extreme than, B's, as the needy elements are inarticulate, unable to make demands. This condition is highly correlated with depressive illness in later life. In other words, many people receive a type of emotional development that puts them on the road to B's situation, with its lack of the capacity for "subtle interplay," although few suffer B's complete emotional impoverishment. We must now return to disgust, which also poses dangers for morality. The threat posed by disgust differs from the threat posed by primitive shame, although both take as their focus aspects of our imperfection and lack of control. Whereas shame remains focused on the self, disgust spreads outward. The parts of the self that are disgust's focus are found disgusting after they leave the body, and the wish of disgust is to remove them, to expel them from the sphere of the self. This wish typically issues, as we have seen, in magical projections of the disgust properties onto people or groups who from then on become a device by which people create more secure boundaries between themselves and aspects of their own animality and mortality. These vehicles of the disgusting are rarely if ever the child's own parents or her closest circle: for that would not accomplish the desired cordoning off. If your cootie-catcher finds cooties on your mother, they are probably already on you too. So the disgusting people are typically people who are different, and who can be avoided as bearers of the contagion of slimy animality. Disgust poses a threat not to morality itself, then—one can have a type of moral system while treating certain people as vehicles of disgust; but it does pose a threat to the idea of the equal worth and dignity of persons that is a very important part of any morality that most of us would favor. Primitive shame and disgust are, however, closely linked, in the sense that both spring from an unwillingness or inability to accept one's actual situation as a needy animal, mortal and highly dependent on others. One might say without exaggeration that the root of disgust is primitive shame, the unwillingness to be a needy animal. Of course all human beings have some primitive shame, and probably could not function without it; disgust, too, is ubiquitous and in
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Winnicott (1965), pp. 140-52, Bollas (1987), pp. 135-56. Bollas notes that such a person can frequently be recognized by his inability to read and comment on a poem. One of the irrationalities in disgust is its association of dirt with nonhuman animals—for nonhuman animals are, on the whole, much cleaner than humans. But the associations, I have argued, are symbolic, aimed at shoring up the sense of power and invulnerability of a dominant group. Similarly impervious to reality was the belief of upper-caste Hindus in India that they were clean and "untouchables" dirty. In actual fact, as Gandhi discovered while working to prevent the spread of a cholera epidemic, the lower castes had cleaner surroundings, since they defecated at some distance from their dwellings, while the upper castes, who frequently used the gutters outside their windows for this purpose, were at high risk of infection.
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some ways functional. But in b o t h cases t h e hypertrophic forms are n o t inevitable, a n d it is in these forms that these emotions pose a particular threat t o morality. O n c e again, development creates different paths for disgust, a n d these paths are often correlated with gender. In his ambitious study The Anatomy of Disgust, William Miller, analyzing disgust's content as I have here, closely links disgust to misogyny a n d the male's longing to distance himself from t h e slimy products of his o w n body, ultimately from his o w n animality a n d mortality. T h e w o m a n becomes disgusting a n d slimy because she is t h e vehicle of t h e man's semen. She becomes, by projection, t h e bearer of all those animal characteristics from which t h e male would like to dissociate himself. Although Miller at times suggests that this gender difference in disgust is inevitable, there should surely be n o d o u b t that it is social, a n d closely connected to teachings concerning ambition a n d control. A n d societies vary considerably in t h e extent to which they encourage such projection reactions. Klaus Theweleit's remarkable Male Fantasies, 3. detailed study of an elite corps of G e r m a n soldiers after World W a r I, finds in t h e writings of these soldiers a hypertrophy of disgust misogyny, in which t h e clean, virtually mechanical body of t h e soldier is strongly contrasted with t h e sticky polluted bodies of t h e w o m e n from w h o m they were b o r n and into w h o m they ejaculate. O n e of his significant findings is that, while at some level t h e bodies of all w o m e n a n d perhaps especially one's m o t h e r are objects of disgust, at t h e level of conscious conceptualization there is a sharp splitting—wives, mothers, a n d nurses being represented as pure a n d "white," prostitutes and working-class w o m e n as sticky a n d disgusting. So in that sense t h e disgusting remains "other," a n d it is always possible to imagine removing it from the world the way one flushes away feces or disposes of spoiled food. W e can see that disgust is thus likely to pose a particular threat to compassion, or at least to any form of it that extends it to h u m a n beings generally, without hierarchy or discrimination. As w e see, then, a view of emotional development reveals some problems that emotions, as acknowledgments of neediness a n d incompleteness, contain for morality; they also reveal rich resources for morality. Indeed, t h e story strongly indicates that w i t h o u t emotions morality could n o t c o m e into being, a n d that it relies o n t h e m c o n tinuously for sustenance. A view of what morality should be like a n d a view of psychological health are mutually supportive, though each also needs to be supported by independent arguments. W h e n w e see that a particular sort of moral system aids and abets primitive shame or conduces to t h e stifling of "subtle interplay," w e have at least some reasons
105 106
Miller (1997), discussed extensively in Nussbaum (1999). Theweleit (1987, 1989).
Emotions and the Origins of Morality to be skeptical about that system. At the very least, we have reason to wonder about its transgenerational stability, since it seems likely to produce people like B, who shut down morally and cannot find access to their reparative capacity. But we may also make a deeper criticism: that such miral systems harm elements of the human being that need support and sustenance. When, on the other hand, we see that a morality that incorporates a large role for flexible judgment and mercy supports the child in her ambivalence crisis, reinforcing her sense that the world is worth living in despite her own badness, this gives us some reasons for being interested in that moral view. At the very least, it is likely that such a view can replicate itself stably across the generations, producing people who continue to inhabit and endorse it. And we may also give the view a deeper sort of praise, saying that it is gentle and supportive toward vulnerable parts of the personality that badly need support. Similarly, if a moral view encourages children to project their disgust reactions onto vulnerable people and groups, we may wonder about that system from the psychological viewpoint: for, as Theweleit's study shows, people who cannot abide their own animality and learn to fantasize their bodies as pure machines are telling lies to themselves, and sustain a brittle and difficult existence. If, on the other hand, we discover that a moral view insists on equal respect for all persons and therefore teaches children that it is wrong to single out a group as the disgusting ones, because we are all equally moral and animal, we will suspect that this view is psychologically promising, because it tells no lies and does not require children (and adults) to live lives of brittle self-deception. From the other direction, when we see that "holding" and the capacity for imaginative play support the renunciation of envy and the acceptance of the legitimate demands of others, we have reasons to think them important and attractive parts of child development, over and above the reasons given in the account of development itself. When we see that an upbringing like B's, with its stress on perfection and primitive shame, produces a person who cannot respect or attend to others as ends in their own right, we have additional reasons for being critical of such an upbringing, over and above those given in B's sad developmental history itself. Similarly, when we see that a type of toilet training that does not encourage a hypertrophy of disgust, and later parental efforts to inhibit the projection of disgust onto other children and groups, are supportive of a just society that accords respect to all persons, then we have reason to support that type of development, over and above the psychological reasons that have been mentioned. When we see that the developmental history of the German officers studied by Theweleit produced people whose rabid anticommunism and anti-Semitism were the vehicle of a hypertrophic and in origin misogynistic disgust, we have reason to shun that sort of child development even if it had otherwise appeared to be conducive to happiness.
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In this way, the developmental story I have presented seems well suited to one broad type of ethical view, one that is both merciful and committed to equal respect. We might still select a morality of the sort that I have characterized as rigid and lacking in mercy, if we were convinced that other powerful arguments supported it. But if we did select such a normative view, we would need to beware of the strains it imposes on the human child, and the possibility that these strains would produce not perfect morality, but moral collapse. Again, we might still prefer the social norms of gender described by Chodorow, or even the male education of Theweleit's officers, if we should conclude {per impossibile, as I believe) that they promote social justice and general well-being in ways that we could independently justify (though surely one prominent aspect of general well-being ought to be the health of individuals). But we would then still need to beware of the strains that they impose on the personalities of individuals, and on the needs of individuals for the "subtle interplay" that is an essential ingredient of love.
VI. "Mature Interdependence" and the Facilitating Environment Winnicott and Fairbairn describe a norm of health, which is said to be the condition in which this story of emotional development culminates in a person who has not suffered some unusually disturbing blow. Fairbairn revealingly uses the term "mature dependence," rather than "independence," and contrasts this with the young child's "infantile dependence." In infantile dependence the child perceives herself as terribly needy and helpless, and her desire is to control and incorporate the sources of good. In mature dependence, by contrast, which from now on I shall call "mature interdependence," the child is able to accept the fact that those whom she loves and continues to need are separate from her and not mere instruments of her will. She allows herself to depend upon them in some ways, but she does not insist on omnipotence; and she allows them, in return, to depend in certain ways upon her; she commits herself to being responsible for them in certain ways. Although this acceptance is never achieved without anger, jealousy, and envy, the story of maturity is that at a certain point the child will be able to renounce envy and jealousy along with other attempts to control, and will be able to use the resources of gratitude and generosity that she has by now developed—and developed in part on account of her guilt and sorrow—to establish the relationship on a footing of equality and mutuality. She acknowledges that she will always continue to need love and secu107
Fairbairn (1952); compare Winnicott s use of the terms "absolute" and "relative" dependence.
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rity, but sees that this can be pursued without a jealous attempt to possess and control. It is only at this point, Fairbairn stresses, that adult love is achieved, since love requires not only the recognition of its object's separateness, but also the wish that this separateness be protected. Analysts sometimes speak as if health were a rather easy thing to achieve. Proust's narrative of the "intermittences of the heart" gives us a valuable reminder of the tensions and ambivalences of the adult human emotional life, and therefore of the enormous achievement represented by what Fairbairn so calmly describes as health, which may require a continuous struggle against the desire for perfection and totality. Behind the increasing competence and maturity—and, indeed, the mature and generous love—of a "normal" human adult lurks much that the Stoics and Proust correctly describe, in an inchoate and often preverbal form that is therefore, while cognitive, especially impervious to reasoning and argument—a seething jealousy, a demand to be the center of the world, a longing for bliss and comfort, a desire to wipe the competing object off the face of the earth—any of which may be very ill-suited to some of the adult's chosen plans and projects. The ambivalence crisis is never completely resolved, and reparation remains a lifelong task. This being the case, we should not ask about the "facilitating environment" for development by looking to the family circle alone (even in its cultural context). To the extent that it ignores roles and institutions, object-relations psychoanalysis has shortcomings as an account of emotions and the imaginative capacities they involve. People cultivate emotions in larger social and political groupings, and they need to learn the types of imagination and empathy suitable to those interactions. We shall not describe those processes and the role of institutions in them here. However, we should acknowledge that political institutions and systems of law are also part of the facilitating environment for the development of all the emotions of a citizen—and we now need to ask, at least in a preliminary and general way, what features such an environment might need to have, if it is to be capable of supporting the adult's continued search for health. Once again, any such political view would need to be well supported by independent arguments; but we can at least get some general sense of the "fit" between a certain account of the personality and a certain set of institutions. At the very least, seeing this "fit" will help us to address issues of stability, showing us that certain sorts of institutions can replicate themselves over time through the personality, and that others cannot. But we have independent reasons to prefer institutions that support
See Rawls (1971). I pose the question he poses, using a somewhat different account of moral development.
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individuals in their efforts to develop their capacities for love and reparation, since these are "primary goods" that any just political system should support. Of necessity these remarks must be sketchy. I begin with some suggestive remarks by Fairbairn. Invited in 1935 to lecture on the relationship between psychoanalysis and communism, Fairbairn decided to construct an argument about the political view suggested by his psychology of mature interdependence, acknowledging that it was highly speculative. Just as the mature psyche, he argues, is one that accepts the other's separate (and imperfect) will and life, and seeks to foster that—while still accepting the fact of mutual dependence—so too, a political life governed by that sort of maturity will be a liberal one, in which individual choice and autonomy are protected and fostered, and people agree to the Millean condition of the maximum liberty that is compatible with a like liberty for all. In this respect, he acknowledges that communism (as then practiced) fares very badly. On the other hand, he also holds that the child's development away from infantile dependence and toward mature interdependence involves the renunciation of exclusive and local loves and the acceptance of everbroader forms of community, governed by reciprocity and mutual care. "Mature dependence" involves a recognition of the parent's separateness and liberty. But by the same token it involves the recognition that others have a claim on the parent—more generally, that others have needs and have, like oneself, a right to the good things of life. Thus, while communism must be rejected because of its assault on liberty, some forms of democracy should also be criticized for being excessively nationalistic and ethnocentric. Ultimately, he argues, a full recognition of human interdependence should lead in the direction of internationalist humanism and away from local, tribal, religious, and ethnic particularism. (Thus he defends something like Kant's idea of a global federation of free republican states.) Fairbairn does not dwell on material need: but it is easy to take the argument one step further, with help from Winnicott. Mature interdependence requires acknowledging the imperfection of the human body, and its needs for material goods; it also involves renouncing the wish of envy to monopolize the sources of good. We might then suggest that mature dependence entails the determination to pursue the fulfillment of basic material needs for all citizens, granting that all have rights not only to liberty but also to basic welfare. All are allowed to be children, in the sense that all are permitted to be imperfect and needy, and an essential part of regard for the humanity in them is to attend to the "holding" of those needs and the creation of a political "facilitating environment." Thus a norm of psychological maturity also suggests a norm for public life, a commitment to the meeting of basic needs, or, to put it differ109
See the list of "central human capabilities" in Nussbaum (2000) and elsewhere.
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality ently, to support for a group of basic human capabilities. I have defended this view of the goal of political organization elsewhere, with independent arguments. At this point, we can see that such a view supports psychological health, as I have described it. It is also well suited to replicate itself stably over time, since its leading ideas support the formation of personalities that are likely to be intensely concerned with the needs of others, and thus to support for its leading ideas. Facilitating environments are created, then, not only by individual parents, but also by customs, institutions, and laws. Institutions can express the view that we are all people who exercise initiative and creativity on a footing of equality; or they can express the view that there is a perfect patriarch who denies to the child the right to be alone. (B comes up with this idea on his own, on the last day of analysis, when he is about to leave Winnicott: "The great master, Freud, the Pope, Stalin: the acceptance of dogma is something that takes the place of father.") They can express the idea that need is a sign of shameful failure, or they can express the idea that need is a normal part of being human. Finally, they can express the idea that our aggressions can never be redeemed, or they can express the idea that we may make reparation for our aggressive wishes and acts. In thinking about material need, political structure, the choice of a system of punishment—in all these areas we should ask what capacities of the personality different institutions support, and to what extent this gives us reason to choose one set over another. We can give one more example of how such deliberations might go, by thinking about punishment. In childhood, an essential goal of punishment, according to the view I have developed, must be to support the child's reparative capacities. Punishments will do this best, my argument indicates, if they do not strengthen primitive shame, which undercuts the reparative capacity. The child should be encouraged to feel guilty, since that is a moral emotion appropriate to what she has done. But she should not be encouraged to have shame at her imperfection, as B did, since this will be likely to create rigidity and terror in the personality, causing the reparative capacities to go underground. This means that the punishing parent should treat the child with dignity and not mock her, since this will give the message that "imperfection means being rejected." The parent should choose a method that strengthens the child's confidence in her reparative capacities, what Winnicott calls her "growing confidence that there will be opportunity for contributing-in." For example, this might
Winnicott (1986), p. 186. Winnicott points out that B avoids naming him, and that he probably wants to name him, since Winnicott has been both a mother and a father figure in the analysis, and he wants to establish independence by defying him. 111 Winnicott (1965), p. 77.
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involve a period of separation from the family context, followed by a reintegration, as the child is allowed to make reparation for what she has done. Public punishments have to meet many demands that parental punishments do not. They must be chosen with an eye to protecting society from violent offenders, and also with an eye to deterring crime. So anything we say here will represent only a part of what must be considered. Nonetheless, the view that I have developed gives us some reasons for skepticism about the current revival of interest in "shaming penalties" for offenses such as drunk driving, soliciting prostitutes, and so on. Societies that use shaming penalties to mock criminal offenders reinforce primitive shame at the frailties of the human being. In the case of the particular offender, this may prove psychologically damaging; it may even produce a moral shut-down like B s, as a crippling anxiety about imperfection paralyzes the ability to attend to others as worthwhile in their own right. In society generally, shaming others contributes to a merciless rigidity such as that characteristic of the B family, in which one was either the father or one didn't deserve to be on the face of the Earth. What we want is more like what B found with Winnicott, a society in which all are children, needy and fallible, and all respect one another as of interest and value in their own right. In dealing with a criminal offender (of the kind, let us suppose, who does not pose an immediate threat to the safety of others), society can perform the function of a parent who "holds" the child despite its imperfection, by allowing an offender to display and strengthen reparative capacities, in community service, conferences between offender and victim, and so on. This should have healthier effects for the individual, strengthening his confidence in his capacity to contribute to society; and it should also lessen the amount of anxiety and hiding in society generally, given that we do not say that "imperfection means being rejected." In general, the argument of this chapter is that most people have too much shame already; what they need is to develop confidence in their capacity to make reparation. We recall, too, that it was B's mothers anxiety that led her to persecute and stifle her infant; and we can guess that as people jump on the shaming bandwagon, their own anxiety will exacerbate their aggressive and persecutory tendencies toward others. Again, we still might choose such punishments for other reasons—if, for fc>
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example, they were shown to have a deterrent effect vastly superior to others. But we should do so in the light of a knowledge of the strains that they are likely to impose on the personality. 112
See Kahan (1996). See Braithwaite (1999). There are other reasons for being skeptical of shaming: in particular, it is difficult to calibrate the quantity of punishment to the quantity of the offense. See Whitman (1998), Posner (2000). 113
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VII. The Neo-Stoic View Revised Again I have argued that the childhood history of emotions shapes adult emotional life: that the emotions of adult life originate in infancy, and that this infantile history shapes their adult structure in powerful ways. Cognitive views that leave out infancy cannot explain the way in which the emotions of adult life bear the shadows of earlier objects. Neither, I have argued, can noncognitive views. The difference between B and a more fortunate man, archaic though it is, is still at root a cognitive difference, a difference in one's perceptions of value and salience, a difference in the narratives of need and dependency one has come to accept. We can now understand more deeply, however, some of the motivations underlying opposition to a cognitive/evaluative view. The emotions of the adult life sometimes feel as if they flood up out of nowhere, in ways that don't match our present view of our objects or their value. This will be especially true of the person who maintains some kind of false self-defense, and who is in consequence out of touch with the emotions of neediness and dependence, or of anger and aggression, that characterize the true self. We should remember that in Winnicott's terms the "false self" is a matter of degree, and that we all have one to some extent, if only the polite social veneer we use to mask our deeper emotions. But for many people the conscious valuations of daily life serve also as a mask worn in the presence of oneself; deeper emotions persisting from childhood operate, and motivate, in ways that the person may not consciously understand. When these emotions manifest themselves, or when their motivating activity is made clear, the person may well feel as if forces of a noncognitive kind were pushing her around: for the cognitive content of these emotions may not be available to her, and even to the extent that it is available it may have an archaic and infantile form. Moreover, it may not match at all the thoughts about the value of objects that she is aware of having. And she may stick to her view despite her conscious thoughts and the evidence before her. Thus, R may be carrying around a great deal of anger against parental objects without recognizing that she has anger at all, and she may even, like Winnicott's B, have a very strong determination not to allow anger into play, for fear of the destruction that might ensue. R may think of herself as someone who wishes all of her objects well, and she may actually wish them well. If she should become aware of murderous anger against them, this might seem to her like being possessed by an alien force, and she
115 Winnicott (1965), pp. 140-52, esp. p. 143: "In health: The False Self is represented by the whole organization of the polite and mannered social attitude, a 'not wearing the heart on the sleeve,' as might be said."
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might easily form the view that energies of a noncognitive type were pushing her personality around. But she would not be right. We can see that we would not fully understand her anger unless we understood its intentional content; thinking of it as merely impulsive, we do not see that she wants to kill a parent, and thus we miss what really explains her actions. Or take Q, a more healthy personality, who has found ways of atoning for aggressive wishes through reparation, and who has developed at least some confidence that she can overcome love by hate. Such a person does not allow a false self to push all primary emotions from the scene; and yet, in her intense focus on creative or reparative efforts, Q may not be fully aware that anger and guilt toward parental objects is a crucial part of her motivation, essential to the explanation of her intense need to make reparation. To the extent that she becomes aware of her anger, she too may feel that it is like an alien force: for precisely what she is doing in her reparative efforts is to make herself into a person who produces good for others. And yet we would not have a complete account of her motivation if we were to treat the anger as an alien impulse, failing to note its intentional content. Take, finally, P, a man who has been raised as the males described by Chodorow are raised: taking pride in self-sufficiency, believing that he has no need of anyone. Like many such males, P continues to have intense needs for holding that will manifest themselves under certain circumstances, and are crucial to the full explanation of his actions. On the other hand, he may have a very strong interest in not identifying those needs as part of him, since he is ashamed of them. When they erupt, he will think: "Who is this needy child? Certainly not me." And he may form the view that emotions don't at all manifest the way the person views his objects; indeed, they may seem to him like invading and obtuse forces that resist seeing things the way the personality sees them. Nonetheless, in such a case we see that the intentionality of early object relations is a crucial part of explaining how he will act. It is important both to see that his love has an early object and also that the emotion's intentionality has remained at an archaic level, rather than getting further development through "subtle interplay" and creative imagining. In short, the phenomenology of the adversary's view is appealing precisely because it does capture the dissonance that many of us feel between what we are aware of intending and what we suddenly find ourselves experiencing under certain circumstances. These may be differences of kind, as when we are aware of goodwill and experience sudden anger; or they may be differences of degree, as when we think we have a mild emotion toward someone and suddenly discover a very strong emotion. The past wells up in us, in ways that surprise the deliberately intending self. But once we see that it is the past that so wells up, and not some shot of adrenalin, we also see that we cannot understand it without getting at the intentional content that is proper to it. The dif-
Emotions and the Origins ofMorality ference of kind is ultimately explained by the fact that infantile emotion toward a beloved object has somehow come to take this present object as its occasion or symbol; the difference in degree is explained by the fact that the present object, not terribly important in my scheme of goals and ends, somehow represents an early object of great centrality. A cognitive view will be obtuse if it does not make room for such archaic and infantile cognitions and for their present force; but a noncognitive view cannot do justice to the way in which the past wells up, to the intense attachments to early objects that are manifest in it. Thus my cognitive view, by including a developmental dimension, makes room for the mysterious and ungoverned aspects of the emotional life in a way that many such views do not. This has consequences, as well, for the picture of character the view will support. All cognitive views of emotion entail that emotions can be modified by a change in the way one evaluates objects. This means that for such views virtue need not be construed (as Kant construes it) as a matter of strength, the will simply holding down the brutish impulsive elements of the personality. Instead, we can imagine reason extending all the way down into the personality, enlightening it through and through. If a person harbors misogynistic anger and hatred, the hope is held out that a change in thought will lead to changes not just in behavior but also in emotion itself, since emotion is a value-laden way of seeing. Clearly this view has important implications for moral education, in the area, for example, of emotions toward members of other races and religions: we can hope to foster good ways of seeing that will simply prevent hatred from arising, and we don't have to rely on the idea that we must at all times suppress an innate aggressive tendency. Some such views suggest that emotional change will be a relatively easy matter: thus Aristotle gives the aspiring orator instructions for taking anger away, by presenting the objects of anger in a new light. If, say, we understand that the Persians have not really wronged us, we will stop being angry at them. But of course life is not always like that. Some angers may indeed shift directly with a new account of the facts; many do not. Again, some hatred and disgust toward groups can be prevented from arising by a good moral education; and yet, hatred seems to arise again and again, despite our best efforts, as if it had some deeper root in the personality. Seeing this recalcitrance in emotion may then make us doubt the cognitive account: if persuasion doesn't bring change directly, and if our efforts at moral enlightenment don't eradicate prejudice, this must be because we are dealing with something other than evaluative thought. I have addressed this point elsewhere, pointing out that many nonemotional thoughts are also resistant to change, particularly thoughts that are formed early in life, and in which we are deeply invested through reliance and habit. Emotion-thoughts involve, in addition, a stronger kind of investment, for they concern elements of our conception of well-being. Surely the Stoics already showed
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that the emotional life is hard to change: their cognitive view implied only that there was a task to be undertaken, not that this task could be easily accomplished; perhaps it could not be completed at all. Similarly, among modern writers on virtue, Iris Murdoch has stressed the long and patient effort of vision, the painstaking inner moral work, that is required if we are to change our ways of seeing people we fear, or hate, or resent. Precisely because such matters are both habitual and important to us, change will not be easy. My view, however, goes further than these views, which ascribe the difficulty of emotion change to habit and the early roots of the relevant cognitions. For my view suggests that we may be quite ignorant of what our emotion-cognitions are, and also that we may have a lot invested in not changing them. For B, seeing himself as perfect/ shamefully imperfect was not just a habit to be addressed by behavioral therapy. These ways of seeing himself were not fully conscious: they emerged into full awareness only in the analysis. Moreover, so much of his life had been organized around them that any change brought a sense of large-scale upheaval: in that sense, one's own character becomes an object of attachment, and poses resistance to alteration. Where early moral development is concerned, my account suggests that we are never dealing with a purely benign picture, into which hatred will enter only if we put it there. The roots of anger, hatred, and disgust lie very deep in the structure of human life, in our ambivalent relation to our lack of control over objects and the helplessness of our own bodies. It would be naive to expect that projections of these negative emotions onto other people will not take place—although we may certainly hope to moderate their number and intensity. My view, then, urges us to reject as both too simple and too cruel any picture of character that tells us to bring every emotion into line with reasons dictates, or the dictates of the persons ideal, whatever that is. Given human ambivalence and neediness, and the emotions that have grown out of that, this is simply not a sensible goal to prescribe; and prescribing an unachievable norm of perfection is the very thing that can wreak emotional havoc, as B s case shows us. If Aristotle's view entails that the good person can and should demand emotional perfection of herself, so that she always gets angry at the right person, in the right way, at the right time, and so forth, then Aristotle's view is tyrannical and exacts of us more than humanity can deliver.
Notice that Kant, by contrast, is less harsh toward the vicissitudes of passion. If we do the right thing with reluctance, or perform our duty with little sympathy, Kant will not think the less of us, so long as we were using every means in our power to do the right. For Kant thinks that some things just can't be helped, and he is inclined to be merciful to the deficiencies of the passional personality.
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One way of bringing this out clearly is to refer to a criticism of Aristotle—and of modern Aristotelians—made by the late H. Paul Grice, the distinguished philosopher of mind and language. In a lecture delivered in the early 1980s at the Princeton Ancient Philosophy Colloquium, Grice claimed that Aristotle has "a Prussian view" of human life. "I cannot lie in the sun," Grice said, "simply because I want to." Everything, he said, has to be justified by its role in eudaimonia. This was a shocking claim: Kant, of course, is usually taken to be the Prussian one, both literally and figuratively, and Aristotle the sunny Hellene. Grice was arguing that it should be seen the other way around: Aristotle exercises surveillance over every aspect of life, whereas Kant lets the passions go, so long as they don't interfere with the will. Now of course the response to this—which Aristotelians were ready enough to give—is that an Aristotelian view can, as Aristotle's does, make ample space for virtues of playful friendly association, and we can easily defend lying in the sun as a virtuous deed on some such conception. The virtuous agent will be the one who chooses and desires to lie in the sun at the right time, in the right way, for the right reasons, and so forth. But Grice's point remains: the sheer wish to do some things notior a reason, and the merciful willingness to cease interrogating oneself about the appropriateness of one's motives and passions, are given no place at all in Aristotle's conception. Kant is less "Prussian" than Aristotle in two crucial respects: (a) once duty is fulfilled, I can do other permissible things as I like; and (b) my duty does not extend to the formation of appropriate desires in the area of sunbathing. It was Epictetus, not Aristotle, who said, "Watch over yourself as over an enemy lying in wait." And it is the Stoic tradition that develops to the most extreme point the idea of zealous critical surveillance over desire and emotion (including the extirpation of the latter where possible). But there is something like this in Aristotle, too, albeit more cheerfully expressed. To this extent, my neo-Stoic view of emotion, by providing the emotions with a history, has already diverged from normative Stoic ethics, and even from Aristotle: for already in
A valuable discussion of this issue, apropos of the relationship between Dostoyevsky s Notes from Underground 2nd the Aristotelian view of motivation, was given in a Ph.D. dissertation by Eunice Belgum (1976). Because of her untimely death, this material remains unpublished. As Seneca's De Matrimonio puts it, "The wise man loves his wife by judgment (iudicio), not by passion (adfectu): he controls the desire for pleasure, and is not easily led to intercourse." Kant is, again, less rigorous: even though sexual desire, in his view, always leads to the objectification and use of persons, it is vain to try to reform it: instead, we simply hedge it round with an institution (as marriage is, in his view) that guarantees mutual regard and noninstrumental treatment.
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my psychological account I provide the basis for condemning those normative approaches as excessively violent toward human complexity and frailty.
VIII. Imagination and Narrative We have had several occasions to refer to narrative and to imaginative play. This theme needs further development, since it is fundamental to our later inquiries into love and compassion. Emotions, we now can see, have a narrative structure. The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete unless its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on the present response. This already suggests a central role for the arts in human self-understanding: for narrative artworks of various kinds (whether musical or visual or literary) give us information about these emotion-histories that we could not easily get otherwise. This is what Proust meant when he claimed that certain truths about the human emotions can be best conveyed, in verbal and textual form, only by a narrative work of art: only such a work will accurately and fully show the interrelated temporal structure of emotional "thoughts," prominently including the heart's intermittences between recognition and denial of neediness. Narrative artworks are important for what they show the person who is eager to understand the emotions; they are also important because of what they do in the emotional life. They do not simply represent that history, they enter into it. Storytelling and narrative play are essential in cultivating the child's sense of her own aloneness, her inner world. Her capacity to be alone is supported by the ability to imagine the good object's presence when the object is not present, and to play at presence and absence using toys that serve the function of "transitional objects." As time goes on, this play deepens the inner world; it becomes a place for individual creative effort and hence for trusting differentiation of self from world. Winnicott speaks of artistic activity, therefore, as a type of "potential space," sacred to the individual, that mediates "between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society." Notice that it is only because the mother herself has cultivated her own "potential space" that she is able to imagine the experience of her child and to respond appropriately to its needs: so imagination is a crucial part of the reproduction of healthy character, and hence of a society's transgenerational stability. The "subtle interplay" between baby and parent is crucially mediated by play with narratives and images, as the child too becomes able to imagine another person's experience.
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Winnicott, in Rudnytsky (1993). See also the essays by Bollas and Milner in the same volume.
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During the ambivalence crisis, narrative play provides the child with several distinct benefits. First of all, spending time in narrative play has already given her ways of understanding the pain that her destructive wishes would inflict on others, and therefore of taking their full measure. At the same time, narratives have given nourishment to curiosity, wonder, and perceptual delight, strengthening her ability to see other people in noninstrumental and even non-eudaimonistic ways, as objects of wonder in their own right. This assists her in her own reparative efforts. Furthermore, this same wonder and delight give her ways of relating to her own sometimes frightening and ambivalent psychology: she becomes interested in understanding it, rather than fleeing from it and pushing it underground in the manner of B. This project of understanding, in turn, militates against depression and helplessness, feeding her interest in living in a world in which she is not perfect or omnipotent. Finally, and perhaps most important, by dressing imperfection in a pleasing and playful shape, narrative play can undercut primitive shame at all that is human, helping a child to attain a certain forbearance and even joy about the lives of imperfect beings. If I am right, that development in turn contributes to the struggle of love and gratitude against ambivalence, and of active concern against the helplessness of loss. References Berube, M. (1996). Life as we know it: A father, a family, and an exceptional child. New York: Pantheon. Belgum, E. J. (1976). Knowing better: An account of Akrasia. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University. Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. London: Free Association Books. Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. II. Separation: Anxiety and anger. New York: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. III. Loss: Sadness and depression. New York: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. I. Attachment. New York: Basic Books. Braithwaite, J. (1999). Restorative justice: Assessing optimistic and pessimistic accounts. Crime and Justice, 25, 1-127. Chodorow, N . (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deigh, J. (1996). The sources of moral agency: Essays in moral psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
See Nietzsche, Gay Science, 107: art saves us from nausea at human life by giving us a good will toward things that we have made. We can relax the demand for omnipotence and perfection because we find that we enjoy something that is fully human.
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de Sousa, R. (1987). The rationality of emotion. Cambridge, MA: M I T Press. Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. London: Tavistock. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud, 24vols. (Vol. 18, James Strachey, Trans). London: Hogarth Press. Hrdy, S. B. (1999). Mother nature: A history of mothers, infants, and natural selection. New York: Pantheon. Kahan, D. (1996). What do alternative sanctions mean? University of Chicago Law Review, 63, 591-653. Klein, M. (1984). Envy and gratitude and other works 1946—1963. London: Hogarth Press. Klein, M. (1985). Love, guilt, and reparation and other works 1921—1945. London: Hogarth Press. Kurtz, S. (1992). All the mothers and one: Hindu India and the cultural reshaping of psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press. Lear, J. (1990). Love and its place in nature: A philosophical interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lopez, F. G., & Brennan, K. A. (2000). Dynamic processes underlying adult attachment organization: Toward an attachment-theoretical perspective on the healthy and effective self. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 47, 283—300. Miller, W. (1997). The anatomy of disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morris, H. (1971). Guilt and shame. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Morrison, A. (1989). Shame: The underside of narcissism. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science(W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Random House. Nussbaum, M. (1993). The Oedipus Rex and the ancient unconscious. In P. Rudnytsky & E. H. Spitz (Eds.), Freud and forbidden knowledge (pp. 42-71). New York: New York University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1994). The therapy of desire: Theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1999). "Secret sewers of vice": Disgust, bodies, and the law. In S. A. Bandes (Ed.), Passions of aw (pp. 19—62). New York: New York University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Piers, G., & Singer, M. B. (1953). Shame and guilt: A psychoanalytic and a cultural study. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York: Norton. Pitcher, G. (1995). The dogs who came to stay. New York: Dutton. Posner, E. A. (2000). Law and social norms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Proust, M. (1954). Du cote de chez Swann. Paris: Gallimard. Proust, M. (1954). Sodome et Gomorrhe. Paris. Gallimard. Proust, M. (1982). Remembrance of things past, 3 vols. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, Trans.). New York: Vintage Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94, 2 3 - 4 1 . Rozin, P., Fallon, A., & Mandell, R. (1984). Family resemblance in attitudes to foods. Developmental Psychology, 20, 309-314. Rudnytsky, P. L. (Ed.). (1993). Traditional objects and potential spaces: Literary uses of D. W. Winnicott. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Seligman, M. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. New York: Freeman. Stern, D. (1977). The first relationship: Infant and mother. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. (1990). Diary of a baby. New York: Basic Books. Taylor, G. (1985). Pride, shame and guilt. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Theweleit, K. (1987, 1989). Male fantasies, 2vols. (S. Conway, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Whitman, J. Q. (1998). What is wrong with inflicting shame sanctions? Yale Law journal, 107, 1055 f£ Winnicott, D. W (1965). The maturational process and the facilitating environment. New York: International Universities Press. Winnicott, D. W (1986). Holding and interpretation: Fragment of an analysis. New York: Grove. Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Zettel(G. Anscombe, Trans.). London: Blackwell. Wurmser, L. (1981). The mask of shame. Baltimore, M D : Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
6
What Should Count as Moral Behavior? The Nature of "Early Morality" in Children's Development Auntsto Blast o
Empirical psychology—its research efforts and theory construction—has its kind of autonomy, but cannot be completely self-contained. Not only does it overlap with, and partially depends on, other disciplines within the social sciences and also philosophy, but, most importantly, it depends on the culture of the broader society. Scientific psychological work cannot even begin without assumptions and concepts that are not, and cannot be, empirically derived, but are taken over from shared cultural meanings. This is particularly the case in moral psychology. The very meaning of what morality is, what is involved in acting morally or immorally, what it means to act intentionally or accidentally, which actions call for moral praise and which deserve moral blame and moral indignation are based on meanings and concepts, frequently unarticulated, that underlie everyday language and guide our communication concerning human experience and social behavior. In this chapter, I attempt to analyze the criteria that psychologists frequently follow in deciding which behaviors should be counted as moral, and the extent to which these criteria conform to the criteria derived from everyday language. The topic is broad. However, I limit my discussion to a narrower area of psychological research concerning the moral capacities of very young children. Both within traditional psychoanalysis and within cognitive-developmentalism, though for quite different reasons, morality is typically not recognized before the elementary school years. According to Piaget (1965/1932), until about the age of seven or eight the child's understanding of moral norms is egocentric and therefore the child's behavior is not genuinely moral. In Kohlberg's (e.g., 1984) account, the forms of moral understanding that are typically found before middle or late childhood are not yet differentiated from self-interest and must be considered as premoral. In the past 15 or so years, a sizeable number of researchers distanced themselves from these rather conservative interpretations of moral development, and have been insisting that children, starting
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from the age of two or even earlier, present several manifestations of genuine morality. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to this group as the "early morality camp." Even though the following discussion focuses on the age at which we can attribute children genuine moral functioning, the real issue is not age. From my perspective, it does not matter much whether morality originates in children at four, five, or eight. Instead, what really matters are the criteria that psychologists rely on to identify morality, and whether or not they can agree on the criteria that should be used. If psychological knowledge about moral functioning is based on faulty or inadequate criteria, it becomes largely irrelevant for understanding people's moral lives.
Criteria of Morality in Everyday Understanding In growing up together in society, we learn to differentiate certain actions from other actions that people perform, to apply to them the label moral or equivalent labels and to attribute to them special meanings. We also learn the criteria that guide the correct use of moral terms. Moral meanings and criteria need not be, and frequently are not, articulated. Frequently, they are only experiential, in the sense that we can recognize when the conditions for moral interpretations are, or are not, present. In sum, moral meanings and criteria are embedded in everyday ordinary language, make social understanding and communication possible, and ground social norms and expectations. These various meanings are interrelated and loosely organized into what could be called the ordinary moral conceptual scheme, but, strictly speaking, they do not constitute a theory. Analytic reflective disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology, or psychology, each from its own perspective, attempt to provide a rational reconstruction of everyday morality and to scientifically account for its psychological foundations and underlying processes. These reconstructions, normally, are not a component of ordinary understanding. On the contrary, the basic concepts derived from everyday language function as external criteria to test the adequacy of conceptual assumptions. Neither social scientists nor philosophers are free to change ordinary meanings to the point where their essential aspects are distorted or lost. This does indeed occur. But there is a price to be paid: The body of knowledge so constructed may be largely irrelevant to the kind of human experience that social scientists had intended to study in the first place. Ordinary moral criteria can be ordered hierarchically along a dimension of specificity and generality. Here, I focus on the most general and essential criteria. Contentrelated criteria are not among the most general. Unquestionably, not all standards and values are considered to be related to morality, according to everyday criteria. On the
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other hand, there appear to be significant variations across communities concerning the list of specific actions, norms, and standards that make up the moral domain. Most important for my discussion are the formal criteria. For an action to be moral, it is not enough that it be objectively and factually right, namely, that it objectively corresponds to social expectations and rules, or even to externally defined moral norms. To be moral, an action must also be performed in "the right way." The right way minimally includes three criteria: The action must be the result of an intention; the intention must be informed and specified by moral motives; finally, it would not be enough for an intentional action to be a result of natural spontaneous tendencies and impulses; the agent must want it because it is morally good. Therefore, on the basis of our ordinary conception of morality, a behavior that is produced accidentally or is a result of causes that fall outside one's consciousness cannot be evaluated as relevant to morality. In addition, an intentional action would not be accepted as morally praiseworthy if it were motivated by egocentric needs and desires or guided by prudential considerations. Moral motivation must transcend personal interests and wishes. From this perspective, fear of punishment, anxiety, a desire to be accepted, liked or loved by other people, and so on, are not moral motives. The third criterion may be more controversial, but follows from the other two. An intention should be subjectively, and not only objectively, moral. In other words, the agent must have a sense, perhaps vague, that what he or she does is good or bad in a special sense, and must want it because it is good or in spite of it being bad. This criterion allows us to distinguish between human morality and the various "positive" behaviors (e.g., sharing, selfsacrifice, control of aggression) that can be observed among several animal species.
The Observations and the Early Morality Claim What are the things that young children, between the ages of two and four, actually do and express that have been interpreted by the early morality camp as indicating genuine moral capacities? The observations are grouped here in three categories: What toddlers actually know and understand; the extent to which they comply with the parents' (or, more generally, caregivers) rules, requests, and prohibitions; finally, the
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Among many others, Harrison (1984) argues that, according to our ordinary conceptual scheme, there is a logical gap between moral responses and those of the natural man, and between the moral and the natural life. Similarly Stocker (Stocker, with Hegeman, 1996) distinguishes moral values and the valuing that derives from natural appetite and desire. One function of development, he argues, is to correctly evaluate our natural desires and to replace them with desires based on moral evaluations (p. 65).
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expressions of empathic feelings and altruistic tendencies. In presenting this information, I refrain from dealing with the validity and limitations of measures and observational tools, possible sampling problems, and the meaning of statistical findings. This approach will free me to focus on the moral meaning of children's behaviors.
Toddlers' Moral Understanding
Three groups of studies yielded information concerning toddlers' understanding of morally-relevant material. The first focused on the acquisition of standards; the second on the understanding of roles, rules, and expectations within the family context, and also of other people's needs, desires, and responses in general; the third looked at children's ability to differentiate morality from social-conventional regulations. The Acquisition of Standards. The type of behavior that is referred to here is well known to anyone who has been in contact with infants and toddlers. From a very young age, as early as 17 to 18 months, children notice the difference, for instance, between an intact and a broken doll, between a clean shirt and one that is marred by spots, and between a shoe with its buckle and one whose buckle was lost. They may cry in seeing the doll with a broken arm, are upset by the spots on their shirt, and want to replace the lost buckle on their shoe. In the language of this group of researchers, toddlers are aware of, and respond with, negative emotions to flawed objects. This type of behavior was systematically observed by Kagan (1981, 1984, 1987), Lamb (1991, 1993; Lamb & Feeny, 1995), and Dunn (1987). These researchers saw in it an indication that adult standards had been acquired and explicitly gave to it a moral meaning. Lamb and Dunn, however, also pointed out children's interest and curiosity about flawed objects, and their frequent delight with deviations from adult standards. Other researchers (Barrett, Zahn-Waxler, & Cole, 1993; Cole, Barrett, & ZahnWaxler, 1992; Kochanska, Casey, & Fukumoto, 1995) attempted to produce in children a sense of responsibility by making them believe that they themselves had caused the damage. The issue here is not simply the standard shape of objects, but the violation of the rule not to destroy things. In this kind of situation, 2- and 3-year-old children responded with a variety of emotional expressions and behaviors. There frequently was tension, distress, sadness, and anger; but joy was not infrequent (Cole et al., 1992). Several children turned away from the experimenter; others refused to continue to play; some acknowledged their blame and apologized, others instead denied any fault (Kochanska, Casey, & Fukumoto, 1995). The large majority of children attempted to fix the damage or asked the experimenter to do so.
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So far the observations. As a group, the authors of these reports seem to consider toddlers' responses to flawed objects and mishaps as moral. Their reasons are: (a) Sensitivity to flawed objects develops approximately at the same time when other standards (e.g., of achievement and mastery) are understood. Thus, it makes sense to speak of a general category of good and bad and of a general concern for right and wrong, (b) Children's response to flawed objects is emotionally similar to their response to other deviations from adult norms and rules, and includes distress, worry, and a sense of uncertainty, (c) In the case of an experimental "mishap," guilt and shame were frequently observed, emotions that seem to be specifically moral, (d) Behaviorally, toddlers respond to mishaps in particular, but also to flawed objects, with apology, selfblame, and attempts at reparation. Understanding Social Norms and Social Exchanges. At least from a common sense perspective, understanding what guides and determines social interaction is closer to morality than understanding the desirable shape of objects. Over the past 15 years or so, Judy Dunn and her colleagues (e.g., 1987, 1988, 1993; Dunn & Brown, 1994) focused on this domain of learning and development through a series of longitudinal observations. Here, only the briefest summary can be given of what many 2- and 3-yearolds know and understand of their social world. First, toddlers acquire a certain degree of what can be called "psychological mindedness": They begin to have a sense of their own and others' affective experiences and mental processes; they can take others' perspective and grasp their feelings, intentions, needs, and wishes; they increasingly talk about inner states; and they seem to have a rudimentary sense of what produces different emotional reactions, and therefore can anticipate other people's behavior. Second, many toddlers understand the practices and customs, and the rules and roles of their family; they know what is acceptable and what is prohibited. They can engage in conversation with both mother and sibling on this topic; can test the limits of what is allowable; can joke and tease the mother about the rules, and can break them with real enjoyment. Finally, toddlers learn very rapidly to deal with other people, also in cases of conflict, in order to get what they need or to give what others need. They can compromise and cooperate; can argue for themselves and for others; can resort to different kinds of excuses and justifications. For instance, they can appeal to a family rule to their advantage: They can ask for the mother's support against the sibling, but only when they know the rule is on their side. Do these behaviors, at this age, actually reflect moral capacities? Do the toddlers described by Dunn and her colleagues understand morality? Are they capable of morally good and bad actions? Even though Dunn (1987) refers to the abilities just
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described as "the beginnings of moral understanding" (p. 91), her position is cautious and differentiated. In fact, she makes an interesting distinction between moral understanding and moral judgment, and insists that toddlers understand "both how to hurt peoples feelings and also that such behavior is not acceptable to family members" (Dunn, 1987, p. 107). She frequently points out the ambiguity, from a moral perspective, of this early development: Toddlers' sensitivity to others' feelings can lead them equally to empathy and compassion and to aggression and cruelty; their understanding of social rules may open them not only to committed compliance but also to glee and pleasure in breaking the rules. In suggesting that these children are not yet capable of moral judgment, Dunn seems to say that, while they are mastering the raw material from which morality is constructed, they did not yet learn to value certain actions and not others, or to feel obliged to go in one direction, but to resist the other, regardless of their momentary needs and preferences. This affective and cognitive discrimination seems to be missing. Differentiation Between Moral and Social-Conventional Norms. Dunn and her colleagues focused on young children's understanding of social norms, but did not attempt to clarify whether they can differentiate what is specifically moral from what is generally social. Several researchers associated with Turiel and working within his theoretical framework are making precisely this claim: From an early age, people distinguish between issues that pertain to morality, those that are related to conventional norms, and those that are the prerogative of each individual's decision (cf. Tisak, 1995, p. 98). Consistently with this view, Smetana (1984, 1989) writes of 2- and 3-year-olds engaging in "moral transgressions." Children's discriminations were determined on the basis of three kinds of indicators. The first consists of spontaneous responses to two categories of events. When children are themselves pushed or bitten, or if one of their possessions is grabbed and taken away by another child (since a person is being harmed, these actions are classified by the researcher as moral), they are likely to scream and cry, to verbally complain, and to physically retaliate. By contrast, these responses do not occur when the same children witness a violation of house or school rules. In fact, in these instances, children tend not to respond at all. Not surprisingly, this sort of discrimination was observed also at 15 months of age. The second indicator consists of a verbal recognition that moral, conventional, and personal actions have different attributes. Children were told simple stories representing either a moral transgression (e.g., pulling a child's hair), a conventional transgression (e.g., not saying please), or a personal issue (e.g., choosing one or another sweater). They were asked, then, whether a certain action is OK; whether it would be OK if the authority did not forbid it or if it was OK in other places; and whether and how much
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the action should be punished (Nucci & Weber, 1995; Smetana, 1981; Smetana & Braeges, 1990; Tisak, 1993). According to Smetana and Braeges (1990), toward the end of their second year, children seemed to recognize that moral, but not conventional, transgressions are wrong also in other places; toward the middle of the third year, they tended to say that moral transgressions are more serious, and more independent of specific rules or commands, than conventional transgressions. On the other hand, "children treated all transgressions as very serious" (Smetana & Braeges, 1990, p. 336, emphasis added). In addition, Nucci and Weber (1995) reported that, at the average age of 3.8, children seemed to perceive the differences between personal issues and moral or conventional ones, but not so well those between the latter two. This conclusion would agree with Tisak's (1993) judgment that, even in matters of personal choice, "authority contingency appears to be a salient factor in young children's evaluation" (p. 338). If this is indeed the case, one can see that differentiating moral and conventional issues and transgressions is not so easy for 3-and-a-half-year-olds. Only one study in this age range (Nucci & Weber, 1995) relied on the third type of indicators and looked at children's justifications for why moral and conventional transgressions are wrong. As reported, children tended to speak of hurting or harming someone else with respect to moral transgressions, and of rules and social order for conventional transgressions. Nucci and Weber (1995) believe that toddlers not only can differentiate moral and conventional transgressions, but they can do so in virtue of concrete, though genuine, concepts of morality and conventional social order. In their interpretation, the main reason is that 3-year-olds seem to understand that certain actions are wrong, not because they are forbidden by parents or teachers, not because they are, or risk to be, punished, but because they harm others. In this case, there would be an understanding of absolute wrongness, justified intrinsically by the nature of the action, and not by the consequences for the agent.
Toddlers Compliance with Rules and Commands To be able to follow the guidelines and expectations set out by parents or teachers requires significant skills, including a minimal ability to control immediate impulses. A large number of informal observations and standardized studies testify to the presence of many of these skills in 2- and 3-year-olds. Emde and Kochanska, both vocal supporters of early morality, are among the most active and interesting researchers in this area. Emde (1992; Emde, Biringen, Clyman, & Oppenheim, 1991; Emde & Buchsbaum, 1990; Emde, Johnson, & Easterbrook, 1987; Buchsbaum & Emde, 1990) re-
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lies in his work on a variety of sources, including evolutionary and attachment theories. He is particularly sympathetic to psychoanalytic ideas, broadly understood, even though he explicitly rejects the classical superego explanation of the origin of morality, precisely because it disregards preoedipal manifestations of moral capacities. He emphasizes those capacities that, in his view, are functionally related to moral development: an inborn motive for engaging and maintaining social exchanges; the ability to take turns in interacting with others; the tendency to share with the caregivers such emotions as joy and pride; children's attentiveness to parents' and teachers' emotional expressions ("affect attunement"), in which they seek the information to guide their own behavior ("social referencing"). As a result, from a very early age, children imitate their parents' behavior. Soon they learn simple rules and action scripts. Eventually, they begin to say "no" to themselves. They test parental intentions and seem, at times, to negotiate certain rules. Even so, Emde et al. (1987) show that fully autonomous compliance is slow to develop and the steps toward it are marked by uncertainty and ambivalence. By the age of 24 months, one can indeed observe dramatic developmental changes. At the same time, as Emde concludes, the more advanced form of compliance—the ability to restrain from prohibited behaviors when the parents are not present—is not an accomplishment of the 2-year-old (Emde et al., 1987, p. 269 Q. Kochanska shares with Emde the interest in the development of conscience, as manifested in children's compliance with parental requests, and also a willingness to rely on a variety of theoretical sources. Empirically, her attempt to isolate the important factors is far more analytic and systematic than Emde's. Theoretically, she seems to be mainly influenced by a tradition that she labels "a classic version of the sociallearning approach" (Kochanska, 1993, p. 327). In this tradition, moral development is seen as social compliance through the internalization of social norms and impulse control. Internalization is then defined in behavioral terms, as the capacity to follow requests and prohibitions, even when one is not observed or cannot expect immediate rewards or punishments. This capacity is considered to be a result of affective conditioning (Kochanska speaks of "conditioned anxiety" and "avoidance learning"). Kochanska's (e.g., 1991, 1993) two-component model of conscience development could be seen as the convergence of the classical learning theory and contemporary research on infant temperament. The first component is the tendency to experience fear, distress, or quilt in the context of rules and prohibitions; and the second component concerns self-regulation, namely, the ability to resist forbidden impulses and to perform socially desirable acts. Both would be strongly influenced by infant temperament—the temperamental vulnerability to anxious arousal and the temperamental tendency toward inhibitory control. In a later modification, Kochanska (1995) hypothesized two different pathways in the development of conscience. In some cases,
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internalization and conscience are mainly produced through vulnerability to anxiety; in others, they would be the result of the child's positive relationships with, and attachment to, the caregiver. In both pathways, however, infant temperament would be the moderating variable. Kochanska tested this model in a series of interesting studies, relying on different kinds of information. Mothers reported that their children, between the ages of 1.9 and 5.10, at least sometimes, froze and were likely to look remorseful or guilty when they were caught doing something wrong; were quiet and avoided eye contact after wrongdoing; spontaneously said "sorry" and promised not to repeat their misbehavior; asked to be forgiven and wanted to be reassured (this set of observations constitutes the "affective discomfort" cluster). At least sometimes, these children drew their parents' attention to their mishaps, spontaneously confessed their wrongdoing, and felt relieved afterwards; were eager to make amends; offered toys or other objects to a playmate that they had hurt, and were relieved when they could do so; tended not to repeat forbidden behaviors, also when the parent was not present; hesitated and stopped themselves when they were tempted; tended to complete chores, also when they were not supervised (this second set of behaviors form the "affective moral regulation" cluster) (Kochanska, De Vet, Goldman, Murray, & Putnam, 1994; Kochanska, 1995; Kochanska & Aksan, 1995; Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995). Even though these behaviors increased in frequency between the ages of two and five, they were already present in significant degree during the toddler years. In their direct observations, Kochanska and her colleagues (Kochanska, 1995; Kochanska & Aksan, 1995; Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995; Kochanska, Padavich, & Koenig, 1996) focused on the child's response to the mother's requests while the mother was present, and on the child's ability to comply with a prohibition in the absence of the caregiver. As a result of their observations, Kochanska and Aksan (1995) arrived at the important differentiation between "committed compliance" and "situational compliance." The first was recognized by the child staying on the task willingly, without needing the mother's intervention; the second was indicated by the child's air of reluctance or a shaky acceptance of the prohibition, the need for frequent prompting, and occasional lapses. Already before the age of 3-and-a-half, children were observed to engage in committed compliance, especially in the context of prohibitions. Committed compliance, but not situational compliance, was found to increase with age and to correlate with compliance also when the parent was absent. Both Emde and Kochanska seem to believe that these behaviors are themselves moral, and not simply important for later moral development (e.g., Emde et al., 1991, pp. 259—263). From their perspective, morality consists of certain classes of behavior, when they are produced by oneself and without external controls. Among these behaviors are empathic responses, reciprocity, distress for wrongdoing, and, most impor-
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tant, compliance with parental requests. Toddlers engage in all these behaviors, at least sometimes, and are therefore capable of moral functioning.
Toddlers' Empathic Behavior
This is an area of children's functioning that has been widely investigated by different psychologists, in many different projects, and in a variety of contexts. At a descriptive level, there is wide agreement and even consensus on what children, on average, can do and tend to do at different ages, and on how their competencies change with development (e.g., Eisenberg, 1986; Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987; Hoffman, 1981; RadkeYarrow, Zahn-Waxier, & Chapman, 1983). From the earliest age, children are attentive and sensitive to the emotional expressions of other people, especially their caregivers. They become quiet and sober, whine and cry, when they hear other children crying. Initially, they are passive in response to others' distress. But during their second and third year, they make inquiries about it and attempt to calm and cheer the person in distress: They offer sympathy through affectionate words, or by touching and caressing; they give objects, including their own toys, when they think that the other person may like them and can be pacified by them. They try to assist or call an adult for help. When a child is the object of another child's aggression, they may try to protect the victim. With age, their helping attempts become less egocentric, more attuned to the other's individual needs, and more effective. In the company of people who are not distressed, toddlers were observed to join in and help with the chores, to cooperate in a common project, and to share their possessions, even those to which they are most attached. Of course, there is also another side in toddlers' responsiveness to others. They can indeed be affectionate and compassionate, but they can also be cruel. At times, they can laugh at others' distress, even at their own victims. They can tease; can fight for the control of space and resources, for their possessions, and also over norm violations; attack, also without provocation. As is the case for empathic behavior, aggression also increases dramatically during the second and third year of life, and becomes more effective and refined with development (Cummings, Hollenbeck, Iannotti, Radke-Yarrow, & Zahn-Waxler, 1986; Dunn, 1987; Dunn & Munn, 1985, 1987). Even more interesting is the repeated finding that, at least during the toddler years, those children, especially boys, who are more frequently and more intensely empathic tend to be those who are more frequently and more intensely aggressive. In Cummings et al.'s (1986) interpretation, empathic and aggressive responses, during the toddler years, may simply indicate a heightened reactivity to social stimuli.
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As a group, those who study children's empathy find its relevance to morality obvious. Sympathetic and compassionate behaviors are less likely to be motivated by fear or other self-interested motives, and are therefore included in practically every psychological definition of morality.
The Moral Interpretation of Toddlers' Behavior Overall, the studies analyzed here are methodologically solid, interesting, and inventive. One may accept, completely, the observations concerning toddlers' understanding of standards and norms, their compliance, and their empathic responses. But it is possible to question the early morality interpretation and to ask whether, in applying the ordinary criteria of morality, these behaviors could be object of moral evaluations, or, more generally, whether toddlers can be considered to be genuine moral subjects. In general, it cannot be doubted that these young children intended their behaviors. But questions can be raised in relation to the other criteria: Do toddlers understand what differentiates moral standards from other standards? If they don't, can they have moral motives? Can they stand back from their spontaneous emotions and impulses, and accept or reject them specifically because they are good or bad? Can their intentions be moral? Understanding Moral Standards and Norms. Kagan, Lamb, Emde, Dunn, and many others observed that very young children respond in a similar way, emotionally and behaviorally, to flawed objects, mishaps, and deviations from norms and family rules. In this sense, 2- and 3-year-olds have standards about objects and behavior, including language. But there are different kinds of standards, and there are different ways of using the language of good and bad, or of right and wrong. As suggested earlier, moral standards and deviations are not like other kinds of standards and deviations, but have specific characteristics, both of an objective and a subjective nature. Philosophers and psychologists may disagree concerning the necessary objective characteristics of moral events. However, there seems to be no disagreement that certain norms and standards, are, as such, completely irrelevant to morality. From a subjective perspective, morality requires a certain degree of personal allegiance and a sense of obligation; moral deviations must be intentional. Therefore, a child may already understand certain standards, but may still be unable to grasp what is specific to moral standards and what is a moral infraction. The child may be able to use the language of good and bad, or of right and wrong, in a global undifferentiated way, without grasping the essential characteristics of what is morally right or wrong. The observation that children experience distress, apologize,
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or try to repair the damage, beg the question about the moral meaning of these responses. When is distress moral? When do apology, reparation, or even self-blame have a moral meaning? One reason why the work of Turiel and his colleagues is interesting is that it focuses precisely on the differentiation between moral and other conventional standards. But what should one say of their evidence? It seems well-established that even young children respond differently to events that Turiel and his colleagues classify as moral and conventional. However, one can question whether they do so by relying on a concept of morality. For instance, it seems clear that only the victims respond to their peers' aggression. It is plausible, therefore, that toddlers are not responding to the immorality of the aggressive act, but to the raw fact that they are being pushed and bitten. Moreover, in giving different reasons for why conventional and moral transgressions are wrong, 3-year-olds (and also older children and adults) may not intend to say that some events are moral and others are not. The different reasons may simply fit the specific description of each action. In saying that biting is wrong because it hurts the child, while wearing the inappropriate dress to school is wrong because it goes against the school's rules, a child may simply describe the two events, without differentiating them in terms of a general concept of morality. Finally, very young children may begin to recognize that certain transgressions, compared to others, are more generally wrong, should be punished more severely, and their wrongness is less dependent on specific norms and commands. But they do not say or suggest that these are the reasons why these actions are moral and not conventional. These criteria belong to Turiel's, but not to the child's conception of morality. I suspect that when toddlers say that pulling a girl's hair is bad, even if the teacher did not forbid it, they may be saying several things, but disjointly: Pulling hair hurts a girl everywhere, with or without rules—this is a simple description of the event: Pulling the hair is bad because what hurts you is bad; and pulling the hair is also bad because you are likely to be punished, even if nobody told you that you were not supposed to do it. But even if toddlers had a grasp of the intrinsic difference between moral and social-conventional events, one could still argue that something very important would still be missing from their concept, so important, in fact, that one could not be said to understand morality without it. What may be present in children's concept is the objective perspective: Certain actions produce certain effects; these actions are objectively bad and should be punished. What seems to be entirely missing (at least no evidence is given for it) is the subjective perspective, in particular, that morality should generate a sense of obligation, a sense of commitment, and should produce guilt when moral norms are transgressed. I am not thinking of whether or not a tod-
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dler is motivated by moral norms, but of whether or not a toddler understands that morality, in general, necessarily involves a sense of internal obligation. Without this understanding, one could argue, there would be no genuine concept of morality. Toddlers' Compliance to Requests and Prohibitions. It is clear that very young children comply with parental rules and requests, even when they are alone, and, in many instances, with good will and eagerness. They are anxious and, at least some, seem to experience guilt when they deviate from adult expectations. But it is not at all clear that these behaviors, as described by Emde, Kochanska, and many others, are moral in nature. From their studies, it is possible to infer that toddlers' compliance or noncompliance is intentional and is accompanied by certain emotions. The question concerns the motives. If one were to rely on the descriptions and analyses of these researchers, one would have to conclude that toddlers are mainly motivated to comply by "deviation anxiety" and fear. The "moral toddler" seems to be a child who is easily distressed and anxious, inhibited and constricted. But, according to the ordinary conception of morality, fear and anxiety are not moral motives. One could become wellsocialized out of fear, but one cannot become moral as long as one's "right" actions are determined by this motive. Something similar can be said about the other motive emphasized by Emde and Kochanska, namely, the need to maintain a good relationship with one's parents. The need to maintain one's parents' love, or the fear of losing it, like "deviation anxiety," is self-centered: It suggests a preoccupation with one's own interests rather than a desire to help others or to do what is good for goodness' sake. The distinction introduced by Kochanska between "committed" and "situational" compliance is certainly psychologically important. However, in interpreting the motives of "committed" children, this author may engage in a bit of semantic inflation. She writes of "feeling of internal obligation," "feeling of internal commitment," and of "fully endorsing and 'embracing'" the parents' agenda (Kochanska & Aksan, 1995). These terms ordinarily would suggest that "committed children" grasp what is intrinsically good in a rule or a command, value it for itself, are motivated by this intrinsic value, and invest their own self in actualizing it. There is no evidence that these characteristics were present. Kochanska may underestimate the degree to which anxiety of all sorts, particularly of losing the affection of one's parents, may produce in children, and also in adults, the kind of internalization leading to reliable or even eager obedience, also when either the contents of obedience or obedience itself are not valued intrinsically. The Case of Guilt Feelings and Empathic Responses. Judging by the ordinary meaning of the terms, the observations that young children express quilt feelings when they
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deviate from the norms (e.g., Zahn-Waxier & Kochanska, 1990) and respond with sympathy and compassion to other people's distress would suggest that these children are capable of genuine morality. Here too, however, a more careful analysis would make the inference doubtful. In fact, it is not clear that what toddlers experience is actually guilt, or that guilt is always an indication of, and a response to, moral concerns. Not infrequently, the term, quilt, is used more broadly, as the equivalent of any negative emotional response to one's wrongdoing. In this case, its moral meaning becomes ambiguous at best. This type of ambiguity is evident when one carefully considers the empirical basis from which the inference was made. For instance, in mothers' reports, on which Zahn-Waxler and Kochanska (1990) relied for their conclusions, children are simultaneously described as guilty but also as anxious, worried, concerned, remorseful, afraid of losing their parents' love, and engaging in reparative behaviors (cf. p. 218 f). A similar mixture of emotions is present in Kochanska's scale, "Affective Discomfort after Wrongdoing" (Kochanska et al., 1994, 1996). In these and in other studies, not only are the various emotional responses hopelessly mixed together but no evidence is provided that the child values the norms in themselves and responds emotionally to the violation of what he or she values. The ambiguity is the same in toddlers' use of "good," "bad," "feeling bad," and so on—expressions that, in children's language, are sometimes classified as moral (e.g., Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; Snow, 1987). Probably the safest conclusion would be that "guilt feelings," as observed in these children, do not provide any clearer evidence of toddlers' moral capacities than their reactions to flawed objects, their compliance, or their social exchanges in general. Perhaps, if guilt is indeed an expression of moral concerns, it can only be assessed with any degree of certainty by gathering independent evidence of children's moral motives. And these, when it comes to toddlers,' are still very unclear. The issue is different for toddlers' empathy. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of their good feelings—compassion for people in distress, and the desire to help and share. The question is whether these spontaneous feelings and desires are moral and indicate the presence of a moral orientation in these children. The impression one gets in reading anecdotal accounts and research reports is that these children respond spontaneously and impulsively to their empathic feelings, simply because they feel so. If they felt angry, jealous, or mean, as they frequently do, they would also respond spontaneously and impulsively to these opposite feelings. In other words, what seems to be missing, or at least unclear, is the capacity to look at one's own compassion and meanness, to realize that the former affect is good and the latter bad, and then to desire to follow the former because it is good, and to inhibit or suppress the latter because it is bad.
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Several observations support this analysis. First, acts of aggression and cruelty increase paripassu with prosocial acts, at least to the end of the third year of life; second, aggression is frequently accompanied by expressions of glee and satisfaction; third, particularly among boys, empathic and aggressive behaviors correlate with each other: Those children who engage frequently in the former also engage frequently in the latter; fourth, at least up to age six, children tend to think that a child who intentionally attacks and hurts another child also feels good about his action (the "happy victimizer" pheonomenon; see, e.g., Arsenio & Lover, 1995); and finally, when preschoolers were asked to compare a child who feels sorry for his or her intentional misbehavior and one who is happy about it, they tended to think that the first child is not better than the second (Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988). That toddlers are incapable of distancing themselves from their emotions, impulses, and actions; cannot take their "good" impulses as object of their judgment and cannot have specific desires about them seems to be uncontroversial and is openly recognized by many in the early morality camp. But the moral interpretation differs. For these researchers, the capacity to look at one's impulses and to have second order desires about them is unnecessary for morality. Others, instead, following our everyday understanding of morality, think that it is essential to moral functioning.
The Progressive View of Morality The conclusion of the analyses pursued in this section seems to be inescapable: When the behaviors that early morality researchers consider to be moral are reinterpreted in the light of the criteria that are embedded in our ordinary conception of morality, their relevance to morality is doubtful, to say the least. Most researchers in the early morality camp seem to be aware that one cannot look at toddlers' morality with the same criteria that are used for adults: They write of the "beginning of morality," of "early" or "first morality," and of "precursors" and "forerunners" of morality. However, they insist in a moral interpretation of these children's behavior. One reason is that they take a progressive continuous view of internahzation and moral development ("a developmental view of internahzation," as Kochanska, 1995, p. 599, calls it). They seem to think that morality, at least psychologically, consists of a number of different processes and abilities, each with its time of ascendance and its own developmental pace—among them, the ability to communicate and to learn expectations and consequences, the ability to respond emotionally to norm deviations, and, eventually, the ability to reflect and reason. In this continuous progression, it is impossible to establish a neat cut-off point, dividing moral from nonmoral functioning. The differences would be mostly a matter of degree. A rather simple form
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of morality consists of complying with one's parents' requests when they are present; a more advanced form may be to comply when the parents are not there; an even more advanced form would be to identify with parental standards, adopting them as one's own, and so on. It is clear that moral capacities have important, even necessary, prerequisites. But a prerequisite may not itself be intrinsically moral. It seems fallacious to argue that, because there cannot be morality without some form of self-control, self-control is by itself moral. On the other hand, it seems unreasonable to adopt different, and age-related, criteria of morality—where would one end? Taking then the standard criteria, an action is formally moral, if it is guided by an intention informed by a moral motive. As I argued in this section, the actions described by Kagan, Emde, Kochanska, and many others in 2- and 3-year-olds do not seem to have these essential characteristics. In looking at moral development as a continuous stepwise progression, one is also confronted with the difficult problem of the transformation of motives: Can fear and anxiety change into love for other people? Can attachment to one's family change into the desire for justice? How? When? Will Kochanska's anxious child, or the child motivated by fear, at some point, realize that fear and anxiety are morally unworthy, and reject them as unacceptable motives for moral behavior? Will the child, overeager to please his or her parents, be able to see, at some point, that this is not the right motive for helping another child? To empirically address these questions, one would need well-designed longitudinal studies; but one would also need a degree of sensitivity to conceptual and theoretical issues and to the large variety of moral expressions, including independence from authorities.
It should be mentioned, in this context, that Kochanska and Aksan (1995) misunderstand or misinterpret the cognitive-developmental view of compliance and internalization. They believe that Kohlberg, for instance, contrasted compliance and internalization, and insisted that conformity guided by external control cannot be moral. They reject this position because, in their opinion, it does not reflect the developmental origins of internalization. Compliance with external demands and controls, they argue, is a first step, "an important condition and antecedent in the long developmental process leading ultimately to conscience formation" (p. 237). In reality, Kohlberg (e.g., 1969) did not contrast compliance and internalization because he did not see internalization as equivalent with morality, as Kochanska seems to do. As for compliance, Kohlberg asked for its motives and reasons. It could be genuinely moral (as in Stage 3). But it cannot be moral if it is motivated by anxiety, or if its moral meaning is not understood. Here lies the crucial difference between Kochanska and Emde, on the one hand, and the cognitive-developmental view, on the other: The latter is concerned with meanings, the former with behavioral prediction.
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From the perspective of everyday meanings, the moral relevance of toddlers' behavior could be defended on two grounds. First, toddlers seem indeed to become aware that there is a special domain of human functioning, that forms one portion of what can be considered objective morality, and begin to engage in behaviors that, from an external objective perspective, are similar to moral behaviors. Once these children grasp that in performing these behaviors, one needs to have a special subjective attitude (i.e., intention and special motives), they begin to have a genuine understanding of morality; and once they themselves assume this subjective attitude, they become moral subjects. In other words, they learn to carve out an area of social functioning, to which they later attach formally moral meanings. Second, toddlers' capacities can be considered morally relevant, if they are empirically linked to later morality, accounting for individual differences in this domain. Whether or not the behaviors reviewed here have a functional relation with later moral capacities and tendencies is an empirical issue of great psychological significance. It is impossible at this point to make any firm statement on this topic. Only few studies attempted to establish links between the toddler years and later ages (Dunn, 1995; Dunn, Brown, & Maguire, 1995; Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995; Kochanska et al., 1996). The age interval has been rather limited, and the results are ambiguous, either because of the usual problems with definitions and empirical operations, or because of their inconsistency.
Conclusion In this chapter, I examined the claim that children younger than three or four have genuine moral capacities. After reviewing the body of research on which this claim is established, I argued that the behaviors described by these researchers, revealing as they are of the enormous strides in early social development, cannot be interpreted in moral terms. In sketching a critique of the early morality position, I relied on ideas that seem to be essential to the ordinary conception of morality, namely, that an action, to be counted as moral, must be intentional, that its intention must be guided by special motives, and that it cannot be the result of spontaneous and totally unreflected impulses. On the basis of these criteria and of what is known so far of young children's behavior, it seems unlikely that these children engage in actions that can be praised or blamed as being morally right or wrong. One could raise a further question: How can one explain that so many psychologists engaged in the study of early social development arrive at interpretations of children's behaviors and capacities that seem to contradict our common everyday understanding of morality? This question cannot be pursued here in any detail. But I wish to briefly raise a few issues concerning the way many of us approach our most
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basic concepts. In fact, one reason for the early morality interpretations must be found in the way many of us understand the relations between our empirical work and the broad conceptual schemes of ordinary social life. Another reason seems to lie in the general theoretical assumptions that the early morality researchers bring to their research and that, frequently unwittingly, determine their preference for a specific psychological conception of morality. With regard to the first point, a split seems to frequently occur between those prescientific ideas and concepts that guide our everyday social exchange and the task of devising operational definitions and creating adequate research methods. In the moral domain, there is an implicit belief that the nature of morality is obvious, and the task of deciding which actions are relevant to morality is unproblematic. Therefore, the emphasis is placed on the adequacy of methods and instruments; and "adequacy" is understood in terms of their capacity to elicit responses and to precisely and reliably capture observations rather than in terms of their correspondence with the ordinary concept of morality. It is not surprising, then, that the different views concerning early morality are presented as a methodological and empirical contrast, and are discussed according to the effectiveness and sensitivity of the respective analytic procedures (Kagan, 1991; Lamb & Feeny, 1995). In addition, theoretical allegiances, sometimes working as unquestioned assumptions, lead many researchers to a specific conception of what morality is all about. Many of those who align themselves with the early morality camp—Turiel and his colleagues are important exceptions—share a number of theoretical ideas that seem to function like unquestioned assumptions. One idea concerns the primacy of overt behavior in psychological descriptions. A second concerns the nature of motivation. Behavior is understood as driven by one form or another of emotional conditioning: The positive or negative emotional consequences of a specific behavior are associated with the conditions under which the behavior was performed; behaviors that are connected with pleasant emotions tend to be repeated; those that are connected with unpleasant emotions tend to be inhibited and suppressed, the more readily the more intense are the emotions. From this perspective, reasons, when they exist, have no independent motivational role. They either function as clues for conditioned emotions, or are themselves behaviors to be explained by modeling and emotional conditioning. The third idea concerns the importance attributed to genetic and maturational processes. Early social processes are interpreted as natural outcomes of a biological readiness for the development of morality; individual differences in socialization tend to be explained in terms of genetically-based temperamental characteristics. Taken together, these ideas would lead one to view sociocultural norms as the ultimate source of human values, social conformity as the basic form of adaptation, and
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emotions as the driving forces in social conformity. It is not surprising, then, that Kagan, Kochanska, Emde, and many others tend to define morality by functional criteria, namely, the emotional consequences that an action produces for the agent, and the ability of these emotions to reliably yield behavioral compliance with the socializing agents. It is important to realize that this conception is not the conclusion of empirical research, but rests on assumptions that are not scientific in nature. This is also the case of the moral interpretation of toddlers' behavior, which largely rests on these assumptions. The point is that, when psychologists become involved in controversies concerning the moral capacities of toddlers or, for that matter, of people in general, they enter a discourse in which the typical scientific criteria of reliability, validity, and representativeness of observations are ultimately insufficient—unless one understands validity in relation to a concept of morality which is not, and cannot, be derived from research. One could read a certain degree of naivete in the confident statements of many researchers, who seem to be unaware of, or perhaps unconcerned for, the way their conclusions depend on prior concepts and implicit philosophical assumptions, and how these assumptions differ not only from those of other psychologists but also, and most importantly, from the meanings embedded in the conceptual scheme that inescapably guides our social exchanges.
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Snow, C. (1987). Language and the beginnings of moral understanding. Comment on Judy Dunn's paper. In J. Kagan & S. Lamb (Eds.), The emergence of morality in young children (pp. 112—122). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stocker, M., with Hegeman, E. (1996). Valuing emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tisak, M. S. (1993). Preschool children's judgments of moral and personal events involving physical harm and property damage. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 39, 375-390. Tisak, M. S. (1995). Domains of social reasoning and beyond. Annals ofChildDevelopment, 11, 95-130. Zahn-Waxier, C , & Kochanska, G. (1990). The origins of guilt. In R. A. Thompson (Ed.), The 36th annual symposium on motivation: Socioemotionaldevelopment(pp. 183—258). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
PART TWO
Issues of Application
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
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Discourse in Context Vilhjdlmur Arnason
The main task of discourse ethics has been to analyze the procedure that participants in practical discourse must follow in order to come to a rational agreement about universalizable norms. An account of how these norms are brought to bear upon particular situations has largely ignored important factors and been mistaken about the relationship between justification and application. As a result, discourse ethics has lost touch with the actuality of the moral life. My thesis is that the link between the levels of ideal practical discourse and contextual judgments can be found in real moral conversations carried out by ordinary people in everyday situations. In these conversations, four things are of primary importance: the facts of the situation calling for a decision, the role-specific duties of the people concerned, the virtues of the conversation partners, and the general norms or principles applicable to the situation. Discourse ethics has ignored three of these four key elements of fruitful moral discourse. This neglect stems from its radical decontextualization of morality. I believe that the fundamental idea of discourse ethics—that in dealing with moral issues we must engage in an honest and unrestrained dialogue—is of crucial importance for the moral life. But this idea will remain detached from our ethical reality if it is not also fleshed out in terms of real conversations. This requires a redirection of the project of discourse ethics. Moral discourse will then no longer be confined to decontextualized argumentation about validity of norms but will also shape a mode of interaction, the way in which we will deal with our pressing moral problems in all spheres of life (cf. Benhabib, 1992, p. 38). In this chapter, I want to address two aspects of this decontextualization of moral discourse. In the first section of the chapter, I discuss the relationship between general norms and particular situations. I argue that the sharp distinction between justification and application of norms is misleading. In order to clarify this relation, I distinguish between public, professional, and private discourses. Through examples I try to show how the relations between norms and context differ according to the type of dis-
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course that is being carried out. In the second section, I am concerned with the loss of identity of the participants in moral discourse. I argue that in order to account for application and moral motivation, discourse ethics must take into account the virtues and the roles of the discourse partners. In the final section, I make some points on the project of redirecting discourse ethics into the context of moral experience.
Norms and Context The project of a critical social theory with practical intent has often been attacked from the viewpoint of those who maintain that human reason is radically situated and cannot maintain a principled theoretical distance over against real praxis (cf. Apel, 1971; Arnason, 1982). The neo-Aristotelian (and the neo-Hegelian) criticism of attempts to formulate universalistic ethics is one line of that attack. The claim is that ethical reason is inevitably embedded in historical life-contexts and the task of philosophical ethics is to reinterpret reason in its practical reality (see Schnadelbach, 1986). This position has a deep mistrust both for critical principled morality and for any rational justification of norms. Both are, according to neo-Aristotelians, destructive of the moral life because they disengage reason from the context which alone can inform it and guide its judgments. The Aristotelian phronesis, the virtue of thoughtful reflection and good judgment, is to do the work required: Informed by what is generally held to be right and just, the prudent man must simply perceive the appropriate course of action to be taken in a particular situation and follow it. This response to a situation requires hermeneutic sensitivity which cannot be taught or derived from general principles, but depends on the cultivation of individuals and their common sense (Gadamer, 1975, pp. 278-289). Habermas (1990, p. 206f.) has said that this hermeneutic sense is one of the two major factors of the moment of application. But he insists that the major ethical task is to justify universal moral norms. He writes: In contrast to the neo-Aristotelian position, discourse ethics is emphatically opposed to going back to a stage of philosophical thought prior to Kant. Kant's achievement was precisely to dissociate the problem of justification from the application and implementation of moral insights. I argue that even in the prudent application of norms, principles of practical reason take effect ... Such principles ... promote the idea of impartial application, which is not a prudent but a moral point of view. Surely, we should not go back to a philosophical thought prior to Kant. In light of the context of our contemporary ethical life, which is shot through with universal rights and principles, I do not see that as a conceivable option. Neo-Aristotelians do not seem to realize that our moral predicament is post-Kantian. This, however, must
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be recognized in a contemporary account of phronesis. Phronesis is an intellectual virtue which not only finds the particular fitting thing to do within a situation but does so in virtue of practical reasoning and wisdom about what is generally right or proper. For a neo-Aristotelian in a post-Kantian world I see no compelling reason why practical deliberation should not be informed by critical moral principles. Of course, neoAristotelians can choose to lean toward what Schnadelbach (1986) has called "the ideology of phronesis" which systematically weakens all validity claims in favor of lived praxis. But in so doing they put up a false dichotomy between the assertion of principles, on the one hand, and the sense for the situation, on the other hand. Habermas (1993, p. 10) buys too much into the neo-Aristotelian interpretation by limiting the Aristotelian notion of practical reason to "the role of a faculty of judgment (Urteilskrafi) that illuminates the life historical horizon of a customary ethos." This interpretation ignores the emphasis which Aristotle (1962, 1144b) places upon the use of "the right reason" and implies discursive capacities which are procedural rather than substantive. The practically wise man in contemporary society will judge the relative significance of specific situations in light of general moral principles. These two "moments" go naturally together in the modern moral experience, and if there is anything that is ww-Aristotelian, it is violating moral experience. But the dichotomy of principles and contextual sensitivity has another side that needs to be addressed. For discourse ethics, the proper ethical work is that of justifying moral norms in practical discourse. But if the norms for test in practical discourse have no concrete reference to context, there is no moral problematic at issue. If practical discourse is not concerned with the application of norms, it is, in effect, reduced to a particular kind of theoretical discourse. Practical discourse, properly understood, aims at correct actions, attitudes, and decisions and not merely at justifying norms. Moreover, as Wellmer (1986, p. 136) has argued, "in the case of morality the problem of grounding has the character of a problem of application; what moral discourse is concerned with is the 'application' of the moral point of view, whether to concrete social problem areas or to the situations in which individuals act." This is because "the norms themselves carry, so to speak, a situation index which binds them to the situations in which they have their origin" (Wellmer, 1986, p. 134). When the norms to be discussed in practical discourse are decontextualized, they become mere prima facie principles which are only effectively valid in nonconflictual situations. As Habermas writes:
Habermas (1993, p. 39) seems to admit this when he approvingly quotes Giinther's (1988) point that the meaning of each norm changes with every situation.
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But this is not sufficient food for moral thought and discussion. Practical discourses are occasioned by conflicts about norms and it is important to distinguish between (at least) two types of conflicts. The first arises when people disagree about the validity of a traditional norm, for example, the Tightness of female circumcision. In this kind of cases, the participants rightly decontextualize the norm so as to thematize its validity as such and, subsequently, to discuss ways to implement the justified norm. The second, and much more common type of conflicts, arises in morally complex situations which are constituted by the acceptance of the validity of the general norms at stake, but disagreement about ways of acting. In such situations, our perception of the conflicting moral demands of the situation is inseparable from our knowledge of prima facie validity of indeterminate norms, but the task at hand is either to tailor more specific principles to suit a more restricted domain or to find out which obligations are actual in the situation. If moral discourse is to guide actions and decisions, what we need to justify in moral discourse are not decontextualized principles, but exceptions to them in morally complex situations or specification of these principles in light of contextual restraints (O'Neill, 1996). This is the stuff of actual moral justification and it can only be done after the scrutiny of the situation.
Discourses and Decisions By lifting practical discourse out of human context in this manner, discourse ethics obscures the issue of both justification and application. We may be able to discuss the moral point of view in that way, but we may lose the point of morality. As Habermas (1982, p. 251) has well said, "ethics is concerned with problems that have their actual place only in everyday practice." In order to find a morally justified response to these problems, it is necessary to evaluate the facts of the situation, not only in terms of prima facie valid norms but in light of the needs and rights, roles and values of the people concerned. If it is to have a connection with real life, this is what moral discourse is about. The main requirement is that people justify their decisions by reference to moral principles and with respect to the facts of the situation. Moral discourse is an example of a real conversation between people about an ethical problem that presents itself within a morally complex situation. It is important to note that not all moral discourses are of the same kind; they may differ in objectives and emphasis according to the moral task at hand. We need to distinguish between public, professional, and private moral discourses. By public discourses I mean conver-
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sations, for example, between those elected or otherwise appointed to deal with political and social issues. Of primary importance here are democratic procedures and observance of the norms of justice. By professional discourses I mean conversations between professionals and clients, for example, doctor and patient who have the objective of making an important decision regarding the latter's well being. Although democratic procedures and norms of justice are important in professional discourses, we have now entered a dimension where questions of individual autonomy, professional beneficence (and possibly paternalism), and domain-specific principles related to these issues come into focus. Finally, by private moral discourse I mean the moral deliberation that takes place in conversations between friends and family members. In these situations, what is needed is not the adversarial principled standpoint of public discourse nor professional knowledge and distance, but attentive listening, personal truthfulness, and understanding. Discourse ethics seem to be best, not to say merely, suited for public discourse. It makes certain sense to say that in the areas of legislation and public policy, rules and norms are first agreed upon and then applied by those enforcing them and abiding by them. The situation is different, however, in other moral discourses where justification of norms can often not be separated from their application. Application can rarely be seen as a cognitive hermeneutical "technique" of bringing a particular situation under a general principle, as is often the case in law. This common description of the relationship between general principles and particular situations is a distortion of what actually takes place in our moral experience. We do not encounter our situations fully equipped with moral norms, wondering about which of them really fits the complicated case. Rather, in deciding what to do in morally complex circumstances we are trying to get clear about the situation where the principles are already implicated (cf. Bernstein, 1995, p. 226 £). In fact, the moral complexity of the situation is constituted by the conflict of principles or norms which we know have prima facie validity. Professional discourses have some obvious advantages for the analysis of application of discourse ethics.' First of all, they are more often explicitly constructed as conversations (e.g., counseling) than other types of moral discourses. Second, their subject
"The ideal of a communicative ethic is thus ultimately tied to the viability and desirability of a democratic public ethos!' (Benhabib, 1986, p. 283) With some important exceptions (e.g., Edelstein, 1984), this type of moral discourse has been neglected in the area of discourse ethics. The discussion focuses either on application in public moral discourses (Apel & Kettner, 1992) or on private moral discourses (Kittay & Meyers, 1989). This reflects the tension between the ethics of care and the ethics of justice. The valid insights of both these approaches to morality can be fruitfully mediated in professional discourse.
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matter is often about clearly identifiable objective moral interests that people recognize as their own. Third, the role-specific duties of (at least the professional) participants in moral discourse are more clearly formulated than in other discourses. This is particularly important because social roles effective in every conversation are primary mediators between general moral claims and the demands of the particular situations. Confronted with a complex moral situation which calls for a decision, four elements are invariably of cardinal importance: the concrete situation facing us, the moral values and principles at stake, the roles and virtues of the people concerned. The reason for starting with the situation is obvious: In it we are first confronted with the problem and the decision must be appropriate to it. To be sure, the idea of the situation is both a theoretical abstraction and a matter of practical judgment. It is a theoretical abstraction in the sense that it is demarcated from the other factors for the sake of analysis. And in each particular case, it is a matter of practical judgment what is entailed in a situation. We often have to interpret and decide what is implied in the constellation of the situation and this can be controversial. Nevertheless, the notion of "the (relevant) facts of the matter" is in most cases both meaningful and important. The context sensitivity required for finding a fitting response to a situation concerns the relationship between the relevant facts and the conflicting moral norms that made the situation morally complex in the first place. To take a few examples: — The decision is about whether to allow a teenager to stay at a friend's party until two o'clock at night. In this case, it is clearly important to know a few facts, for example: How old is the teenager? Who is at the party? How will she get home? Is it dangerous to be on the street at this hour? and so forth. This would be an example of relevant situation factors in a private discourse between parents and a teenager. — The decision is about whether to respect the wishes of a Jehova's Witness to reject blood transfusion. In this case, it is also important to know some facts, for example: How old is the patient? Is he competent to make the decision? Is he fully informed about the consequences of his refusal? and so forth. This would be an example of relevant situation factors in a professional discourse between a physician and a patient. — The decision is about whether to allocate money to health care, earmarked for the use of lung and heart transplantations. In this case, we need to know some facts, for example: What is the level of public health care in society at large? Is money urgently needed for other important social tasks? Would this amount of money really benefit the recipients? and so forth. This would be an example of relevant situation factors in a public political discourse, for example, between members of parliament and members of a hospital administration. In each of the three cases, it is to be expected that the people concerned are not in agreement about what would be the right thing to do. The way in which we handle the dis-
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agreement, however, differs between the three types of discourses because the ethical substance is quite different. Nevertheless, if we are to deal with our moral problem in a morally defensible way, there will be a common thread in all moral discourses. This element is simultaneously procedural and substantial. The procedural aspect is the form of the dialogue which must be carried out in a manner free of deception and coercion. Only in such a dialogue can we meet the substantial moral requirement of respecting people as persons. If we reconstruct an optimal way of settling a moral dispute, we will also see how the moments of application and of justification are intertwined. In dealing with disagreement in everyday situations, we can use rational means or have recourse to some form of violence. In the case of morality, rationality is bound to the structures of communication (Habermas, 1984, chap. I.I). Therefore, if we use any means which hinder the other partner in the discussion to express her claims, if we do not listen to her or in some other way make no effort to understand her, we are behaving irrationally and immorally. Since we disagree with her, however, we demand that she substantiates her claims. If the reasons for her claim are only based upon some generally acknowledged facts of our "intersubjectively shared life-world," we do not thereby regard her claim as valid or justified. Only when we thematize the accepted norms and critically examine whether they can be accepted with good reasons in this case do we have a justified application. But these norms are not detached from the situation. On the contrary, it is precisely their embeddedness in the situation which made them problematic in the first place. Therefore, the attempt of the participants in a contextual moral discourse to justify a norm is simultaneously its application. Let us look briefly at our examples to substantiate this point. What makes each decision difficult is that more than one important moral value or norm is at stake in the situation (there may be more conflicting values than the ones mentioned in each case, but I am not trying to exhaust the possibilities): — In the first case, the values at stake are the autonomy of the teenager, on the one hand, and his welfare, on the other hand. — In the second case, the values at stake are the autonomy and religious freedom of the Jehova's Witness, on the one hand, and his life, on the other hand. — In the third case, the values at stake are the justice of a fair allocation of scarce health care resources, on the one hand, and the life of the patients in need of a lung and heart transplantation, on the other hand. The first case is characterized by two decontextualizedprima facie validnorms: (a) that the individual has the right to live her own life as she chooses as long as she does not
What precisely would count as a good reason is relative to the situation and the type of discourse.
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harm others, and (b) that parents ought to secure the welfare of their children. These norms are constitutive of this moral situation which cannot be described without them. The moral task in this case is not to go through "a two-stage process of argument consisting of justification followed by application of norms" (Habermas, 1993, p. 36). Responsible parents would sit down with their daughter and discuss with her the reasons why her liberty should be restricted and why it is their duty to protect her. And in providing these reasons they must at the same time justify the general observance of these norms and their specific observance in this case. This is why every norm has a "situational index," as Wellmer puts it. Similar things could be said about the other two examples. In both cases, a justificatory applicatory discourse is occasioned by the clash of two important moral values. A solution is not found by arguing that decontextualized autonomy is, in principle, more important than life and welfare, or that justice is more important than the other three. The reasons for preferring one principle over the other must be connected to the relevant features of each case. Whether the norm of preserving life is to override the norm of the right to make decisions for oneself depends in the second case on the fact whether the Jehova's Witness is himself competent to make the decision. And in this case—as in many others—it is misleading to talk only about fittingness. It is clearly wrong—given modern assumptions about respect for persons—to impose medical treatment upon a competent patient who has refused it. The way in which the patient is handled and the decision is made is nevertheless a matter of fittingness and propriety. A decontextualized justificatory discourse on the norm of saving a man's endangered life and of the norm of justly allocating health resources would be completely unproblematic. The results of that discourse would not be of much help when it comes to the complex context of contemporary health care allocation. And as soon as these norms are connected to this context, there is no clear demarcation line between justification and application. We simply have to think through the situation in which these norms are already implicated and try to reach a fair decision about plans of action or suitable policy norms for this domain. Such a decision will have to be carried out in an open and honest dialogue which observes the authority of the best argument, that is, the reasons which give weight to the norms concerned. These examples show how the norms are constitutive of the situations. The moral complexity in each case is due to the fact that we are presented with more than one
The fact that one principle must be favored at the cost of another in a particular situation does not mean, of course, that the second principle is any way devalued as such; its prima facie validity remains unaffected. Moreover, the prima facie rule that respect for autonomy is to override concerns for welfare remains unaffected in principle even though it is reversed with good arguments in specific cases.
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powerful moral claim. For the same reason, the meaning of the norms is dependent on the situation and cannot be fully abstracted from it. Therefore, the discourses of justification and application are intertwined in real conversations. The "formalistic ethics that consistently works out the independent logic (Eigensinn) of normative questions" (Habermas, 1982, p. 51) is threatened with emptiness because it severs the ties to the ethical substance which is the matter of moral thought.
Identity and Motivation In the terminology of Carol Gilligan (1982), the discourse ethics mode of thinking has been formal and abstract rather than contextual and narrative. This is understandable both in light of the emphasis on the justification of norms over their application and in terms of the thesis that the subject matter for practical discourse is universalizable norms of justice and not evaluative questions of the good life. Gilligan criticized this conception of morality for being overly concerned with respect for universal rights and principles, while ignoring particular relationships and responsibilities. The latter is seen to be the heart of an ethics of care which emphasizes the individuality of the "concrete other" rather than the common humanity of the "generalized other," traditionally cherished by moral theorists (Benhabib, 1992, pp. 148—177). While this tension has much in common with the one between neo-Aristotelianism and discourse ethics, different features come into focus. The neo-Aristotelian critique of discourse ethics stresses the cognitive aspect of application, that is, the nature of moral judgment and the importance of hermeneutic sensitivity. The care ethic critique of discourse ethics puts more emphasis on motivational or affective factors of the moral life. What is at issue is not only the dichotomy between formal principles and concrete situations but the subordinate role that is given to affective-motivational factors in discourse ethics. The justificatory task of discourse ethics is anchored in a pragmatic philosophy of language which "lifts out" of context the implicit universal presuppositions of communication. It is the task of real people, however, to translate the moral insights, clarified in "ideal" practical discourse, into moral action. For that they need cognitive and motivational maturity. If moral discourses are about ways of acting in morally complex situations where rights, interests, needs, and values of concrete individuals are at stake, then that is where the affective-emotional constitution of the participants come to a test. The
Habermas (1990, p. 179) takes both cognitive and motivational factors into account in his description of the problem of application.
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moral point of view cannot be brought to bear on the case at hand without an effective sense of justice which includes the "capacity for sympathetic and imaginative perception of the requirements of the particular situation" (Kymlicka, 1990, p. 266). This sense is required for all applications and, therefore, it is important for the situational analysis that goes along with, the justification of ways of acting. Moreover, if people do not become affectively equipped to act morally there will be no moral discourse. This requires that we flesh out further the context of moral discourse. I select two issues for this purpose. First, in order to deal with the question of motivation, we need to discuss the role of the virtues in moral discourse. Second, the issue of identity can best be accounted for through the notion of a role (cf. Emmett, 1966). Discourse ethics has been strikingly inattentive to the importance of virtues and roles in moral life. The explanation seems to be obvious. On the reflective level of practical discourse, we seek free and informed consent between rational agents about decontextualized norms. But within particular situations that demand decisive action, we are among people with specific roles, responsibilities, and obligations which require virtues to be carried out. In real conversations, I am neither an isolated moral self nor a member of an ideal communication community freed of all moral restraints. I am a concretely situated self, already in relationship with others. I am not only responding to a unique situation in light of the universal moral point of view; I am doing so as a particular individual with roles (such as a father, a medical doctor, a politician) which have general ethical content. In this sense, I am "generalized-concrete" and so are others. I carry these ethical facts into every single situation which calls for a moral response. Therefore, we need to analyze and emphasize the virtues and social roles effective in every conversation, and these do differ in the three types of moral discourse outlined above. Although it is possible to reach a hypothetical rational agreement about our prima facie duties (toward "generalized others") without knowing the identity of the participants in practical discourse, it is impossible to reach a sensible moral decision about our actual duties (to "concrete others") in a situation without knowing who we are and how we relate to other people. The concrete identity of the other is always crucial in private moral discourse, it is often of major significance in professional discourse, but often cannot, and perhaps ought not to, be taken into account in public discourse where impartial fairness is of crucial importance.
Virtues and Roles Most attempts to return to virtue theory have oversimplified the problem, and the reference to social roles need not fare any better. Moral virtues and social roles are still
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understood within the monological discourse of the tradition. It is necessary, therefore, to reevaluate the importance and implications of these factors in moral life in light of the shift toward the ethics of discourse. Dialogical virtues are those character traits which provide for a thoughtful and honest conversation. In addition to the universal pragmatic conditions for practical discourse (Habermas, 1990), these personal traits are necessary for a moral conversation. Some virtues are cross-discursive, in the sense that they are among the prerequisites of each and every moral discourse; other virtues are discourse-specific, that is, peculiar to public, professional, or private discourses. Put in most general terms, two things are required for a moral discourse to take place. The first I call dialogical willingness and the other dialogical competence. The first is the minimal requirement of all real conversations. Willingness to converse does not in itself, however, imply any moral virtues. A person entering a dialogue may do so exclusively for strategy purposes and not with the aim of reaching an understanding (cf. Habermas, 1984, p. 286). Such behavior is, of course, often indicative of serious emotional and psychotic disturbances, but let it suffice here to say that the strategic person lacks communicative competence. By this term, I mean the ability to engage in conversations, express oneself and to listen to others, and to place oneself in the other's shoes. At this point, several virtues come to the fore. The project of reaching understanding requires sincere, honest, and understanding persons who are not only willing to obey the best argument but have the character of carrying out the conversation in a fair and even a humble manner (cf. Gadamer, 1975, e.g., pp. 319-324). Habermas has interesting things to say concerning this matter, although he does not employ the language of virtues. In describing the ideal speech situation, where he reconstructs "the anonymous competencies of idealized subjects," he describes "the symmetrical relations ... between the participants in the discussion" (Habermas, 1970, pp. 129, 131; McCarthy, 1978, p. 306f). These imply (a) truthfulness of ex-
The reflexivity required in moral discourse concerns the duties and roles, which, according to Habermas (1990, p. 107), "derive their self-evident quality from background convictions." In part, the issue is whether an individual can question and reexamine or even replace what is "given" or whether he remains bound by it. In reflectively distanciating themselves from their socially defined duties and roles, the actors gain free access to the possibilities of their culture. This is an integral part of the task of need interpretation and interest satisfaction which is at issue in practical discourse. As Rehg (1991, p. 36) has argued, this makes it difficult to separate moral and evaluative issues: "Whether one finds the consequences ... of a norm's general observance acceptable depends on how one understands certain interests, which in turn depends on one's needs interpretations and the values through which needs are expressed."
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pression, (b) liberty to select and employ speech acts, (c) just observation of rules, and (d) equal opportunity for the assumption of dialogical roles. This reconstruction of communicative competence is bound to have a selective starting point. Surely it is impossible to truthfully express one's attitudes, feelings, and intentions without the virtues of honesty and sincerity. A person exercising her liberty to employ speech acts needs a certain amount of courage, but she must also show moderation in order to respect the equal opportunity of all participants. Nobody can justly observe the rules without fairness and integrity. All of these are clearly "traditional" virtues, but in the dialogue they take on a new function in light of the aim of reaching an understanding. The virtues I have just described are among the general conditions for all moral discourses to take place, that is, for "the speaking-situation as form of life" (Habermas, 1970, p. 132). However, different discourses may require specific virtues because of the circumstances peculiar to them. Let us look at our examples from this perspective. The debate about whether to spend public money on lung and heart transplantations is, from the moral point of view, a question of justice and would primarily require the virtue of fairness. Fairness carries with it a cluster of virtues, truthfulness and honesty being the cardinal ones because they are the major obstacles to strategic action. And if Habermas (1993, p. 68) is right that "justice and solidarity are simply two sides of the same coin," the virtue of fairness would also imply friendship in the wide Aristotelian sense of the word, the filia which holds together all social organizations. I do not mean that these virtues are sufficient foundations of a just distribution of scarce resources; I am only saying that they are necessary constituents of a just procedure. As Habermas writes: It is quite sufficient to appeal to a common process of discursive will formation that subjects all norms to the same standard—the capacity to command general assent— and secures the deontological force of their validity against an unlimited orientation to consequences by admitting only regulations that are equally in the interest of all. Only the universalistic privileging of what is equally good for all brings the moral point of view to bear in the justification of norms. (Habermas, 1993, p. 69) But this is not sufficient because "the deontological force" is ineffective if it is not fuelled by the personal motivations that we call virtues. Surely, Habermas (1990, p. 209) argues that "the discursive justification of norms is no guarantee of the actu-
See Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII. In effect Habermas (1979) recognizes this in his analysis of the cultural processes of socialization and individuation in the course of which the conversation participants have acquired their competencies.
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alization of moral insights," but this presupposes the sharp distinction between justification and application which I have rejected. If justification is analyzed in close relation to applicatory discourses, it will become clear that these character traits are intrinsic to the discursive process. It must be admitted that discourse ethics lends itself well to the public sphere, where the aim is to make decisions concerning common social goals and generalizable interests. It is not as well fitted, however, for professional and private moral discourses. This is partly because of the asymmetrical relations between the participants of these discourses. Although participants in public discourse do not in fact have the same power, they are in principle equal simply as citizens of the state. The relationship between people in professional and private discourses is quite often inevitably unequal, where one is dependent upon the other, and this calls for additionalvinu.es in the process of justification and application of norms. This is quite evident in the situation of the physician and the Jehova's Witness. In the most general way one can say that the duty of the physician is to care for the wellbeing of the patient and to respect him as a person. Therefore, the conversation between the doctor and the patient needs to aim at two moral objectives. One is to preserve the dignity of the patient. This is not done by treating him as an "ideal" rational being, but by taking into account his particular capacities for deliberation and decision making. This requires that the doctor keeps at a distance from the patient so as to give him elbow room to exercise his judgment and autonomy. In order to do this, the doctor must inform the patient and enable him to participate in decisions concerning the treatment. Hence, the importance of truthfulness. At the same time, the conversation aims at caring for the patients well-being. This requires nearness In the sense that the doctor participates sympathetically in the patient's condition and provides him with emotional support (cf. Kant, 1990, p. 337; O'Neill, 1985). In this regard, the virtues of beneficence and understanding play a major role. An obvious objection to this position from the discourse ethics point of view is to say that these virtues, especially the caring ones, have nothing to do with the justification of norms—they are merely a matter of context sensitivity and an ethical issue for the good life. But if we are to take Habermas' words seriously, that what is needed in moral argumentation "is a 'real' process of argumentation in which the individuals concerned cooperate" (Habermas, 1990, p. 67), then we must be sensitive to the context which occasions the argumentation and its conclusions have to fit. The virtues of honesty and understanding are necessary in the case of the medical doctor and the Jehova's Witness because if the doctor does not exercise these virtues, he is unlikely to allow the patient "freely and equally" to participate in the dialogue. If the "ideal role taking" is not to remain some imaginary step or procedure in the philosopher's solitary mind, we must consider how rational conversations can take place between real
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people. In the patient-professional relationship, an honest and emphatic conversation is a duty because it enhances the capacity for self-determination (see Arnason, 1994; Katz, 1984, chap. V, VI). The patient will understand the reasons behind the doctor's recommendation and the professional will understand the reasons for the patient's refusal. This mutual exchange and understanding cannot be separated from a real discourse of justification. Finally, in private discourses, like the one between the teenager and her parents, we have still another context of justification and application. The basic dialogical virtues of fairness and truthfulness are still operative, but because of the specific relationship between the participants, the virtues of love and care now come to the fore. The norms that are up for justification and application in a situation like this cannot be rationally discussed without taking into account the moral substance of the family—the obligations implied in being a mother, a father, and a daughter. The roles of the participants give them an identity which is needed for an assessment of rights and duties which are of major importance in most human relationships. However, in situations of moral conflict, social roles do not tell us what to do; the Tightness of the decision must always be critically assessed in moral discourse. Many moral dilemmas arise because of conflicting obligations that have their source in the various functions of individuals. What interests me here is how such conflicts may occasion an interplay between levels of discourses. Let us imagine that a disagreement arises within the family, for example, between husband and wife concerning division of work within the home. It is not unlikely that such a debate would center around the role of the woman. An argument which merely refers to the traditional responsibilities of women is clearly unacceptable because it reinforces illegitimate power which does not allow women to define their own identity. Therefore, if the discourse is to take moral arguments properly into account, it must move to another level where the legitimacy of the traditional roles and their accompanying value structures is explicitly thematized. Historically, this has meant that the debate is transferred into political discourse where it is discussed from a perspective which makes room for general interests. Similar things could be said about disagreement at the level of professional discourses. One could imagine both disagreement within a professional group or between professionals and clients concerning particular practices. In fact, the majority of issues in biomedical ethics in recent decades concern the tension between the welfare of patients, as defined from the perspective of traditional medicine, and the patients' claim to autonomy which refers to universal principles (cf. Arnason, 2004). It is no longer acceptable for a physician merely to appeal to codex ethicus. Both these examples indicate the importance of being able to appeal debates from personal and professional discourses to the public realm where the discussion is to be freed from
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the interests associated with certain roles. This implies "the right of the self to distance itself from social roles and their content or to assume 'reflexive role-distance'" (Benhabib, 1992, p. 73). This distanciation can best be exercised and achieved in critical conversations. Two reservations must be made at this point, one in each direction so to speak. The first is that public discourse in a particular society at a particular time must not be seen as "the highest court of appeal." This is because real public discourse is often distorted by factors which counteract general interests and, hence, cannot be taken to represent the moral point of view. This can only be anticipated in the form of a community of moral subjects in cooperative search for just sociomoral arrangements. The second reservation is that the moral element of the role-factor cannot be neglected because it is constitutive of the familial and professional practices. Plato's words that "every art has its own function and benefits its proper subject" still have validity in this regard. In this sense, the "nature of the case" restricts the autonomy of practical discourse. The nature of the art of medicine implies, for instance, certain things about the professional-patient relationship which cannot be done away with by consent in public discourse. Professional discourses are bound to follow a logic of their own, suitable to their subject matter. Therefore, they cannot be properly understood as imperfect versions of practical discourses.
Redirection of Discourse Ethics In order to redirect discourse ethics into the context of moral life, we could flesh out the implications of a remark that Habermas (1982, p. 255) made in a reply to his critics: "If the actors do not bring with them, and into their discourse, their individual life-histories, their identities, their needs and wants, their traditions, memberships, and so forth, practical discourse would at once be robbed of all content." If moral discourse is to be regarded as a process where the participants are dealing with their daily moral problems, then discourse ethics has to change its emphasis. I will end this chapter by making a few remarks pointing in this direction. First, it should be clear that discourse ethics which is engaged with real argumentation does not focus exclusively on decontextualized and demotivized issues. Such dialogical ethics would also, and even primarily, attempt to analyze the conditions for dealing with the moral issues of everyday life in a responsible way. Habermas has mentioned these conditions, but he has not connected them well enough with his theory
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of practical discourse. He is right, of course, that "discourse cannot by itself ensure that the conditions necessary for the actual participation of all concerned are met" (Habermas, 1990, p. 209). But discourse ethics can, nevertheless, contribute to these conditions by analyzing both the social institutions and normative practices which facilitate and obstruct moral discourse as well as the individual qualities and relationships which sustain and endanger the moral life. These conditions are both formal and material. The formal conditions concern the procedures that secure the fairness and impartiality of the conversations, while the material conditions refer to what is needed in order to realize these formal conditions. One does not have to positively spell out exactly what social conditions and personal qualities are needed for a successful moral discourse, but it is the task of responsible discourse ethics—in consultation with social and psychological theories—to point out the ideological constraints and "pathology" which frustrate our moral projects. "What is involved here," Wellmer (1986, p. 127) writes, "are specific negotiations rather than advances towards some ideal." Instead of merely reconstructing and abstracting universal standards and positively formulated formal principles of reason from the context of experience, this approach implies that the theorist's task is also to articulate the concrete experiences of injustice and organize them into a meaningful pattern. This is not done in order to rationally justify our critical claims, but rather in order to clarify the "securely anchored feelings of injustice" (Honneth, 1981, p. 15) in our lifeworld, "to get a clearer view of the situation" (Habermas, 1990, p. 211) and thus prepare the grounds for a practical change. By proceeding in this manner from the experience of perceived injustice as it makes itself manifest in the everyday moral consciousness, the problem of mediation between moral theory and ethical life could be diminished. Habermas (1990, p. 205) has even admitted that a noncontextual definition of a moral principle is not satisfactory: Negative versions of the moral principle seem to be a step in the right direction. They heed the prohibition of graven images, refrain from positive depiction, and as in the case of discourse ethics, refer negatively to the damaged life instead of pointing to the good life. This cannot be done, however, if practical discourse is abstracted from the sociohistorical context. This negative approach shows well how it is impossible to separate the formal and material presuppositions of dialogical ethics clearly (cf. Honneth, 1986). Habermas' (1990, pp. 200—203) argument about the interrelatedness of justice and solidarity also implies this interrelation, namely, that a major condition for the practice of discourse ethics is an established "network of interpersonal relations and a system of mutual recognition." Second, discourse ethics must not limit itself to the analysis of the conditions for political or public dialogue but must also deal with the specific issues involved in professional and private discourses. The democratization of society cannot be implement-
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ed without changes in the private and professional spheres of people's lives. To mention only one reason, the dialogical virtues necessary for the democratic process are formed mainly in the private sphere of upbringing and in the professional sphere of education and therapy (Warren, 1995). But professional and private discourses are not only to be analyzed because of their relationship to public discourse. They are certainly worthy of separate analyses, if only for the fact that they lead us into moral contexts of relationships and reciprocity which differ in important ways from public dialogues. To mention one example, which is important in light of the interdependence of justice and solidarity, the everyday reality for many people in the private and the professional spheres is characterized by the fact that they are caregivers for dependants. By examining only the public practical discourse, communicative ethics has, in its own way, continued "the centuries-old neglect of the basic issues of child-rearing and care for dependants" (Kymlicka, 1990, p. 285). Such specific dependency is different from the more extensive relations of dependency and reciprocal vulnerabilities which Habermas refers to in his argument for solidarity and hence call for a separate analysis. It is not sufficient to stabilize "a network of symmetrical relations of recognition" (Habermas, 1993, p. 109) when the moral interaction is constituted by asymmetrical relations which radically affect the performance of the dialogue and the possibilities for participating in it. In summary, the sharp distinctions between justice and the good life, justification of norms and their application must be reconsidered. These distinctions, which often are made "for the sake of the analysis," may stand in the way of a fruitful analysis of our real dialogical conditions and our everyday context of communication. If it is the needs and interests of the historical actors that are at stake in moral discourse, then the dialogue must not be projected out of the context in which they are formed and deformed. On the contrary, the discourse ethical analysis should be extended into the public, professional, and private conversations that are continually taking place within the constraints of everyday life. The function of a discourse ethics with critical intent should not be to theoretically eliminate these constraints in order to make way for hypothetical results, but to find out which of these constraints belong to the facticity of the human condition and which are due to social and cultural interventions which could never be defended in moral discourse among those affected. This would be an important step toward connecting the important theoretical insights associated with the idea of practical discourse and the practice of moral conversations. The attempt to account for the material conditions of moral discourses in real life implies that the discussion be placed in a broader context of the contemporary moral predicament. But nothing could be more in the spirit of an ethic growing out of critical theory with practical intent. The direction of an ethic of discourse should be toward a culture of emancipatory conversations.
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Acknowledgments Thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung and the Research Fund of the University of Iceland whose grants enabled this research; to Prof. Albrecht Wellmer at the Free University of Berlin and Prof. Wolfgang Edelstein at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for various assistance in relation to this research; to Prof. Richard Gaskins, Dr. Logi Gunnarsson, and Prof. Mikael M. Karlsson for critical reading of an earlier draft of this chapter.
References Apel, K.-O. (1971). Hermeneutik undIdeologiekritik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Apel, K.-O., & Kettner, M. (1992). Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschafl. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Aristotle. (1962). Nicomachean ethics (M. Ostwald, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Arnason, V. (1982). The context of morality and the question of ethics. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Purdue University, Calumet. Arnason, V. (1994). Towards authentic conversations: Authenticity in the patient-professional relationship. Theoretical Medicine, 15, 227—242. Arnason, V. (2002). Towards a better life: The possibility of universal discourse ethics. In G. Bexell & D. E. Anderson (Eds.), Universal ethics: Perspectives and proposals fom Scandinavian scholars. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Arnason, V. (2004). Sidfrcedi lifs ogdauda. Reykjavik: University Press and Centre for Ethics of the University of Iceland. [Forthcoming in German translation, LIT Verlag] Benhabib, S. (1986). Critique, norm and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press. Benhabib, S. (1992). Situating the self. Cambridge, MA: The Polity Press. Bernstein, J. M. (1995). Recovering ethical life. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Edelstein, W. (1984). Moral intervention: A skeptical note. In M. V. Berkowitz & F. Oser (Eds.), Moral education: Theory andpractice(pp. 387-401). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Emmet, D. (1966). Rules, roles, and relations. Boston: Beacon Press. Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and method. New York: Seabury Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giinther, K. (1988). Der Sinn fur Angemessenheit. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1970). Summation and response. Continuum, 8, 123-133. Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1982). A reply to my critics. In J. Thompson & D. Held (Eds.), Habermas: Critical debates. Boston: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action (Vol. I). Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1990). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Boston: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1992). Faktizitat und Geltung. Beitrage zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
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Habermas, J. (1993). Justification and application: Remarks on discourse ethics. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (1981). Moral consciousness and class domination: Some problems in the analysis of hidden morality. Praxis International, 2, 12—25. Honneth, A. (1986). Diskursethik und implizites Gerechtigkeitskonzept. In W. Kuhlmann (Ed.), Moralitdt und Sittlichkeit (pp. 183-193). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Kant, I. (1990). Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Stuttgart: Reclam. [Original work published 1797] Katz, J. (1984). The silent world of doctor and patient. NewYork: Free Press. Kittay, E. F., & Meyers, D. T. (1989). Women and moral theory. Lanham, M D : Rowman and Littlefield. Kymlicka, W. (1990). Contemporary political philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McCarthy, T. (1978). The critical theory ofjurgen Habermas. Boston: MIT Press. O'Neill, O. (1985). Between consenting adults. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14, 252-277. O'Neill, O. (1996). Towards justice and virtue: A constructive account of practical reasoning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rehg, W. (1991). Discourse and the moral point of view: Deriving a dialogical principle of universalization. Inquiry, 34, 27-48. Rehg, W. (1994). Insight and solidarity: The discourse ethics ofjurgen Habermas. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Schnadelbach, H. (1986). Was ist Neoaristotelismus? In W. Kuhlmann (Ed.), Moralitdt und Sittlichkeit (pp. 38—63). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Warren, M. (1995). The self in discursive democracy. In S. White (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Habermas (pp. 167-200). New York: Cambridge University Press. Wellmer, A. (1986). Ethik und Dialog. Elemente des moralischen Urteils bei Kant und in der Diskursethik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. [The persistence of modernity. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1991]
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Moral Intimacy and Moral Judgment—Tailoring General Theories to Personal Contexts BillPuka
1. Setting Up The Decades of Our Discontent
Many within both moral philosophy and psychology bemoan the failure of mainstream theory and research to touch everyday life concerns. Leading moral philosophies imply little about how to conduct personal relationships or about the ins and outs of interpersonal interactions. Their focus is more foundational and conceptual, more general and abstract. Indeed, trying to bring these viewpoints down to earth (or up to it) seems more difficult than the moral difficulties they should aim to address. Their principles appreciate the equal essence of our humanity, but overlook the peculiar package of personal traits with which we identify. Thus, they promote a respect for personhood that leaves our identity out, or uncared for. This last shortfall is most serious in psychology where interpersonal ties, motivating emotions, and experiential textures are key. The leading accounts of moral competence focus on mutual respect and concern through reasoning and cognitive reflection primarily, shown in the ability to explain and justify our moral stands. Much less research concerns the how-tos of engaging compassionate sensibilities or engaging in mutually gratifying interpersonal "negotiations." The mainstream Piagetian and Kohlbergian accounts follow philosophical suit to a T, in fact. They depict holistic cognitive structures of reasoning—theories-in-the-head—not sensitive decision making through personal interplay in the field. While claiming to observe "social interaction" and the resolution of interpersonal problems or dilemmas, their depictions ignore the actual dynamics of deliberation and dialogue completely, not to mention the inner turmoils and shared dramas involved. Their research subjects are not even observed while problem solving or interacting with others nor questioned on the "how tos" of such processes.
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In moral philosophy, the above dissatisfaction has spawned entire fields of applied and practical ethics, which prefer case studies to theoretical systems and principles. In moral psychology, this dissatisfaction has refocused empirical inquiry on particular traits, skills, and emotions in ethical relating, as opposed to cognitive structures. Empathy, caring, and interpersonal negotiating are the most prominent (Gilligan, 1982). The foregoing complaint is odd in one respect. Generally, unified theories in any field are designed explicitly to provide fundamental explanations, not to decide or predict individual cases. In ethics, they never attempted to address questions like, "Should I do such a sleazy person that big a favor?" but, instead, "What are the criteria by which we can distinguish valid from invalid moral beliefs and rationales?" Moreover, mainstream philosophical theorists have explicitly resisted their application to practical problem solving, trying to confine them to academic circles and debates. Criticizing their lack of applicability of the failure of theorists to apply them is then much like criticizing application for being applied or practical. Yet in another sense, ethical theorists claim to deal in practical logic and prescriptivity. They often represent their work as ethics itself—the study of and teaching. The choice to confine the field to fundamental explanatory theory is a very odd and skewed one, worthy of challenge. This is more so in cognitive-moral psychology where practical competences are supposedly measured for their naturalistic effectiveness in life context. Thus, it is important to recast fundamental unified theory as merely one brand of ethical theory that should not dominate. Indeed, "theories generally," as opposed to "theorizing," may not be what ethics need most. Fundamental explanation might best be relegated to the background of ethics as a very specialized metastudy, modeled perhaps inappropriately on theory in physics. But there is still another side. Deep ethical understanding as crucial in dealing with the most serious and difficult ethical choices and handling difficult conversations about them. The typical lack of such understanding and reflection figures often in negotiations breaking down. Depth and breadth of such understanding takes the lead in matured character development and sense of moral identity. Indeed, attaining moral wisdom in any degree requires a level of fundamental and global understanding not unlike that sought by fundamental theory in ethics. (And this is so even if fundamentalism is seen narratively, as just one story to be told, not especially more privileged or valid than others.) Thus, perhaps we should take a pause, and consider how the fruits of even the most abstract explanatory theories and models can provide for practice before we put them in their properly contemplative place. Major ethical theories would not have attained such longstanding plausibility, after all, had they not borrowed generously from common sense and experience, likely enhancing it. True, their vestigial quest for the holy grail—the Law that unlocks the secret of right and good—paints them in childlike poses from a morally wise per-
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spective. And moral wisdom certainly focuses on artful living in one's nexus of social relations, where theory seems most outsized. But, as truly applied ethics has shown (ethics applying general principles), more guidance for practice than expected can be found if principles are used artfully as perspectives, not rules, including particular lenses from which cognitive orientations and attitudes derive. As Kohlberg aptly put it, contemplating a general principle gives one a moral point of view—a cognitive perspective for viewing what people are, where their value resides, how it expresses itself, and the many ways of appreciating it. Certainly, applications to general contexts, like public policy or a professional ethos, allow us to distinguish what is "in the spirit" of a certain ethic, or not, just as good laws do. And this spirit applies well to the "basic human" element of respect even when dealing with one's intimates—when addressing one's children or spouse and recognizing, despite some appearances, that they are their own person, with relations to strangers in social roles that are independent of you. Another reason that structural theory in psychology raises more problems than formalistic philosophy is the former's reliance on the latter, overlaying general structure with more general structure. While psychology's research intent has been applied or social-interactionist by nature, its methods fail to focus on ethical process or intercourse. We should expect to find scenarios in the data here, not structures. Moral interviews should be coded as: "Subjects first think this, then that, then they feel this other thing and are then tempted to say whatever." From descriptive scenarios should rise prescriptive ones straightway: "The competent thing is first do x here, then if A reacts with x, we next do y or perhaps z in the hopes of reaching z +1." Instead, data is reconstructed as cognitive structure or schemata that must then be translated for application to assess its plausibility. These two long and conceptually unsure extra steps make no sense in an empirical exercise. Worse, critics have drawn a consistent connection between the principled orientation in these structured accounts and immoral implications for practice. The structure of justice translates into callous disregard, dismissiveness, and punitiveness in many personal encounters. Just regard rejects many of our most heartfelt concerns as lacking in moral merit, as "illegitimate claims to undeserved rewards" (Gilligan, 1982). (The key Kantian criterion of adequacy is not called "impersonality" for nothing.) This situation is morally perverse and intolerable. Conscious insensitivity to personal context and particulars is a mortal flaw. Moving On: A Roadmap Rather than further bemoaning these fates, however, we will try to moot them. In fact, we will consider several systematic strategies for doing so both in philosophy and psy-
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chology. We proceed in three movements. First, we consider how to render general theories contextually alert, personable, and serviceable in daily life, without losing their theoretical virtues. A first order of business here is to confront the intractable conflict among the major theories. It is unfathomable to me that there has ever been talk of applying ethics—actually intervening in professional contexts with Kantian, Utilitarian, and virtue principles—when these major tools of application are so consciously at odds. Ethics is an internally inconsistent discipline, like any good theoretical research discipline, and can not be consistently applied as such. First Movement. A summary sketch is offered below for diagnosing "the internal conflict among general theories" and the philosophical process-gone-awry of generalization, combined with reductionism, by which it arises. This turns out to be precisely the problem and process that leads ethics away from practice. Remedies are suggestions for how to remedy the conflict and unrealism problem at once, at their genesis, by systematically reversing the processes of generalization and reduction. This process—the Savings Approach—de-structures theory into substantive components, then restructures and interrelates these components as they stand, neither reducing nor generalizing them to any great degree. This approach preserves many more ethical phenomena within theory—ethical realities well known to common experience and common sense—than is typical of ethical theory. The Savings Approach recapitulates the ethical intuitionist tradition in this regard. But this inclusive tendency also extends to structural features of theory used to organize ethical "data" of experience in nondistortive and manageable ways. (This is not typical of the intuitionist tradition.) The aim of the Savings Approach is to generate nonreductionist "mixed views" (Rawls, 1972) that avoid conflict and abstractness by mutually paring down universal principles into localized rationales, focused on their favored case domains. These are then arranged in motley confederation by a variety of tandempairing techniques and mutual restraint provisos (Puka, 1984, 1995b). Several of these qualify as a "Right Mix," an adequate and applicable ethic, if not the singular champion of ethical theory per se. Right Mix ethics will diverge somewhat, but not seriously conflict. The steps of the Savings Approach can only be characterized briefly here, to play the backup function required of them in a truly applied ethic. The particular Right Mix derived from them (Puka, 1983—1995, 1995b) serves primarily to ground and assess those empirically demonstrated cognitive competencies that compose this applied ethic, as an architectural blueprint grounds actual construction of an edifice and indicates plans that conform or go awry. Indeed, the philosophical Savings Approach is accorded only one step in the process of formulating a truly applied ethical procedure through interpretive analyses of cognitive data.
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I propose, then, that we use research psychology, not applied philosophy, to devise a truly practical ethic. For guiding actual moral practice, the most empirically-based observations of actual decision-making competence are preferable to any derivation of conceptual implications from philosophical principles or rationales. The former have a demonstrated track record of practical success; the latter, posed from a contemplative armchair, have none at all. They rely on intellectual plausibility, which often turns implausible and reflects an embarassing rationalistic oafishness in emotionally sensitive interpersonally subtle interactions. Aside from grounding applied ethics, philosophy is relegated the ironic task here of transforming psychology's empirical account of practice into something truly practiceable—something teachable and learnable, something fit for habituation and internalization through practice routines, and ultimately raised to the level of artful performance. (Leave it to philosophy to be hands on.) Second Movement. Structural reconstructions of psychological functioning remain more descriptive or observation-based than does explanatory theory. Thus, when their undue structuring is cleared out (paralleling the reversal of reductionism in moral theory), they capture practice above all. This is not true of ethical theories. And because they focus on competence in functioning, they are fit for prescriptive translation. That is, they describe good practice, and so can be readily translated into directives for ethical choice and behavior. For several years, I have been researching and describing the actual processes of moral problem solving, left out by standard moral interviewing with Kohlberg's Moral Judgment Interview (MJI) and Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT). Applied cognitive science offers the alternative technique of verbal performance protocols ("think-aloud" interviews), which are then subjected to "task analysis" and programmed in computer simulations. These methods provide better accounts of how the moral deliberation process actually unfolds and can guide the clearing away of the theoretical structuring of observations that depart from parsimonious description. Philosophy has a third role to play here as all measures of cognitive-moral competence rise little above common sense. By conceptual extrapolation, the functional logic of such competence can provide just the lift needed to become "uncommon good sense." This turns competence to excellence and artfulness without reverting to intellectualism. Our second step follows a type of Savings Approach to de-structure cognitivedevelopmental theory, clearing away the nonpractical structuring of cognitive-moral development data, and refitting the competencies observed to work better together. Here, the research findings of Kohlberg and other cognitivists are combed for their substantive elements and operations, roaming across the divergent stages of moral de-
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velopment as if they were conflicting moral views or theories. Focus is on intermediate-sized moral concepts uncovered by Bebeau and Thoma (1998) which represent the home case domain that moral operations/rationales must handle. Similar emphasis is placed on localized operations or rationales, depicted by such researchers as Rest, Turiel, Hoffman, and Narvaez (See Puka, 1995a) rather than the general principles of Kohlberg's highest stages of competence. The former are already localized; they need not be pared back to their home domains to work together harmoniously, as conflicting universal principles did in philosophy. Thus, they can be fitted straightway to each other for functional effectiveness in the particular contexts of everyday choice. While the term "deconstruction" has taken on a technical meaning in conceptual analysis, a more earthly analogy to building construction and renovation serves the hands-on understanding needed for our first two movements. Like a wrecking crew, we stand before the holistic and elegant architectonics captured by the structural features of ethical theory and cognitive-moral schemas. We note the smooth exteriors and uniform structural girders that general principles and cognitive operations are designed to create for moral reasoning. Then, quite unceremoniously, our two de-structuring approaches take a wrecking ball to these graceful designs, treating their organization as little more than the neat compartments in an overly kemp tool box that can be cannibalized in a salvaging operation for component parts. After scavenging the structures, a motley assortment of choice picking are laid out and tinkered with, trying to fit the end of one rationale into the end of a similarly shaped operation, clipped this or that concept together with this or that operation to play tandem functions in the production of desired ends. The grand super-structures—the tool box itself—is thrown aside and ignored, and with it go the many controversies associated with the theories involved. These include not only controversies over utility-preference maximization or the categorical nature of imperatives but also the developmental heart of developmental stage theory, with its over-bold claims. We are interested in competence and the ways in which it can be learned, not how it may naturally and universally develop via assimilation, integration, disequilibration, accommodation, and hierarchical reintegration. A method is provided for making the right selections of tools and fasteners from these box structures, and for fitting parts together for apt use. Special emphasis is placed on ferreting out the most personally intimate and sensitive rationales observed by Kohlbergians that were were left at the early end (the bottom of the box) in his stage sequence. These are the interpersonal rationales of fairplay, trust and loyalty, helpfulness and understanding of Stages 2 and 3. Such value and virtue rationales are the precise sorts of small components that become hidden under the superstructure of stage holism. Yet they are all the more crucial for everyday moral problem solving once broad perspectives and institutionally-mediated rationales are added to our moral
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competencies at later stages. This is what critics recognized when challenging the apparent callousness and depersonalized nature of postconventional moral thought. To rehabilitate these "earlier-developing" competencies means reversing a further influence of structurally reductionistic theorizing. Kohlberg threw out the baby with the bathwater when pointing out the flaws of early stage rationales that would cause higher stage reasoning to reject them. It is true that rationales fit for face-to-face negotiation, family ties and peer preferences often show personal favoritism, legitimating an unsavory in-group/out-group mentality. They are morally arbitrary and prejudiced in key respects. But they also reserve an honored and needed place for personal virtues, especially relational, reciprocal, and benevolent virtues. They give strong expression to mutual identification and empathy, the glue of moral community. Kohlberg failed to accord such virtues partial credit for their limited moral salience and strengths. Thus, he failed to inquire into how later stages would preserve and reintegrate these rationales within more inclusive moral perspectives. This repeated oversight is all too visible in Kohlberg's stage-by-stage comparative adequacy comparisons (Kohlberg, 1981b). Correcting for these shortfalls infuses higher-level reasoning with the personal and interpersonal sensibilities needed to achieve fuller competence in daily life. By depicting the workings of higher stage systems in broader social-institutional contexts, primarily, Kohlberg denuded them of interpersonal intimacy and everyday interaction. Final Movement. The culmination of the second Savings Approach, backed by the first, is a stepwise moral decision procedure: Respect and Fairness. In sum, its twodozen or so steps constitute an empirically based applied ethic—a proceduralized rendering of cognitive-moral reasoning systems, reconfigured as a loose confederation of component abilities fit to flexible and contextual functions. Critics will be surprised that so many procedural features and subfeatures can be mined from the handful of cognitive operations cited in Kohlberg's global depictions of postconventional reasoning. This might provide reason to reconsider what Kohlberg's stage theory simply says, after having long-dismissed it for alleged flaws. We now go into detail, starting with philosophical theory and the philosophical Savings Approach.
2. Philosophical Renovation De-Structure/Restructure A long journey begins with big questions: the questions that motivate it. How can we utilize the existing services of general theory to assist applied ethical theory? How can
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we adapt the major mainstream theories to better serve practical choice? The journey's end, I reiterate in the following answer. Reverse the march of general theory building, removing the shaping influence of generalization and "reduction" to a universal principle at each point in its emigration from localized rationales. This means circumscribing the scope of general structure, restoring the moral substance or content within its sway, and recruiting the substantive elements or implications of structure itself. The principle of equal respect, for example, picks out a subset of personal features in its intended recipients that compose their so-called personhood. This personhood or rational autonomy also composes the substantive equality of persons. Principled respect engages a substantive orientation toward personhood that expresses rationally autonomous appreciation for the merit or respectworthiness of personhood that can be distinguished from a felt concern for personal features and the desire to support, nurture, or foster them. Respect involves refraining from pursuits that infring on others' autonomy and taking actions necessary to protect or restore its prerequisite resources when they are threatened. Reversing reductive generalization also means restoring the diversity of moral rationales and dimensions (such as the types of respect or concern) that theory tries to homogenize. Kantian and Kohlbergian critics can only fault individual rights for mistaking not interfering with others as somehow relating to them respectfully because the many different and subtle ways respect must be shown for persons in myriad forms of interaction are simply left out by abstracted principles. Of course, ethicists and commonsense respondents must be able to tell the difference between respecting someone in a situation and simply not stepping on them, coercing, stealing from, or killing them. Respect can not be the same as ignoring someone despite both avoiding interference in others' free pursuits. While the Savings Approach clears away distortive structural shaping, it tries to retain the organizing dynamic that structure adds. This dynamic brings conceptual coherence and functional coordination to ethics, both crucial guides to practice. Greater pointedness and contextuality is brought to the de-structured ethic by adding heuristics alongside, born of practical know-how.
Going Up: The Reductive-Overgenemlization Scenario
To reverse the theory-building process requires a scenario of how it goes forward. Here is such a scenario for moral philosophy—a brief caricature really—that figures in the effect of cognitive-moral development on moral common sense. An ethical theory begins with a set of commonsense beliefs, values, and rules of thumb. This "ethic" fits certain concerns—joint welfare and individual privacy, self-development
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and integrity. In this favored domain, it works well and is quite valid. In commonsense ethics, we imbibe and utilize several of these domain ethics to address different areas of concern—work, play, family, and friendship. The quest for cognitive and moral competence, however, is marked by extending views that work somewhere (in their home domain) into other domains where we might need them. It also involves a process of relating interweaving views for joint use and coordinating these combined functions so that they enhance effectiveness, but do not increase confusion. Where our best conceptual offerings do not quite handle that world, we reshape our reality to fit. We squeeze unwieldy issues into existing categories and operational matrices. While this well-recorded process of cognitive assimilation increases certain ethical competences, it also introduces key distortions and limitations into our thinking. One effect of assimiliation is that most of us come to focus on a certain slice of ethical experience more than others in league with a certain ethical slant, and fit most to the cases in that domain. Our commonsense intuitionism becomes less and less motley over time, and less and less apt to be neutral across the range of ethical concerns and angles on them. Moral philosophy usually begins within this already overgeneralized and distorted context of common sense, extending its natural (cognitive-developmental) tendencies. Devotees of one focus and approach take to one theoretical tradition, others to alternatives. Traditionally, a moral theory has been required to handle all issues in its home domain (conceptual plausibility), showing the logical mechanism by which it does so (explanatory adequacy). Then, to become a general theory, it must venture out into additional domains, coveted by alternative theories, until it encompasses the ethics as a whole (universal theory). This also increases its seemingly fundamental or foundational nature. Its explanatory principles render more and more foreign territory in terms of a favored logic of rights, benevolence, or fairness, seeming to go deeper beneath the surface of that territory to show its underlying reality. A theory's capacity to roam the full range of moral territories, providing a single law (or small set) for bringing them all into line, is what makes for its adequacy. Where several theories compete in this quest, each theory must pretend to the throne, showing its hegemony over rivals' turfs. It must explain all unfavored cases—areas of moral relevance from which it did not arise and for which it was not designed. Again, this demonstrates its capacity to go below all surface appearances, unearthing a secret and fundamental bedrock underlying all of the ethics. Universahsm is an unlikely quest that indeed foreshadows pretense. In practice it requires each view to stretch itself beyond its core competencies, and its capabilities generally. While each theory shows surprising ingenuity in simulating the strengths of rivals, it stretches thin to do so, straining plausibility in foreign climes. We thus see theories arguing their basic logic extra territories that are most foreign to them, where
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rivals are on firmest ground, though all territories should be equally conquerable, but for our ideological habit of seeing them superficially in other terms. Thus, for example, "rights theory" typically handles issues of individual freedom with dispatch. But it falters on issues of social distribution or fostering joint progress toward group ideals. To compensate, it invokes the notion of positive rights—rights to goods. This gets it into the welfare game without sacrificing to welfare logic. But how do we transport the basic logic of respect for free will or rational autonomy together with the rubric of rights that grounds it? After all, people sometimes use their will to pursue goods, but not always. And it is not the goods or their experiential effect of satisfying us that merits respect. Theorists opt for the gambit of need as the basis of positive rights, which is especially friendly to the welfare mentality, showing concern for quality of life, which is their motivating moral orientation. But rights logic must then translate the relevance of need, and provide the rationale for being concerned about it, in respect-for-autonomy terms. Need is not attended to morally as the evil of deprivation or the experience of suffering that it shows. Rather, need interferes with free choice, that is why it is relevant. And it is in the effort to protect free choice, even from the onslaught of its own psychological colleagues, that we must accord rights to need fulfillment. Here, principled reductionism and overgeneralization have helped reiterate an age-old observation on inner freedom. There are self-infringing qualities to some of our motivations—motivations that are in us, but not of us. But reducing concern exclusively to respect and need to internal slavery rather than also recognizing the painful deprivation, sense of personal anxiety and insecurity, and suffering that need involves. Indeed, these features of need have greater moral importance and should be given greater prominance in an account of them. But this is not an option to one-sizefits-all theory. Worse, as libertarians point out, this sort of overreaching leads to internal inconsistency, ripping mortally at the core logic of each theory. Negative rights against acts of theft or infringement on us assure our privacy—our individual freedom from interference with our choices. By contrast, others' rights to good not only allow them to interfere with me and mine but require that I provide them a right of way to do so. This is theoretically intolerable. Notably, maintaining consistency in the logic of rights renders libertarian views impotent in simulating welfare principles. Thus, libertarians simply deny the validity of such principles, the moral concerns that motivate them and the moral relevance of the favored cases they explain. This is another inherent strategy of fundamental theory, which almost all rival theories engage in to a degree. What one can not explain, explain away. What can not be explained away, deny. Put more delicately, unlocking the secret of morality predictably shows some of our commonsense beliefs to be spurious and
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without merit. This is part of the surprise and revelation involved. Unfortunately, dismissing or even explaining away whole domains of cases usually involves wildly implausible positions and shows embarassing shortfalls in each theory's enterprise. Of particular interest is the service played by the adequacy notions of theoretical elegance, parsimony, and unity in this theoretical enterprise. It seems no accident that theorists talk with forked tongues about these notions—claiming that these are not merely useful devices for frugal inquiry but also demonstrated features of ultimate reality. Nor is it a mere curiosity that theorists wax poetic at the second fork: "The truth is one," "God designs with the beauty of simplicity; He wouldn't play dice with the universe." Within the less etherial contests waged among theoretical rivals, these notions become exclusionary crtieria of adequacy, assuring that there can only be a single victor. And without one, the chief competitors would sooner debate forever (or at least for centuries). Even acknowledging two (Utilitarianism and Kantianism respect) is unsatisfactory, supposedly showing a field in deadlock and stagnation. Such criteria reflect and enforce the requirement that any would-be victor explain the full diversity of moral judgments with a single principle or surrender. How proposterous. Moral phenomena fall in wildly diverse types with different internal logics and functions—concerns, orientations, traits, attitudes, perceptions, activities, understanding, feelings and emotions, senses of respect, admiration, appreciation, fairness, guilt, shame, vice of every sort, social relationships and practices, personally intimate versus social institutions rights and wrongs, injustices, violation, and character integrity. Requiring explanation to take one form in all contexts means defining the project of theory building itself as that of formal reduction. This could be seen as the malaise of mainstream ethical theory. On these criteria, generalizability becomes universality and coherent organization becomes unity and holism. It is not surprising, therefore, that the the political facts within theoretical rivalries differ markedly from the logical ideal, yielding not a single victor, but a short list of inflated candidates. Once encased in uncrackably holistic shells, conflict among alternative ethical theories becomes untreatable. It occurs holistically, not here and there across competing theories. So no piecemeal remedies or accommodations across alternative theories can cure. They are tried, but to no avail. Positive rights is one, rule-utilitarianism another. Such innovations typically lead in the direction of further reductionism. Code-utilitarianism is the most humorous example, showing the capacity to adopt Kantian respect principles as a whole, but for purposes of maximizing social welfare. ("Yes, I'm a strict Kantian in all respects, but only for general happiness' sake.") How does Utilitarianism tell if it is a normative ethic or a metaethic under this arrangement? The practical application of such general theories foreshadows unmitigated conflict in practice also, for similar reasons. Theoretical inadequacy (prescriptivity, plau-
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sibility, explanatory adequacy) is thus doubled at both levels. To meet reductionist adequacy criteria in application, discrepant cases must be delegitimized. The rhetoric for this process has become familiar in philosophical debate: "That doesn't fit the principle because it is not really an ethical issue." Buttressing this "explain away tactic" is the ad hoc explanation, which is hastily assembled and tacked on in scores. The simple good of "pleasure" is turned into "happiness" (as a string of pleasure states that is somehow more the sum of its parts), preference satisfaction (getting free choice into the experience), or qualitatively meaningful and worthy experience. All along it is denied, however, that anything but pleasure or happiness is involved. The ad hoc additions supposedly only make the ultimate principle (of good) "richer" or more "textured," not "inelegant" despite the reality that these different states are more different than alike, some not being states of experience at all. The result of these machinations is not pretty: Those very criteria of logical generality, holism, and elegance that were to assure adequacy instead undermine it. They hide theoretical flaws and limitations. More ironic, they impugn themselves. The more unified, elegant, and simple a general principle, the more complicated and motley its prescriptivity or implications for application.
Coming Down: A De-Structuring Plan Away out of these dilemmas involves analyzing the range of holistic ethical theories, breaking them and their universal principles into component parts. All major rivals are welcome because their staying power indicates that they have something important to say. We need not fear their mutual animosity because, as sets of particulars, they will not stay rivals for long. The analysis involved aims to recover a wealth of prescriptive substance or contents within each perspective, extending from local rationales for application to particular values, virtues, and tenets. Recovering this substance as components of more generally organized structures assures that we do not start from scratch when putting the pieces back together again. Indeed, we start from pieces of theory, not from the particular cases or beliefs that theory must account for. In justice theory, for example, we will reinstate the many types of fairplay and fairmindedness there are, self-possessed (as a personal trait), self-expressive, relational (as an interactive dynamic) group-oriented or institutionalized in small communities, and so forth. These differences are not merely on the "spheres of justice," in which acting justly or making just distributional decisions is involved, based on productive merit, equal status, or the like, in different contexts. These are wildly different types of moral phenomena, categorized misleadingly and distortively by their common relationship to justice logic. Each phenomenon will show, on top of these differences,
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important functional differences geared to their different local spheres and more particular contexts of operation. Consider how many forms of respect we can show someone, especially when they are in very different relationships with us and of very different ages. It is fine to say that we respect the equal personhood in each, which gets at the most general orientation we take to them and the most minimal and maximal limits of how we treat them. But the particular ways we express respectful attitudes toward them and their particular traits or actions, also the way we institutionalize this in our interpersonal interactions with them, involve much more. The differences, moreover, concern more than behavior style. In Utilitarianism, consider the many diverse activities that constitute contributing constructively to the group or community, the neighborhood or society. Consider the many ways to help, to promote help, support, nurturence and empowerment for others toward enhancing the many experiential and motivational qualities their lives can contain. Typical theoretical models for utilitarian decision or calculation would disappear here with societal scale. Any decisions we make as an individual would depend completely on the contributions being made and contemplated by all those around us, or lack thereof. We could never calculate our useful share, using rules of thumb of or otherwise. Instead, the moral issue would be where to join or jump in, within a nexus of ongoing practices based on their appearing to be making headway and the likelihood of our clicking or shining in them. Imagine also what it would be like to specify the substance of so-called rights principles of whatever theoretical sort. Regardless of how we engaged distinctions between rights and liberties, entitlements, claim-rights, or enabling rights, we would have to specify their content and extent. At present, normative theories seem most to borrow from the preambles of national constitutions, assuming broad rights to life, liberty, opportunity, and the acquisition of property (e.g., primary goods). Or they accord rights to social values adopted from lists compiled chiefly by economists—education, shelter, dignified living standards, and comparable quality of material life-assets. Dealing at the level of abstract principles, why get farther into detail? Consider, finally, how many types of subvalues and subvirtues there are—types of satisfaction, safety, security, self-esteem, respect, or appreciation, also types of honesty, integrity, kindness, courage, and persistence. On the virtue side, we would specify truly adult and nontraditional virtues like "playing it cool": (type one) conveying one's romantic interest in a potential lover in the gradual nongushing manner so that this avoids making them feel pressured or suspicious of one's motives; (type two) talking to a teenage member of a violent gang in a way that gains street credibility with him because we are not trying too hard to act like a peer; (type three) maintaining one's bargaining position with a business or real-estate concern that sees you as being too cagey about your capacity to obtain financing to purchase an asset they are offering.
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A significant breakdown here would include presently unspecified virtues, insightly said, long ago, to "have no name." An example would be what I will call, inelegantly "mama-tess/d-day criticality." This is the virtue of showing impatience with nuveauriche individuals (who rationalize their not contributing to charities on the grounds that charities waste funds) in a manner that signals understanding of the partial merits on their view, combined with noncondescending bemusement at their self-seenthrough attempt to stretch logic, along with some support of their underlying good will that would show itself charitably were it not hemmed in by a subculture of second-generation immigrants who worked so hard to elevate themselves financially that now giving funds away to people who did not, for whatever reason, seems self-contradictory. (Certain moral exemplars, such as Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day, seem to show this "attitude" in writings and interactions caught on film, as do many employees I have interviewed at charitable organizations.) A constructive way that theoretical deconstruction mitigates conflict among theories is by allowing piecemeal matches across their components. A rule-utilitarian and Kantian view of inviolable rights can coexist here, as can the strict duties correlated with them. They can form functionally independent rationales, one boosting the value of a certain right for advancing social good in certain contexts, another grounding inherent respect in others. Because the Savings Approach avails us of all competing theories, not requiring that we reject the insights of all but one, we can use each theory's take on the same matter to add complementary detail. This not only makes a huge difference itself, but changes defect to asset. What was a thin and stretched holistic principle previously becomes a modest and therefore plausible facet of a plausible rationale. Positive rights, for example, are no longer pictured as the way social welfare should be handled, but only as a way of guaranteeing some positive and equal respect to each social member within socially aggregative welfare policies. This would allow such rights to be limited to the bare necessities of life, as they should be, without which people would live like animals, desperately seeking food, lest they perish. How could we say we respect them at all and allow this? They must have a right of way to more. Seeking more from them than this, as we should, no longer need require an intrusive extension of their rights into others' arena of autonomy. It can be handled, as it should be, as a general social responsibility to which we make some share of mutually beneficial contribution. Here, rights play their most able deontological role as side-constraints on the means to good ends. Teleological responsibilities promote good ends as a whole. Such a deconstructive analysis is a boon to ethical application as well. It brings parity of scale between ethical categories and the elements of everyday moral problems. Most interpersonal issues tend more toward the particular than the universal. Localized rationales serve best here. With the ethical components of general principles all
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laid out, each component of a concrete ethical problem can find a rationale or two fit for it. Likewise, most components can find at least one or two aspects of an ethical case to serve, tailored well to its particular requirements. The Savings Approach decreases the likely conceptual inadequacy of any mixed view erected from its fruits by allowing its users to focus component rationales on those tasks and cases they each handle best. Notice that the components we use are easy to justify by their obvious fit to specific functions. But they come already justified in a broader sense, if in part: Their pedigree, after all, stems from a major enduring theory of ethics and prominent superprinciple, minus the most controversial features involved. Indeed, disconnecting these components from their harboring principles initially was specifically designed to remedy distortions in the components caused by being subsumed as well as sheltered there. The mere fact that these component rationales are more easily applied also counts in their favor since meeting theoretical criteria of adequacy does not guarantee plausibility where it counts—where the rubber meets the road.
Building Back Up: A Sketch of Right-Mixing A deconstructed ethic lacks organization, however, with its accompanying assets. Where it provides understanding, it does not supply the depth, breadth, or internal weave of big-picture coherence. In some respect, it is less like a philosophical theory than an ethical code. Yet, it will be too long and detailed to work as a code. Coming to it with an ethical problem would set us at sea, requiring that we sift through reams of detail with little guidance on how to coordinate it. These are just a few reasons for rebuilding this agglomeration of ideas into something coherent like a theory, but only part way. Conceptual coherence and functional confederation is not to come at the cost of partisan hegemony, rigidity, distortive reduction and abstraction. As noted, the layout of all these raw ethical materials brings the outlook of ethical intuitionism first to mind, then ethical pluralism, its surprisingly less-developed modern cousin. I opt instead for a "mixed theory," as previously noted (Rawls, 1972), which seeks maximum coherence and depth through general rationales, yet without creating a superstructure of universal principles that reshapes components to its mold. Piecemeal Ratings. We proceed toward a Right Mix by first assessing the pros and cons of each component. The more assessment measures we use here, the better, including (a) substantive or inherence rating, (b) relative "conduciveness to an established and central moral aim," (c) prerequisite role in another central components
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function, and (d) status on an eclectic range of metaethical adequacy criteria. These piecemeal assessments suggest which components to preserve as is, which to use selectively, and which to link with stronger partners. The ethics literature provides hosts of well-established criticisms of each leading tradition, and some well-accepted retorts and accommodations to them. If used carefully, these general criticisms can be interpreted relative to component rationales in Utiltiarianism, Kantianism, virtue theory, and the like. Such criticism is central to the eclectic theory-building process itself, not for its repair and refinement. It tells us what each component is fit for, even by showing where it fails. (Component 12 can function in roles 1 and 3, but not 2, 4, or beyond, and only in contexts g-1. It is fit for partnering with components 35 and 51 or as a check on 23, but can not stand alone except in emergencies, as a last resort.) As a general rule, those rationales of leading theories that have survived serious challenge and criticism should be initially preserved for mixed theory. Thus in Utilitarianism, for example, "the good" defined as pleasure, preference-satisfaction, meaningful productivity, the successful execution of a worthy lifeplan, and societal welfare should all be retained, then selectively parsed, interrelated, or ordered. Each has a sensible rationale, which weakens unbearably when it is posed as the surpreme or exclusive depiction of good. Eclectic theoretical reconstruction proceeds by trying out different rationales and combinations of them, then assessing the pros and cons of each in the foregoing ways. For example, we take those components of a general right to freedom that prevent treatments that are truly worse than death, and weave them as side-constraints into certain components of what was a general right to life. Or perhaps we order rightscomponents in this way, specifying which aspects of life should be protected as freedoms-of-action, which as self-expressions, which as sustaining awareness of one's existence, and which as a joyous quality of experience or relatedness to others. Where our creativity fails or seems ungrounded, we can opt to retrace the steps of traditional theory building here, merely side-stepping each of its overgeneralizing and reductionist mistakes. It would be best to devise explicit criteria and systematic methods for filtering out these two tendencies, and others, using a less caricatured version of the reductionist theory-building scenario sketched above. An important part of the process would involve explicating the purposes of general and intellectual theory building from applied theory building, then distinguishing them from each other. The former sort of theory would target logical versus narrative explanation, for example, logical prescriptivity versus practical prescription, logical elegance and unity versus practical simplicity. These two sets of features normally conflict with each other directly—the more logically unified, elegant, and conceptually simple a view, the harder it is to understand in a case context or to apply. For applica-
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tion, all its useful features are hidden and must be explicated. Logical theory would aim at a type of intellectual explanation, applied theory at more commonsense and practical understanding as well as ethical knowhow. In the main, we would knit either type of resulting Right Mix view together via piece-by-piece tailoring, emphasizing content in some cases, function in others. Pieceby-piece parsing also will be key. In applied theory, fit for everyday life ethics, we would try to serve local and circumscribed theoretical purposes throughout. All such purposes would be substantively (ethically) based, not intellectually pleasing (within the ethically conceptual domain). It is about time that we ended the conflating of attempts to create intellectual objects, fit for intellectual rumination, versus a conceptual guide for practical understanding and action. The practical purposes served by an applied ethic provide the main justification for stitching components together one way versus another. Therefore, these purposes would have to be carefully specified and supported. Stating purposes in typically global forms will not do, such as: (a) resolving conflicts of individual interest; (b) providing a common ground for trusting and mutually beneficial cooperation; (c) preserving an equal domain of individual privacy, freedom, and opportunity for each individual in moral community; or (d) devising social institutions that will call out and nurture our distinctly human capacities, thereby civilizing our species and promoting character. These are not only unconscionably abstract and general, but they confound political, legal, and ethical concerns. The array of Right Mixes that are generated by these creative exercises and assessments must themselves be comparatively assessed, based on how richly they have preserved the array of possible feasible components across all major ethical traditions— both strong or usefully weak components. They also must be assessed on how many organizational features of theoretical structure they have preserved, promoting coherent and coordinated function without its flaws. In general, the more the better, since this compounded the best preserved traditional justifications for ethical theory. Other motley and general criteria of adequacy noted will then be applied as well, leading to final tallies of adequacy. Where all else fails to resolve internal conflict, rank ordering is always possible. But the costs of this questionable procedure must be weighed against the pros and cons or retaining divergent alternative theories or principles. Another, appropriately applied alternative is to leave the resolution to negotiation processes within contexts of application. This admittedly transfers an intractable intellectual difficulty to a less conceptually ideal arena for dealing with it. But, it increases ethical self-determination in practice—usually a good trade. More, the ethical rationales of mixed theories will likely be localized and manageable enough to guide such negotiation. And some of the heuristics to be added to truly applied ethical theory should include system-
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atic negotiation procedures as well. In fact, it is hard to see how ethics can be mutually respecting of individual autonomy, or conduciveness to the satisfaction of all concerned in a moral issue, if negotiation among them is not fostered and effected. Some may doubt the Right Mix project generally. Is whipping up an ethic in this way really feasible? How can we accomplish the theoretical collusions needed with so many disparate elements to meld, yet also without homogenizing them? Is there any hope of resolving internal conflicts without resorting to some hierarchical tie-breaker, such as rank ordering? It might boost our confidence to look to available models. How do sizeable social groups do this sort of thing, or ethnically diverse communities with their often cantankerous and feuding factions? How do cognitive systems do it, with all their differentiated elements and operations? How does the brain do even a small part of it, using neural nets and columns, given its vast store and constant input of information, at conscious and subconscious levels? There are many ways to closely coordinate elements without absorbing them into a central processor. We need merely work almost as hard at it to see as we did at the more onerous task of trying to reduce this many to one. We countenance the proposterous theoretical saw that people should only follow principles that all rational people can agree on. Thus, we should be able to swallow the prospect of loosely confederating diverse tenets and rationales that people can be helped to negotiate in situations where reaching some accommodation is crucial. Rank-ordering has been a bane of traditional ethics that causes more controversy than it dispels. In the Savings Approach, however, its use is unproblematic. Indeed, it fits right in since it is used piecemeal, in a circumscribed and partnered fashion. For example, suppose we rank certain general rights highly, as forms of individual respect. This inadvertently allows individual fiat and undue self-interest to block progressive social-welfare efforts and responsibilities. As libertarians note, we can not tell people they have a protected right of way to do what they wish in some area, then oblige them to help others should some exigency arise that deprives or harms them. The proper job of rights in this social welfare venue, however, is to prevent the majority tyrannies in such efforts. That is all it should do. So the more general juxtaposition of rights and welfare obligations will not suffice. Faced with this juxtaposition in an eclectic motley approach, we would simply cut back the scope of the right selectively, specifically letting utilitarian obligations in to work needed effects and provide proper balance. Our rationale for circumscribing rights should be somewhat independent. Rights are designed primarily to respect persons in their capacities of free will, not to choose or pursue any whim that arises—whether selfexpressive or not, socially conditioned or not. The idea of according people "maximum liberty comparable to the like liberty of others" mixes these types of respect in an intolerable way. Each degree of rights granted, after all, places duties on us that restrict legit-
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imate choice. It would be irrational and morally perverse to accept (will) a restricting of one's basic liberty to protect the free pursuit of others' whims. Trying to avoid substantive irrationality is a good justification for an approach. But an additional part of the justification for circumscribing rights in this way can be primarily theoretical—it works to resolve internal conflicts. Still, we might just as well take the clearest alternative path, when motley theorizing, ranking certain rights second to selected social responsibilities. Doing so plausibly would require that we select specific types and degrees of social responsibility that do not bode tyrannical abuse, or that inherently counter rights in their core functions of assuring respect. These utilitiarian responsibilities would be chosen and shaped in part specifically to avoid conflict with rights and respect. Those types and degrees of social responsibilities left out of the selection would then be inserted further down in the ranking after some circumscribed portions of rights were included. This sort of maneuver is unheard of in reductionist theory. It would be considered "rigged" there. And it is clearly rigged here, which is why some independent justification of social responsibilities in this context is desirable. But the justifying rationales of traditional ethical principles actually favor such rigging, promoting it as a positive virtue. Ethical concepts, such as rights and responsibilities, are mere tools in the hands of these rationales, to be used as suits them. This would have been noticed and installed as the lead rationale in theory building had the veil of overgeneralization and reductionism not been lowered over moral philosophy as a field. Indeed, rights themselves might never have been considered as a tool of respect, if we were carefully trying to target the respectworthy aspects of persons morally. Rights are outsized for interpersonal relations, intrusive in trying to convey fair relationships, oafish and legalistic in resolving conflicts, and about as insensitive in the context of mutual negotiation as can be.
Building On, Building Out A mixed theory is not an applied theory per se, but an unusually applicable one if it is designed correctly—in motley enough fashion. Also, because it is more modular than traditional theories, an applied component can more easily be plugged into it. To my knowledge, there is no truly applied theory in ethics, nor any truly applied form of theory yet proposed. "Theory" may not be a form that "truly applied" can feasibly take. The more aptly a theory captures ethics' practical logic, the more easily its implications should be traceable into action guidelines. But guidelines alone do not a theory make, even when grouped in certain coherent ways and wrapped in a decision procedure.
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Assuming this is a research issue, not a logical one, we might start the theorybuilding process here by considering carefully how know-how is constituted, especially where it must pause occasionally for reflection, for interpersonal consultation and negotiation, and summon extraordinary degrees of interpersonal sensitivity and personal questioning. What allows or causes us in these seemingly habituated processes to compare the merits of alternative paths? To monitor our choices and progress in action, suspecting that we are spinning our wheels or failing to see the forest for the trees? What causes us to make creative innovations in our approach? Working from the other side, we might inquire into why there is no real theory of personal investing, entrepreneurship or work productivity, no theory of effective mountain climbing, rafting, or hang-gliding—this despite the explosion of business and sports literature. Closer to home, why is there no theory of college teaching, academic writing and publishing, or teaching—this, in the area where a prolific theoretical literature has always been "the thing." What is it that a theory can not provide regarding teamwork, romance, how to win friends, and influence people when we seek advice? What we seemingly need to provide the "knowing that" that aids "know-how" are a few apt models to emulate, some thoughts on strategy, a variety of "tips" and suggestions on what to expect if this or that approach is tried, and a range of illustrative examples. A mark of modern ethical codes, formulated by philosophers, is that they include these features. (The US Senate Ethics Code originally formulated at the Hasting Center is a chief example.) Such codes not only forward various prescriptions but illustrate how they work in different contexts, flag how they typically (might) go wrong in practice, and suggest ways that their different provisions might work together. While such codes are not applied theory, perhaps they can spawn such theory. My contribution to that effort follows, drawing from empirical research on decision-making competence in interpersonal ethics. It is a two-step contribution, first providing a practical procedure for building an applied ethic, then an applied procedural ethic itself, emanating from it.
3. Psychological Renovation Operationalizing Cognitive Operations
The working model I pose for the guts of an applied ethical theory is the "good recipe." An applied theory will feature many such recipes, capable of combining to rustle up a full course meal, feast, or banquet, depending on how many hungry mouths (problems) there are to feed (solve). Like a good cookbook, an applied ethical theory will
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wrap such recipes in a cocoon of orientations or stage settings. Narratives will serve here, covering topics, such as "gathering appropriate ingredients," "getting oneself used to the kitchen and stove," "getting comfortable with cooking implements," and so forth. (I take the knee-jerk antipathy toward "cookbook approaches" as a chief impediment to moving applied theory forward, and choose this model specifically to "subvert that dominant paradigm.") The procedure for composing such a cookbook, like the Savings Approach, to a "mixed ethical theory" should come from an area of philosophy called theory building. Neither the area nor the term actually exists—too heuristic to exist, too "cookbook." This area would be a specialty of the broader would-be discipline, "philosophizing," which would distinguish and detail the many proven strategies for organizing ideas into coherent explanations, argues them in cogent ways, and offers comparative justifications to determine their relative adequacy. This area and its theory-building specialty would yield something like philosophical recipes in themselves, of which the Savings Approach is one. They might be seen as carrying a type of approach found in Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and extended in a self-reflective direction by phenomenologists such as Murleau Ponty or Husserl. Like these analytical approaches, this more constructive theory-building area and specialty would differ greatly from both formal and informal logic, on the one hand, and rhetoric, on the other. The former is basically nonnarrative, dealing with symbolic explanation rather than conceptual understanding and cogency. The latter, along with its narrativist philosophical cousins that see argument either through its psychological effects on listeners or through its storytelling qualities. In contrast to these philosophical enterprises, the actual procedural content of the cookbook is drawn from empirical psychology. It constitutes a corrective interpretation of moral-judgment data, reanalyzing the data's depiction as both holistic systems and developmental stages of moral reasoning. Additional research observation (including data from my own verbal performance protocols) is used to add further heuristic detail, missed by mainstream research methods that invited judgmental conclusions from subjects, and their justification, not actually deliberations or related processes of moral reasoning. The results of these procedures that reinterpret philosophical and psychological theory are justified as we proceed. Each step in the ethical cookbook's composition below is backed by the main rationale for including, or taking, it as a crucial means to the desired end. In a sense, it invokes a rule for directing the theory-building mind that can be explicated and justified, compared to alternative steps and strategies. These steps for cookbook construction are ultimately guided and checked against Right Mix ethical principles, arrived at via the Savings Approach. The actual steps in the resulting applied ethic are drawn from direct observations of cognitive operations, functioning
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competently. These observations are then interpreted and reinterpreted to capture cognitive-moral competence without the distortive structuring of data and controversial extraempirical qualities tacked on to them. No existing ethical theory qualifies in this way. No applied ethic (known to me) is composed of functioning competencies, proven effective in interpersonal relations and social interactions. Indeed, the best explanatory and justificatory arguments made for existing ethical applications do not even get at this primarily empirical issue. Much less do they extend to the distinct areas of needed competence observed in psychological research. These include the initial alertness to ethical concerns, the perception of ethical problems or ethical components of interpersonal problems, their interpretation as ethical issues of a sort, various types of inquiry into these problems, advice-getting and deliberation about these problems, interpersonal discussion, negotiation, the mutually self-critical monitoring of any decisions made and the decisionmaking processes involved, comparative justifications of those decisions, and the further processes of enacting them, including ongoing critical monitoring, assessment, and revision. I now lay out the psychological Savings Approach for constructing the main ethical recipes featured in our cookbook. Like a recipe in itself, this applied theory-building procedure is formatted in steps, the most conceptually interesting of which (below) extend from "Reverse Psychology" through "Enhancements." Two warnings: Like the Savings Approach above, this outline is savagely edited from a book-length account and is, therefore, a hard read. Ironically, its highly compacted and unexplicated form may appear sketchy and simplistic. To avoid this misimpression, I invite readers to ponder each step imaginatively, not simply reading it, to put yourself inside its functionality. The outline also embodies a "get-down-to-work," and "get right inside the process" orientation that may leave those unfamiliar with the details of moral psychology a bit at sea. To help remedy this adrift feeling for those most vulnerable to it, a short outline of Kohlberg's Stages is attached (Appendix A).
From Meaning Scheme to Decision Procedure (From Justice Structure to Personable Choice)
Starting Point. Because the most promising applied ethic would be based on the best evidence available of moral problem-solving competence and effectiveness in daily life, we begin with the best account of such competence—that particular system of postconventional reasoning competence known to cognitive developmentalists as Kohlberg's Stage 5. It is a system observed over more than thirty years of empirical research by hundreds of researchers in most countries of the world, including critics
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trying to disconfirm it. Stage 5 postconventional reasoning conceives morality as a tacit mutual agreement, shown through institutionalized social practices, that accords mutual respect for each social member's autonomy (through equal fundamental rights), and expects each to contribute in kind to trusting and mutual beneficial social cooperation, under conditions of equal opportunity. These are its three fundamental orientations, marked by social contract, negative rights, and rule-utilitarian rationales. Unfortunately, Kohlberg's depiction of this cognitive-moral system puts undue emphasis on the social-institutional and even political features of moral cognition, newly acquired at this moral-developmental stage. It also unduly emphasizes principles of rights and social justice at the expense of other moral themes, especially those of concern, compassion, and benevolence in personal relationships but also those of fairplay and fair-mindedness. These de-emphasized themes are especially crucial in everyday life. To help neutralize these biases at the outset, a more neutral, if less detailed, interpretation of postconventional reasoning is "added," derived from twenty additional years of empirical research by Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, and Thoma (1999). This interpretation accepts the three main orientations of Stage 5 as included, but not defining of moral competences in the system, working conjointly with a variety of other rationales and themes depicted by Kohlberg and others at other stages of development. Rest's interpretation is further amended by interpreting those of its cognitivemoral features that deal with moral concern for quality of experience, and with providing support or help for others, in terms of the care research. In particular, the level of "mature caring" reported by Gilligan (1982), Belenky, Lyons, and Brown (see Puka, 1995a) is integrated into Rest's neo-Kohlbergian account wherever possible. Our decision-making method rises initially from here (see Appendix A, if needed). Upgrading. Adding to the foregoing corrections on postconventional competence, we further enhance the Rest-Kohlberg account of postconventional reasoning, using piecemeal components from other leading research programs in moral psychology. These include data-based accounts by Blasi, Damon, Gibbs, Gilligan, Haan, Hoffman, Lyons, Selman, Tappan, and Turiel, emphasizing moral perception, emotion, empathy, role taking, identity, reflection, response-ability, relationality, negotiation, and interpersonal conventionality (see Puka, 1995a). We also extract components from less well-verified, but morally prescient accounts (e.g., Kohlberg's Stage 6). These are components that can be extrapolated from verified accounts (e.g., Stage 5) by moral logic and by cognitive principles of competence-development, such as incremental differentiation, integration, and inclusivity. Adding these last extrapolations provides some place for obvious philosophical improvement on commonsense ethics, despite the lack of current empirical testing for their real-world effectiveness. Again, we treat higher
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and lower stage components of reasoning above primarily as different (not graded) competencies, avoiding the host of controversies surrounding developmental claims. Acknowledgment. We next further credit the main cross-partisan criticisms of highlevel moral judgment competence. And on their basis, we further revise our initial Kohlberg-Rest model of postconventional reasoning from within. (Again, these criticisms argue that depictions of higher development are biased away from interpersonal morality toward social and political ethics.) In particular, we hypothesize that features of earlier-developing moral reasoning, which address relationships, are incorrectly excluded from accounts of more inclusive and adequate thinking. This includes those features most related to values and virtues as well, discriminated against by a partisan choice of moral relevance and adequacy criteria. The assets of these rationales and operations should have been sought and captured at higher levels, in a more evolved and selective form. Instead, their deficiencies were allowed to mask their strengths, leading to their exclusion. This regressive interpretive tendency requires correction. Circumscription. Even this attempt to upgrade and expand the Kohlberg and Rest projects will give undue prominence to "justice" and "conflict-resolution" themes in moral cognition at the expense of thematic caring, honor, integrity/authenticity, love (agape), and communitarianism. We presume that other research programs will go forward on these other themes mirroring the thoroughness of Kohlbergian and neoKohlbergian research. The work of Enright (1995) on forgiveness provides an example. Future research will also uncover aspects of these alternative themes even within the "justice" and "conflict-resolution" arena, along with additional features of interpersonal respect and fairness. Researchers, such as Blasi, have been working in areas, such as accountability, sense of responsibility, and related guilt that add a great deal to the sense of obligation in Kohlberg's account without necessarily invoking divergent programs of research or theory. Kohlberg's earliest accounts of his own original study speak lavishly of such themes, especially love (Kohlberg, 1984). By trying to salvage these alternative themes within the Kohlberg-Rest programs and through only closely associated programs using similar methods, we have chosen empirical verification and research reliability over philosophical aspiration. It would be satisfying, for Right Mix purposes, to identify cognitive competences in the diverse ethical rationales convered by philosophical ethics. But research on these other themes, where it exists at all, is much less well-tested—vastly less well-tested. That research findings on relational caring are widely vaunted, based on criticism of Kohlberg's research, would be puzzling were it not for this other option of putting aspiration above empirical validation. Care research may represent the most developed research program on a full alternative theme to justice in moral psychology, especially when seen in relation to research on
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related subthemes like empathy. Yet it offers nothing like the methodological rigor, trackrecord of findings, research replication or programatic criticism, revision, and ongoing development found in Kohlberg (Colby et al., 1987) nor Rest et al. (1999). This is of special importance in qualitative research where it is not clear that normal standards of scientific rigor are being met even in the best research. Studies using Rest's well-validated DIT alone have numbered over a thousand per year for many years. (Kohlberg's research with the MJI numbers in the thousands despite the greater complexity of its methods.) Care research using Gilligan's methods (which still has not been published or critiqued in standardized form) may number in the low hundreds all told, despite the comparable time span of the Rest and Gilligan research programs. e. Our task now is to recapture components of "earlier-developing" reasoning uncovered in fortified-Kohlbergian research. (For us, again, this is merely partially less competent reasoning, that is highly related and seemingly prerequisite to partially better reasoning.) Again, the most relevant rationales concern not only personal values and interpersonal virtue rationales but also intimate social perspectives associated with Kohlberg's Stages 2 and 3. (These are primarily interpersonal and peer-group levels of morality.) According to well-verified cognitive principles of development, once varied moral categories or dimensions are differentiated, it would be a sign of incompetence (developmental regression) for them to disappear. Thus, we would expect Kohlberg's highest system of cognitive-moral competence to be inclusive of earlier stage values and virtues keyed to interpersonal relations and with empathic identification within interpersonal perspectives. Some of these value and virtue rationales are morally arbitrary and inadequate in some ways. (Bad values are involved, questionable or amoral traits or abilities, better called vices than virtues.) Some interpersonal perspectives show undue personal favoritism, as well as in-group/out-group prejudices. But even these show partial assets, and there are others that are morally salient and adequate, fit for integration with Stage 5 principles. In-group loyalty, trust, and reliability are highly desirable for those in one's group. And they are not inherently excluding of others nor disloyal and untrustworthy toward them. Falling short in social scope and in not being fully egalitarian does not remove all virtue from these virtues—far from it. Yet, Kohlberg's descriptions of postconventional reasoning give no place to such virtues, which violates his own developmental principles of greater inclusivity and hierarchical integration with greater moral development. How the social compact of mutual respect and alliance in postconventional reasoning is to function without them is a mystery, especially little alternative motivation is depicted at this level.
Decomposition. To restore the place of earlier-stage (partial) competencies, we comb through conventional and preconventional levels of moral judgment, looking
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for as many piecemeal components as possible, including pairs or three-way partnerships among elements. The relations among these elements are treated as additional components. Based on an analysis of Kohlberg's higher stages, we conclude that he vaunts the role of systemic coherence or functional unity in competence, failing amply to credit particular abilities and operational rationales for their contribution to system success. Thus, it may require going to raw interview data to find them all as they were originally differentiated. We may even have to assess the kinds of coding categories used, and those that might have been used, that would pick up differentiations in the areas of values, virtues, and interpersonal abilities especially, since Kohlberg was so adamant regarding the moral arbitrariness of these concepts. With his eye to cognitive integration primarily, then, he may have been less careful in assuring that each was noted and then scored. Still, to simulate the reliability of current Kohlbergian findings, we also must assure that further differentiated elements we uncover are scorable within new coding categories that are of a piece with those currently used. Eventually, we would want to test any new categories in additional interview research and its statistical analysis. Phraseology. Next, we distinguish between those faults cited by critics that are attributable to the particular language and interpretive categories Kohlberg used to depict data from those that concern the phenomena being observed more directly. The first might involve using the term "justice" when "respect" is more appropriate, or "rights" when a combination of liberty and the responsibility to respect it better captured what interviewees said. The second might involve omitting certain moral (benevolence) themes, responsive interpersonal abilities, or relevant contexts of personal doubt or interpersonal struggle. Note that while the first fault often is insubstantial, it sometimes can have the effect of adding phenomena that is not actually observed, or subtracting it. Once the former faults are assembled, rhetorical redescriptions are posed of all the component abilities, operations, and interrelations they affect, using categories that are more shared or neutral among the full range of major ethical themes and traditions. The Right Mix helps us assemble them as do the most recent Kohlberg writings that recognize three major moral orientations aside from rights and justice (Colby et al. 1987). For example, we substitute the more general term of "responsibility" for terms like "duty" or "obligation," where the latter is used in certain specific ways, such as the duty that is correlative to an individual right. We use "mutually respectful expectation" where the concept of "owing debts" is emphasized. Care is taken here not to repeat the same mistakes being corrected by reading in features of moral cognition based on favored moral rhetoric. We exploit rhetorical and interpretive leeway only, trying to compensate with personalized speech for a presumed overemphasis on rights-and-justice terminology. (These seemingly shallow al-
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terations can yield dramatic changes in descriptive substance as the contrast and debate between research on ethical caring and justice reasoning reveal.) Upward Mobility. Ignoring or directly countering developmental sequencing, we now depict so-called earlier-stage competencies in later stage terms. This means two things. The first involves assessing how the adequate portions of differentiated elements at these stages might serve the broader "principles" and institutional roles of postconventional thought. The second involves assessing how they would serve the interpersonal perspectives and roles of earlier stages that should be preserved and integrated into postconventional thought. Kohlberg's highest stages presume these perspectives and roles, together with the relationships involved. But his stage descriptions focus on what is newly acquired at each stage of development and so do not explicate these roles within broader social-institutional expectations. To be understood, this task must be illustrated at length. Moreover, we must clarify beforehand that it involves conceptual extrapolation, yielding conceptual hypotheses (not observations) that require empirical testing and moral assessment. Forming Virtue Hypotheses. To illustrate, a crucial task is to recast the Stage 3 virtuerationales of "trust and loyalty in small in-groups" as they would be conceived in promoting social goods. These would include equal opportunity in society, respect for equal liberty, the willingness to advance social welfare, and also to promote national character. This requires relocating trust and loyalty to the social-institutional context, where relations to others are mediated by a range of impersonal institutions and by the representatives of certain groups. But it also means bonding them to those faceto-face practices and small-group interactions that characterize that institutional context. It further means affirming them where they are tied to small cliques (as in Stage 3), but in ways that avoid in-group prejudices. (Trust and loyalty should not be exclusionary toward out-groups, for example, nor show undue favoritism to those in the "inner circle.") In part, this means reconceiving small cliques in terms of their contributing social role—as something like a small-scale division of social and economic "labor" in a "free-market" of social interaction. Trust and loyalty would not only be shown to close family members and friends, for example, because of our special affections and relations to them, nor our shared experience, but because of special responsibilities tied to special social roles. Such responsibilities would rise from the same grounds as our general social responsibilities. Forming Social-Perspective Hypotheses. The recasting of such virtues depends on coordinated recasting of social perspectives. Within a society, family and friendship groups have certain legitimately expected roles to play that contribute to social cohe-
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sion, sense of meaning and belonging, social morale, or good will and cooperativeness. In most societies, however, they fulfill them by the way as a function of fulfilling special responsibilities. The family is responsible for child rearing and the myriad types of socialization that involves. Parents are even supposed to provide emotional and financial cushions for adult children who fall on hard times, just as children are to provide care when their parents become elderly. Special trust and loyalty are essential to playing these roles, just as small "cliques" of a morally responsible but still special or cliquish sort play essential roles in broad institutional functions and responsibilities. In postconventional reasoning, the individual rights or liberty orientation assumes like the division of labor in society, expecting every individual to take care of themselves if they can, presumably through cooperation with others and through special intimate relationships, such as with friends and in the family. Likewise, these small groups are expected to take care of themselves since society can not do so nearly as well and since remote strangers should not be expected to except as a default. This is not an uncaring view, typical of "rights to noninterference" thinking, but one that recognizes both the proper and feasible limits on caring in large-scale contexts, limits also recognized by care theorists, such as Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (1984). Assessment. We now reassess the moral relevance and adequacy of the components uncovered and those hypothesized above. This means first reevaluating the earlierdeveloping versions of such values, virtues, and social perspectives, then again extrapolating that assessment to cover our hypothesized higher-competence version of them. Intuitive comparisons among traits and perspectives here can be aided by both philosophical adequacy criteria and competent performance-standards (problem-solving standards) found in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Following Rest and colleagues, we aver Kohlberg's preference for singular standards of Kantian formalism, consulting the range of adequacy standards from teleological, intuitionist, utilitarian, perfectionist, and virtue traditions. Note that Kohlberg explicitly affirmed such orientations in his data as well, providing them empirical support. Ethical egoist and libertarian rights criteria might also be consulted despite their more obvious philosophical shortcomings. While Kohlberg explicitly affirmed only four moral orientations—justice, utilitarianism, perfectionism (virtue and character), and social maintenance—ethical egoism and libertarianism are represented prominently in his highest empirical stage (Stage 5) as noted. Again, Stage 5's rights-orientation features only negative rights— nghts-to-noninterference, not positive or liberal rights as well. Stage 5's social-contract orientation of Stage 5 has a powerful egoist orientation, looking exclusively to individual interests for entering moral community and cooperation. To achieve generality, it conceives the reasonable mutually agreeable purposes of morality in morally minimalist terms, protecting private autonomy. Those components that rate well on at least one of
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the major criteria (normative: utilitarian, perfectionist, virtue, and respect-justice; metaethical: deontological-formalist, teleological, intuitionist) show upward mobility in our reanalysis, moving to the next round. Savings Approach. To achieve further moral validation of these cognitive-moral components, we seek matches between them and the substantive components of leading moral theories and principles. The reverse is also desirable—buttressing our commonsense moral problem solving with the enhanced insights of substantive moral theory. Where these philosophical components closely match cognitive-moral ones, we have reason to think they would be functional in interpersonal problem solving, not simply appealing intellectually. That reason is empirical evidence. As discussed previously, however, all of the leading theoretical traditions are deeply flawed and in conflict. (Teleological adequacy and moral relevance is often deontological inadequacy and amorality.) They also are slanted by the distinctly conceptual goals of theorizing. (We are interested here in rating moral problem-solving competence, not conceptual acuity in representing it theoretically.) Thus, we must liberate the morally substantive particulars of each theory from these distorting influences before we can use them to match against unearthed components of postconventional reasoning. (As noted in earlier parts of this chapter, distinctly intellectual structuring and formal reductionism must be filtered out.) Following the philosophical Savings Approach, this means distilling each tradition's main tenets and moral rationales, formulated in their own piecemeal terms. And it means introducing measures in each set of tenets, or in the partnering of each with each other, to overcome shortfalls. Let us assume that the foregoing process of de-structuring and reconstruction in moral theory was successful and can simply be inserted here for taking this giant step forward. Advocacy. Kohlberg's (1981a) stage-by-stage comparison remains the most detailed account of how demonstrated moral competencies, organized in developmental systems, compare in adequacy. Here he lists what each (lower) stage does poorly and how the next stage corrects for it. Then he cites limitations in that improvement relative to an even greater improvement at the next stage, and relative to philosophical standards of moral adequacy. To take what we need and what is best from this account, three approaches are desirable. The first step is to support the supportable claims in Kohlberg's account and extend them. This means showing that more personally contextual competences were already reintegrated in higher competence levels than critics claim, and can be shown functioning there in the data and in Kohlberg's interpretations of it. (Here, we tease out the relational and communitarian aspects of certain reciprocal exchanges in lower-stage justice, and the respectful upholding of certain status quo institutions in the conventional stages.) It also means further sup-
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porting Kohlberg's exclusion of some early-developing competences due to their moral prejudices, arbitrariness, and other inadequacies, and their supplanting by broader, more impartial rationales. We might show, for example, that certain personal virtues and interpersonal values rate as badly on our broadened and eclectic standards of adequacy as on Kohlberg's more partisan Kantian ones. Among these would be the misconceived virtue of revenge at Stage 2 (striking a blow for a blow), of blanket forgiveness at Stage 3 (meant simply to avoid possible feuds and smooth over internal conflicts in one's group), and of Stage 3 generosity, geared exclusively to purchasing others' approval and high group status. Reverse Psychology. The second approach locates and argues for the "positive side" of each inadequacy charged against a stage system. For example, the alleged indeterminacy of a stage rationale in decision making is construed as flexibility, eclecticism, and due tentativeness there insofar as that interpretation can be made plausible. Conversely, the "negatives" are located and identified within Kohlberg's adequacy claims for each stage system. The vaunted decisiveness of a certain rationale or cognitive operation, for example, is reconstrued as rigidity, oversimplification, and social hegemony. Where these reinterpretations can be soundly supported, we gain a new and fuller picture of postconventional reasoning, its strengths and weaknesses. This same recasting of pros and cons is then applied to "earlier stage systems" in Kohlberg's account. (Recall the "baby-with-the-bathwater" hypothesis previously raised.) Reverse-Engineering. We now take a third approach, noting currently unseen deficits in postconventional reasoning—in allegedly fully mature and adequate reasoning—that still require remedy. Looking over the newly revealed strengths now revealed in "earlier stage systems," and our hypotheses on how these rationales might be cast in "higher stage terms," we now consider where they can supply that remedy. We consider also how they might be reintegrated into postconventional reasoning, or preserved as functionally independent competencies, to add strength. (The latter option credits the so-called "complex stage model" erected from evidence that some "earlier stage" reasoning is preserved in development to be accessed in confederation with later systems to enhance performance [Rest, 1979]). But, again, the prospects we "consider" here, in these three approaches, must eventually be tested empirically to see if moral common sense spontaneously achieves these competencies or needs to be supplemented through education in these specific ways. The simplest testing procedure would merely add probe questions to Kohlberg's MJI and, perhaps, new test dilemmas that pull for interpersonal roles and practices within broader social institutions where value and virtue rationales might be crucial. Should some positive results be found, the samples of postconventional reasoning used on the DIT could be made more de-
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tailed, to include such roles and practices, values and virtue rationales. A far better way to test our hypotheses would be to use methods, such as verbal protocols that observe moral problem solving in process, especially in interpersonal interactions. Processing. Armed with positive empirical findings, or while hoping for them, we now take on the translation of postconventional reasoning competence into a moral decision procedure. Obviously, if finds come in the form of cognitive process, not structure, this task is made vastly easier. My own research on problem solving, however, has not yet revealed something like a most competent set of processes. Rather, it has yielded a range of cognitive styles for addressing problems that do not seem particularly relevant to how competently one ends up resolving them. These styles, however, and those found for two decades in nonmoral problem-solving research can at least be used as models for proceduralizing moral reasoning competence. We can translate the styles used into something like recipes or directions, deciding which types are most suitable for ethics. These might include directions for replicating a scientific experiment, directions for assembling or installing a household item, or recipes for designing an expert system (artificial intelligence program) that makes robots perform simple functions. As noted, even "step-programs" may be consulted from the popular psychology and personal growth literature. Procedural Testing. Finally, we pose a variety of typical ethical cases and apply the resulting procedures to them step by step. We observe and then assess the results for retesting and development. Kohlbergs nine classic research dilemmas pose conflicts of interest, values, rights, and obligations. Some are outlandish and extreme, some more mundane with a dramatic element. A good ethical problem-solving procedure should not necessarily be able to handle extreme cases well, much less outlandish ones. It should also allow, as Kohlberg's competence measures do not, for ultimate puzzlements and untreatable tragedies. Great competence does not mean invariable solution. Thus, in this last step, we choose the most typical and important moral issues of everyday life for testing our procedure. This includes not merely conflicts but joint concerns and aspirations as well as plans and projects. Soliciting such problems from respondents is important so that their view of what an ethical issue is has influence. Test cases should be posed at various social levels, in different roles and contexts—in the personal and familial sphere, in friendship circles, with neighbors, coworkers, strangers in the community, and remote groups in society at large and across the globe. Our problem-solving procedure may be formatted and applied as practical directives, engaged in linear form—"First do this, next do that, now we try to see it this way ..." Or it may be phrased as reminders about how things normally go when they go well, "We should find our attention shifting to this, then we should feel ourselves moving to that ..."
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Our application process may be repetetive, cyclical, or spiraling, as contrasted with linear—whatever works. As many approaches as seem to hold promise should be tried. Based on initial performance testing, we also might evolve metadirectives engaging the problem-solving procedure, some geared to different sorts of contexts, some for application by several people in interaction, playing typical roles. While the foregoing array of adequacy criteria will figure in assessing the procedures effectiveness, additional performance criteria will be needed. A good approach will be cogent, not merely intellectually justified, it will motivate those using or impacted by it, not merely provide them information or other good grounds for acting. It will favor low-risk strategies in some context, accepting more risks in others. Performance criteria should be borrowed from other areas of problem solving and also evolved as testing of the procedure proceeds.
Samples The above outlines focus on "giant steps" in theory building, and in deriving an ultimate moral problem-solving procedure. They thus leave out the detail work that is most crucial for gaining concrete applicability to cases. I now offer a brief sample of how a step in the psychological Savings Approach would fill in—the Acknowledgment step. I also offer an overview of an actual moral decision procedure (Respect and Fairness) derived from this theory-building recipe. It focuses on the main movements of the procedure, such as first perceiving the problem, then interacting with others to gather information and a sense of where they stand on it. Finally, I sample a particular step of the procedure or recipe, Step 9, one of its most unexpected rationales, dealing with "special obligations" and also the more general need for unequal treatment based on just merit and closeness in a relationship. Detailing "Acknowledgment. "This step prescribes that we, "credit critiques that fault cognitive-developmental accounts of moral competence for downplaying interpersonal ethics and the morality of relationships. In particular, hypothesize that Kohlberg's latest developing stages (or stage descriptions) fail to integrate key morally relevant and adequate features of earlier interpersonal stages. Assume that these must be reinstated and enriched to fulfill his own Piagetian adequacy criterion of increased inclusivity." Most critiques emphasize the failure of Kohlberg's Stage 4 to preserve the benevolent values, virtues, and rationales of Stage 3, and their peculiarly relational orientation. The "higher" stage can be thought of as politically more adroit for its emphasis on lawabidingness and just reward for good citizenship. But it appears more morally backward than Stage 3 for its failure to preserve the key moral values and virtues: kindness, forgiveness, relational intimacy (closeness), trust, and loyalty. Not only are the interper-
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sonal variants of such values not conserved within the next stage's broader perspective but no social-institutional equivalent of them is posed to compensate. Loyalty might have become part patriotism here, also part community responsibility, neighborliness, and occupational dedication. Kindness might have become sociocentrism—a willingness to exceed one's contributing share or agreed upon obligations (at Stage 4) for the social good. ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") Kohlberg's reductive partisanship for justice, say critics, prevented it. But we also can fault Kohlberg's Stage 3 for failing to sustain some of the selfinterested and mutually interested features of Stage 2, in more prudential or enlightened form. Many forms of instrumental egoism that seek benefits from others, including friends or loved ones, are central to relationships. They focus moral dilemmas raised by parting or divorce. Moreover, they need not involve the wanton using others "as means only" to get what is needed. Thus they need not be seen as morally deficient. Yet instead of elevating the tit-for-tat notion of Stage 2 into a fairer just desert rationale, Stage 3 emphasizes self-sacrificial forgiveness. It promotes toleration of offense, exploitation, or abuse and kindness toward those who fail to reciprocate, doing their share. While some of Stage 3 "niceness" has an instrumentally self-regarding component—approval-seeking or conformist—its dominant golden-rule logic is too otherdirected to capture prudential interpersonality. If Stage 2 thinking is underrepresented at Stage 3, it is likely to be underrepresented at each later Stage (4 and 5) also. (As noted, we see only remnants of instrumental egoism in the Stage 5 "prior to society" perspective where we each are to negotiate our moral deal [social contract] with others, looking out for ourselves.) Self-interest of this sort skips Stage 4 it seems, partially violating Kohlberg's invariant sequence assumption. Both Stages 5 and 6 are notable for their failure to highlight just desert. Yet key to interpersonal relationships (at Stages 2 and 3) are affirmative notions of "doing for the other" and thereby meriting "being done for" in return. The disaffirming corollaries to these notions are key as well—"being done to" and "doing back." Such just-due rationales are typical bases for interpersonal complaints of unfairness in adult relationships, and of being taken advantage of. ("Look at all I've done for you, believing all you said about our working for a team, being there for each other, getting each other's back. And now you go and ...") Why did these rationales disappear in higher, more inclusive competences? This broader analysis of Kohlberg's fault creates the need to reinstate certain fairness rationales, based on his own findings and assumptions about what they imply. We must now consider how to restore them along the sequence, unto the postconventional (Stage 5) level. A Postconventional Recipe. My conceptual experiments with the psychological Savings Approach have yielded three different recipes of Respect and Fairness so far
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from fortified postconventional reasoning. Each has been checked for adequacy during each phase of its construction against a version of "Right Mix" ethical theory. (This was derived in turn from the philosophical Savings Approach.) The resulting recipe was applied to solve several problems of relationship including love triangles and encounters with homeless street beggars in a downtown doorway. The solutions are very detailed and pointed because Respect and Fairness identify ethical subproblems all along the way and rally their arsenal of good ideas to address each. The result is that scores of solutions are generated, not one ultimate solution. Indeed, little of the original problem or issue initially addressed is left once the process of treating it goes forward, transforming the situation and the views of those within it. In applied ethics, even the notion of what Aristoteleans call an inclusiveend solution is transcended in this way, leaving behind simplistic models of means and ends or process and outcome. The following overview and sample from Respect and Fairness is followed by a short list of the problem-solving method's most surprising features.
Steps of Respect and Fairness Perceptual Orientation and Sensitivity. The first seven steps deal with moral perception. They operationalize and personalize the notion of "assuming a moral point of view." Here, we find research subjects' implied "directives" on how to view each other as individuals and moral partners, how to couch our identity and status relative to the purposes of moral community and cooperation, and how to respond attitudinally to what we see. These processes are to occur with appreciation for worth, sensitivity to welfare, respectfulness, and the like. The "moral point of view" operationalizes here something like this: "Now it is time to engage various perceptual and interpretive habits, exercising certain perceptual shifts and concentrations, that produce the mental pictures and attitudes prescribed. See this person before us? Here is what to look for in her/his appearance and manner, and what to focus on that is hidden underneath. Here is how he or she should appear to us and make us feel when we are done. If these reactions don't follow, let us try the following ..." Concretizing and Activating Orientations. The next three steps deal with what particular personal and societal conventions to adopt in order to express and show respect. They offer great detail on how we should think out our moral relatedness to different types of situations, determining our responsibilities and shaping our involvement. (When asked, research respondents can cite hosts of criteria for these determinations, as they can cite hosts of purposes for moral institutions. Researchers should
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ask these sorts of metaethical questions more often when interviewing subjects. Simply ignoring the matter or importing criteria from philosophy to do the job leaves much out.) A startling feature of these steps is their championing of inequality or respectful preference alongside equality. This was prominent in my own interview research on the process of problem solving, following by metaethical probe questions. Respondents determine the degree of each—equality and inequality—relative to the "specialness" of the relationship involved. The relationship's relative value and the merits shown in carrying it on also figure in. The four steps following these concern how to gather a range of information and personal perspectives on a situation, how to deliberate fair-mindedly about it, taking others' perspectives, and also negotiating perspectives with others involved. Respect and participatory deliberation are seen as inseparable. Judgment and Action. The final seven steps deal with tailoring the different types of respect, and ways to avoid disrespect, to distinct social and personal contexts. Research respondents make clear that personal respect differs when shown toward one's children, parents, siblings, friends and lovers, peer-group members, neighbors, colleagues, and comembers of community. In more intimate contexts, respect and fairness invoke conventions of personal consideration, trust, support, and the like. Not to show kindness and favoritism here would signal disrespect and be experienced as betrayal. (Thus, the typical philosophical distinction between respect and benevolence is not applicable here.) So-called basic and equal respect is the stuff of more remote or mediated encounters with strangers. It is not respect's morally defining form. When probed, interview respondents make this very clear, supporting Kohlberg critics. Yet respondents can readily distinguish such lavish respect from more caring or benevolent ethical orientations that arise from different sensibilities and intents. The following sample step of Respect and Fairness, with some substeps included, conveys a sense of how many particulars can be teased out of general depictions and extensively probed interviewees. (Remember that, unlike Kohlberg, we are not fixated on cognitive operations that can be universalized. Any content, any way of thinking or interacting that works is welcome so long as it fuels competence for one type of person or another.) I use official-sounding and generalized language to ape Kohlberg's stage descriptions, implying that concrete thinking and directives can sound as structural and philosophical as his depictions of that sort. Step 9: Equality, Merit, Favoritism (Special Obligations). We should honor people's basic equality as individual members of moral community and partners in its functions. But we should also honor their relative standing as members or partners. This
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means treating them differently relative to the merit of their effort or contribution. Most valid moral conventions reflect this. But they also reflect a greater degree of favoritism, rooted deep in both respect and moral convention. — We can, and should, form special relations with others, for the special goods of intimacy and belonging they bring. Doing so also contributes greatly to key community practices, such as parenting, material production or trade, and the like. Special relations involve explicit or implicit promises of special regard, mutuality, and reliance. These must be kept. — But even accidental relations of a close sort raise special expectations for special treatment, whether biologically-based (by blood) or tradition-governed (by ethnicity, religious affiliation). Where allowed to grow, such expectations should not be disappointed. (This is less so even where others foist unwelcomed attentions, merits, or debts are urged on us.) — Our preferential treatment here can be based on personal taste and appeal as well, or an idiosyncratic view of someone's merits. We can favor friends, where their friendship seems irrelevant, and avoid people we do not like despite their basic worth. Our personal tastes and attractions count, as do our personal opinions. They are part of us and important to us. We identify with them, in part, and express ourselves through them. — Such favoritism is legitimate to an extent simply because we hold it to be, personally, and consider it none of morality's judgmental business. At least it is not in the purview of morality's most meddlesome and restrictive functions. In private areas of life that do not impact other's basic dignity, aspiration, or bring direct personal offense, we can simply "do what the hell we want." Out of self-respect, we can feel morally justified in using our discretion this way. But more fundamentally, we do not need morality's permission to be ourselves. Morality is our tool; we are not its. We define morality, not vice versa. — Moreover, preferring someone need not imply rejecting another. Thus, morality's business is served either way. Of course we must be very careful here to recognize the great worth of others as our peers and partners, leaving none out, and acting in the spirit of appreciation. This adds significant moral appeal to individuals even where personal appeal may be lacking. Mere personal taste on our part can not dismiss it. — Also imbued with moral appeal are those seemingly superficial features of personality that on closer inspection express someone's morally central capacities and aspiration or are self-identified by their possessor. These are bases for respect. In addition, we are to appreciate our own worth and respect its sources. Thus, we can do "whatever the hell we want" so long as what we want is thoughtfully valued and self-expressively pursued. That is, it must be self-respecting.
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— By contrast, some situations (e.g., job interviews) are role-governed and carry implicit expectations of equal consideration. Our show of personal preference also can be experienced as personal rejections by others. This is predictable, in fact, because our interpersonal conventions are highly personable and neighborly, expressing respect through myriad courtesies and considerations. In face-to-face situations, preferences demonstrated in some cases cannot avoid rudely passing over others or leaving them out as if they were less deserving, deficient, or even inferior. — Impressing people in this negative way is contrary to the spirit of respect. Even unwittingly, we should not reject or alienate moral comrades or partners. Respect, in its affirmation and support of others, tends toward interpersonal inclusivity rather than exclusion.
Surprising Features Certain unexpected, seemingly non-Kohlbergian features of Respect and Fairness bear note. First, with an interpersonal focus restored, respectfulness and fair-mindedness supplant "justice reasoning" as the central moral theme of high-level competences. This makes a huge difference in practice and experience: Respecting a person differs greatly from respecting her/his rights, for example, or rendering her/ his share of a social pie. Second, the value of individuals and friends becomes key to respect (as it was Kohlberg's Stages 3 and 4 especially). So does mutual appreciation. In practice, respect is born of esteem and appreciation. These are all but left out in Kohlberg's description (and redescription) of postconventional reasoning. Third, a strong emphasis is placed on the perceptual and expressive aspects of respect, seeing through the eyes of respect, and conveying one's respectfulness. Rest's life-research and four-component model is more revealing here than Kohlberg's mention of the "moral point of view." Fairness is perceived in the steps mostly as an outlook and attitude, not as a "distributive principle." Fairness is fair-mindedness. But justdesert rationales are restored, rising from Stages 3 and 4. (Such rationales are noticeably absent in Kohlberg's higher stages. This is especially obvious when we look at morality in a relationally enhanced manner, focused more on the nonmaterial merits of how we treat and come through for people, than on economic earnings or wages owed.) As illustrated, the steps of Respect and Fairness also legitimize inequality in the forms of personal favoritism and preference, based on the degree of relationship and its merits. Indeed, the worthiness of personal relationships per se is given high moral status viewed as embodiments of moral community in microcosm. They also congeal
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mutual efforts to realize relationship ongoingly, keeping relational conventions going. Likewise, these steps restore the values and benefits of relationships (rising from Stage 3 especially) with the accompanying virtues. Related values include belonging, sharing, mutual reliance, and support. Related virtues include trustworthiness, honesty, loyalty, altruism, forgiveness, and toleration. At higher levels of competence, these are characterized by respondents in a highly and morally selective way. Perhaps most surprising of all—for postconventional reasoning—is a readiness to consult or follow convention at almost every turn. The emphasis here, however, is not on "social conventions." It is on the myriad personal and interpersonal conventions that determine how one conveys respect or disrespect up-close-and-personal, in everyday situations. Of course, these steps and the moral operations they expose look quite different in actual problem solving than in these depictions. Alas, showing that difference must await the coming of my volume, The Right Steps.
References Bebeau, M., &Thoma, S. (1998). Defining and testing a measure of intermediate level ethical concepts. Paper presented at AERA, San Diego, CA. Brown, L. M., Tappan, M., Gilligan, C , Miller, B., & Argyris, D. (1986-1995). Reading for self and moral voice: A method for interpreting narratives and real-life moral conflict and choice. In B. Puka (Ed.), Caring voices and women's moral frames (pp. 161—190). New York: Garland Press. Colby, C , Kohlberg, L., Gibbs, J., Speicher-Dubin, B., Hewer, R., & Candee, D. (1987). The measurement of'moral judgment(Vols. 1 and 2). New York: Cambridge University Press. Enright, R. D. (1995). The moral development of forgiveness. In B. Puka (Ed.), Reaching out (pp. 219-249). New York: Garland Press. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kohlberg, L. (1981a). Essays on moral development: Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L. (1981b). From is to ought: How to commit the naturalistic fallacy in the study of moral development and get away with it. In L. Kohlberg, Essays on moral development: Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice (chap. 4). San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L. (1984). Stage and sequence: The cognitive developmental approach to socialization. In L. Kohlberg, Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages (chap. 1). San Francisco: Harper & Row. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics. Los Angeles: UCLA Press. Puka, B. (1984). The savings approach to public policy. In T Attig, D. Callen, & R. G. Frey, (Eds.), Social policy and conflict resolution (pp. 120-137). Bowling Green, O H : Bowling Green Press.
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Puka, B. (1995a). New research in moral development and Caring Voices and Women's Moral Frames. New York: Garland Press. [Vols. 5 and 6 of Moral [Development: A Compendium, containing research reports in moral psychology by authors such as Blasi, Brown, Damon, Gibbs, Gilligan, Haan, Hoffman, Lyons, Selman, Tappan, and Turiel] Puka, B. (1995b). Toward moral perfectionism: Niceness rampant. New York: Garland Press. Puka, B. (1983—1995). The right mix: Making a federal case out of ethics. Unpublished book manuscript. Rawls, J. (1972). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rest, J. R. (1979). Development in judging moral issues. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rest, J. R., Narvaez, D., Bebeau, M., &Thoma, S. (1999). Post-conventional moral reasoning: A neo-Kohlbergian approach. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Appendix A (Refresher-Outline of Kohlberg's Stages) Stage 2: It is right to pursue one's own immediate interest, letting others do the same, also to make fair deals of mutual exchange and benefit. Stage 3: It is right to live up to what those close to you expect of you and what people generally expect of you in your roles as peer-group and family member. You should have good motives of concern for others, following the golden rule. And you should maintain mutual relations, upholding in-group norms and practices through trust, loyalty, respect, gratitude, toleration, and forgiveness. Stage 4: It is right to fulfill the actual duties you have agreed to as a social member, maintaining the social system as a whole. You should contribute your share to social well-being and protection, primarily by conforming to stabilizing, "status quo" practices, such as tradition and law; holding high the right to life and freedom. Most, you should help guard against social breakdown and chaos, even through toleration of benign nonconformity where necessary. Stage 5: It is right to do what the moral institutions of society prescribe, at the social, peer, and family level, insofar as they represent the joint consent of members. We should bring institutions into line with the social will and create new ones by informal social contract. Different moral rules are relative and arbitrary except where they serve such a social agreement and the two basic purposes of morality—resolving conflicts of interest and establishing ground-rules for trusting, mutually beneficial cooperation. Two ruleorientations are key to these ends: maintaining individual rights to noninterference and responsibly advancing joint (utilitarian) welfare. Rights to basic life, liberty, and opportunity also are inherent and are not to be sacrificed for the greater good.
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Stage 6(empirically unverified): It is right to follow self-chosen ethical principles of universal justice, equality of human rights, and respect for the dignity of individuals. These compose a moral point of view for judging existing sociomoral institutions, at all social levels. These should be followed or violated relative to their alignment with such principles primarily. Rights and justice include noninfringement and rendering aid where equality of freedom and dignity are threatened.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.
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Moral Resilience—The Unhappy Moralist Fritz K. Oser and Roland Reichenbach
Moral Decision Making Under Pressure One major problem of morality in context concerns the form and amount of pressure that an individual experiences when deciding issues that include both effectiveness demands and moral obligations. In fact, true morality involves dealing with the risk of having to decide against external or internal expectations. The pressure can come from internalized performance standards or from the structure of the social, economical, or political situation that demands a nonmoral type of decision—for example, oriented toward profit or production outcomes. This is the case when a firm demands that a salesman sells products that he would never buy himself. Another example may be civil disobedience in a political situation in which a dictatorial system demands obedience to a command to oppress or kill innocent people. When we talk about moral competence in a Kohlbergian sense, we mean a judgment that is given in a situation that is free of time constraints, pressure, or coercion. Rarely, moral performance in real-life decision-making situations matches the complete moral competence. In addition, morality in context is always a decision-making process requiring an emotional balancing of two goods. We may say that it is easier not to be moral and just listen to what brings success. We may say that it is a sign of prudence not to expose oneself to danger. It is probably also easier to discuss in a neutral and open situation. However, real biographical or historical moral decision making and action always requires something like moral courage, or the will to stand up against unjustified expectations and pressure. There is no relevant moral decision making without stress. But who is immune against pressure from outside? Who can resist if one is only required to close an eye if a lot of money is at stake? Who can resist an offer when this would be perceived as a refusal of cooperation, and an oppositional stance? Who wants to lose a case in a trial, when winning presumes only a "marginal" denial of moral claims? In this chapter, subjects who resist internal or external pressure for morality's sake are called morally resilient. Moral resilience is manifested in a situation in which
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someone accepts the risk to be punished, to forfeit winning a case, to be unsuccessful, and so forth, because of moral considerations. In this contribution, we would like to discuss cases and dimensions of moral resilience. We would like to show that in particular negotiation, skills often interfere with the moral point of view, and that moral resilience can easily be demonstrated in negotiations.
Forms of Moral Resilience Moral resilience refers (a) to resistance against obtaining or accepting a good when there is indication that the procurement of that good is connected to something negative, (b) to resistance against public pressure even when acting in favor of weak or persecuted people, leading probably to the consequence that the action may damage the moral subject, and (c) not bearing witness against others when this testimony only yields an advantage to the person in possession of relevant evidence in a case, but not for the person whose destiny is at stake. Resilience in these forms represents cases of situated morality. It responds to conditions, which more than any abstract or artificial dilemma, contains high complexity, restriction of time, necessary decision making (omissions cannot be neutral), and often secrecy of the act (the probability of a legal suit being a subordinated consideration). Psychologically, moral resilience is a performance condition (as opposed to moral competence). It depends, besides the restrictions mentioned, on a variety of emotional variables, such as fear of discrimination, fear of exclusion, pressure from a related group, loss of relationships, or fear of defamation and punishment of relatives. But not only this is decisive: Often, the actor is indebted to persons who are concerned by this decision. An example may be: How can someone testify against his or her employer if the testimony can jeopardize not only his or her own employment but also the jobs of an entire team, and so forth. One question immediately arising touches on the distinction between moral courage and moral resilience. These two concepts overlap, but can nevertheless be differentiated: Moral courage relates to the transformation of a moral decision into a concrete act, whereas moral resilience serves the inhibition of an immoral act which would represent great advantage to the moral subject. In this chapter, we wish to discuss the issue of moral resilience in view of a special case—the negotiation of divorce. This obviously means restricting the range of the problem. On the other hand, we hope to ascertain ecological validity of the construct by focusing the argumentation. Accordingly, we refer to only one form of moral resilience—while knowing that the other forms mentioned earlier are of equal importance.
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Resilience in the Negotiation Process: Resistance to the Maximization Demand We have stated that the negotiation process serves well to demonstrate the balancing of two forces, a success-oriented process and a morally founded process. The question is why some persons in a negotiation context resist the demand to win at all costs because of moral considerations, whereas others do not. Negotiating the best for your own prosperity is a psychological and economic demand. It gives the negotiation process meaning. Hundreds of "how to do" books give advice on how a negotiator can achieve the best solution for himself. No one can successfully negotiate without bearing in mind the "best alternative to a negotiated agreement" (the BATNA; see Fisher & Ury, 1981). The concept of BATNA implies that both protagonists must transform the (broader) zone of negotiation into a zone of agreement where both parties receive the possibility of finding the best available solution. The best solution must be better than a certain range of minimal gain. There is no negotiation without the willingness to increase, improve, or enhance economic or psychological goods. This imperative is so strong that anybody seriously engaged in a negotiating procedure must comply with it. Negotiating, as an interactive process, implies that two or more claims relative to the same interests and implying the same stakes need to be balanced such that both parties achieve the optimum. Experts deal skillfully with both the bargaining process and its results. They may differentiate between persisting interests and momentary positions, understand the function of each phase in the negotiation process (cf. Gulliver, 1979), and use sophisticated tactics very effectively (cf. Birkenbihl, 1990, p. 182). What is problematic in this? Frequently, the skill of the experts contradicts moral claims—especially if experts profit from the weakness of the adversary, misinform the other side, or, above all, hide information that may weaken or damage their own position. Because a good negotiator is supposed to win, he or she might be tempted to use every means in order to reach the goal. Often, good negotiators appear to be paralyzed by the goal, and, especially if no legal consequences are to be feared, engage in a "power game" to the very extent consistent with its purpose. Negotiation theories (or courses) rarely deal with morality; it is supposed that competent negotiations automatically lead to transparent consequences, or that success is good in itself. Perhaps there is no other field of human interaction that implies so strongly that success is morally good. This is the reason why negotiations are prototypical situations for analyzing the hidden immorality of acts that are legally accepted and imply no consequences beyond, perhaps, a bad conscience. Many examples of this can be found in the literature.
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In his book "Livro do Desassossego," the Portuguese novelist Fernando Pessoa describes an "immoral" act where the protagonist legitimately insists on his legal rights, but, at the same time, neglects his moral duty: Chef Vasques struck today a bargain, which ruins a sick man and his family. During the bargaining he completely forgot that a human being faced him, he only saw the commercial adversary. After he had signed, his moral sensibility caught up with him. Of course, this was after the contract was signed; if it had occurred before the signature, the bargain would not have been signed. "I am sorry for this fellow," he said to me. "He is doomed to poverty." Then he lit a cigar. And he added: "In any case, if he needs something"—he thought about alms—"I won't forget that I received many ten thousand Escudos, thanks to him."—Chef Vasques is not a monster: he is a man of action. The one who looses in this game can surely count on alms because Vasques is a gracious man.
This is a good example of the paralyzing force: "... he only saw the commercial adversary," and this is also a good paradigm of consequences following the action: "... if he needs something—he thought about alms." There is tacit knowledge that the protagonist's course of action was wrong, but he cannot reverse the procedure. Now the question of moral resilience comes into play. Vasques is not a monster, but he does not resist the inner pressure of his right and duty to win. He is fascinated by the bargain, knowing, but not actualizing that there are other responsibilities, and thus pursues the end as if in a frenzy. Another reaction could have been to introduce a new factor into the negotiation situation: to win while entertaining the moderating consideration that the sick man should be able to survive. Obviously, this would complicate the negotiation process because within rational choice or economic calculations there is no place for sociomoral thinking and altruistic emotions. In general, this is perceived as relevant in every textbook of economics and in all economic contracts: We cannot see why a profit can ever be problematic with respect to the logic of moral sentiments. Explanations of Moral Resilience The case of Vasques raises the question why some people care about and respect the logic of morality, while others do not. What makes Vasques unresponsive to the needs of others, and what generates resilience in others? A simple answer may be that Vasques exhibits low-level negotiation strategies, as they are described by Selman (1980, p. 51). Higher level strategies are characterized by an attempt to achieve and respect mutuality. This calls for a state where both parties must be satisfied with the balance established through the contract. However, a counterargument comes to mind immediately: Mutuality in negotiations does not equal moral reversibility, it simply follows a cooperative win maximization logic. The sick man did agree to the transaction because he thought that he would profit from the bargain himself. More-
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over, at least in retrospective Vasques is aware that the balance was not well-equilibrated. Thus, we cannot assume that he is at a lower stage of negotiation capability. A second type of explanation can be taken from Werner and Smith (1989) who clustered major protective factors in the following three categories: (a) dispositional attributes of the person, (b) affective ties within close relationships, and (c) external support systems which are connected to schools or committees. We do not detail here findings related to the three components (see also Werner, 1997). But we suggest that these factors relate to the general welfare of a person or to successful development rather than to resilience in a strict moral sense. We would translate these factors in the following way: Examples of personal factors are a stage of moral judgment, moral selfefficacy beliefs, and moral sensitivity (see Nunner-Winkler, 1997). As a relationship factor, the concept of responsibility may be helpful. While the concept used by Werner is designed to serve as an indicator in the context of development in view of the question of moral resilience, we look to the norms of the negotiation culture and the unique situation in which a person decides to take (or not to take) into consideration the challenge of care, truthfulness, or justice, knowing that the outcome of the process may be disadvantageous or even disastrous. We propose that there is a combination of internal and external forces that lead a subject in a situation to take a moral point of view or to abstain from it. In the negative case, this combination of factors is as follows: On the one hand, there is a capacity to screen knowledge of the consequences for the other. On the other hand, however, there is a concentration on one's own purposes as a game in which winning generates good feelings. The situational stress transforms itself into thrill; the rules of the game lead to what we might call the "immoral flow." The situation resembles the blindness of a mountaineer who is eagerly approaching the summit and ignores the danger of a sudden change of weather. We might speak of cognitively desired moral blindness. The act of closing one's moral mind refers to the willingness to reduce complexity to fit the rules that determine the game. Thus, the question at stake is not one of moral stage, moral sensitivity, or moral knowledge, but rather of reducing the procedure in a game situation to what is perceived as essential: the game itself. In other words, the desire to win overrules the moral duty not to hurt others and to take advantage of their weakness. In contrast, persons showing moral resilience appear to be able to resist professional and nonprofessional pressures and the desire to succeed under all circumstances, and even seem to be able to resist the temptation to prevail in a negotiation that is important to them. Thus, moral resilience has to be distinguished from the moral point of view (Baier, 1974). The question is not, "What shall I do?" but rather, "Can I live up to my convictions?" or "Can I resist the temptation (to be the best, to be successful, to be powerful ...)?" Thinking in terms of the moral point of view, we usually first try to define the moral problem in question, and then ask ourselves whether there is a
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moral principle or some moral standard that can be applied to the situation in order to solve the problem. However, in "performative situations," the question is rather how we give voice to the moral problem, and how we do that if an important disadvantage appears to arise for us if we act this way.
Resilience With Respect to Hiding Important Information An especially illuminating case is the instance of one party involved in the negotiation of having access to confidential information that would weaken their position if publicly known. Whereas no one would expect that the informed party will communicate the information in question to the disadvantaged opposing party so that the latter can work out a better deal, the question remains what to do with the information. This is a case of applied morality. The main point here is that the context enhances the actor's desire to win, and not to reflect on morality. The context obstructs the moral aspect of the process. There is no duty not to win or not to push the other side to the end of their financial rope instead of giving in, even if some institutions tell us not to behave in such immoral ways and not to decide unresponsively. Are we discussing a nonbinding and merely postulated duty? Indeed, one can act as if the concealed information did not exist, and no judge would legally sanction such behavior. However, if one considers the possible consequences, the question arises whether a binding duty exists although it cannot be enforced by a law court. This makes the issue exceptionally interesting. The philosopher Birnbacher (1995, p. 186), in an impressive article, tries to show that Hare is wrong when he argues in terms of this two-level model of action and omission to the effect that conformity reigns between "intuitive principles" that are pragmatically justifiable, but erroneous if prevailing "intuitions." The charge is that Hare exaggerates the degree of conformity between the two levels in actual cases. This implies "not to accept the intuitive claim that the person responsible for an omission carries less responsibility for the consequences than a person who does act carries for the consequences of that act" (Birnbacher, 1995, p. 186). The reason for that statement is the close structural similarity of both behaviors. At first blush, the weakness of Birnbacher's analysis is manifested by the fact that he introduces a counterexample for each example of act or omission, thereby contradicting the principle just established. We illustrate this byway of two of his cases: Birnbacher takes the example of lack of benevolence. Take a case where collecting a debt from a needy debtor is in a situation where the creditor could do without that money. An omission to collect the debt would have been morally preferable. Another example, this time for an omission, is the failure to observe the prohibition to look at
Moral Resilience: The Unhappy Moralist Eurydice. In this case, acting as demanded would have been morally preferable. —One gets the impression that an omission is morally weightier (positively or negatively) than acting in cases where the well-being of a person is central, but contrary to a favorable end for the opposing party. Hence, one should discuss each case on its merits without quick generalization. A concrete example of the possibility to hide important information in negotiation situations occurs regularly in our courses on negotiation: the so-called Winter versus Winter divorce case. The aim of these courses is to practice and reflect on complex negotiation cases. The participants are mainly managers and officials at the higher echelons of nonprofit organizations and public administration. During the first two days, we work on cases without any particular moral framework; the main goal is to understand the conditions of successful negotiation. The experience of maneuvers in simulated cases is completed by an introduction into the psychology of negotiation: Participants become familiar with theories regarding the structure and process of negotiation. The "moral" case, the divorce story, appears on the program only on the third day. This case was developed and first used by See (1987). The case concerns a divorce settlement of a couple—Paul and Barbara Winter— with five children. They had been married for 15 years. Paul is a civil servant, an officer in the police, earning about 86,000 Swiss francs per year. His work is stressful, and he is on duty mostly in night shifts. Paul and Barbara own a house and two cars; recently, Barbara has inherited some money. For some time, Barbara has tended to neglect her three younger children. She has repeatedly gone to town with her two older daughters, met a 19-year-old tennis player, flirted with him, presumably has an intimate relationship with him, and was "caught" with him in Paul's car by the police, and so forth. Paul confiscated Barbara's key to his car and threw her out of the house. She left her family, and, meanwhile, she has not seen her children for weeks. Moreover, she has given up her job as a preschool teacher. The negotiations take place between the attorneys of husband and wife. It is out of the question that Barbara and Paul, the two parties, might be reconciled. The decision to divorce is definitive. Each side attempts to gain as many advantages as possible; at the same time, the children's well-being needs to be considered. The schedule of the course involves the following steps: (a) The presentation of the case and affiliation of the participants with the parties concerned; in each of several groups, two play the role of lawyers representing Barbara, and two are assigned the roles of Paul's attorneys, (b) The distribution of information sheets; each group receives a general description of the case, and each pair of "lawyers" is provided with confidential information regarding the person represented by them, (c) Each group prepares for the negotiation with mindmaps and strategic plans, (d) The negotiation starts. Typically, it lasts between two and three hours.
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From the perspective of moral resilience, the key issue is that Barbaras attorneys have very negative information about her, whereas Paul's lawyers work with "normal" expectable information consistent with the picture of a loving husband and father, and a good and diligent citizen. In contrast, the confidential information about Barbara reads like this: Confidential information fior Barbara's attorneys
You have instructed one of your most capable staff to collect information on Barbara. He visits family members and neighbors to inquire about her reputation. The consensus seems to be that she behaves like a teenager, hanging out with young people, and flirting with the former boyfriend of her own daughter! Her behavior is mostly offending. Asked who should keep the children, most persons thought that Paul would take better care of them as he is conscious of his responsibilities and dependable. Barbara said: "Well, the people, the people in this little place in the middle of nowhere, they pounce on everybody. And Paul is really boring. My God, he is a dead loss! And such a sap wants to be called a policeman.—The children, yes I want them. I am their best friend. They need me, I love them. How could Paul look after them?" Here are the children's most important comments:
Daniel (3 years): "I want my mum to come back." Joseph (6 years): "I love Mummy. But she leaves me alone too often; then I have only Danny to play with. She goes out with Laura and Celine. She only takes me shopping. When I wet my bed, she beats me in the morning." Peter (10 years): "I love Mummy and Daddy. If I have to choose, I want to stay with Daddy. He cares for us and in the evening he reads a story to me. When Mummy left Daniel and Joseph to themselves, I visited my friends. When Mummy brought her friends along, we had to stay in our rooms until they had left again." Laura (13 years): "I love my Mummy, but I no longer want to stay with her. She behaves like a friend, not like a real mother. She does not take care of her children, above all of my little brothers. Frequently, she went out with Celine and myself while Daniel and Joseph stayed at home—and Daddy slept upstairs." Celine (14 years): "If my parents get divorced, I want to stay with my father. I like my mother, as we all do, but I believe that something is not quite right with her; she has behaved rather strangely for some time. In case the judge orders me to stay with my mother, I will run away." Barbara Winter wants to gain custody of the children, or at least of her daughters, to whom she feels closer.
Moral Resilience: The Unhappy Moralist The research question we ask is this: How do Barbara's "attorneys" behave? What do they do with their information? Which moral standards do they apply in order to close the case?
Procedural Indignation: The Truth is Naked The course procedure gives insight into what happens from the moral point of view concerning both parties: After the closing of the negotiation, participants present their settlement, that is, the final result of the negotiation (e.g., all children go to Barbara, Paul pays such and such amount of maintenance and loses the house; he can keep one car, etc. Or, the two older girls go to Barbara, the three younger children to Paul, etc.). As we will see below, all combinations are possible. Only after the exchange of the results, the course participants get to know the confidential information that the opposite party had been provided with. This is the one moment during our course where we can expect uproar and emotion among participants. Inevitably, Paul's attorneys will react angrily. They seem to explode emotionally, calling the representatives of the other party liars and cheaters. In sum, they express that they would have negotiated quite differently if they had been provided with only part of the information that was accessible to Barbara's attorneys. Paul's attorneys blame the other party for being immoral, for rationalizing their dirty maneuvers, for cheating, and for jeopardizing the children's future—all in order to gain the custody of at least some of the children for Barbara. Now, of course, a fierce discussion about keeping back information and other dirty tricks in negotiations, about the immoral behavior of attorneys in general, and about the general state of civil society takes place. Often, Barbara's attorneys reply with the argument that all this information could have been obtained through cross-examination if only the other party had been interested and shown some resolve. At this point, we must interrupt the description of our subjects' reactions and reflect upon our role as experimenters in this game. Of course, this is only a simulation of real-life situations and behaviors, and it refers to situated morality. Situated morality (like situated learning) captures dimensions of reality that may, or may not, represent typical features. Reality, in our case, can be constructed in such a way that a decision to conceal the truth, to refuse giving everybody the same share, or to be equally helpful to everyone can be considered more moral than the opposite line of action. Given the instruction to work for the client's interests, the pathway to a moral world is not unidirectional in this situation. We cannot say that Barbara's lawyers are immoral because they took the role of defending an irresponsible mother. This would be an oversimplified and rigoristic interpretation. The participants do in the
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course what lawyers do all the time (defend their clients' interests), only less professionally and with the awareness of playing a part in a game with nobody actually meeting his or her fate. What we try to show is the emergence of impartiality in an unfair and chaotic field of interaction. Supressing and ignoring information in the battle, or judging this to be a reason for deploying moderate and cooperative negotiation strategies is only one aspect, but maybe an aspect that gives one a cue to the situation. One question that arises concerns the effects that our work with the participants during the first two days of the course may have on their behavior in this simulation. Do Barbara's attorneys bargain hard to obtain for her the custody of her children because we have just put the will to be successful in a negotiation into their minds? Because we have stimulated the desire to win, and thereby—implicitly—to neglect moral norms? Could it be true that the participants do not react "normally" in the moral domain, but display a desensitized moral conscience as a consequence of the first phase of the course? The opposite hypothesis would be that we witness a real-life phenomenon in that morality is not found on the surface of rationality, but needs to be dug up from deep down within the different layers of a person's diverse interests. This is a moral dimension to which hardly anyone has paid attention so far: This concerns the hiding of morality within processes of communication, particularly in the area of negotiating and decision making. To our knowledge, only one relevant volume in education has dealt with the question, "The Moral Life of Schools" by Jackson, Boostrom & Hansen (1993). These authors developed the concept of the "moral well-being of students" and demonstrated that (a) literally every decision made by a teacher has a moral component, and (b) that in schools many teachers do "more harm than good to their students" (p. XVII). Their tendency to devaluate morality behind the constraints of a broken interaction, such as a divorce, shows that most professionals neither act nor reason according to their moral competence, but act according to a morality implicit in bargaining and profit maximization. Only if a person distances herself from the priority of profit maximization and reflects critically upon what is happening, can she uncover the hidden aspects of the tactics used and unveil the moral implications. Only then can the drive toward success at any price be constrained and opposed. The most interesting aspect of morality consists in the fact that the crucial test can only be made when it needs to be dealt with under pressure, never in a context free of coercion. What is at stake is the descriptive content of real moral acts, counterclaims, and justifications in situations where differences in the psychological structure no longer suffice for an explanation of such contents. Oesterdiekhoff (1998) in contrast with Weber and Elias has shown that a description of moral structures and personality char-
Moral Resilience: The Unhappy Moralist acteristics cannot be justified solely by a person's actual behavior and cognitions. It remains to be shown that a sociology of behavior can elucidate more than actual situations involving hidden morality. This is because the many layers of a situation prohibit a quick and precise inference from the execution of an act and its justification to a person's moral base structure; further, knowledge of the moral structure so far does not permit to conclude as to the moral spirit of the times. Our case not only illustrates procedurally how persons in a professional negotiation conceal morally damaging information; rather we demonstrate the construction of a moral equilibrium between parties that often shows a strange characteristic: Not revealing potentially damaging information leads to life-based justifications for doing what prima facie appears to be wrong. The potentially damaging information is disguised in order not to endanger a successful outcome of the negotiation, the latter being considered the higher value; but it is also disguised for the sake of a presumedly disturbed person whose attorneys put more weight on psychology and sociology than on morality. The moral content is at stake. If Barbaras attorneys had revealed the results of their detective work, they could no longer maintain the position that she, as the mother, should obtain custody of the children. In reality, she does not want the children because they get in the way of her pursuits. However, she has to pretend that she wants them because only then can she play her social role and avoid losing face. The case draws its strength from the fact that one group has "normal" information about a client, but the other has only negative material relative to the client's moral stature, and thus what we have is a disequilibrium of moral values. On the material level, the main question remains: What are the consequences for the children if the negotiations are "successful," and the client receives her "rightful" share of the custody of the children? There is one group of participants who argued for Barbara's custody of the children, and kept doing so after all was settled; these participants behaved as if nothing important had happened. Indeed, they did not harm people physically. They won a fairly easy victory because they benefited from the fact that the opposing party did not have any confidential information. Usually they do not feel guilty for a while because they can persuade themselves that nothing bad will happen. The situation was beyond repair anyway, and nobody knew what type of partner Paul really was. Winning is all that counts; after all it is an attorney's job to get as much as possible for his clients. And it should not be forgotten that simulation can be understood as nothing but a game. This implies an opportunity to play harder than one would claim to act in real life. In this case, the potentially bad consequences are not perceived, or their significance is minimized (resulting in diminished responsibility). One has done one's duty as an attorney, and anyway nobody knows whether Paul's attorneys also did not have confidential damaging information about him.
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But this is only one group. What about the many others who argue differently about the same outcome?
Resilient Negotiators: Unhappy Moralists In this section, we would like to turn our view toward those defenders of Barbara who fight for a good divorce settlement including an attractive financial deal for Barbara (that would enable her to live an independent life)—but, at the same time, plead for giving custody of all children to Paul, not Barbara. About one third of the 110 subjects agreed (in their opposing roles) on giving all children to Paul. How can we explain this? The morally resilient persons who used their information against the prima facie interests of their client (that is, in the normal case, not to uncover the information to everybody, but rather transform it in order to indirectly help the attorneys of the opposing party) in most cases do not appear happy with the result of their work. When we talk to these persons, they voice the impression that they have not fulfilled the demands of a good negotiation They do not feel really successful even when convinced that they have done the right thing. One of them stated, "I am exhausted, I will never become a good negotiator. I think it was the right thing to do, but I am wondering how we could have brought things together." This seems to be the key issue: On the one hand, the negotiator should be a winner with good tactical and economic abilities. On the other hand, he should have a moral stance. Power, Khmelkow, and SelfEsteem Project Team (1998) found that a self-critical position regarding this issue increases the likelihood of low self-esteem. The judgment recorded above points in the same direction. Subjects entertaining an "additive model" of the relationship between success and morality tend to separate these two domains. The balance of strategic and communicative acts, according to Habermas (1981a), is uneasy. A more ideal model would be the "regulative model" where communicative forms of informing or limiting the aspects of effectiveness are integrated with forms of evaluating the responsibility
The data presented in this chapter derive from a questionnaire that the participants of the negotiation courses fill out after the end of the negotiation, but before the whole group discussion. The answers of 110 participants in different courses are included here. The results should be read cautiously. First, data are event specific; second, there is no control of social class; third, often someone would like to give all children to Paul, but does not have the power to arrive at this result. The main question we were interested in was whether the groups who agreed that Barbara should have the custody of the children scored lower in morally relevant variables than the groups who agreed on giving custody of the children to Paul.
Moral Resilience: The Unhappy Moralist of outcomes (see Oser, 1998). Subjectively, if we separate domains, we cannot be satisfied if one of them interferes with the other. By intercorrelating some of the items of our questionnaire, we expected similar responses to the question of how certain outcomes of the negotiation are to be understood. In what follows, we would like to mention a few interesting differences (all Pearson correlations). Persons who decide to give the children to Barbara show a highly significant correlation between the statement "Morally, I behaved completely correctly" and "I am satisfied with the outcome" (.707). When the children were separated (e.g., the older went to Barbara, the younger to Paul), the correlation was less high (.46*). When the children were given to Paul, there was no significant correlation (.22*). What does this mean? Our data seems to show that persons (at least in our sample) who behave in a morally dubious way nevertheless have the tendency to interpret the result (of their behavior) as morally correct and, on the whole, satisfying, while the persons who try to behave in what they perceive as decent ways nevertheless are more likely to feel somewhat negative, rather unhappy, and insecure. This again leads to the assumption that there exists a complement to the "happy victimizer" (Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988), namely, the resilient "unhappy moralists." In other words, persons acting in a morally correct manner do not generate positive correlations with content about the solution they reach. This can be sustained with another significant correlation: "The solution is in the interests of all concerned parties" correlates positively with "We were lying" (.39*) if the children were allocated to Paul, but negatively, if the children were given to Barbara" (-.64*). That means that for Paul's defenders, there is a positive relationship between lying and interests. They do believe that lying could help, whereas the "true liars" do not believe that. "Moral correctness" does not correlate positively with "lying" for persons who agree to give the children to Barbara; rather, the correlation is highly negative (—.66*). For Paul's lawyers (children were given to him), the correlation of "moral correctness" and "responsibility for the broken marriage" is not significant (.27*), whereas for the persons who give the children to Barbara this correlation is significantly negative (—.64*). In sum, the unhappy moralist appears to be a person who suffers from morally not being compatible with success. He knows that the goal of winning in a negotiation situation interferes with the goal of caring, and avoiding injustice. Typically, this conflict lets the unhappy moralists doubt their ability to ever reach an equilibrium between the two values. Still, these moralists are resilient negotiators. When faced with the negative information regarding the client they represent, they successfully resist the temptation to rationalize the significance of this information or simply to lie. Liars among our subjects suggested the following: "It is clear that all children want to be
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with their mother," "Everybody knows that the children hate their father," or "You know well that the father never mentioned that he wants custody of the children." What about the rationalization, the practical explanations (justifications) of morally dubious behavior? To obtain a clearer picture of how people deal with the dilemma of having to do a dirty job, we need to look at the whole-group discussions that take place after the small-group negotiations in the divorce case.
Four Debatable Justifications For Not Having Been Resilient As mentioned above, the participants are informed by the course instructors, after their exchange, regarding the results of their negotiations about the confidential information for the two parties. In most cases, Paul's attorneys react emotionally. "I feel victimized, you obtained a compromise by fraud"; "It is unbelievable what kind of swindlers you can be!"; "We have been cheated"; "Morally speaking, this is dishonest behavior." The outbursts are expressions of moral indignation. Many members of Paul's party cannot understand that Barbara's party behaved as if their confidential information was just as innocent as their own. There usually follows a longer discussion phase, during which members of Barbaras party seek to justify themselves. The justifications correspond to one of the following four patterns: (1) If we had disclosed the information, Barbara would have found other attorneys who would have contested the correctness of the confidential information and everything would have started again. Who does not pull the rope always loses. "If we do not do it, somebody else will" is an attempt at generalizing the debatable behavior. It is implied that the action would have taken the same course anyway, whoever did it, whether he wanted to or not. Not moral reasonableness counts, but only strategic success. It does not matter who commits the immoral act because it will happen anyway. Therefore, the act is separated from the person who commits it. Hence, the justifying argument consists in contesting that there is any responsibility for wrongdoing because somebody else would have acted the same way, getting paid for it. This argument is never generally agreed upon by the participants. It is worn out, and the emotionality with which it is usually presented translates the fact that the arguing parties finally are not convinced of the moral correctness of their omission. Also, using such an argumentation tends to bring disrepute to a profession which is not usually inclined to do everything for profit, in particular if it comes at the moral cost of doing harm to the weak, the children, and so forth, rather than observing the moral norm of treating them fairly.
Moral Resilience: The Unhappy Moralist (2) Another frequently used argument concerns Barbara's mental health. If only she undergoes therapy, she will be alright after a while, and look after her children as a good mother. To this is often added that she is not responsible for Paul's night shifts. Underlying these arguments is the belief that persons are not responsible for their immoral deeds; the circumstances did not leave them any choice, therefore it was alright to fight for Barbara's rights. Eventually, she was not responsible for what happened to her. This argument is convincing only as long as one is not aware of the fact that it cannot be generalized because a psychological justification can be given for every possible case of misbehavior. Every murderer has suffered from an unfeeling foster mother. Therefore, this argument does not carry much weight and is often rejected rather quickly by the opposing party. (Even the version where Barbara successfully undergoes psychotherapy and therefore is entitled to the custody is not accepted by all.) (3) A third argument runs as follows: Those who want to give Paul custody of the children have no idea what the "real" world is like. In that world, a judge would always decide against Paul and for Barbara. Therefore, it is justified to take this eventuality into account even if it means some constraining because any other decision would mean falling prey to illusions that have little to do with the reality of official courts. From this point of view, it is better to look at the legal side first and accommodate this, and ask any moral questions only afterwards. This argument is not very rational. Following through with it leads to the consequence that morality depends on external constraints. There are many historical examples that demonstrate into what abyss such a course of action might lead. The history of ethical freedom teaches us how important is the possibility of entering freely into moral arguments with organizations or institutions. Morality—and the advocacy of justice, care, and truthfulness is needed to balance the sheer will to win that tends to dominate negotiations. (4) The fourth argument concerns the oppression of women. It runs more or less as follows: Because women have fewer chances in life and are often treated unfairly, Barbara should be entitled to the custody of her children. This compensation argument abstracts from the particulars of the case and immediately introduces a higher principle of justice as the sole determinant—even if the children suffer from it. "Paul has put the load of five children on Barbara. He is guilty enough to disadvantage her in any case." The implication is that Barbara has no free will and is the victim of arbitrary decisions by other persons. Usually, women demolish this argument by showing that it is not rational. One cannot simultaneously argue both for and against the autonomy of the decision taken.
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These four types of arguments justifying nonresilient negotiation strategies appear almost each time when Barbara is given the custody of her children, or when the children are separated. They are used as justifications by persons with high social responsibility (such as managers) who do not understand how they came to do such harm to weak children in the process of maximizing the benefits for their client. As their arguments fall on their face rather rapidly, the uneasiness of the participants become ever more visible as they realize the weakness of their argumentation and the impossibility of reaching a consensus. The arguments we are discussing are not universalizable and therefore are not morally acceptable arguments; they merely serve as self-defense. This brings us back to the question whether these rationalizations either manifest lower stage reasoning or represent moral performance, but not true moral competence. Is moral resilience simply a question of higher moral competence?
Moral Competence, Moral Performance, and the Question of Moral Resilience The four types of arguments sketched above suggest a structurally "low" judgment. But this is not the case. If we believed that moral performance is nothing but incomplete moral competence, this hypothesis would be highly plausible. Theoretically, however, moral competence is different from moral performance (with some overlap, of course). As Kohlberg understands it (1981, 1984; Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983), moral competence is a judgment under optimal conditions (lack of pressure or constraints regarding resources, and sufficient time to discover an elaborate solution). These conditions can be compared to those of the "ideal speech situation" (Habermas, 1981b). To construct a solution of a moral conflict in a resilient way reflects a different moral structure, a form of performance that includes aspects of the moral will. Such performance structures can be different depending on the architecture of the relationship between the personal moral self and the prevailing situational constraints. Moral judgments as performances in real moral situations differ greatly from mere theoretical dilemma situations where the focus is on "pure" competence. Situated judgments are influenced by the specific contexts and their constraints, by the feelings of the actors, by expectancy patterns, by the moral indignation of persons concerned or involved, and, of course, by other factors. Thus, there are contexts and personal perspectives that influence and form the moral performances which can be elucidated in negotiation processes, but which also may inhibit the expression of actual moral competence. Introducing the notions of developmental context, realism, and developmental plasticity of judgment, Bakes (1990) has introduced a framework that may help to
Moral Resilience: The Unhappy Moralist consider these aspects. Age, historical situation, and nonnormative elements of individual experience also impact on the performance of judgments and promote (moral) development. By looking at judgments in negotiation processes, we do not deal with the general development (of competence). Rather, we focus not only on the conditions of the willingness to win by morally problematic means, such as lying, but also on the conditions of acting according to one's expectations as a moral subject. Immoral behavior—especially in negotiation processes—must be analyzed mainly in terms of personal and contextual constraints, and not from the competence perspective of moral judgment, or from the perspective of abstract ideas about what persons view as right or wrong. In real contexts, the "genesis of immorality" is strongly influenced by forces from inside the person and from the outside (the situation and other persons) and should therefore also be described in view of these factors. Psychological research, however, has rarely been devoted to the analysis of contextual conditions of performance judgments. In that respect, it must be said that most empirical (and nonempirical) research is carried out in some sort of "moral void." Damon (1977), for example, in one of his well-known experiments, asked children whether they would obey if their parents asked them to steal. The result is that most of the children he asked refused (see also Laupa & Turiel, 1993; Tisak & Tisak, 1991; Smetana, 1988). In this research, we find careful descriptions of the stages of authority belief and, thus, competence judgments. Let us imagine the results if real parents were instructed to encourage their children to steal in some situation of urgency. How would the children solve the conflict between the potential withdrawal of love and moral duty? Obviously, such research would not only provide an entirely different perspective on the relevance of competence as manifested in abstract moral reasoning but it would also provide a more appropriate view on morality in context. As a consequence, statements such as the following would be interpreted quite differently: "This research has shown that children reject commands from otherwise legitimate authorities if the command is judged to be morally unacceptable. In contrast, regarding conventional rules that regulate the functioning of social systems, authorities are judged to be legitimate when giving commands consistent with the conventional system." (Laupa Turiel, & Cowan, 1995, p. 137) Apparently, these researchers discuss contextual conditions of moral judgment. However, we believe that they actually are doing something else, and that the children in the contexts discussed by the authors would act very differently. Another example—which we will not discuss further—is Helwig's (1995) who distinguishes between two dimensions in order to provide a better understanding of moral judgment performance: (a) "the types of social and moral issues brought to bear in making a decision or judgment" and (b) "the developmental level, conceptualized more locally than in traditional stage theories" (p. 167). Similar points of critique would have to be made here. The moral agent, situated in a specific context, is only in
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part a rational and competent analyst of his or her moral obligations. Competencies in moral judgment are weakened by coercions from the inside (such as specific expectations or stereotypes, e.g., as "in negotiations you have to win") and the outside (such as a tough opposite party using unilateral strategies in negotiations). Thus, in performance situations, judgment is covered by the shadows of other forces of life that strengthen the wish to be successful, to be nice, to be a winner, and to become reelected, and so forth. Often, these shadows are values that override morality (Nisan, 1990). And that is one reason why morality in context follows other rules than moral reasoning competence may suggest.
The Difficulty of Reconciling Success With Morality In the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned three different fields of action where moral resilience may be required. Omission of abuse of information is only one form; we chose this as a heuristic because, in a prototypical way, it starts from a situation where we can be immoral without suffering legal consequences. This may be the most attractive reason for not being resilient. Not being forced to behave morally means that morality is given to one's free will and autonomous decision making. The proverbial expression "The truth is always naked" served as a section heading earlier in this chapter. Unfortunately, the differences in the realm of moral performance are not always black and white. Resilient and nonresilient negotiators cannot be separated on all dimensions which we took to be morally relevant. Here are some examples for both clear differences and the lack of difference: The persons who decided to give custody of the children to Barbara, or to separate the children, believed that they held back significantly more information than those who gave unrestricted custody to Paul. "Moral correctness" is rated lower if the children are given to Barbara and much lower if they are separated. But the nonsignificant comparisons seem to be even more interesting. There were no significant differences for the following items: "Our solution took the children's welfare into consideration"; "We negotiated in ethically correct ways"; "The opposing side was trusting us"; and "We have lied"(!). Why is this? We believe that the reason is the mixture of morality and strategic success. We call this the "interpretative model" of the relationship of success and morality. It seems that people have somehow integrated postmodernity with their moral minds. It seems that modern people find it difficult to reconcile success with morality. And this is why subjects who are not morally resilient evaluate themselves either as successful or as unsuccessful. Those who are resilient often have the feeling that morality leads to failure when it is important to get one's way. For them, morality inhibits success.
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In contrast to this widely held notion, we would like to frame moral resilience as a responsible way of striving for success, a construction of a solution where the product pursued is a priori in balance with moral criteria, such as justice, care, and truthfulness. In the divorce case, we may still keep our information for us; but we use it in order to support the weakest party in the game, the well-being of the children, and resist the temptation of riding roughshod over the interests of the other party. To be morally resilient does not simply mean to be morally good in the general sense of the term. It means to be good (and prove one's integrity and character) under conditions ofrisk. Morally resilient persons not only react to situational constraints as if they played against the functionalist success-oriented rule of the game but make an attempt at generating an integrity of moral adaptation. Thus, the process of handling the hidden information is more important than the product. Moral resilience can never be rigorous or orthodox. It remains between two worlds, constructing each of them with explicit reference to the other.
Moral Resilience and Claims for Universality If expectations regarding the internal rules of a negotiation situation and, in addition, the expectations of a related reference group combine with the wish to win, what then does it mean to be morally resilient? How can a person step out of this set of expectations to act according to general principles of morality? The liberal emphasis on the freedom of economic interchange allows for "unfair" negotiations, and the more cunning someone is, the more morality is lost behind tactical considerations. The conservative position highlights community as a place where practices of the good life are cherished, while diminishing the emphasis on the self-actualization of the individual and stressing common values (Maclntyre, 1987; Oakeshott, 1984). But also in communities, the "rational ends of action," as Max Weber calls it, may focus on meansends relationships and overaccentuate the rejection of deontic justifications of a moral end. As mentioned at the outset, the purpose of negotiation is to contribute to the interests of each party; naturally, each side wants to reach an optimal solution. Obviously, this does not permit to disclose every information that could be used against one's interests. Thus, any negotiation needs space for personal reservations on both sides. But this, again, gives rise to a "grey area" of moral disequilibrium. How, then, can we establish a claim for morality in negotiations and how must this claim be structured beyond the arguments already presented? Is there any norm that commands similar authority in any type of situation? A negotiation is a semipublic process that requires a coordination of individual and social demands. The unspoken but universally given moral claim refers to a tacit un-
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derstanding of the limits of rational egoism, implying the quasi-contractual promise not to betray or to exploit the other person. Hence, morality is much more than the sum of what is valid in general. There is always an offer of trust in the unspoken promise that a person will also take into account the other's needs as he or she perceives it. That is why, in the field of negotiation theory, the most important concepts stress the continuity of the relationship between the partners to a negotiation as a necessary element that must always be taken into account (Gulliver, 1979; Fisher & Ury, 1981). What is a continuous long-term relationship other than a functionalization of the general unspoken promise to be correct, just because I do not know everything in the package that the bargaining is about? To presuppose this tacit mutual understanding is a powerful construct of the reality of negotiation. To give a promise and to keep it, even when nobody else can really control the fairness of the maneuvers in the negotiation process and the contractual fidelity (beyond what is observable during and after the bargain) is a powerful moral act. Hannah Arendt (1981, p. 312, author's translation) has written: "The task which is given through the capacity to give promises and thus regulate important human things must be confronted and cope with the uncertainty. The only other way to get things in order would be self-control or power over others; and both of these are not necessary. For the promise and the resulting contracts and agreements are the only bindings to others which are adequate to a freedom under the conditions of non-sovereignty." What this means, we learn only by negative experience. This turns the negotiation into a place of moral endeavor. Through the unspoken but lived promise, the moral foundation of negotiations has at least an element of universality.
References Arendt, H. (1981). Vita activa oder Vom tatigen Leben. Miinchen: Piper. Baier, K. (1974). Der moralische Standpunkt. In G. Grewensdorf & G. Meggle (Eds.), Seminar undEthik (pp. 285—316). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Bakes, P. B. (1990). Entwicklungspsychologie iiber die Lebensspanne. Psychologische Rundschau, 41, 1-24. Birkenbihl, V. F. (1990). Psychologisch richtigverhandeln. Professionelle Verhandlungstechniken mit Experimenten und Ubungen (6., iiberarb. Aufl.). Augsburg: Moderne Verlagsgesellschaft. Birnbacher, D. (1995). Handeln und Unterlassen im "Zwei-Ebene-Modell der Moral". In C. Fehige & G. Meggle (Eds.), Zum Moralischen Denken (Vol. 2, pp. 176—186). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Damon, W. (1977). The social world of the child. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Fisher, R., & Ury, W. (1981). Getting to YES: Negotiating agreement without giving in. Boston: Hougthon Mifflin [In deutscher Sprache: Das Harvard-Konzept: Sachgerecht verhandeln—erfolgreich verhandeln. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus].
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Gulliver, P. H. (1979). Disputes and negotiations: A cross-culturalperspective. New York: Academic Press. Habermas, J. (1981a). Responsibility and its role in the relationship between moral judgment and action. In C. Gilligan & L. Kohlberg (Eds.), Advanced seminar in research in moral development. Habermas, J. (1981b). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Helwig, C. C. (1995). Social context in social cognition: Psychological harm and civil liberties. In M. Killen & D. Hart (Eds.), Morality in everyday life: Developmental perspectives (pp. 166-200). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, P. W., Boostrom, R. E., & Hansen, D. T. (1993). The morallife of schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L., Levine, C , & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A current formulation and a response to critics. Basel: Karger [Neu veroffentlicht 1984 als: Moral stages: A current statement and response to critics. In L. Kohlberg, Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of'moral development(pp. 207—386). San Francisco: Harper & Row.] Laupa, M., &Turiel, E. (1993). Authority reasoning and social contexts. Journalof"Educational Psychology, 85, 191-197. Laupa, M., Turiel, E., & Cowan, P. A. (1995). Obedience to authority in children and adults. In M. Killen & D. Hart (Eds.), Morality in everyday life: Developmental perspectives (pp. 131-165). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Maclntyre, A. (1987). Der Verlust der Tugend. Zur moralischen Krise der Gegenwart. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Nisan, M. (1990). Moral balance: A model of how people arrive at moral decision. In T. E. Wren (Ed.), The moral domain (pp. 283-314). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nunner-Winkler, G. (1997). The development of moral understanding and moral motivation. International Journal of Educational Research, 27, 587-603. Nunner-Winkler, G., & Sodian, B. (1988). Children's understanding of moral emotions. Child Development, 59, 1323-1338. Oakeshott, M. (1984). Political education. In M. Sandel (Ed.), Liberalism and its critics (p. 232). New York: University Press. Oesterdiekhoff, G. W. (1998). Kulturelle Bedingungen kognitiver Entwicklung. Der strukturgenetische Ansatz in der Soziologie. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Oser, F. (1998). Ethos—die Vermenschlichungdes Erfolgs. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Power, C , Khmelkov, V., & Self-Esteem Project Team (1998). The moral basis of self esteem: A cognitive developmental approach. Unpublished manuscript. See, H. (1987). Party maneuver (Winter vs. Winter). Unterlagen fur die Verhandlungssimulation. Alabama University: Law School. Selman, R. L. (1980). The growth of interpersonal understanding. New York: Academic Press. Smetana, J. (1988). Adolescents' and parents' conceptions of parental authority. Child Development, 59, 321-335. Tisak, M. S., & Tisak, J. (1991). Children's conceptions of parental authority, friendship, and sibling relations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 36, 347-369.
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Werner, E. (1997). Gefahrdete Kindheit in der Moderne: Protektive Faktoren. Vierteljahresschrifi fur Heilpa'dagogik und ihre Nachbargebiete, 66(2), 192-203, Themenheft: Gesellschaft im Umbruch—Die Heilpadagogik vor neuen Herausforderungen, ed. by F. Peterander & G. Opp. Werner, E. E., & Smith, R. S. (1989). Vulnerable but invincible: A longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. New York: Adams, Bannister, Cox.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
10 Do Concepts Matter? The Impact of a Justice Framing on Responses to a Moral Dilemma— A Research Note Rainer Dobert and Natalie Juranek
1. Introduction—"Morality" and "Justice" Kohlberg and some of his followers have claimed again and again that their research deals with matters of justice and the disentangling of "justice operations," such as "equality," "equity," "reciprocity," "prescriptive role-taking," and "universalizability" (cf. Kohlberg, 1984, p. 624; Dobert, 1996a), and so forth. The astonishing fact is that we find, at the same time, a huge field of justice research in social psychology, which is by and large ignored by Kohlberg and his followers who, in turn, are by and large ignored by the social psychologists (Deutsch, 1985; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Montada & Lerner, 1996). One of the possible explanations for this inconvenient state of affairs may lie in a conceptual ambiguity of the term "justice." Both sides deal with different types of action problems and conflicts, but term them equally "justice." Even a superficial view of typical research instruments and operationalizations in both theory and tradition proves that this is the case: What part of resources like money, and influence, and so forth, should go to an actor under varying conditions in comparison to other sufficiently similar actors is the typical research question in the social psychological tradition; on what normative principle should a conflict between equally valid moral norms (e.g., Heinz dilemma: property vs. life) be decided, irrespective of other similar actors, is the question in the Kohlberg directed research. In fact, there is virtually no overlap between the two paradigms on the operational level and that means that the use of the term "justice" must differ. The difference consists by and large in the following: For Kohlberg, the term "justice" covers the whole domain of morality inasmuch as this domain consists of strict claims (rights and duties). In the social psychological tradition, justice refers to only a section of the whole of morality. In particular, the justice complex comprises
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of (a) distributive justice, (b) harm-redressing justice as restitutive or retributive justice, (c) formal justice, and (d) procedural justice (see, i.e., Buchanan & Mathieu, 1986). Distributive justice deals with the basis of legitimate claims on the results of cooperative endeavors (e.g., income, harvest); harm-redressing justice restores the relative positions of harmdoer and victim within the aggregate of burdens and advantages of cooperation (if you beat me up, I am worse off than before; if I beat you up in retaliation, you are exactly as bad off as I—if the beating I gave you was "just"); formal justice guarantees that the burdens and advantages implied by the social validity of moral rules are granted to all actors equally; and procedural justice refers to an equal influence (noninfluence) of all actors on the execution and result of procedures, such as discourses or raffles. Tentatively, we can say that the justice complex always deals with the distribution/balance of burdens and advantages among a plurality of actors in similar positions. In contrast, the core domain of morality deals with the rules pertaining to those goods and evils which every actor must strive for or avoid (i.e., not to be killed; cf. Gert, 1983). A comparison of actors in similar positions is not at stake. To give one example, in the mercy killing dilemma it must be decided whether it is morally right to end the intolerable suffering of a patient. To accomplish this, certainly the suffering of the patient must be compared with the duties of a doctor; but this is not a comparison of actors in similar positions—the question of justice does not arise. But if one asks whether all other doctors are confronted with a difficult dilemma like this, or whether other suffering persons would also be granted the mercy of a deadly dose, then the dilemma is turned into a dilemma of justice, touching upon the relative position of a doctor or a patient in the aggregate of goods and evils, compared to other doctors or patients (formal justice). Granted, there are conceptual ambiguities involved here, and the field of morality is not cut into "justice" and "the morally right" (nonjustice) in exactly the same way by all philosophers. So why not just acknowledge the terminological differences and leave concepts—including Kohlberg's all-encompassing usage of justice—as they are? After all, terminologies are matters of convention and may be chosen in this way or another. We do not disagree in toto; certainly there is a strong conventional component in terminology, but terminologies define or skip boundaries between phenomena which may turn out to be either inappropriate or necessary. In the following, we will try to defend the thesis that Kohlberg's broad usage of the concept of justice eliminates a distinction which has its worth even in empirical research. Before we try to substantiate this thesis by recourse to some data, we want to prepare the field with a short excursion to Rawls. We do this because Rawls has served, in a certain phase of Kohlberg's theorizing, as a sort of philosophical archangel of his moral psychology, and from him derives the "justice framing." But this is based on a misunderstanding of Rawls' procedural approach and a neglect of his categorization
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of the whole field of practical reasoning. The fair/just procedure (we note en passant that Rawls would not accept this identification of "fair" and "just"; see Rawls, 1972, p. 13) is a technical device to generate the whole field of morality which, in Rawls' theory, covers more than "justice." A brief glance at his tree of practical reasoning (p. 109; see Figure 1) in the Theory of justice suffices to substantiate this point. To spell out the implications of this table for the relationship between Kohlberg and Rawls, three short remarks are required. (a) Rawls analyzes social systems and institutions from the perspective of justice; principles for individuals (requirements or permissions) are not his main topic— he just touches upon them. The reason for this partial inclusion of principles for individuals lies in their indirect relevance for a theory of justice:
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Rainer Dbbert and Natalie Juranek So while the distinctive role of conceptions of justice is to specify basic rights and duties and to determine the appropriate distributive shares, the way in which a conception does this is bound to affect the problems of efficiency coordination, and stability. We cannot, in general, assess a conception of justice by its distributive role alone ... (Rawls, 1972, p. 4)
The argument is roughly: Justice has a distinct function in social systems and must be constructed in the light of this function. But every viable conception of justice must also be at least compatible with other functional prerequisites—efficiency, coordination, and stability. Principles for individuals, like natural duties and obligations, pertain to one of these additional functions, namely, to that of stability and vice versa. They must be dealt with in a theory of justice, not because they fall under the concept of justice, but because allotment/distribution may influence stability. On the other hand, "influence" is less than "structuralization" and this is of some theoretical significance. In Piagetian thought, structural development of domains is governed by domain-specific functions. Operations and their "meaning" must be specified in terms of the relevant function. In moral theory, exactly this is excluded when the whole sphere of morality is identified with one function (justice). Then, one must look for "justice operations" where "stability operations" may be at work, and exactly this occurred to Kohlberg. (b) Next, we must simply ask what segment of practical reasoning sensu Rawls is being touched by the content of Kohlberg's dilemmata? Undoubtedly, they do not deal primarily with justice, but with conflicts between natural duties and/or obligations. "Heinz" entails a conflict between the natural duty to respect the property of others and his natural duty/special obgligation (marital contract!) to help his wife. In the euthanasia dilemma, the negative duty "not to kill" stands against the professional obligation of doctors and the natural duty of mutual help. Again and again, the analysis of Kohlberg's dilemmata shows that there is little reference to justice, but a lot to natural duties and obligations. That is why Rawls' philosophy does not support Kohlberg's metapsychological assumptions, but rather those of the social psychological tradition referred to above. (c) The more differentiated terminology also allows for more flexible theoretical maneuvering. One may look at one conceptual field from the point of view of another. Rawls himself does this when he lists among the natural duties of individuals the positive duty to uphold justice. What follows for the list of natural duties for the individual, once just institutions have been set up, is the question; conformity to just institutions is the answer. Justice is perceived from the angle of requirements for individuals. In the same way, it is possible to look at requirements from a justice perspective: Are the burdens of natural duties and obligations distributed among all individuals equally or not? The question presupposes
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a differentiation of domains of morality—otherwise, one can only ask whether justice is just. In the following (section 2) we will show empirically that it does happen that subjects frame Kohlberg's dilemmata in a justice perspective and that this framing makes a major difference to the ordinary nonjustice framing chosen by most subjects. In the final section (3), we will give a tentative theoretical interpretation of the effects of the justice framing.
2. Data: The Partnership Dilemma 2.1
The Dilemma and Its Relationship to Justice
In the following, we will report data which arose in response to the dilemma presented below. The Partnership Dilemma
Mr./Mrs. S. has a full-time job and in his/her leisure time has been engaged for some years in the activities of a human rights group. Since S. was elected chairperson of the group a year ago, the commitment takes up several days of the week, including weekends. Despite the large amount of Lime taken, diis activity is a source of enjoyment and fulfillment for S. and the group is very satisfied with his/her work. S's wife/husband lost his/her job a couple of weeks ago and now spends not only the days but also the evenings alone at home. He/she would therefore like S. to cut down the activities in order to care more for him/her. What ought S. do and why? The dilemma was presented to 44 men and 44 women of different socioeconomic status in the age group ranging from 25 to 45 years. The dilemma was always adapted to the gender of the subject: The opposite gender had become unemployed. By further questioning, the interviewer attempted to get the subject to process aspects of both sides, but still to decide clearly for one line of action. In addition to this dilemma, we used three other dilemmata: one was Kohlberg's mercy killing dilemma which served as an anchor; the other two pertain to ecological problems (the closure of a polluting factory vs. jobs, and the protection of a bird population vs. recreational needs of the human population; see Dobert & Gericke, 1997). The structure of the partnership dilemma entails roughly a conflict between the following principles: — the general duty of mutual aid versus the natural duty to support human rights, — the special obligations of partnership versus the right to self-fulfillment. This is not a justice dilemma in the narrower sense of that concept. But if one were to follow the Kohlbergian use of the term, its structural core could consist of nothing but justice operations. Thus, it would make little sense—if any—to ask how justice framing would impinge on the dilemma. One would simply not ask this question. If, on
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the contrary, the justice domain was not identical with the moral domain as a whole, it would make sense to look for an impact of "justice" on the framing of the dilemma. It could be introduced as an extraneous variable and studied as such. This is what we are going to do in the following. We hypothesized that there could be two possible ways to introduce a justice framing into the dilemma: A. There might be ideas about the proper distribution of spare time between partners and their needs. B. Considerations of formal justice might impinge upon the dilemma, implying that the existing social order would not allot the rights and duties incorporated in the dilemma equally to the partners. In effect, A was not used. It would have amounted to an argument claiming that one partner has a just claim to something like one half of his/her partner's spare time. Although an attractor of this sort was effective in the field, it was not based on justice framing. The reason for this probably is the fact that the partner's spare time is really his/her own. A justice framing, on the contrary, would imply that the ownership of spare time is, in principle, open and must then be settled by justice considerations. This does not seem to be the way the "attractor" must be accounted for. B was used. A small subsample doubted whether formal justice in a situation like this would generally hold in a society like ours. The impact of this framing is relatively drastic in our data. Before we go into this, the scoring system must be explicated.
2.2 The Scoring System From Kohlberg's mercy killing dilemma, a stage score of moral reasoning was calculated for each subject. Beyond this, three types of scores were derived from the partnership dilemma: (a) justice framing, (b) decision of action (partner or human rights group), and (c) content categories of the reasons offered for action decisions. The Justice Score. A justice score was assigned when the subject focused on a comparison with his/her partner and claimed that he/she always had to be the one who unjustly sacrificed himself/herself, whereas the partner never did. Thus, these subjects felt they had a reason to redress an unjust imbalance in the distribution of moral burdens or restrictions. The Choice of Action. The typical Kohlberg dilemma as a rule entails a binary decision without leeway for compromise constructions (Heinz: steal the drug or not). This is different in the partnership dilemma, where compromises are easy to construct via
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the quantifiable variable of "time invested in ..." Therefore, the action decision constitutes a continuum which was "punctuated" and turned into a five-point scale as follows: 1 = pro partner (give up the group almost completely and care for the partner: e.g., "He should cut down the group work and care for his unemployed wife as long as it is necessary"); 2 = compromise/partner (focus mainly on care for the partner, but try not to give up the group: e.g., "He should care more for his wife, but should not give up the other thing completely; he can't go out as much as he wants to anymore"); 3 = compromise (give some importance to partner and group: e.g., "You have to find a compromise; there's always a way to serve both sides"); 4 = compromise/group (focus mainly on staying with the group but make some concessions to partner: e.g., "I'd decide to continue to work in the group, but not to spend as much time there as before in order to have some more time at home"); 5 = pro group (clear preponderance of human rights group: e.g., "I wouldn't give up the group just because she got unemployed"). To facilitate further analysis, the pure compromise category was used as little as possible. Pro Partner Categories
Pro Group Categories
Duties: Duty to help the partner or his/her Importance of human rights: Subjects referred right to be helped, stemming mainly from the to the number of individuals helped by the marital relationship (e.g., "he has to help, be- group's work or to the priority of serving the cause that's what you've got a partner for," general public (e.g., "there are many examples "they decided to live together in good times of human rights violations"). and in bad"). Self-fulfillment: Referred to their own selfNegative consequences for self: Subjective interinterest in terms of the activities of the huest in the partner, fear of marital conflicts or man rights group, to the enjoyment which reloss of the partner (e.g., "otherwise they'll suits from it, or to the necessity of self-fulfillquarrel," "he'll start drinking," "they'll get a ment through participation in the group acdivorce"). tivities ("if he really enjoys it ...," "everyone Priority of partnership in comparison to the gen- has certain interests," "if he gave it up, he'd eralpublic (human rights): Priority is given to also be dissatisfied"). the partner because human rights apply to Duties of the partner: Subjects referred to the him/her as well, or because of a closer re- unemployed partner's duty to show some unlationship to the partner or greater value ac- derstanding for his/her opposite's commitcorded the partner. ment to the group (e.g., "he should accept it, Empathy: Subjects expressed an understandif it's important for her," "for such an imporing of his/her unemployed partner's feelings tant activity, he should also participate"), and the difficulties of his/her situation (e.g., Devaluation of partner's demands: Subjects "it's very difficult to cope with unemployargued against the partner's right to such a ment," "he feels lonely and depressed"). demand or against the severity of his/her suffering (e.g., "the demand is very selfish," "he can easily find other activities").
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Content Categories of Reasons. In the data, 34 distinct arguments backing action decisions could be identified. These were condensed to "global" categories. Five global content categories were defined for the reasons supporting action in favor of the partner and four for those in favor of the group. The weight of each argument was rated on a five-point scale ranging from 0, "not mentioned at all," to 4, "strongly argued." The categories are presented above.
2.3 Results: Profile of the Justice Group
As argued above, in the Rawlsian or social psychological terminology, the partnership dilemma is no justice dilemma—and that was the way the overwhelming majority saw it. Seventy-nine subjects framed it without reference to justice, but a minority, totalling nine subjects, couched it in terms of a violation of formal justice: Individuals like them are typically expected to do that which is not expected of others. The impact of this perspective on the dissolution of the dilemma is distinct. Despite the small number of "justice framers," significant differences arise in 6 out of 9 dimensions (or 8 out of 11 if one includes the summaries). The justice framing group focused significantly less on duties vis-a-vis partner and partner's priority; it stressed instead self-fulfillment of the partner's own duties and devaluation of the partner's demands (see Table 1). Consequently, this group decided more uncompromisingly than any other subsample in favor of the engagment in the human rights group. Their arguments can be summed up roughly as follows: "We must always unjustly sacrifice ourselves, whereas the others would never do so. Therefore, we have a right to self-fulfillment, too, and we do not have a duty to care for our partners; they have to look after themselves. And that's why we are determined to remain in the human rights group." It is also of interest to note that this group—despite its clear-cut decision for further engagement in the human rights group—does not stress the importance of human rights as content of this engagement more than the rest of the subjects. It is self-fulfillment that counts—not human rights. This holds even though human rights would provide additional support for this subsample's decision; for most of the other subjects, "human rights" stood in the way to their preferred line of action. All this is astonishing enough to justify our conclusion thus far that the narrower defini-
Some variance is covered up by the globality of categories; "empathy," for instance, was also coded when it was purely rhetorical as in, "he/she shows understanding for the partner's wishes, but maintains his/her own commitment to the human rights group"—that is, frustrates the partner's wishes.
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Table 1 Mean Strength of Argumentation in Content Categories Without justice component
(N=79) Pro partner:
0 = not mentioned 4 = highly estimated
Duties (care/relationship) Negative consequences for self Partner > general public Empathy
X Partner arguments Pro human rights group:
0 = not mentioned 4 = highly estimated
Importance of human rights Self-fulfillment Duties of partner Devaluation of partner's demands
X Group arguments
2.1 1.2 0.9 2.3 6.6 1.4 1.9 0.8 0.6
Justice
framing (N=9) 0.7" 0.6
0.1* 2.0
3.3" 1.6
4.7
3.1" 1.6* 1.9** 8.1**
2.5
4.2**
Action decision:
1 = partner, 5 = group ** Mann-Whitney U-test, p < 0.01; * p < 0.05.
tion of justice seems to be more fruitful than Kohlberg's wider use of the term. We would not have identified this subsample in our data and, more important, it would have been impossible to construct a theoretical interpretation of the specificity of the justice group if everything were "justice" anyway. This holds the more so, as justice leads, in this case, to an impairment of moral thought. No variant of Kohlberg's metapsychology can account for this.
3. Theoretical Discussion We still must clarify, in more detail, the theoretical meaning of the intervention of justice in this dilemma. We will do this in two steps by (a) relating the data to the debate between Kohlberg and Gilligan, and (b) by relating it to a conception of postconventionality which is based on a more adequate conception of the dialectic between the universal and the particular in morality than one can find in Kohlberg's theory. The goal of this discussion will be to demonstrate that justice in this case leads not to a strengthening of "justice operations," but to a deterioration of moral judgment. To prevent misunderstandings, let us reiterate the underlined qualification, "in this case!" We will come back to it.
234 3.1
Rainer Dobert and Natalie Juranek The "Justice Group" in Relation to Kohlberg and Gilligan
We place the above reported data into the context of the Kohlberg/Gilligan debate for two reasons. The "justice subsample" was drawn from the total sample via the item "use of justice framing"; there was no recourse to any further information. On closer inspection of this subsample, we found that all subjects in this group were women— the probability of this result being 2 , that is, sufficient. Furthermore, the content of the dilemma relates clearly to the Kohlberg/Gilligan controversy. Without doing violence to semantics, one can maintain that the dilemma focuses on a conflict between a Gilligan value, care for one's partner, and Kohlberg values, such as human rights and the right to self-fulfillment (Gilligan, 1982). As we have seen, the intervention of the "justice operation" leads to a strengthening of the Kohlberg values. The right to selffulfillment in an engagement for human rights becomes predominant, compared to the needs of a partner. Superficially, this seems to be roughly in line with Kohlberg's and Gilligan's theorizing—"justice" leads to more justice!—except that women are the representatives of justice. But this interpretation misses the moral significance of the justice-induced transformation of moral thought. Kohlberg would have to classify this shift in emphasis as an instance of structural development or at least as a gain in structure ("move justice"). This has not only to do with his predilection for the justice rhetore but also with a second metapsychological strategy he chose. He tried to back his moral psychology by recourse to metaethics— namely, the moral point of view. Moral development consists of realizing the moral point of view. On this basis he tried to capture the difference between his own and Gilligan's moral psychology in the following way: From our point of view there are two senses of the word moral, and two types of dilemmas, each corresponding to these differing meanings of the word moral. The first sense of the word moral corresponds to what formalistic moral philosophers have called the "moral point of view," a perspective which we elaborate upon later in section 10 where we quote Frankena's "Ethics"^1)!?)). The "moral point of view" stresses attributes of im-
One does find formulations in Gilligan's writings, which could justify taking "self-fulfillment" as an indicator of "care" (responsibility for the self); but that responsibility for the self should at least express a logic of connectedness to other persons. Otherwise, terms get completely mixed up and loose their meaning. In view of the fact that not even "human rights" have been notably emphasized by the justice group, we conclude that the isolated individual is at stake! Let us note just en passant: As very young children do realize the moral point of view when the moral problems are simple and tangible, the moral point of view as such does not capture the essence of moral development. Compare hereTuriel (1983), Dobert (1987), and NunnerWinkler (1997).
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partiality, universalizability, and the effort and willingness to come to agreement or consensus with other human beings in general about what is right. It is this notion of a "moral point of view" which is most clearly embodied psychologically in Kohlberg s stage model of justice reasoning. There is a second sense of the word moral, which is captured by Gilligan's (1982) focus upon the elements of caring and responsibility, most vividly evident in relations of special obligations to family and friends. As Gilligan herself points out, this sense of the word moral does not include the notions of impartiality, universalizability, and an effort to come to consensus with all other human beings about the "right" decision. (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983, p. 22) The point of this quotation is that strict moral obligations (the "right decision") exist in the domain of "Kohlberg values," not in the domain of "Gilligan values." This is just one way of saying that obligations to particular persons are extramoral. On this basis, any strengthening of the particular must be interpreted as a loss of moral structure. Conversely, the justice groups engagement in self-fulfillment in the pursuit of human rights must be conceived as morally more mature than solidarity with one's partner. This is not the intuition of the majority of our subjects, and, we believe, for very good reasons. Such an interpretation involves a serious conceptual error that pertains to the role of the particular in a universalistic ethic. The particular can very well be the content of universalistic requirements (e.g., the particular responsibility of parents for their own children). Let us go back for a moment to Rawls' table of practical reasoning and inspect its nonjustice parts—those pertaining to the partnership dilemma. His distinction between natural duties and obligations marks the relevant point unequivocally. Natural duties hold unconditionally between all persons, obligations do not. To quote: There are several characteristics features of obligations which distinguish them from other moral requirements. For one thing, the arise as a result of our voluntary acts; these acts may be the giving of express or tacit undertakings, such as promises and agreements, but they need not be, as in the case of accepting benefits. Further, the content of obligations is always defined by an institution or practice the rules of which specify what it is that one is required to do. And finally, obligations are normally owed to definite individuals, namely, those who are cooperating together to maintain the arrangement in question. (Rawls, 1972, p. 113) Now in contrast with obligations, it is characteristic of natural duties that they apply to us without regard to our voluntary acts. Moreover, they have no necessary connection with institutions or social practices; their content is not, in general, defined by the rules of these arrangements. Thus we have a natural duty not to be cruel, and a duty to help another, whether or not we have committed ourselves to these actions ... A further feature of natural duties is that they hold between persons irrespective of their institutional relationships; they obtain between all as equal moral persons. In this sense the natural duties are owed not only to definite individuals, say to those cooperating together in a particular social arrangement, but to persons generally. (Rawls, 1972, p. 114)
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Applying this distinction between obligations and natural duties to Kohlberg's interpretation of the controversy with Gilligan, one may think that some misunderstandings must be involved. What he evidently mixes up is the content of a statement (who is mentioned) with its consensual basis (who would agree). This is the distinction between the generality of statements and their universality. Lack of generality does not exclude universality. When / make you a promise, everybody will agree that I have a moral obligation exactly vis-a-vis you. This holds for obligations in general and it does not lessen their binding force—they belong to the moral domain. With this peculiarity of obligations in our minds, we now return to our dilemma. The question is, then, whether "care" for a depressive partner is an obligatory aspect of partnership. Certainly, there is more than one way to conceive a close relationship. But it seems to us—and to most of our subjects—that in the course of time something obligatory also accrues to partnerships. Sooner or later partnership implies, among other things, that one has a special responsibility for the well-being of the partner— something he/she can legitimately expect. Inasmuch as Gilligan's theory aims at special obligations of this type, she deals with true moral claims, and skipping these claims, can per sebe classified neither as "the right decision" (Kohlberg) nor as a "just" decision. Thus, Kohlberg's flirtations with philosophy seem to be of little help in coming to terms with the data reported. The fact is simply that the justice group in this study falls through the theoretical sieve of Kohlberg and Gilligan—possibly because we are dealing with a wrong decision. 3.2
The "Justice Group"and Postconventionality
What we want to show in this section is that the impact of the justice framing in this case consists indeed in an impairment of moral judgment. In order not to depend too strongly on our own moral intuitions, we will try to accomplish this by demonstrating that the justice group deviates significantly from the postconventionals in this sample. The implicit assumption is, of course, that postconventionals construct the "best" solutions to moral dilemmata. "Best" is understood in this case—sensu Piaget—as the "most adequate" solution to the problem at hand (not, i.e., just "as referring to some principle"). Now, what else should "adequacy" in this context mean other than the ability to construct a solution which "conserves" as much of the legitimate claims of the dilemma as possible? Doing justice to the universal and to the particular and not negating one in favor of the other should, on this view, be one indicator of postconventionality. Thus, postconventionals will process the claims of both sides most thoroughly. We will come back to this perspective later. Let us first adduce some quantitative evidence to back this assumption. Table 2 throws some light on action decisions and arguments according to stage.
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Table 2 Means of Choice of Action Categories Total Stage
Pro partner:
0 = not mentioned 4 = highly estimated
Duties (care/relationship) Negative consequences for self Partner > general public Empathy
X Partner arguments Pro human rights group:
0 = not mentioned 4 = highly estimated Z Group arguments
Importance of human rights Self-fulfillment Duties of partner Devaluation of partner's demands
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
1.6 1.6 0.8 2.2 6.2
2.1 1.1 0.6 2.2 6.1
2.2 0.4
0.7 1.8 0.8
Justice framing
1.4 2.6
0.7 0.6 0.1 2.0
6.6
3.3
2.3
0.4 3.7
1.4 2.0 0.8 0.9 5.1
6.7
1.6 3.1 1.6 1.9 8.1
2.5
2.7
3.1
4.2
2.4 1.2 0.8
Action decision:
1 = partner, 5 = group 1
Stages are assigned on the basis of Kohlberg's mercy killing dilemma. Note. All subjects are pressed to come up with a decision of action and get a respective code; but they are free to choose some variant of backing their decision argumentatively. Most of them do not use all variants; therefore, the group-means are low saying: Some subjects used this type of argument strongly, others insisted more on other arguments. The emphasis laid on a particular argument by subjects using it at all is, in this sense, distorted by calculating means.
Postconventionals stick tenaciously to a compromise position (M = 3.1), that is, they respond to the partner s needs and insist on the human rights engagement, and back this decision by a very balanced consideration of all possible reasons in favor of the partner or engagement for human rights. If we sum up all the arguments postconventionals processed—either for human rights or the partner—we obtain a relationship of 6.7 (human rights group) to 6.6 (care for the partner). For the Stage 3 conventionals who strongly vote for the partner, this relationship is 3.7 to 6.2; for the justice subsample who strongly vote for the human rights group, the relationship is 8.1 to 3.3. That is, Stage 3 thinkers tend to negate the universal to strengthen the particular duties. The justice group, on the contrary, tends to negate the particular duties in order to strengthen the universal right (to noninvolvement, i.e., self-fulfillment). The Stage 3 thinkers and the justice group deviate most from the well-balanced position of the postconventionals—in opposite directions. We conclude from this that, as it is philosophically far from acceptable to classify instances of care as extraobligatory or nonmoral, we expect postconventionals to respect "particular" obligations as binding as universal duties. Our quantitative data seem to bear out this assumption.
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But we still have no clear idea of how postconventionals manage to hold the contradictory claims together. Arguing for both sides may simply reflect indecision. What constructions do they use to set up a balanced position? We have to go a bit into the qualitative data in order to catch at least a glimpse of the integrative constructions. One way to justify the partners claims without giving up "human rights" consisted in attempts somehow to generalize the human rights to the partner: "The partner has human rights, too." But, in specifying these human rights, most conventionals recurred to the special claims deriving from the partnership relation (in a partnership you can expect ...). That is, on closer inspection, the integrative construction was mainly rhetorical—partnership obligations falsely being called "human rights." Let us call this—in most cases unsatisfactory—strategy "generalization." There were more successfull strategies of integrating the competing claims in one construct which we will call "internalizations." In internalizations, one construct was twisted and applied in such a way that the opposing claim could be satisfied within the guiding principle. We expected to find these internalizations especially among postconventionals because moral development should also conform to Piagets three-phase model of equilibration. This model deals with the cognitive internalization of negations. Negations are cognitive counterarguments, deviant evidence, or competing claims. In our dilemma, the claim to self-fulfillment negates the partner's claim to care in the same way that human rights do: To satisfy one claim, the other must be sacrificed. That is the nature of the dilemma. The negations cause disequilibrium which, according to Piaget, is usually overcome in three phases (Piaget, 1975; applied to the abortion conflict, Dobert, 1996b): (1) One of the negations is cognitively repressed; (2) a differentiation is introduced such that claim A can be satisfied under certain conditions, claim B under others; (3) an integrative construct is generated in which all negations are internalized. In our dilemma, people who, for instance, only talk about the suffering partner or the right to self-fulfillment use repression (phase 1). This holds by and large for the Stage 3 thinkers (partner!) and the justice group (self-fulfillment!), respectively. Dropping the human rights engagement only in the event that the partnership is endangered is an example of differentiation (phase 2). An integrative construct (phase 3) is represented, for instance, by a quotation from subject 131: ... because the social engagement would appear shallow and empty, if the person closest to oneself were without any significance. It becomes questionable whether one is really committed to other people—human beings, one's neighbor, one's wife—if it is completely irrelevant what happens to them. It is a contradiction in itself, and I would doubt in this case how serious and honest this general commitment is. This quotation represents an internalization because the subject breaks the original contradiction between human rights and care by transposing the validity of human
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rights to the partner. Through this maneuver, human rights loose their character as a negation of care. This is based on a differentiation between true engagement and shallow engagement for human rights. Shallow engagement—in this case neglect of the partner—would be a negation of human rights. This negation is negated by care for the partner as proof of true human rights concern. "Proof of" is the key device: The "partner" is no longer a possible negation of human rights, but an "instance of." Therefore, at the same time, the priority of action can be set in favor of the partner without invaliding/negating human rights. Thus, a complete integration of all possible negations is achieved. Such a complete integration of negations is the trademark of mature thought and, therefore, true internalizations should be found especially among postconventionals. Table 3 contains the relevant information. In sum we may state: Justice leads, in this case, to an impairment of moral thought. The impairment consists of the repression of legitimate moral claims to special care in a close relationship. Postconventionals acknowledge these claims clearly; therefore, the distance of the justice group to the postconventionals is considerable. This result could hardly be formulated if morality were identical with justice. It is also noticeable that Gilligan's content (care) may have Kohlberg's form (rights). Moreover, men may insist more on care than women who, in turn, may insist more on separateness (self-fulfillment). After all, the justice group consists exclusively of women. A large portion of these results could be understood once we underpinned Kohlberg's moral psychology with a moral philosophy that fits to his dilemmata. It is not concerned with justice, but with the "morally right" as incorporated in conflicts between obligations and requirements sensu Rawls'. But still the "meaning" of the very peculiar impact of the justice framing is somewhat dubious. We will try to clarify this
Table 3 Integrative Strategies1 Generalization % (n) Stage 4: N = 40
15.9 (7)
Stage 5: N= 16
16.7 (3)
Internalization % (n) 2.3
(1)
55.6 (10)
The numbers are comparatively small because we are dealing here only with constructions in which one type of claim is being used to take account of the competing claim. In most cases, subjects argue by stressing the importance of one claim as overruling the other (hierarchy), and use differentiations, such as "Human rights are, of course, important, but in this case ..."
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issue in such a way that it will also become clear why we had to emphasize that justice has this effect in this special case.
4. Justice as Representative of the "Political" To begin with, let us consider a counterargument to our interpretation: We based it on a formal conception of maturity/postconventionality (integration of negations); but this may be misleading in our dilemma. There are moral conflicts whose correct solution presupposes a "repression of negations," that is, a strict refutation of claims. If, for instance, one individual desires the property of another, the claim of the former can be refuted legitimately in toto, and the search for compromise would be out of the question. Something like this may also hold for our partnership dilemma. In view of the fact that "care" is unequally distributed between men and women, does a woman not have the right to redress this injustice by withholding care from her partner? It seems to us that this—possibly feminist—argument does not hold. The partnership in this dilemma is depicted as an intact partnership, and the respective male partner is not one of those men whose sole goal is to subjugate and control women. After all, he accepted living together with a woman who has her own occupation and is intensely engaged in political activities. So punishing him as an individual for a case of social inequality would, in all probability, be an instance of Sippenhaft (liability of all members of a family/group for the crimes of one member) which entails punishment of the innocent. In no version of morality can this constitute a defensible principle. To strengthen this line of argumentation, let us adduce a further piece of evidence from another research project. Oser and Reichenbach presented their subjects a dilemma in which a caring father was being divorced from his wife who had neglected her children and was always out pursuing relationships with other men. The subjects had to act as attorneys for the disputing parties and draw up a divorce contract. Some of the subjects fought for giving all the children—against their will—and all the money to the neglectful woman, "because women have to suffer from so much injustice otherwise" (Oser and Reichenbach, this volume). In this case, not only is the innocent man punished in virtue of his belonging to the category "males" but also the children who do not even belong to the category of the guilty (males), but represent the innocent par excellence. The decision to turn against them cannot count as a morally adequate solution to the dilemma. Again, a justice framing has led to a solution of a moral conflict which can only be conceived as a material deterioration of moral judgment. What makes a justice framing have such an effect? The answer lies in a dimension of which justice—in these dilemmata—is merely a representative, namely, the political
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dimension. One must not necessarily be a follower of Carl Schmitt to acknowledge that under the civilized forms of political struggle something less civilized may lurk, namely, Schmitt s friend-enemy as the constitutive difference of the political: Once we recognize that the partnership dilemma has been framed as an instance of the political conflict between the sexes/genders, we understand how "justice" as the representative of the political could lead to a deterioration of moral judgment: The "partner" gets a touch of the "enemy" and, as such, does not deserve "care." In Germany, we have had enough experience with this understanding of "the political" to be quite sure that a touch of it suffices to spoil everything. Of course our analysis has proceeded under the methodological restrictions of a hypothetical dilemma in an interview situation. These constraints must be taken into account when assessing the weight of our results. Two points must be made. First, a hypothetical dilemma cannot replace real life. Therefore, it is an open question whether the caring men would stick to caring if they actually had to pay the bills; and we doubt whether the self-fulfilling women would deny their partner's claims in the presence of the latter. Second, an interview constitutes a social context of its own—possibly a context with different implications for men and women being interviewed by female interviewers exclusively. In a time of growing awareness of the discrimination against women and women's rights, it might be quite impossible for men—particularly when they face a female interviewer—to take a less caring, more egotistical position. That would be neither very politically correct nor socially desirable. For women, the pressure may have operated in the opposite direction: They may have felt that they had to show feminist concern and dissociate themselves from the "typical housewife." The interviewers seem even to have strengthened this effect by putting greater emphasis on the "suffering of the wife" when interviewing male subjects, but attaching more weight to "giving up the human rights concern" vis-a-vis female subjects. In sum, there were some measurement problems, and it is possible that part of the "justice effect" can be reduced to this factor.
References Buchanan, A., & Mathieu, D. (1986). Philosophy and justice. In R. L. Cohen (Ed.), justice: Views from the social sciences {pp. 11—46). New York: Plenum Press.
Deutsch, M. (1985). Distributive justice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dobert, R. (1987). Horizonte der an Kohlberg orientierten Moralforschung. Zeitschrift fur Padagogik, 33, 491-512. Dobert, R. (1996a). Wider die Vernachlassigung der "Inhalte" in den Moraltheorien von Kohlberg und Habermas. In W. Edelstein & G. Nunner-Winkler (Eds.), Zur Bestimder Moral (2nd ed., pp. 86-125). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
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Dobert, R. (1996b). § 218 vor dem Bundesverfassungsgericht. Verfahrenstheoretische Uberlegungen zur sozialen Integration. In W. van den Daele & F. Neidhardt (Eds.), Kommunikation und Entscheidung. Politische Funktionen offentlicher Meinungsbildung und diskursiver Verfahren (pp. 327—367). Berlin: edition sigma (WZB Jahrbuch 1996). Dobert, R., & Gericke, T. (1997). Grundlagen der Verrechtlichung von Natur. Die Entstehung und Verankerung von Umweltnormen im umgangssprachlichen Bewufitsein. In E.-J. Lampe (Ed.), Zur Entwicklung von Rechtsbewufitsein (pp. 465—515). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Gert, B. (1983). Die moralischen Regeln. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral developmen: The nature and validity of moral stages. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A current formulation and a response to critics. In J. A. Meacham (Ed.), Contributions to human development (Vol. 10). Basel: Karger. Lind, E. A., &Tyler, T. R. (1988). The social psychology of procedural justice. New York: Plenum Press. Montada, L., & Lerner, M. J. (Eds.). (1996). Current societal concerns about justice: Critical issues in socialjustice. New York: Plenum Press. Nunner-Winkler, G. (1997). The development of moral understanding and moral motivation. International Journal of Educational Research, 27, 587-603. Piaget, J. (1975). Biologische Anpassung undPsychologie der Intelligenz. Stuttgart: Klett. Rawls, J. (1972). A theory of justice. London: Oxford University Press. Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
PART THREE
Morality in Sociocultural Context
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
11 The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices—It Depends on Where You Sit Elliot Turiel
For Sigmund Freud, life with others is hard. For Emile Durkheim, life with others is easy. This difference between the two men does not reflect a clinical assessment of the nature or quality of their social relationships nor does it reflect the relative severity of social life in early 20th century Austria and France. Rather, these are characterizations of opposing views regarding life in society or civilization put forth by two of the most influential social scientific thinkers of the 20th century. Although they had different conceptions of the relationships between individuals and society, Freud and Durkheim took seriously the study of such relationships because each thought that life with others is necessary. In Freud's (1930) formulation, civilization cannot be dissociated from discontents. Life in society is protective, but involves struggle, conflict, ambivalence, and a large measure of unhappiness. Life in society is necessary to protect against hardships that emanate from the physical and material world and especially to protect against the threats from people's relations with each other. The union with others that constitutes community serves efforts to subject nature to the will and benefit of humans. Community also serves to protect people from the suffering that comes from another aspect of nature—human or biological nature. Relations among people must be regulated and controlled because of natural aggressiveness, "a piece of unconquerable nature ... a piece of our own psychical constitution" (Freud, 1930, p. 33), which poses great danger to individuals and civilization. The union of people in community and the development of culture, while furthering the happiness of individuals by providing protection and affiliation, is at the same time responsible for much human suffering. Civilization is a major source of suffering because it imposes great sacrifices on instinctual gratification—on sexuality and
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aggression. The great compromise is an exchange of happiness for security. This inevitable clash of individual (biology) and society makes for ambivalence, conflicts, tensions, and pathology. It is the interplay of needs and functions served by society with the psychological necessity for both the gratification of instincts and their restriction that makes life with others hard (and ultimately unhappy). In great contrast with Freud, Durkheim (1925/1961) thought that life with others is easy since he presumed there is no clash of biology and life in communities. Insofar as there is a "natural" propensity, it is to be social and to participate in communal life. Indeed, a main source of pathology is the disjunction of individuals from collective life. The individual cannot exist without society or "deny it without denying himself" (Durkheim, 1906/1974, p. 37). Through living in society, individuals transcend themselves in ways necessary not only to gain material benefits (the profane) but also to construct knowledge through collective representations and to attain morality through the supraindividual, emotionally-based, symbolically-driven attachment to, and respect for, the social order (the sacred). According to Durkheim, it is through participation in a group, normally a group less personal and less individualized than the family, that individuals come to form morality. Such a morality, to be morality proper, must be based on that which transcends individuals (self or others). It is society that constitutes a moral end in that it is felt as supraindividual. It is in the propositions that individuals transcend themselves through willing involvement in society and acceptance of the rules, duties, and obligations embedded in the social order that renders life with others, for Durkheim, easy—not only easy but often exhilarating. Insofar as a society functions well, individuals participate without ambivalence, struggle, conflict, or efforts at subversion. Insofar as society does not function well, there can be suffering. If a society does not integrate individuals strongly enough, so that they do not feel the sacredness of the supraindividual, or if there are weak regulations, the result can be egoistic or anomic suicide (Bellah, 1973; Durkheim, 1897/1951). In large measure, psychologists have moved away from Freud's emphasis on ambivalence and conflict and toward Durkheim's conception of social harmony. Part of the reason for the shift is that there has been serious questioning of Freudian conceptions of individuals with biologically-based intense needs requiring modification, sublimation, and repression as a means of becoming socialized (just as behavioristic socialization conceptions have been questioned). In the place of these Freudian conceptions, there has emerged a conception of children, who, by very young ages, manifest positive emotions like sympathy and empathy (Hoffman, 1991), and act in prosocial ways (Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman, 1983). Another reason for the shift away from Freud's concepts of discontents is that there has been an emphasis on the integrative role of culture in development, with con-
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ceptions of individuals in culture generally compatible with Durkheim's formulation. This is the case, for example, in the reemerged "discipline" of cultural psychology (Shweder, 1990). In several formulations of self and morality (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Shweder & Bourne, 1982;Triandis, 1990), it is implicit that life with others is easy. It is implicit in the presumption that, for the most part, social life occurs in harmonious cultures where people willingly participate in collective or shared meanings. It is also implicit in the wide agreement, according to Triandis (1996, p. 408), "that culture consists of shared elements that provide the standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, communicating, and acting among those who share a language, historic period, and a geographic location" (emphasis in original). Many of the reasons for moving away from the Freudian conceptions of the individual's relations to civilization are, I believe, valid ones. There is evidence that relatively young children develop positive emotions toward others, engage in positive, helpful, or altruistic actions, and through their social interactions do develop moral judgments which are not simply imposed on them by parents or other adults. It follows, therefore, that participation in culture is not solely an imposition on individuals but also has a positive, spontaneous, and willing quality to it. In these respects, it may be said that life with others is easy. That is only part of it, however. Without resurrecting Freudian explanations of individuals' relations with society or the explanation of moral development as the process of modifying instinctual features into other ends, we need to once again pay much more serious attention to Freud's insight that life in culture (or, as he put it, civilization) entails ambivalence, conflicts, tensions, suffering, and discontents. It is not that researchers fail to recognize that people suffer, feel pain, and can experience a good measure of unhappiness. It is recognized that suffering, pain, and unhappiness stem from material conditions (e.g., poverty, harsh physical circumstances), illness and death, the actions of some people (e.g., the pain inflicted by the aggression of those who deviate from norms), and aggression between nations (e.g., war). As an aside, I would note that many of these sources of suffering, though recognized, have not been much studied in research on human development. The Freudian insight that has not been sufficiently recognized is that conflict, suffering, pain, and unhappiness often come from social relationships among people participating in a group and even living together, and from competing forces within the individual. Unlike Freud, however, I view discontents, in large measure, as associated with differing perspectives within society, and with the moral and personal judgments that individuals develop. A major focus of this essay is on discontents stemming from moral judgments about hierarchies in social organization, with persons and groups of persons in positions of greater or lesser power, influence, and status. Such
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social interactions involve an interplay of harmony and conflict, independence and interdependence, personal entitlements and social responsibilities. The mix in orientations applies to people in interpersonal relationships, such as between men and women (including husbands and wives). However, social structural categories and cultural practices are implicated in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships since in many cultures men, in general, are in social positions different from women. Other types of social interactions, especially among members of higher and lower classes or castes, entail conflicts and a mixture of social and personal orientations. In addition to conflicts and discontents among people participating in communal life, there are oppositions, contested meanings, and activities aimed at subverting cultural practices. I emphasize subversion rather than rebellion or revolution for two reasons. One is that much of the opposition comes from people who are vulnerable in society, and thus are not in positions to engage in rebellion. Just as importantly, if not more, opposition comes from people who are very much part of the culture. Since they are identified with the culture, they are not attempting to engage in rebellion. Therefore, we cannot simply draw a distinction between those who uphold cultural practices and those who oppose them. The same people do both—that is, they may be ambivalent, accepting and opposing cultural practices. For these reasons, cultural practices are not solely straightforward, cohesive, accepted ways of doing things. Rather, they can be nebulous, with many sides and connotations. Embedded in cultural practices are multiple and often mixed messages as well as struggles, conflicts, oppositions, and contested meanings. The conflicts and discontents do not automatically emanate from distinctions in social hierarchies. They are associated with people's judgments about self, others, social organization, and morality. In these regards, too, the perspective I put forth differs from that of Freud as well as of Durkheim. There is a sense in which Freud and Durkheim took like positions on morality, although their respective positions on the process of acquisition differed. Each proposed that the morality of individuals entails the incorporation of the norms or moral standards of society through identifications with concrete authority (i.e., Freud) or the collectivity and its symbols (i.e., Durkheim). The propositions put forth here are based on research showing that in many cultures children develop moral judgments of welfare, justice, and rights that are not solely given in societal norms or standards (Turiel, 1998a). Concommitantly, children develop judgments about areas of personal choice and jurisdiction (Nucci, 1996). Moral judgments are applied to cultural practices, such that they result in critiques and subversive actions to right perceived wrongs. Moreover, when personal choices are perceived to be restricted arbitrarily or in order to benefit other groups, they sometimes become treated as issues of moral rights.
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Early Social Development and Social Conflicts As already noted, there is a good deal of evidence to support the idea, in contrast with previous psychoanalytic and behavioristic propositions, that early in life children display positive emotions and affiliate with others (Dunn, 1987; Hoffman, 1991; Kagan, 1984; Kochanska, 1991). There is also evidence that young children are sensitive to the interests and well-being of others, acting in prosocial or altruistic ways (Eisenberg & Strayer, 1987). As examples, observational studies in homes have shown that even children under two years of age share toys, help mothers with household tasks, cooperate in games, and respond to the emotional distress of others (Radke-Yarrow et al., 1983). Moreover, young children show comfort, engage in forms of caregiving, and react with sympathy and empathy (Hoffman, 1991). The evidence of positive emotions and social actions in early childhood can be interpreted in several ways, however. One increasingly common interpretation is that children are mainly socially-oriented, affiliative, cooperative, and concerned with the well-being of others (Wilson, 1993). For some, children's moral propensities are primarily emotionally based, and emotions guide very young children's awareness of moral "standards" (Kagan, 1984). However, most of the evidence presented for this idea entails concerns with regularities in nonsocial realms—such as reactions to broken objects, torn clothing, and missing buttons, or anxiety about pictures with distorted faces and bodies (see Turiel, 1998a, for a critique). Explanations of the sources of children's positive emotional and social orientations range from biology to socialization, often with a combination of biological and experiential features (Hoffman, 1991; Kagan, 1984; Shweder, 1994; Wilson, 1993). An illustrative example, for the present purposes, comes from propositions put forth by James Q. Wilson (1993) in his treatise on The Moral Sense. Wilson, himself not a psychologist, relies heavily on developmental research and other social scientific findings. His set of propositions is illustrative because it reflects a message many (including psychologists) have derived from research on young children's emotions and social behaviors. The message is that children can be readily incorporated into social life because of innate predispositions and/or as a consequence of the appropriate experiences in the early years. Among the innate characteristics that have emerged through evolution are bonding, attachment, affiliation, and, more generally, "sociability." The appropriate manifestation, in the child, of these predispositions to sociability and acts of sympathetic reaction, helping, caring, and sharing is best facilitated by the right early experiences in the family. These entail that parents provide love and nurturance, act authoritatively, and stress the need to meet duties and fulfill responsibilities.
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There are affinities in this approach with Durkheim's societal perspective and with cultural analyses (see Shweder, 1994). The natural sociability of humans, assumed by Wilson, also renders life in society unconflicted and unambivalent. Yet, it is believed that everything is not smooth in, especially, contemporary times in the United States. Moral problems exist in that there is often a lack of commitment to personal responsibility and associated increases in crime, drug abuse, and political corruption. These moral problems, however, are treated as a consequence of outliers—of people who are deviant and who do not behave in moral and social ways. To a fair extent, this occurs in contemporary Western societies because too many children grow up in families that do not provide the appropriate nurturance and firmness (due to too much divorce or too much indulgence). A more enduring and universal reason is that many deviant and antisocial behaviors are biologically determined. Therefore, tensions in society are most frequently due to individuals' "immoral," antisocial, or impulsive tendencies. These tendencies, along with propensities to self-interest, have been heightened in contemporary Western societies by another force: Intellectuals are to blame. Intellectuals have produced a climate by which the society suffers a lack of confidence in the language of morality and virtue (see also Bennett, 1992; Etzioni, 1993; Kagan, 1984; Shweder, 1982). Pitting ordinary people against "intellectuals" reflects a deeper issue—namely, that judgment, rationality, reflection, and deliberation are regarded as unimportant (and sometimes with mistrust) or secondary to the reflexive, habitual, and emotional (see also Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, &Tipton, 1985; Bennett, 1992; Kagan, 1984). In these formulations, the early emerging emotions more often than not produce better outcomes than reasoning or deliberation. By portraying deliberation and reflection as socially and morally maladaptive, the door is to largely shut on the likelihood that people will take perspectives on social norms and cultural practices which may involve scrutiny, evaluation, or efforts at their transformation from moral viewpoints. In turn, the stage is set for traditionalist and cultural perspectives that do not allow much for conflicts and tensions within cultures. If all goes well, with "normal" biological processes and the right kind of family socialization, life with others is easy. Leaving the outliers aside, cultures are harmonious, revolving around cohesive ways of doing things. However, there are several limitations, as well as a selective reading of the evidence, in the now relatively common formulation regarding young children's moral, social, and personal development. One limitation is the lack of recognition that social interactions shift in a variety of directions in early childhood. In addition to positive, otherregarding, prosocial actions, children often display opposition to others, conflicts, and exploration of the socially prohibited. A second limitation lies in the de-emphasis of
The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices the moral, social, and personal judgments developed by children. A third limitation is that the lack of attention to oppositions and judgments results in a failure to attend to conflicts over cultural practices and reflections upon culture (which perhaps occurs later in life). First, consider a body of research which shows that even in early childhood life with others is not solely a matter of social participation through helping, caring, affiliating, and cooperating. Some of these findings come from the work of Dunn and her colleagues (Dunn, 1987; Dunn, Brown, &Maguire, 1995). In line with research already mentioned, they have shown that with increasing age children display greater sympathy and empathy for others. At the same time, however, their research shows that with age children display increasing opposition to others and greater interest in engaging in acts that are socially prohibited. By the ages of three or four years, children show increasing awareness of, and adherence to, social standards and display more teasing of their mothers, more physical aggression and destruction of objects, and greater propensity to engage in disputes and arguments with mothers and siblings. Furthermore, research I have conducted with several colleagues has shown that young children make moral judgments which are differentiated from judgments about social conventions and realms of personal jurisdiction (also see Nucci, this volume). Children form understandings of morality (especially regarding harm), along with conceptions of social organization and the realm of the personal. I will not review this line of research here as it has been discussed extensively elsewhere (see Turiel, 1983; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987). My purpose in mentioning this line of research is to note, first, that children's moral judgments begin to emerge at early ages (by 4 to 6 years, and more consistently by 7 to 10 years), and that they differentiate morality from other domains of social judgments. These differentiations also demonstrate that individuals' social thinking is heterogeneous with different types of understandings, on the part of individuals, regarding different aspects of social interactions. In their judgments, children are not solely concerned with doing good, avoiding harm to others, or pleasing others. For children, there is a vast social world experienced, which includes, in addition to moral concerns, customs, conventions, and social institutions. It also includes persons and an awareness of the inner lives of selves (Spiro, 1993). The concern with persons, referred to as the "personal domain," perhaps reflects some of the oppositions and conflicts evidenced in the research by Dunn and her colleagues. As elucidated by Nucci (1996), children are not solely moralists who have little concern with the goals and interests of individuals and personal agency. Nor are children solely self-interested, with little concern for the welfare of others. This type of heterogeneous moral, social, and personal thinking has been documented in a variety of national or cultural settings, in-
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eluding Brazil, Korea, Indonesia, Nigeria, Zambia, and India (see Turiel, 1989, for a review). The differentiation of domains of social judgment, of course, is not restricted to childhood. It has been found in adolescents and adults. These findings parallel findings on oppositions and conflicts of the sort discussed earlier. Oppositions and conflicts are not limited to early childhood nor to children's relationships with parents. Oppositions and conflicts in the family occur at various ages, including middle childhood, adolescence, and adulthood (Dunn & Slomkowski, 1992; Shantz & Hartup, 1992; Smetana, 1989; Vandell & Bailey, 1992). Furthermore, at various ages conflicts occur among peers (Killen, 1989; Ross & Conant, 1992), even within friendships (Hartup, 1992), and among siblings (Dunn & Slomkowski, 1992; Vandell & Bailey, 1992). Some research has also documented what most people know (though it is essentially left out of analyses of social development)—that strong oppositions, conflicts, and disagreements occur with some frequency between spouses (Cowan & Cowan, 1992; Katz, Kramer, & Gottman, 1992). In summarizing research on conflict, Shantz and Hartup (1992, p. 1) concluded that "Whenever people interact—especially when they interact often—disagreements and oppositions are inevitable ... Conflicts—between
Recent research has examined relationships between domains of social judgments and actions (Turiel, in prep.). The research entailed extensive observations of social interactions in several settings within elementary and junior high schools (in and out of classrooms) and yielded evidence that social events, conflicts, and transgressions were often of a moral or conventional kind, and that types of discourse in the behavioral situations differed in accord with the domains of the events. Social interactions and communications within the events were, in important respects, different for the moral and conventional events. In reaction to moral events, participants responded with statements about the injurious effects on others, the unfairness of actions, and, at times, with physical or verbal retaliation. By contrast, reactions to the conventional events focused on rules, sanctions, and commands to refrain from the acts. In addition, judgments about the events were assessed among the participants shortly after the events had occurred. Judgments about moral events differed from judgments about conventional events in ways consistent with previous findings in studies conducted in nonbehavioral contexts. Acts in the moral domain, in contrast with acts in the conventional domain, were judged independently of rules, institutional context, or authority dictates. As examples, children were more likely to judge that it is wrong not to have regulations on moral acts than conventional acts, and that the moral acts would be wrong even if a rule did not exist in the school or in a school in another city (but not conventional acts). It was also found that transgressions in the moral domain, in contrast with conventional transgressions, would be wrong even if the teacher dictates that they are acceptable. In turn, justifications for judgments about moral events were mainly based on welfare and justice, whereas for conventional events, justifications were mainly based on considerations of social organization, rules, authority, and tradition. Moreover, similar judgments and justifications were made by these participants when responding to situations put to them in hypothetical terms.
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people and within people—are part and parcel of everyday living, and to such an extent that they must be regarded as intrinsic to the human condition."
Varying Perspectives on Cultural Practices Social development, it would appear, is not smooth or straightforward. Nor does culture make it so. Social development and social life involve a combination of harmony and opposition as well as heterogeneity of social judgments. They also involve a variety of types of social interactions. Jean Piaget (1932), another major thinker in the social sciences, writing about morality at around the same time as Freud and Durkheim, recognized some of this. He did not appear to have a position as to whether life with others is hard or easy, but he did emphasize that the nature of life with others depends on who the other is and the relationship between them. In particular, he maintained that an understanding of moral development requires attending to two distinct ways that children relate to others. One involves relationships of younger children with adults, which entail unilateral respect, and the second involves relationships among older children, which entail mutual respect. The distinction drawn by Piaget, between social contexts involving interactions between children and adults in authority and social contexts involving interactions among children, was an important insight because of the recognition that contextual variations occur at levels more local than cultural contexts (more about this below). It also was an important insight because of the recognition that social judgments can vary in accord with types of social interactions and the nature of relationships (e.g., equal or not, reciprocal or not). Moreover, it entailed the implicit recognition that differing perspectives can be involved within social interactions (e.g., the differing perspectives of a child in a child-adult context and in a child-child context). However, Piaget did not go far enough in that he did not uncover the heterogeneity of social judgments, distinguishing only between heteronomous (deemed less advanced) and autonomous moral judgments (with heteronomy being preceded by a premoral phase in which there is consciousness of, and pleasure in, regularity). By autonomy, Piaget did not mean independence or detachment, but used it in "the sense that the subject participates in the elaboration of norms that obligate him instead of receiving them ready-made as happens in the case of norms of unilateral respect that lie behind heteronomous morality" (Piaget, 1960/1995b, p. 315). He thus downplayed the multiplicity of social relationships in early childhood relevant to the development of moral judgments. By presuming that young children's relevant relationships were ones of unilateral respect for adults and that norms are received ready-made, Piaget did not attend to oppositions with adults, or to influences or relationships with siblings and peers in early childhood (Turiel, 1997).
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According to Piaget, therefore, the young child's entry into moral reasoning is mainly through respect (unilateral) felt for adults, the authority of adults, and a system of rules perceived to be supported and endorsed by the respected authority. The child's sense of obligation begins with sentiments of respect directed from child to adult: "The main factor in the obligatory conformity of very young children is nothing but respect for age—respect for older children, and, above all, respect for adults."(Piaget, 1932, p. 103) It is only with the shift, in later childhood, to the influence of peer relations (and mutual respect) that we see the development of autonomy, through which individuals participate in the elaboration of moral norms (Piaget, 1960/199 5b). That young children distinguish among domains of personal, social, and moral judgments suggests that their perceptions and inferences about social relationships go beyond what is endorsed by authority or their system of rules. Young children's moral judgments are influenced by peer relations, emotional understandings, and experiences in which people are harmed or treated unfairly (Dunn et al., 1995; Nucci & Turiel, 1978). Moreover, adults relate to children (and vice versa) in a variety of ways which are guided by the types of events occurring. For instance, parental discipline practices as well as the communications between parents or teachers and children are different with regard to moral and conventional issues (Catron & Masters, 1993; Nucci & Turiel, 1978; Smetana, 1989). Parents or teachers tend to use explanations pertaining to needs, rights, and consequences for acts entailing harm to others, whereas they use explanations pertaining to rules and social order for violations of social conventions. Also with each other children tend to express hurt, injury, and losses experienced in moral violations. There is also evidence that children evaluate the fairness and appropriateness of adults' methods of discipline according to their own moral judgments (Saltzstein, Weiner, & Munk, 1995). One manifestation of the reciprocal quality of social interactions is that children do not always accept the adult perspective (Killen, 1991; Laupa, Turiel, & Cowan, 1995; Nucci, 1984). Just as children see a difference between moral and social conventional transgressions, they can be critical of adults' decisions and justifications. The need to expand Piaget s conception of diversity in social relationships goes beyond early childhood. In later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood there are several
In his sociological studies, Piaget began to consider more general distinctions in social interactions through analyses of their diachronic and synchronic aspects, and through parallels he drew between egocentricism for individuals and sociocentricism for groups. The diachronic refers to analyses of historical influences on society and the dependence of one state upon previous ones (traditions and continuity). The synchronic refers to analyses of interactions at a given moment in time, which may be integrated into new functions and which can serve to alter historically based meanings. Piaget argued in favor of analyses including both the diachronic and synchronic (commending Marx for doing so) rather than those emphasizing one or
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other sources of variations in social contexts—especially ones pertaining to social interactions among people who hold differing positions of status, power, and influence in the social hierarchy. Piaget did attempt to capture elements of inequality of power and status between adults and children, on the assumption that children hold highly positive feelings and judgments about the status of adults. However, it is likely that relationships between, say, adults of different social classes or castes are not the same as relationships between children and their parents or teachers. Even in relationships among peers, which Piaget regarded as ones of equality, there are likely to be hierarchical features. For instance, peer interactions among men or among women may constitute a different social context from peer interactions between men and women. More generally, the existence of social hierarchy means that there are a variety of types of social relationships within cultures. I am not proposing, however, that individuals' moral judgments are unstable, shifting from situation to situation. Nor am I proposing that morality is relative to the positions of individuals in the social hierarchy. Quite to the contrary, the proposition is that people in different positions, while maintaining similar judgments regarding welfare, justice, and rights, sometimes apply those judgments differently. The application of moral judgments is related to other domains of judgments, including the personal and conventional. In many situations, the perceived inequalities in personal entitlements differs between those in dominant and subordinate positions. In addition, those in subordinate positions often have a perspective that results in sensitivity to unfairness or rights denied.'
the other (criticizing Durkheim for his emphasis of the diachronic and Pareto for his emphasis of the synchronic). With regard to individual development, Piaget contrasted egocentricism (confusing one's point of view with that of others) to sociocentricism (decentration of self and cooperation among people). With regard to sociological analyses, however, Piaget (1950/ 1995a) put forth a different conception of sociocentricism. He proposed that sociocentricism is linked to ideologies, which entail a centering on the group or collectivity. Parallel with the need in individual development for a shift from egocentricism to a differentiated state, there is need, in societies, for a shift from sociocentricism to a decentered state: "If the development of rational operations presupposes cooperation among individuals, which liberates them from their initial intellectual egocentricism, the sociocentric collective representations are the social equivalent of individual egocentric representations." (Piaget, 1950/1995a, p. 74) We do not have to look far to find examples of social movements that have been based on perceptions of unfairness or the denial of rights in the society. In the United States, the feminist and civil rights movements are among the most visible in the latter part of the 20th century. The leading spokesperson of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., articulated the moral underpinnings of the movement when he said, in his well-known public letter written while he was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, that he had led a nonviolent demonstration "because injustice is here." Moreover, he regarded oppression itself as the source of protest: "Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come."
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The existence of social hierarchies, in itself, does not necessarily mean that people form multiple judgments and perspectives or that they are a source of conflict within cultures. In fact, some have maintained that communal life is harmonious in the context of social hierarchies as long as there is an overlay of traditions, cultural practices, and shared meanings. For some (e.g., Bellah et al., 1985; Bennett, 1992), it is the failure to maintain traditions and shared understandings that makes for moral or societal conflicts and problems (for further discussion of these positions and their implications for justice in the family, see Okin, 1989, chap. 3). Some have argued explicitly that there are common or shared understandings among those in different positions in the social hierarchy which make for relationships of interdependence. Discussing the ethics of community, particularly as it is practiced in India, Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, and Park (1997, p. 145) have maintained that social hierarchy is based on asymmetrical reciprocity: "The person in the hierarchical position is obligated to protect and satisfy the wants of the subordinate person in specified ways. The subordinate person is also obligated to look after the interests and well-being of the superordinate person ... The understood moral obligations of the interdependent 'other' in such a relationship is sensitive responsiveness to the perceived or expressed needs of one's interdependent self." Shweder et al. (1997) provide a concrete example: "Wives should be obedient to their husbands, and husbands should be sensitive and responsive to the needs, desires and inclinations of their wives. That is why the theme of 'selves' or 'souls' clusters with the themes of duty, hierarchy, and interdependence." Shweder et al. use the metaphor of feudal ethics (they say, "tongue-in-cheek") as "central to Oriya ethical argumentation in the context of communitarian concerns." The metaphor of feudal ethics is said to be difficult for Americans to understand because it does not fit well with their "free-market mentality." This is because feudal ethics entail an interdependence of people, whereby those in dominant positions take care of, and are responsible for, those in subordinate positions, while those in subordinate positions maintain allegiance to, and make sacrifices for, those in dominant positions. In this view, therefore, some cultures lead people toward interdependence whether they are in dominant or subordinate positions. They develop a "duty-based" morality where they "take care of one's own," which contrasts with the orientation of Americans to independence and "survival of the fittest" in a "rights-based" morality. As put by Shweder et al. (1997, p. I46f): "The particular wisdom of the South Asian discourse of community is that the well being of persons who live or work together or share other life projects is interdependent. If your actions weaken those you depend upon (whether in the upward or downward direction), they weaken you. This is true w)hether you are the 'lord' or the 'servant'." Interestingly, Shweder et al. (1997) believe that Americans would benefit from an incorporation into their culture of non-Western ideals, to which Americans recoil. As they put it, "most
The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices In these types of communitarian-cultural analyses, it is presumed, first of all, that all parties place interdependence and caring for each other primary. There is no discussion of whether people use their positions of dominance to assert their own prerogatives, interests, and entitlements. Furthermore, insofar as burdens are borne by those in subordinate positions, it is said that they are accepted because of the power on individuals of collective representations and because of the benefits of interdependence. The problem in these presumptions is that they are held with little attention paid to the possibility that, in addition to shared understandings, there are contested understandings, oppositions, and conflicts over power, influence, and status. Instead, the focus has been on public ideologies and cultural practices from the perspectives of those in dominant positions. An alternative view is that closer attention to the perspective of people in different social positions reveals: that often there are deep disagreements about cultural practices; that such disagreements, in part, stem from a multiplicity of social orientations and goals held by members of a culture; that members of a culture, along with accepting its practices, can find serious moral failings in it; and that along with harmony and shared meanings there is conflict, struggle, and contested meanings. In keeping with these propositions regarding contested understandings within cultures, Okin (1989, p. 67) has maintained that in contemporary society in the United States there are "no shared understandings" in views about gender, and more generally that "oppressors and oppressed—when the voice of the latter can be heard at all— often disagree fundamentally." Indeed, there has not been extensive or careful examination of the perspectives and judgments of the oppressed or those in nondominant positions. However, the perspectives of those in nondominant positions are also im-
Americans recoil at the idea of feudal ethics because a feudal ethic does not fit well with the philosophical underpinnings of our historically evolved political culture and our free-market mentality" (p. 145). With reference to problems in the United States they state: "Nevertheless, in the cultural domain of health and well-being, the simple principle of'take care of one's own' might have far-reaching consequences if it were taken seriously as an ethical obligation." (p. 146) Many psychological and social problems would be alleviated, ranging from community health to the elderly, and problems arising from national health insurance. It is not apparent, as discussed below, that hierarchy and asymmetrical reciprocity are absent in America (see Hochschild, 1989; Okin, 1989). If it were the case that Americans recoil from those ideas, Shweder et al.'s assertions would raise serious questions as to whether they want to impose a non-Western cultural view upon a Western culture and what would justify such an imposition. The reasons they give imply a critique of Western culture from a perspective they would apply across cultures (even though the perspective is, in their view, largely absent in American mentality). Shweder et al. are not the only ones to argue that Americans need to appropriate more interdependence (e.g., Bellah et al., 1985).
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portant, and perhaps different, reflections of culture. Those perspectives are windows into conflicts, tensions, below the surface activities, and an interplay of varying social orientations. As has been proposed by the cultural anthropologist Claudia Strauss (1992), meanings given to public and dominant values, and practices "from the top," may differ from those given by individuals who are not in dominant positions ("from the bottom"). There are several sources, some journalistic and some from research, which do examine these different perspectives and which provide a picture (and a fair amount of evidence) of disagreements, conflicts, and subversive activities. The evidence comes from not only Western cultures but also non-Western ones—including traditional cultures. Examples of hidden oppositional activities in the context of cultural practices, taboos, and restrictions (many codified by law, with severe sanctions) come from journalistic accounts about Iran in the 1990s. Some of these accounts surfaced after the presidential elections of May 1997. The cleric elected as President by a wide margin (69 % of the vote) was considered more "moderate" than the previous President and all of his opponents (how moderate he is apparently is open to debate). One Iranian, a jewelry and crafts vendor, believed the election was "a referendum about freedom. The voters are saying that we're tired of people snooping into our private lives. What we do at home is our own business. With Khatami in power, the government is going to stop telling us what we can read, what we can watch and what we can do." ("Many Iranians hope mandate brings change," The New York Times, May 26, 1997) Not everyone agreed with this man's opinion that the election would bring substantive change. However, it appears that there are many on-going underground and illegal activities with regard to dress, entertainment, alcohol, reading material, fraternizing between males and females, and even sexuality. These are all activities restricted in Iran for the past 15 to 20 years: "And helicopters flew over Northern Tehran looking for satellite dishes, just as the Guards walked in the park to watch the boys and girls, or entered houses to look for alcohol and opium." (V. S. Naipul, "After the revolution," The New Yorker, May 26, 1997, p. 65) One woman, reflecting on the nature of underground activities, stated ("Beating the system, with bribes and the big lie," The New York Times, May 27, 1997): "We live a double-life in this country." She went on to explain: "My children know that when their school teachers ask whether we drink at home, they have to say no. If they are asked whether we dance or play cards, they have to say no. But the fact is that we do drink, dance and play cards, and the kids know it. So they are growing up as liars, knowing that their parents are also liars and knowing that to survive in this country we have to be. That's a terrible thing, and I want to change it." The oppositional, but hidden activities go beyond dancing, playing cards, and drinking at home. Many people engaged in other activities which entailed "quietly re-
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sisting laws that restrict their private pleasures" (The New York Times, May 27, 1997). The list includes widespread use of satellite dishes (hidden from the helicopters by tents), videocassettes, compact disks, fashion magazines, and alcohol. A complicated means of subterfuge exists to smuggle, obtain, and use these items. Even policemen sometimes partake in these underground activities by accepting bribes from offenders. It is also reported that women carry lipstick and makeup to use in places where it is expected they will not meet police or religious authorities. Public contact between unmarried males and females, considered a grave transgression, also occurs. As put by V. S. Naipul {The New Yorker, May 26, 1997, p. 69): "There was a sexual revolution among the young, and a falling away from the too strict, too pervasive faith. After all the pain, a new nihilism seemed to be preparing." An Iranian school teacher, with reference to "a bold urban underground of young people" (who were not part of the prerevolutionary times) put it into a political context {The New York Times, May 26, 1997): "When I was growing up in the Shah's days, the way to rebel was to become a Marxist or, even better, an Islamist. Now the way to do it is to drink, use drugs and go to secret parties. We used to have girlfriends, but we never had sexual relations with them. Now kids have sex as a form of political protest." Another example, reported by Mernissi (1994), in recollections of her childhood life in a Moroccan harem during the 1940s, also pertains to listening to music and dancing. Mernissi recounted events involving conspiracies among women to engage in acts prohibited by their husbands (see Turiel, 1998b, for details). In one of Mernissi s recollections, the women managed to obtain a key to a locked radio in order to listen to music and dance while the men were away. Not unlike the events in Iran, mothers provided mixed messages to their children regarding truth and lies; mothers instructed the children to keep their activities secret from their fathers. More generally, the women of the harem expressed discontent with the unfairness of many traditions, which were felt as suffocating. Practices such as polygamy and the wearing of the veil were considered unjust and ways of stigmatizing women. The women hoped for different lives for their daughters. Life in the Moroccan harem of the 1940s was different, no doubt, from life in Iran of the 1990s. In Iran, many of the opposed restrictions were imposed by governmental and religious authorities (it would be informative to also examine relationships in the family). Moreover, Iranians had experienced changes approximately 17 years earlier from the days of the Shah to the revolutionary days. Perhaps it could be said that the Moroccan harems of the 1940s were also undergoing transition and experiencing external influences. I would suggest, along with Appadurai (1988) and others, that rarely are there peoples who are not in some degree of transition or who are not in contact with others: "Although assiduous anthropologists might always discover some borderline examples, my general case is that natives, people confined to and by the places to
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which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a larger world, have probably never existed." (Appadurai, 1988, p. 39) Some of the commonalities in the examples from the harem of Morocco and Iran of the 1990s are informative. In both, there are accepted cultural practices, which, at the same time, are opposed, manipulated, and subverted. In Iran, some of the opposition is with regard to cultural practices and restrictions affecting women (especially regarding dress). In the harem, the focus was primarily on gender. The burdens, hardships, and subordination of women in several Islamic countries and in India have been examined in other journalistic accounts (Bumiller, 1990; Goodwin, 1994). These accounts document that women in many cultural contexts think that rules, behavior codes, and cultural practices are against women and in favor of men—who are accorded autonomy and personal entitlements. These accounts also document that women are not always, or entirely, content with these cultural practices, and they do try to circumvent them some of the time. Complaints were voiced about hardships for women, ranging from malnutrition (for young girls when scarce food is given to boys), to dowry or bride burnings, to the easy availability of divorce to men and custody laws favoring men, to arranged marriages and polygamy, and female circumcision. A common theme across cultural settings is women's beliefs that men impose unfair work burdens and that men do not do their fair share (Bumiller, 1990; Chen, 1995; Goodwin, 1994; see Hochschild, 1989, and Okin, 1989, for accounts from the United States). In several instances, organized social movements and protests have been established (see also Walker & Parnar, 1993, for a discussion of indigenous organizations to protest and change practices of female circumcision). The types of conflicts and oppositions recounted in journalistic reports and other sources are paralleled in reports of research findings by anthropologists and psychologists who have not focused only on those in dominant positions. As one example, Abu-Lughod (1993) conducted ethnographic studies of Bedouin women in Egypt. She compiled women's stories and conversations around several themes pertaining to their roles in a patriarchal culture with arranged marriages, polygamy, and other cultural practices by which women are expected to submit to men's wishes and commands (consistent with Shweder et al.'s characterization of the ethics of community in India where "wives should be obedient to their husbands"). Abu-Lughod found, however, that the women often were not obedient nor in adherence to cultural practices. There are differences, disagreements and conflicts among people, efforts to alter existing practices, and struggles between wives and husbands as well as between parents and children. Of particular relevance here are the efforts of females to resist cultural practices like arranged marriages and polygamy. Moreover, women develop strategies directed toward many aspects of daily life, such as leisure activities and al-
The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices leviating the burdens imposed upon them, and circumventing the restrictions males place on females' education. These examples also show that cultural practices among this group of Bedouins do not correspond to individuals' perspectives and actions. Still, the Bedouin women are not simply in opposition to the culture. On the basis of her investigations, Abu-Lughod portrays the women as identified with their culture, but at times taking a critical stance to it. There is a combination of fulfilling role expectations or prescribed duties in line with public expectations andeSorvs, at subverting those expectations and asserting their own will, desires, and judgments which may not be in accord with social expectations or with the judgments of those in dominant positions (for analyses of oppositions based on social class, see Willis, 1977). The evidence of opposition and conflict is buttressed by research showing discrepancies between public cultural symbolic systems or ideologies and individuals' conceptions and judgments. The public side is likely to reflect more on those in dominant than subordinate positions and to be unreflective of conflicts and disagreements within culture. A comprehensive review of research, bearing specifically on concepts of self and persons as independent (bounded) or interdependent (unbounded), has been provided by Spiro (1993). On the basis of a review of research conducted in Nepal, Japan, India, and Burma, Spiro maintains that cultural conceptions of self or persons are not isomorphic with individual conceptions.
Contexts for Concepts of Persons and Social Relationships The propositions I have put forth have a bearing on how we characterize cultures, and commonalities or differences between cultures. They also have implications for explanations of contextual variations between cultures, and especially contextual variations within cultures. In particular, ambivalences, conflicts, and discontents stemming from different perspectives on cultural practices, as well as discrepancies between public ideologies and individual conceptions, all suggest the need for distinctions in the descriptions of cultural orientations, and for attention to situational variations in the application of individuals' multifaceted social judgments. It must be stressed that situational or contextual variations, in this perspective, are a function of the application of stable moral, social, and personal judgments. This is to say that individuals balance or coordinate their judgments in accord with the parameters of particular situational features. For instance, insofar as people in dominant positions impose their personal interests or goals, those in subordinate positions might apply their moral judgments in opposition or resistance. Frequently, however, those in subordinate positions apply their judgments of justice or fairness in indirect ways because of fear
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or prudence since they are vulnerable to the power of those in dominant positions. Furthermore, persons in subordinate positions may be ambivalent, given their commitment to their culture. It appears that in traditional cultures, such as the Moroccan harem of the 1940s, Iran of the 1990s, and the Bedouins of Egypt, interdependence or the force of societal duties and asymmetrical reciprocity (as distinguished from cultural orientations to independence, rights, and equality) do not fully capture what occurs. Indeed, Spiro's (1993) examination of research on discrepancies between public ideologies and individual conceptions was motivated by an interest in exploring the validity of claims, much stimulated by Geertz (1974/1984), that the Western conception of the person differs from conceptions held in non-Western cultures. The distinction drawn by Geertz was between conceptions of persons as bounded (Western) and unbounded (non-Western). This distinction has been extended and elaborated upon by many who contrast conceptions or self, persons, and morality in Western and non-Western cultures (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Shweder & Bourne, 1982;Triandis, 1996). I have already referred to one variant of the distinction in Shweder et al.'s (1997) proposition that Americans have a free market mentality, with an orientation to independence and survival of the fittest, whereas South Asians are oriented to an interdependence of taking care of one's own and asymmetrical reciprocity. As Markus and Kitayama (1991) have noted, several terms have been used for this contrast, including, on the one side, independent, individualistic, egocentric, autonomous, or selfcontained, and, on the other side, interdependent, collectivistic, sociocentric, and connected. These dichotomies are meant to distinguish cultural orientations and to constitute contextual differences between cultures with their distinctive psychologies. The ways in which the distinction between independent and interdependent cultures is drawn varies somewhat from one researcher to another, with some drawing a sharper distinction than others. Nevertheless, for most who draw the distinction, it is meant to characterize fundamental differences in concepts of persons and social relationships. Geertz (1974/ 1984), for instance, explicitly stated that "the actual conceptions involved vary from group to group, and often quite sharply" (p. 126). Similarly, Shweder and Bourne (1982) saw a sharp distinction in that for members of "sociocentric organic cultures" the independent concept of self "must feel alien, a bizarre idea" (p. 194); different peoples "adopt distinct world views." A common feature among those drawing these distinctions is the presumption of a substantial degree of generalizability of the orientation within each type of culture (how much is hard to specify), and that there is, it follows, an overarching way of characterizing cultures on their concepts of persons. A representative example is provided by Markus and Kitayama (1991, p. 225), who proposed that "in many Western cultures
The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices there is a faith in the coherent separateness of distinct persons ... Achieving the cultural goal of independence requires construing oneself as an individual whose behavior is organized and made meaningful primarily by reference to one's own internal repertoire of thought, feelings, and action." The contrasting non-Western orientation to interdependence is one in which "cultures insist ... on the fundamental connectedness of human beings to each other. A normative imperative of these cultures is to maintain this interdependence among individuals." (p. 227) Note, however, that Marcus and Kitayama also state that in interdependent cultures individual characteristics are assigned secondary roles. Furthermore, at the end of a comprehensive review of research, they suggest that there may be a discrepancy between prevailing ideologies in Western cultures and individuals' characteristics: "Perhaps Western models of the self are quite at odds with actual individual social behavior and should be reformulated to reflect the substantial interdependence that characterizes even Western individualists." (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 247) This conclusion, which is based on their reading of some of the evidence (Spiro, 1993, also concluded that there is substantial independence in non-Westerners; also see Nucci, 1996; Turiel, 1994, 1998a, 2002; Turiel & Wainryb, 1998) is difficult to integrate into their more general formulations. Note that Markus and Kitayama do retain the idea of "Western individualists." One way of making sense of these findings is to say there is a mixture of the types, but that one predominates in some cultures and the other predominates in other cultures. Such a formulation would require explanation as to why the secondary orientation is as prominent as it appears in the data. My proposition is different. It is that general orientations, insofar as they may exist in public or cultural ideologies, do not reflect the dynamics of social interactions at the levels of groups and individuals. The mixture or combinations of orientations is systematically (though not exclusively) associated with interactions of a hierarchical nature, and positions of dominance and subordination. Insofar as there are differences between such groups, they do entail dynamics at group levels. Whereas there are commonalities among people holding different positions in the hierarchy, there are also differences in perspectives that characterize the different groups. Therefore, variations are connected to who is in what position, and to relationships between people in different positions. The dynamics within groups and between groups I have considered apply primarily to social hierarchies at the level of societal organization and that encompass life more generally. There are many kinds of social hierarchies. For instance, hierarchies exist in activities like playing in an orchestra, participating in team sports, or attending school. Whereas all these types would be interesting to study, the kinds of conflicts and discontents I have considered most clearly apply to groups with positions associated with the broader social system (these can play out in sports, school, families, or work
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settings). Moreover, it is necessary to understand how this all plays out at the level of individual judgments and actions as well as particular relationships (e.g., between husbands and wives), where there are often interweavings of interdependence and independence in given situations. By interweaving, I mean that the same set of actions can entail both independence and interdependence, such that it is difficult to disentangle them in particular situations. Therefore, I focus on the constructs of individualism (or independence, autonomy, personal agency) and collectivism (or sociocentricism, interdependence) as they are related to the perspectives of persons in different positions in social hierarchies. Just as these constructs are associated with discontents and subversive activities of those in subordinate positions, they are also associated with perspectives taken by (and given to) persons in dominant positions. As proposed by Okin (1995), injustices in the family, in both Western and non-Western cultures, are likely to lead boys to absorb the message that they have a "natural" enhanced entitlement (I would add that this often applies to people in higher social classes or castes relative to people in lower classes or castes). In other words, there are several sides to social hierarchies and to social contexts that involve relationships between persons in positions of dominance and subordination. In addition to roles, duties, and connectedness, another side of social hierarchy is the assertion of personal interests, entitlements, and autonomy for, and by, those in privileged positions. The juxtaposition and interweaving of these types of judgments are evident in the findings of a series of studies conducted among Druze Arabs living in Northern Israel (Turiel & Wainryb, 1998; Wainryb & Turiel, 1994). The social practices of the Druze restrict many of the activities of women, including dress, bodily ornaments, sexuality, work, education, and leisure (e.g., dancing, going to places of entertainment or beaches). The community has a patrilineal and patriarchal family structure which shapes interactions among men, women, and children. Roles are clearly demarcated, with men in dominant positions and women in subordinate positions. One set of studies (Wainryb & Turiel, 1994) examined judgments about conflicts or disagreements between family members in dominant (i.e., husband, father) and subordinate (i.e., wife, daughter, son) positions regarding several types of choices of activities relevant to cultural practices, including educational and occupational choices, household chores, friendships, and leisure activities. The studies showed, unsurprisingly, that men were accorded a good deal of decision-making power and discretion over the activities of their wives and daughters as well as their own activities. The studies also showed that the Druze make judgments based on both interdependence (including role responsibilities) and independence (autonomy and personal entitlements). Specifically, interdependence was largely applied in judgments that persons in subordinate positions should acquiesce to the wishes of those in dominant
The Discontents and Contents in Cultural Practices positions, whereas independence and freedom of choice were accorded to those in dominant positions. Among the Druze, therefore, there is a coexistence of concepts of persons as autonomous and independent, with personal entitlements (mainly for males), and of persons as part of a social network in which personal jurisdiction is subordinated to others and the requirements of their roles. Complicating the ways the social thinking of the Druze can be characterized is that in making judgments about conflicts among family members, Druze females were concerned with pragmatics and with justice. Sometimes they judged that females need to go along with the preferences and dictates of males because of their power to impose serious consequences on them (e.g., abandonment and divorce). Thus, females were aware of the power accorded to men and of their own vulnerabilities. However, the people in subordinate positions did not simply accept the practices uncritically. Females judged as unfair practices which allow men to dictate the activities of women and which place the women in such vulnerable positions. This does not mean, however, that Druze males have total independence. Along with their independence, males have duties, responsibilities, and burdens. I do suggest, however, that the findings show that individualism (independence, autonomy, agency) is systematically connected to role and status differences in the social hierarchy and that there are discontents. Another feature complicating characterizations of the thinking of people of the Druze culture stems from the findings of a study on their concepts of rights to freedoms of speech and religion (Turiel & Wainryb, 1998). With regard to the exercise of freedoms of speech and religion, Druze males and females, in many circumstances, judged that restrictions by husbands and fathers on wives and daughters are not legitimate. It appears that restrictions on choices of some activities (e.g., leisure, friendships, household chores, and educational and occupational pursuits, as assessed in Wainryb & Turiel, 1994) are more acceptable than restrictions of freedoms of speech and religion. More generally, it was found that the Druze maintain concepts of rights to freedom of speech and religion which they apply in universal and noncontingent ways. They also balanced the exercise of the freedoms against other moral and community considerations. There is also some indication that members of the Druze community have different construals of personal characteristics and cultural influences for males and females. In another study, for which our analyses are currently underway, we posed adolescent and adult males and females with questions about activities like taking employment in a city different from one's own, or renting an apartment in order to live alone. Clearly, these types of activities are regarded in their group as acceptable, or at least tolerated, for males and unacceptable for females. These differences are associated with conceptions of different "psychologies" in that males are construed as highly independent and females as dependent. In linking independence for males and dependence for females,
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they recognize that cultural practices vary for different categories of persons as culturally determined. Frequently, males were described as free and self-reliant. As an example, a 14-year-old female stated it would be alright for a male to live alone: Because in our culture a man is given complete freedom ... No one would oppose a man being free. We like men to be like that. That's the way it is among the Druze." [A male] "has the right to choose his own way. He wants freedom, and in our village a man has more freedom ... A girl likes a boy to be responsible, free and—and the most important thing—strong. That's what every girl hopes for. A 16-year-old male expressed it as follows: A man needs to be free, he's supposed to be free. (Why?) Because he is the educator, as the saying goes. He plans things for his family, he fights for his family. The girl is restricted to her home. Both of these adolescents described females in different terms: She can't establish herself on her own, she can't rely on herself. She needs someone to tell her what to do. (14-year-old female) As long as she lives in her parents' home; her groom will come and take her wherever he wants to, to paradise or hell. She is under his control. Either her parents dominate her or her husband does. (16-year-old male) Some explicitly connected the differences between males and females to cultural expectations. One 14-year-old female said that men are given higher status and freedom than females ("there is a hierarchy") because "that is what the culture has decided." However, for some this takes on negative connotations. An 18-year-old female judged that it would be good for a woman to take a job in another city, but "it would be forbidden, according to our customs." She also believes there are constraints—some of which are unfair: He is free. Even when a baby is born, people are glad if it's a boy, and less glad if it's a girl. We live in a conservative culture. Maybe in the future I might want to treat my daughter in the same way as I would treat my son, but the culture wouldn't let me do it ... His status is higher. That's understood, and you can't argue with it.
Conclusion Thus far, I have emphasized conflicts and discontents within cultures, the multiplicity of social and personal orientations within cultures, and especially differences between people in different positions in the social hierarchy. I have said little about cultural differences since the emphasis has been on potential parallels (i.e., conflicts, heterogeneity, perspectives). This should not be taken to mean that I propose cultural differences do not exist or that insofar as they do that they are unimportant. Differ-
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ences exist, for instance, in practices between modern Western cultures and some of the traditional cultures considered here. There are differences in cultural practices bearing on the lives, on the one hand, of Bedouin women in Egypt or the women of the harem in Morocco, or Druze women, and middle-class American women, on the other hand. With regard to gender, however, Western cultures are not free of social hierarchies. A good deal of evidence exists as to inequalities and struggles between men and women in several spheres of life (Hochschild, 1989; Nussbaum, 1989; Okin, 1989). Unequal treatment of women is reflected in their underrepresentation in the political system, in positions of power and influence in business and the professions, and in fewer opportunities for paid work (Okin, 1989). Inequalities are also part of gender relationships in the family, with the interests of men given priority over those of women. In dual career families, often women are expected to do more of the undesired household tasks, and men have entitlements, such as greater time for leisure activities (Hochschild, 1989). The greater burdens endured by women than men in the family, which has been of much discussion among social scientists recently, has not escaped at least one of the participants (an adult female) in our most recent study among the Druze: A man's life is simple. He works, he comes back home; he has no other responsibilities. I work too, and I have kids, and a home. He knows that when he comes back, everything will be ready for him. That's such a pleasure. When I come back home I have more work to do at home. So, who do you think deserves to get out a little and enjoy life? It is necessary to account for cultural influences on both males and females (or people of different social classes) as well as commonalities among groups of people in like positions in the social hierarchy in different cultures. There is a sense in which people in like positions (e.g., males in dominant positions or females in subordinate positions) share perspectives. Possible shared understandings with other males and contested understandings with females was articulated by a 14-year-old male from the Druze community—along with the glimmerings of a universal judgment: Look, it would be better for me if everything stayed this way. I can see from the viewpoint of a girl, she would like a change, like equality, with boys. She would like to have the same rights. But of course everyone just wants what is best for themselves. And this situation, the way things are now, this is better for me, this is better for men. I can see, though, that for girls it would be much better if they had more freedom and more rights. For the present purposes, I want to stress that situational variations are associated with perspectives in a social hierarchy. Judgments can be at levels less general than cultural context in the sense that individuals or groups sometimes act in ways contrary to pub-
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lie practices or taboos, or in contradiction with those in positions of dominance. Within a culture, we have seen, there are variations about practices pertaining to matters like dress, forms of entertainment, work for women, sexuality, arranged marriages, polygamy, and divorce. Within a culture, too, there is more than one side to cultural practices, with varying interpretations of them. The different sides entail not only the perspectives of different people but ambivalences on the part of individuals. One salient point of connection between cultures, it appears from most of the evidence, is that people form moral judgments pertaining to issues of welfare, justice, and rights. It is the pervasiveness of moral judgments that produces contextual variations within cultures. Thus, I return to the question of whether life with others is hard or easy. I have tried to show that Freud's assumption that civilization brings with it discontents in the form of conflicts, struggles, and disappointments, is important to understanding social relationships. However, Freud thought that people come to social life kicking and screaming (and aggressing, of course), so to speak, because they do not want to (at least unconsciously) renounce instinctual gratifications. Freud did not give sufficient attention to the sociability and willing participation of people in social life. Durkheim did. But Durkheim did not give sufficient attention to the conflicts, struggles, and ambivalences that occur in most social arrangements that humans have managed to establish. He also did not give sufficient attention to the morally motivated underground, hidden, conspiratorial activities of many people. In the context of cultures that include people in varying positions of status, power, and influence, therefore, social practices are far from straightforward. They serve multiple purposes, send mixed messages, have positive and negative connotations for the same people, and can be more positive for some people than others. Some practices that may differ from one culture to another, such as those pertaining to arranged marriages, polygamy, sexuality, or wearing the veil, also differ for people within cultures. As we have seen, the perspectives to each of these practices often differ between males and females. Both Freud and Durkheim, in their presumptions of conflict or harmony, gave insufficient attention to moral judgments of welfare, justice, and rights as well as to social construals and psychological attributions (Asch, 1952). People also make construals about social practices and have a fair amount of awareness about their own culture. In one of our studies with the Druze, it was evident that even young members of the culture made construals of how it "works." They were aware that freedom and self-reliance is granted to males and not females. They were also aware of where benefits and burdens rest. Recall the 14-year-old male who thought that the existing arrangements were beneficial to himself and, from the perspective of girls, saw that change was desirable. His conclusion was that "everyone just wants what is best for themselves." That would not be my conclusion nor my basis for proposing that there
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are conflict, struggles, and subversion in social life. Surely, people do want what is good for themselves. Issues around self, however, go deeper than that. People also make moral judgments which lead them beyond just wanting what is best for themselves to concerns with others and with society. It is a combination of personal concerns and moral concerns that can result in conflict and efforts to alter social arrangements.
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
12
Changes in Moral UnderstandingAn Intergenerational Comparison Gertrud Nunner-Winkler
On the street in front of the house corpses were lying—human beings killed by fragments from shrapnels and bombs. Almost all homes in the neighborhood were burning. While I was sitting in the basement I heard the horrible screaming of the German dive bombers that attacked Warsaw. Already in September 1939 it was beyond doubt for me that this was a crime, even though at the time I probably would not have used this word—for in those strange odd days the term "crime" was associated with poison that the treacherous wife served her husband in wine. A. Szczypiorski (1997)
Introduction: Moral-Philosophical Assumptions Today's public discourses abound with laments on the corruption of morality. Culturecritical diagnoses deplore not only the decay of concrete virtues and traditional social institutions but also of basic moral attitudes, such as "human solidarity" (Liibbe, 1978) or "patriotism" (cf. Maclntyre, 1984, 1985; Taylor, 1989). In contrast, I want to claim: What we observe is a process not of moral erosion, but of moral change—albeit one that is accompanied by grave misinterpretations. Its core is a change in the foundation of morality: Norms are no longer derived from God's commands or natural law, but from the rational will of all concerned. Once moral rules are no longer decreed by transcendental powers, but have to be collectively agreed upon, two basic principles come to the fore: equality and harm avoidance. Men will enjoin upon each other only such duties they deem in their interest (harm avoidance) and only inasmuch as all can be assured that their individual interests are given equal consideration (equality). To begin with equality: Without good reason nobody will consent to regulations that treat him as an unequal; henceforth, it is deviating from equality—as the simplest "most natural" form of distribution—that needs justification (cf. Tugendhat, 1993);
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reference to God who bestowed higher powers to the king and put each in his own place in a hierarchically ordered society will no longer suffice. Modern philosophers stipulating consensus as the basic criterion for the validity of moral rules (cf. Rawls, 1972; Habermas, 1983), thus granting each individual an equal right to veto, make this core assumption of equality explicit (Dworkin, 1978). Nevertheless, for some time, equality was mistaken for a merely formal procedural prerequisite. In fact, however, it is a substantive modern value, the realization of which has long been struggled for (e.g., by the civil rights movement, by feminists) and still is contested. Given a rational interest in harm avoidance the contents of collectively agreed upon norms can be derived from universally shared characteristics of man. Unlike angels man is vulnerable, unlike saints he is able to wilfully harm others, and unlike instinct-driven animals he is able to refrain from doing so, that is, man is in need of and capable of morality. Under normal conditions, he desires that neither he nor those he cares for are harmed, that is, he is interested in morality. All humans can be harmed directly. Thus, all will wish negative duties (Rawls, 1972, calls them "natural duties") to hold. And given these demand omissions only they can in fact be followed at all times by everybody with respect to everybody. Also, as a social being in need of cooperation, man can be harmed indirectly, for example, if his legitimate expectations are not met. From this fact, culture-specific positive duties are derived that can be summed up by the abstract rule "do your duty" (cf. Gert, 1988). As such, this rule is universally valid. The specific contents, however, vary across roles, cultures, and historical epochs. Promise-keeping exemplifies the logical structure of such a universal rule to fulfill specific duties: Keeping a promise is universally obliging—yet, what one needs to do totally depends on what it was one promised to do. If harm avoidance is the core interest, men will ascribe to moral rules zprima facie validity only, that is, they will allow exceptions whenever by transgressing a norm greater harm—impartially judged—can be prevented. In concrete dilemmas, consensus may not be reached: Empirical prognoses of consequences are uncertain, and in pluralistic societies people will differ in their evaluations of what constitutes greater harm. Therefore, there is a realm of legitimate disagreement on what is the best solution of a moral dilemma. This does not imply relativism: Transgressions that serve the interests of the wrongdoer only are clearly immoral. Yet, strict adherence to rules no longer is the intrinsic value it once was, when God expected absolute obedience. This seemed justified given God's wisdom and benevolence, which guaranteed that, in the long run, for the faithful everything will turn out for the best. With the erosion of this basic trust an "ethics of responsibility" (Weber, 1956) began to emerge: Men develop an interest in flexible context-sensitive norm application based on a more abstract principled moral understanding that guides the distinction between justifiable and illegitimate exceptions to rules.
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To sum up: Due to the process of secularization, equality, and harm avoidance —the core principles of an inner worldly moral understanding—will gain ground. In the light of these, traditional norms are subjected to close scrutiny, and only actions that harm or discriminate others will be banned. Thus, new demarcations between the moral realm and the sphere of personal discretion will arise. Also, moral rules will be attributed a prima facie validity only. In the following, some of these changes in moral understanding will be empirically demonstrated. (1) Focusing on harm avoidance leads to — a contextualization of moral understanding: Rules are ascribed a prima facie validity only, that is, are no longer held to be valid without exception. — recoding of "moral" and "personal" issues: Sexual behavior—once considered the core of morality—is transferred to the personal domain (at least as long as only consenting adults are involved). In contrast, political behavior comes to be moralized, inasmuch as in a democracy each has some say and the consequences concern all. (2) Focusing on equality implies challenging traditional hierarchies in gender and generation relations. (3) Experiencing such changes leads to misunderstandings, specifically to confusions concerning the term and/or constitutive features of morality.
The Empirical Investigation Design of the Study The hypothesized changes in moral understanding are tested in a cohort comparison comprising of three generations: 65 to 85, 40 to 50, and 20 to 30-year-olds. This design is based on two assumptions: - There is individual stability in moral views so that subjects' moral judgments reflect collective understandings prevalent in their formative years. - Secularization in Germany has progressed markedly during the time period considered. I will briefly try to substantiate both assumptions. Individual Moral Stability. There are different hypotheses regarding the changes of sociopolitical attitudes over the life span (Sears, 1981): - Life-long openness: During their life course, individuals tend to continuously update their beliefs and attitudes, that is, the prevailing "Zeitgeist" is the most important determinant for personal outlooks.
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— Persistence: Early socialization influences have an "imprinting" effect. — Life cycle effects: Age is a convenient marker denoting cumulating biographical experiences that shape a person's world view (e.g., "He who is not a communist at 18 has no heart; he who still is a communist at 28 has no brains"). — Sensitive phase: There are specific phases in the life cycle during which attitudes are developed. Once formed, they will remain pretty stable over the life course. From a careful review of pertinent studies, Sears concludes that sociopolitical attitudes evolve during late adolescence and early adulthood years. Although some social moral learning already takes place in childhood, adequate moral judgments presuppose further sociocognitive development and biographical experiences. Thus, only in adolescence are those higher levels of sociocognitive development attained that are prerequisite for grasping basic sociopolitical ideas (cf. Adelson, 1971; Merelman, 1969) and only then does the growing individual begin to take part in the coconstruction of collective meaning systems. Once formed, these attitudes prove remarkably stable during life time, irrespective of individual mobility and conflicting socioeconomic interests or the evolvement of contrary views in public debates. Secularization in Germany. The cohorts to be compared grew up in widely differing sociomoral milieus: Members of the oldest cohort spent their formative late adolescence/early adulthood years between 1935 and 1945, the middle cohort between 1960 and 1970, the youngest between 1980 and 1990. Reviewing national opinion surveys since the early 1950s Kocher (1993) notes a remarkably large generation gap in the old German provinces that opened up during the years of the 68-revolution. It is larger than in other West European countries or the USA because only West Germany experienced such drastic sociohistoric changes (from totalitarianism to democracy) and it is larger than in the new German provinces as these were by-passed by the public debates of the 1960s. In fact, the passing of the German constitution in 1949 did not mark a definite breach from the NS era: Thus, in the mid-1950s still almost one half of the West German population maintained that had it not been for the war, Hitler would have been the greatest statesman; also, antisemitic stereotypes still prevail among members of the older generations (Allensbacher Jahrbuch, 1993, p. 402). Democratization and secularization came to pass only slowly—effected more by the exchange of personnel than by individual changes. Only a very rough and superficial sketch of some aspects of the three historical eras assumed to have been decisive in shaping the sociomoral attitudes of the three cohorts studied can be given. — Nazi era: The Third Reich manifestly advanced secularization taken literally as a process of a separation of state and church. Although in the beginning Hitler had sought and partially found the support of the churches (e.g., Reichskonkordat,
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Deutsche Christen), soon the NS state began to discriminate the churches and to clear public life from religious vestiges: Religious associations and news services were repressed or smashed, monasteries and religious foundations expropriated, denominational schools dissolved, members of religious orders prosecuted with charges of sex or currency offenses, religious services kept under surveillance, and ministers arrested. These antiecclesiastical actions, however, aimed less at dissolving religiousness than at replacing Christian symbols, rituals, and beliefs by Nazi ideology and Nazi practices. Nazi ideology functioned as a pseudoreligion exacting obedience and sacrifice for "higher" values, that is, for values that transcend the individual's personal strivings and limited life span. This ideology was backed by special pseudoreligious rituals, for example, the practice of bestowing mother crosses (Weyrather, 1993). By coupling incentives and threats, this ceremony helped to consolidate the "moral ideals" of sexual chastity, orderliness, propriety, and respectability as well as an essentialist understanding of women's duties. The Nazi pseudoreligion denied individual rights: Persons derive their worth from being part of an encompassing stream of their race's genes. If someone's genes happened (or were maintained) to be afflicted by hereditary diseases (which also included alcoholism, deviant behavior, sexual recklessness, etc.) the "responsibility to the race" "justified" extinction or at least sterilization (Weingart, Kroll, & Bayertz, 1988). The pseudoreligion also denied equality by propagating essentialist conceptions of gender differences: Being a worthy and dutiful mother willing to sacrifice her sons is the very nature of women, just as much as it is the very nature of man to become a heroic combatant and sacrifice himself for the final victory of the German race. — The era of the 68 s: As noted above, the most radical value change in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany took place during the 1960s: There was a drastic increase in political interest; a change in political culture with new forms of political protest emerging; a sharp drop in church membership and religious commitment; a liberalization especially of sexual norms; a rise of postmaterialistic attitudes toward the economic sphere; a preference given to individual over and against collective interests (cf. Kocher, 1993). During these years, the generation gap opened up that has not been bridged since. Although the youth protest movement had not originated in Germany, the conflicts here were particularly intense—heightened by the indignation at the lack of public discussion of the Nazi past. The youth protestors aimed at tearing down this veil of silence ("under the gowns the fug of 1 000 years"). Thus, in the late 1960s the process of secularization truly made headway: The young generation repudiated Church censorship exercised in the name of transcendental powers and rejected the pseudoreligious idealization of a collectivity that had been propagated in Nazi times.
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— The 1980s: The political ideals of the 68-generation, however, still contained traces of salvation hopes albeit directed to inner worldly social goals: The idea of molding society at will had inspired that generation. In confessions of members of the "red army fraction" (RAF), the belief that social justice and peace could be effected by individual actions, if necessary by violent actions, is explicitly expressed. But this reformatory social optimism gradually waned: the recognition of unexpected consequences came to the fore; economic growth had come to a halt; future prospects seemed dim; people began to worry; party loyalty decreased. Habermas (1985) coined the metaphor for this changing "Zeitgeist": the new complexity ("Die neue Unubersichtlichkeit"). To conclude: West Germany may be an especially well-suited case for studying "morality in context." Given that subjects tend to hold on to attitudes developed in their formative years and given that sociohistorical transformations have been especially pronounced in recent German history, an intergenerational comparison may yield a quick-motion picture of the effects of the processes of modernization and secularization that in other Western countries have dragged on over centuries.
Procedure
Sample. The oldest cohort (n = 144) is part of GOLD (Genetically oriented Zifespan study and differential development; cf. Weinert & Geppert, 1998). Subjects were interviewed at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research by staff members. The two younger cohorts (each n = 94) were drawn in a quota sample (using gender, age, and education as criteria) from the old German countries and interviewed by a commercial opinion research agency. Instruments. The study focuses on two aspects of moral change: type of motivation and content of beliefs; only the latter will be reported on below. First, subjects' spontaneous understanding of the concept of morality was explored. The question was: "What do you think of when you hear the word 'morality'? Could you give me an example of behaviour you consider to be clearly immoral. Why do you feel this way?" Then subjects were presented 25 brief vignettes and asked to personally evaluate the behavior depicted and judge its moral relevance. The vignettes represented transgressions of duties toward God (e.g., not having one's child baptized, seceding from Church) and duties toward the self (e.g., considering suicide, failing to develop one's talents); of norms regarding sex roles and the family structure (e.g., homosexuality, working mother, divorce); of "new" (ecological) norms (e.g., recycling, using public transport). Results will be presented concerning the following items only: working
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mother, NSDAP, homosexuality (for a full analysis of all data, cf. Nunner-Winkler & Nikele, 2001). — Working mother: A young woman with two small children works full day. Her husband makes so much money that the family could easily live on his income. — NSDAP: Mr. K. joined the NSDAP in 1935 and became politically active in this party. — Homosexuality: Two men have a homosexual relationship. The questions were: — Personal evaluation: "How do you feel about this situation? Do you think this is ok or not ok? Why do you feel this way?" — Exceptions: "Could you imagine a situation in which you would feel differently? Under what conditions?" — Moral issue: "From your perspective—does this situation involve moral issues or not? Why?" Finally, for a list of 20 proverbs stating folk wisdoms or recommending rules of conduct, subjects had to indicate whether in their childhood they had heard each of them often, sometimes, or never.
Results (1) Contextualized Moral Understanding The following hypothesis is to be tested: With modernization and with secularization, people will ascribe to norms a prima facie validity only. Thus, younger generations will have a more flexible norm understanding, that is, will be more willing to allow for exceptions. Two types of data are pertinent to this issue: Familiarity with proverbs expressing generalized folk wisdoms, on the one hand, and the definition of morality and the specification of immoral behavior, on the other. Proverbs. The everyday use of proverbs is declining over the generations. While such sayings were quite familiar to most of the oldest subjects, many of the youngest do not even know them. On average, the difference between the oldest and the youngest subjects who had never heard the individual proverbs amounts to over 20 percent. The drop is especially marked for those sayings that refer to God's power (e.g., God's mills grind slowly—more than 3 0 % difference), or to very pronounced gender or generational inequalities (up to 40 % difference, see below). Already at the turn of the century, Durkheim interpreted such a decline in use of proverbs, that is, of generalized dicta that irrespective of context are deemed to hold without exception as an indicator
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for modernization: "Advanced societies ... not only ... do not produce any new proverbs, but the old ones die out little by little, lose their proper acceptation and end by even no longer being communicated ... These short formulas end ... by becoming much too narrow to encompass the diversity of individual sentiments." (Durkheim, 1966, p. I69ff, see also Lindenberg, in press) Definition ofMorality and Examples of Immoral Behavior. Over the generations, there is a clear trend toward defining morality in more abstract and, at the same time, more individualized terms. While most of the older subjects simply refer to concrete rules (e.g., not to lie, steal, murder, have an affair) or virtues (e.g., sincerity, faithfulness), the younger subjects either emphasize individual judgment (e.g., It is a question of personal attitude) or name abstract principles or functions (e.g., concerns social life, is necessary for social functioning). This difference is reflected in the way immoral behavior is conceptualized. If morality is defined by clear-cut rules, it suffices to name transgressions. If, however, rules allow exceptions, more abstract principles are needed to decide on the justifiability of an exception. Describing immoral acts then requires the specification of concrete contexts and aggravating conditions that allow no excuse whatsoever. Thus, when requested to cite examples for immoral behavior, most of the oldest subjects simply enumerated transgressions of moral rules (e.g., stealing, lying, etc.). Only 32 percent described concrete circumstances (e.g., to deceive the elderly/ to take food away from someone who is hungry). The percentage of subjects contextualizing the immoral act rose to 38 percent in the middle and 55 percent in the youngest generation (e.g., to steal money from someone who is known to be in need/ a sales agent talking East Germans who are not used to such marketing practice into buying uncalled-for goods). Some of the concretely contextualized examples of immoral behavior given by younger subjects reflect a highly developed ego-syntonic moral sensitivity inasmuch as (even admissible) acts are considered immoral, not because they infringe on given rules, but because they violate the constitutive principle of morality —equal respect (e.g., If a woman tourist sunbathes topless on Greek islands; this is immoral—not because she is bare, but because she violates norms that hold in another country. She does not consider the feelings of the Greeks/If a man tries to become acquainted with a woman, not because he takes a personal interest in her, but because he wants to come into contact with an important man she happens to be acquainted with). To conclude: There is a sociohistorical change toward a more contextualized moral understanding. For the younger cohorts, generalized dicta become increasingly obsolete, and strict rule obedience is no longer seen as an intrinsic value. Rather, morality is understood in a more abstract principled way. In consequence, concretely specified situations are required for an unequivocal moral evaluation of an act.
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(2) Recoding of "Moral" and "Personal" Issues
The hypothesis to be tested is: Once morality is no longer derived from God's will or natural law, but from rational consent, traditional norms will be subjected to close scrutiny, and only actions that harm or discriminate others will be banned. This will result in a reevaluation of sexual and political behavior. Sexual Morality. The content of examples for immoral behaviorwds analyzed. The topic most often mentioned in the oldest cohort was sexuality. Thirty-eight percent of the oldest subjects (vs. 27% in the middle and 15 % in the youngest cohort) used sexual "misdemeanor" to illustrate immoral behavior, the charge being: too much sex—too fast, with the wrong partner, in the wrong place (e.g., sleeping with a different partner every night/living together without being married/sleeping with a man you have just known for two days/topless dancing). In contrast, younger subjects—if they mentioned sexuality at all—focused on harm done to third parties (e.g., sexual offences against children/kidnapping women for brothels). Similarly, in defining morality, older subjects often referred to rules or virtues with sexual connotations (e.g., marital faithfulness/chastity/decency/propriety). All in all, almost one half of the oldest subjects (vs. less than one fifth of the youngest) identify the core of morality with the regulation of sexual behavior and consider suppressing sexuality an intrinsic value: Unlicensed sexual enjoyment is seen as a wrong in, and of, itself. In the youngest generation, the linkage between morality and sexual control has largely been severed: As long as no harm is done, sexual behavior is classed with personal issues. The fact that sexuality has been shifted from the moral to the personal domain can be seen even more clearly in the responses to the item "homosexuality": About one third of the oldest subjects (vs. only 2% of the youngest) strictly condemn homosexuality (e.g., "This is criminal/sinful/unnatural/repulsive"); 44 percent (vs. 8% of the youngest) somewhat mitigate their condemnation by offering excuses (e.g., "It's not their fault—it's hereditary/they were born that way/they are sick—it's a pathological disposition"). Less than 10 percent of the oldest subjects (vs. 60% of the youngest) fully accept homosexuality (e.g., It's a question of pleasure not of morality/if they feel attracted to each other it's perfectly ok to have a relation) or morally justify a right to one's personal sexual style (e.g., People ought to be more tolerant/one has to accept wherever love arises). Eighteen percent of the oldest (vs. 9% of the youngest) qualified their acceptance (e.g., As long as they keep their affair in private/have an enduring relationship). To conclude: With modernization, morality increasingly focuses on harm avoidance. As far as sexual behavior is concerned this implies an extended range of individ-
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Table 1 Judgments Passed on Early NSDAP Support Evaluation Motive
Inner conviction Self-serving interest
Acceptable
Wrong
Idealist (1) Careerist (3)
Ardent perpetrator (2) Opportunist (4)
ual discretion. The personal domain, however, is not only widened—with respect to political behavior a reverse trend can be noted: With democratization, responsibility for political decisions increasingly comes to be ascribed to individuals with the effect that the realm of politics is becoming moralized. Political Morality. Responses to the item "NSDAP" (the Nazi Party) may provide a test for this claim. In a first coding procedure, the arguments used to back judgments on Mr. K. joining the NSDAP in 1935 were classified by content. Most arguments referred to motives whereby either "inner convictions" or "self-serving interests" were imputed to Mr. K. Type of motive and direction of evaluation, however, turned out to be independent (cf. Table 1). Thus, for some, a person who joined from conviction is not to be blamed (1)— rather, he who joined for opportunistic reasons is the one who committed a wrong (4) (e.g., "If he was convinced that it was right one can't morally reproach him. If, however, he acted on opportunistic concerns—that would be blameable"). Others, in contrast, condemn someone who joined from inner conviction—given the kind of conviction in question (2); they are more willing to be lenient with someone who joined for strategic reasons or acted under pressure (3) (e.g., "He was an ardent perpetrator and this party was aggressive and fascist and wronged Jews, foreigners, gipsies—that was immoral/It's not immoral—many joined; sometimes even opponents did because they worried about their career"). Thus, in the moral evaluation, both "idealism" and "opportunism" can function as an aggravating as well as an alleviating factor. Focusing on "idealism" expresses adherence to an "ethics of conviction" (Gesinnungsethik): What counts is the purity of the mind, the formal willingness to act upon one's persuasion, and to be consistent. The content of the persuasion does not matter. The counterposition focuses on the content of the decision: One may condone a man who entered to avoid risking his job, yet would surely condemn him had he joined because he shared the party's inhuman brutal views.
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Also, reference to an alleged lack of knowledge was put to contrasting uses. This argument was brought up both as a way of denying the moral relevance of the issue and as a way of excusing people (e.g., "It's got nothing to do with morality—one could not know at the time/It was immoral—but people did not realize"). Thus, a sentence by sentence analysis of the cognitive content of the arguments produces inconsistent results. Therefore, a new coding strategy was devised focusing on the pragmatic function of an utterance (illocutionary force) rather than on its semantic content (locutionary aspect) (cf. Austin, 1962). Responses were classified according to the stance a speaker took. The following positions were distinguished: - Justification: In this account, the speaker accepts responsibility for the act in question, yet denies that it was offensive or claims that at least it was not as offensive as it may appear (cf. Semin & Manstead, 1983, p. 25). This is done by relating the act to some other norm holding in the society at large or in specific subgroups that depicts or defines the behavior as morally neutral. In other words: The speaker provides a socially acceptable description of an apparently immoral action (p. 89). In the responses to the NSDAP item, three types of justifications are found: • Justification by reference to persuasions: Mr. K. is not to be condemned because he followed his true conscience. • Justification by normalization: Mr. K. is not to be condemned because he did what everybody did; what at the time nobody could have known to be wrong; what was normal behavior at that time. • Justification by segmentation: Mr. K. is not to be condemned because the act in question does not belong to the moral domain. Given that joining a political party is a personal issue, following one's own inclinations or interests is perfectly legitimate (e.g., He simply wanted to keep his job. That is not a question of morality. Morality is more a matter of personal relationships/Political affiliation is a purely personal matter). - Excuse: The speaker concedes the badness of the act, yet does not accept (full) responsibility by pleading ignorance or powerlessness (e.g., "It was wrong, yet— they did not know at the time, they were not enlightened/Maybe he was forced"). - Condemnation: Condemnation is a third person analogy to the first person category of apology described by Semin and Manstead. In apology, the agent openly admits to having violated a norm and takes full responsibility for this transgression. In condemnation, the act is explicitly stamped as unjustifiable and the actor is attributed (full or partial) responsibility (e.g., full condemnation: Already at that time, the NSDAP held racist and military views—one could recognize that those were inhuman values; mitigated condemnation: It is immoral, as we know today. At that time, however, people were made stupid by the state).
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— Abstention from judgment: Some subjects refused to pass a moral judgment on account of the lack of context information. Various pieces of information deemed necessary for sound judgments are enumerated (e.g., motives/actions/circumstances, etc.) Almost one half of the oldest subjects justified Mr. K. (18% by persuasion, 12% by normalization, 17% by segmentation, 5% used more than one argument); in contrast, only 24 percent in the middle versus 12 percent in the youngest cohort found his behavior acceptable (4% vs. 2% justified it by persuasion, 4% vs. 5% by normalization, 16 % vs. 5 % by segmentation). Younger subjects more frequently condemned Mr. K. by referring to inviolable human rights and maintaining that one could have known. Admittedly, condemning others for wrongs one was in no position to have committed oneself might be considered cheap. This may have motivated some of the middle-aged versus young subjects to explicitly or implicitly refrain from passing a judgment (e.g., do not know: 12% vs. 21%; depends on context: 25% vs. 28%). Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the "excuse" position was only rarely taken (by 19% of the oldest, 9% of the middle-aged and 12% of the youngest subjects). After all, this position might have allowed to distance oneself from the NS regime without tormenting self-incrimination or self-righteous condemnation. These different positions reflect differences in moral understanding: By referring to "idealist" motives in justifying Mr. K., many older subjects show that they focus on the "purity" of the mind only and totally neglect content. Also, older subjects often deny the moral relevance of political issues. Younger subjects, in contrast, more often appeal to substantive issues (e.g., human rights), and tend to assign political activities to the moral realm, given that they concern human welfare.
(3) Equality The claim that equality is the core value of modern moral understanding will be exemplified by changes in the relationship between the generations and the sexes. Adult-Child-Relations. All the items from the list of proverbs that define agedependent status differences are becoming increasingly outmoded. This is especially true of the conventional greeting ritual that used to oblige boys to bow and girls to curtsy to adults, and of the rule that children are automatically to pick up objects adults dropped. Between 51 and 70 percent of the two older cohorts report having regularly heard these admonitions; in contrast, only between 15 and 20 percent of the youngest even knew that such rules existed. Altogether, in recent times, children are "put in place" much less frequently than used to be the case.
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Gender-Relations. Many of the proverbs defining gender-specific behavioral standards (e.g., "A lady does not cross her legs") are hardly known by the younger subjects. Surprisingly, however, it is the oldest cohort who least often has heard some of the items (e.g., "A lady does not smoke/put on makeup in public/girls do not fight"). As can be concluded from subjects' spontaneous comments, the reason is that in those days such behaviors were so unthinkable that there was no need to forbid them. This suggests the following steps in the sociohistorical process of value change: At the outset, specific behavioral patterns are so firmly institutionalized that they are seen as "natural," and their normative basis remains unnoticed; the first deviations to occur will provoke intense admonitions; finally, the new behavior becomes accepted and is normalized. In the present case, the change led to a relaxation in the enforcement of sex stereotyped behavior. This trend toward greater acceptance of gender equality is also reflected in responses to the item "working mother." Again, the two-step coding procedure—by position and argument—was used because contrary evaluations were backed by the same arguments. Thus, the motive "working for money" by some was taken as indicating objectionable materialistic motives, by others as reflecting a praiseworthy readiness to help out in case of need. And reversely, the motive "working for intrinsic reasons" by some was used to condemn (e.g., "This cry for 'self-realization' is sheer egotism") and by others to justify the working mother (e.g., "It is acceptable if she is so highly committed to her work"). First, subjects were classified according to their position. — Condemnation: with or without exception (e.g., "It is wrong. Children need their mother, not a substitute person. ['Exception?'] Only if they are in financial needs/ She's irresponsible towards her children—children have a right to being educated well and cared for. Parents have the responsibility. ['Exception?'] No, this is absolutely wrong"). — Justification: with or without restriction (e.g., "It's ok. I would never forbid her to work if she is capable and wants to work. ['Exception?'] Yes, if the children suffer from it/It's ok—men and women have equal rights. It's good for her personal development to go to work. ['Exception?'] No"). Then the arguments were classified into the following categories: — Condemnation • because of neglectfulness (e.g., "Children have a right to their mother/the mother is irresponsible/she's got no right to work"); • because of negative consequences to the children or to society (e.g., "Children will turn drunkards/become criminals/suffer/need their mother/need security— or: She should not take scarce jobs away in times of unemployment/She causes costs—the state has to subsidize kindergartens").
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— Reasons justifying exceptions • economic concerns (e.g., "If they are in debts/want to build a house/if the husband is unemployed"); • mother's needs (e.g., "If she's highly committed to her work/if she suffers by staying home all the time"); • adequate substitute care (e.g., "If children are well cared for/if grandparents are close"). — Justification!acceptance • by reference to women's needs (e.g., "She wants recognition/fulfillment/independence"); • by reference to equal rights (e.g., "Men and women have equal rights/it's a personal decision whether the husband or the wife takes care of the children"). — Restrictive conditions • Reference to negative consequences (e.g., "Child suffers/is sick/is handicapped/ gets poor grades in school/the family suffers"). Over the generations, there is a shift from condemning working mothers to accepting them. While condemnation is extensively argued for by drawing on deontological arguments, that is, mother's duties or children's rights (oldest: 53%, middle: 38%, youngest: 25 %) and/or utilitarian concerns, that is, children's sufferings (oldest: 47%, middle: 25%, youngest: 16%), the counterposition often is simply stated implying that the item is treated not as a moral, but a personal issue (e.g., "People are free to decide how they wish to lead their lives/split up household chores/organize family affairs"). Among the young subjects, only a few bring up moral concerns when making a deontological argument for gender equality, or discussing possible restrictive conditions. Harm avoidance is the only justification forwarded for limiting the general principle of noninterference with personal liberties. To conclude: Most of the older subjects believe that caring duties accrue to mothers by virtue of their being women and having children. Many of the younger subjects, in contrast, frame the problem of child-care, not in terms of ascriptive duties, but in terms of good household organization. Given their basic assumption of gender equality and the more abstract principle of harm avoidance, several alternative solutions to the problem of child-care can pass as acceptable (i.e., the father, grandparents, domestics, etc., take care of the children). Again, one may try to reconstruct the actual process of value change. Starting point is the dominant norm that keeps mothers from working. In fact, in 1973, 41 percent of the subjects older than 60 years (in contrast to 22% of the subjects under 30 years) would even recommend that a law be passed forbidding mothers with children under 10 years of age to hold a job (Allensbacher Jahrbuch, 1983, p. 386). In public, norms can only be delegitimized in normative discourses, that is, by appealing to counter values. In the case of the "working mother," the idea of gender equality
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functioned as a countervalue that allowed to call the assumption of a priori gendered duties in question. A more empirically oriented utilitarian debate will then substitute for the former deontological discourse. In the long run, the issue is taken out of the moral domain altogether and classified under the personal domain. A moral issue will be seen to arise only in the case of harmful consequences.
Confusions About Morality Since World War II, far reaching changes in moral understanding have taken place, especially in Germany—the nation late in partaking in democratization. Such changes are accompanied and/or effected by public debates and intense conflicts that also produce misunderstandings, blunders, and fallacies. Examples are interindividual contradictions in the use of the term "morality" and intraindividual confusions about the substantive meaning of morality. I will illustrate some of these mix-ups by comparing personal and moral evaluations of the item "working mother," and drawing upon subjects' initial explications of their understanding of morality. There are various consistent positions: — Moral condemnation: The item is assigned to the moral domain; the behavior in question is declared to be morally wrong; the judgment is justified by moral concerns (e.g., neglect of duties, harm committed), and objectivity is claimed for this judgment. To give an example: "She wrongs the children. It is true, there is a problem: she may feel malcontent or want to be independent, yet in fact, it is wrong. ('Moral issue?') Yes, it's got to do with morality. It's immoral. Children will turn into criminals or will take drugs." The subject acknowledges conflicting aspects (the mother's incompatible desires), yet claims strict priority for an overriding deontological concern (children's right to having their mother fulfill her duty), and additionally backs this by a utilitarian argument (negative consequences arising from wronging others). — Acceptance: The item is considered to belong to the personal domain. It raises questions of the "good life" that are within personal discretion and—at least prima facie—have nothing to do with morality. Two quotes may illustrate this position: "It's her decision—provided the children are good taken care of. ('Moral issue?') No, everyone has to decide for herself what kind of life she wants to lead. "/"One of the parents should stay home. It's a personal decision—in the family. ('Moral issue?') No, it's a question of organizing everyday life. Morality would only enter if the children were totally left to themselves." Both subjects clearly demarcate the moral from the personal domain and reckon the issue of a working mother to the personal domain—the first without qualification, the second with the proviso that no harm ensues.
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— True tolerance: The subject personally objects to working mothers, yet accepts that others may differ in their value priorities (agree to disagree). A position will figure as "true tolerance" only if the reasons backing personal condemnation are based on subjective evaluations and do not refer to neglectfulness or grave harm done to third parties (e.g., "It's not absolutely wrong. She wants independence. ['Moral issue?'] No, it's a question of how to lead one's life, not a question of morality. She does, however, waste a wonderful time. I would not do that"). There are also inconsistentpositions, however, that bespeak widespread confusions with respect to morality. — Ambiguity of the term "morality": As has been shown, many older subjects have a restricted understanding of the term "morality," identifying it with social regulations of sexual behavior. Some even refuse to classify as "moral" behavior they strictly condemn on what would normally be considered moral grounds, for example, neglecting one's duties and committing grave harm. The following responses of one subject exemplify such a narrow definition of the concept of morality: "('Examples of immoral behaviour?') Necking in public; bathing naked; three persons going to bed together. ('Working mother?') It's wrong. The mother ought to stay home. ('Moral issue?') No, admittedly the children may be harmed, but a moral problem? As long as their marriage remains harmonious, it's not a question of morality." The fact that morality used to have these sexual connotations may be one of the reasons that some of the younger subjects totally reject the term as "an outdated concept," an "uninteresting word," as "Philistine," or explicitly distance themselves from "moralizing attitudes," from the "pseudomorality," and "the double standards invented by society in order to put down others." This rejection of the word "morality" or its (conventional) meaning sometimes goes along with a strong commitment to (what normally would be called "moral") standards (e.g., "['Family X refuses to sort their waste for recycling.'] This is totally wrong. ['Moral issue?'] No, that's got nothing to do with morality. It's simply irresponsible in view of life chances for future generations/['married woman has an affair']. That's not a question of morality—it's a question of reliability or insincerity"). — Pseudotolerance: Some subjects—especially in the oldest cohort—strictly condemn a piece of behavior on moral grounds (i.e., neglect of duties, doing harm), yet, at the same time, invoke a principle of tolerance or refrain from passing a moral judgment (e.g., "['Working mother']. Wrong. Children need their mother, but these young women want everything. ['Moral issue?'] No, it's a question of personal opinion"). This discretion, however, mainly seems to function as a cover for their unwillingness to stand up for their own positions and risk conflicts. Pseudotolerance, that is, holding on to one's own moral convictions, yet waivering any claim to prescriptivity, is a way of coming to terms with sociohistorical trans-
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formations. Especially for the older subjects, this may be a useful strategy inasmuch as it allows them to simultaneously maintain self-consistency and harmonious relations with the younger generations despite their widely diverging attitudes. Nevertheless, there are costs to this position. The intellectual task of disentangling the complexities of the moral principle of tolerance is shunned. While tolerance is called for in cases where merely conventional regulations or personal issues are concerned, it is inappropriate to tolerate wilfully or thoughtlessly committed injuries. Failing to make such distinctions may (cognitively) lead to moral relativism and (motivationally) to moral indifference: Even when real wrongs are committed, people will abstain from taking a stance. Using the concept of conscience in a totally content-free manner functions as a typical pseudomoral excuse for such a strategy of avoiding conflicts (e.g., "['Working mother']. That's definitely bad for the family. She ought to forego her career. ['Exception?'] No, if the husband makes enough money there should be no exception. ['Moral issue?'] No, it's up to the partners to decide. They have to make it consistent with their own conscience"). With respect to the item "working mother," almost one third of the subjects held an inconsistent position, that is, they condemned the behavior on moral grounds, yet excluded the issue from the moral domain, or stripped morality of any universalizable prescriptivity.
Conclusion With secularization, morality needs inner worldly justifications. As a consequence, equality and a shared interest in harm avoidance come to the fore which leads to changes in moral understanding: Strict rule obedience is replaced by context sensitive applications of general moral principles. A reclassification takes place: Behavior that does no harm to third parties is classed with the personal domain (e.g., sexual behavior among consenting adults); behavior with potentially harmful consequences for others comes to be reckoned under the moral domain (e.g., political behavior). Equality comes to be interpreted more extensively, that is, inequalities in the distributions of rights and duties justified only by ascriptive criteria (e.g., age, sex) loose legitimacy. Thus, rather than morality being on the decline, a new moral understanding gradually emerges. This process of sociocultural transformation is accompanied by misunderstandings. As an act of protest against too narrowly conventionalized definitions of morality, some persons drop the concept altogether; as a way of avoiding conflicts others waiver its core characteristic—namely, prescriptivity. The present report focused on changes in the cognitive understanding of morality. As the full data set shows, there are also changes in the structure of moral motivation
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(Nunner-Winkler, 2004): Across the generations, strict superego controls and prereflexively shaped conformity need dispositions recede and come to be replaced by more ego-syntonic modes of moral motivation. There is an affinity between the cognitive and the motivational changes in moral understanding: While one can only submit to concrete rules that are set by authorities and literally internalized in early childhood, one can more willingly follow norms that are derived from the rational will of all concerned and that—in the interest of minimizing harm—allow for contextsensitive application. Again, these changes indicate not a corruption of morality, but rather more voluntary forms of moral commitment.
References Adelson, J. (1971). The political imagination of the young adolescent. Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Early Adolescence, 100, 1013—1051. AllensbacherJahrbuch der Demoskopie 1978-1983 (1983). Vol. 8, ed. by E. Noelle-Neumann & E. Piel. Miinchen: Saur. Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie 1984-1992(1993). Vol. 9, ed. by E. Noelle-Neumann & R. Kocher. Miinchen: Saur. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2nd ed. 1975). Durkheim, E. (1966). The division of labor in society. New York: Free Press. Dworkin, R. (1978). Taking rights seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gert, B. (1988). Morality: A new justification of the moral rules. New York: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. (1983). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1985). Die neue Unubersichtlichkeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Kocher, R. (1993). 40 Jahre Bundesrepublik: Der lange Weg. In E. Noelle-Neumann & R. Kocher (Eds.), Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie 1984-1992 (Vol. 9, pp. 400410). Miinchen: Saur. Lindenberg, S. M. (in press). Norms and values: How do they work and does the school have an important function? In W. Veugelers, M. H. Bosman, & A. Kassenberg (Eds.), Destrijd om het curriculum. Leuven-Appeldoorn, The Netherlands: Garant. Liibbe, H. (1978, April). Holzwege der Kulturrevolution [Stellungnahme zu den Thesen "Mut zur Erziehung," in: Lehrerzeitung B.W., 1978, 9, 255-256]. Schulintern, 8-11. Maclntyre, A. (1984). Is patriotism a virtue? In A. Maclntyre (Ed.), The Lindley lectures (pp. 84-102). Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas. Maclntyre, A. (1985). After virtue. London: Duckworth. Merelman, R. M. (1969). The development of political ideology: A framework for the analysis of political socialization. American Political Science Review, 63, 75—93. Nunner-Winkler, G. (2004). Sociohistoric changes in the structure of moral motivation. In D. K. Lapsley & D. Narvaez (Eds.), Moral development, selfand identity (pp. 299-333). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Nunner-Winkler G., & Nikele, M. (2001). Moralische Differenz oder geteilte Werte? Empirische Befunde zur Gleichheits-/Differenz-Debatte. In B. Heintz (Ed.), Geschlechtersoziologie (pp. 108-135). Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag (Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderband 41). Rawls, J. (1972). A theory of justice. London: Oxford University Press. Sears, D. O. (1981). Life-stage effects on attitude change, especially among the elderly. In S. B. Kiesler, J. N . Morgan, & V. Kincade Oppenheimer (Eds.), Aging: Social change (pp. 183-204). New York: Academic Press. Semin, G., & Manstead, A. S. R. (1983). The accountability of conduct: A social psychological analysis. New York: Academic Press. Szczypiorski, A. (1997). From the opening address: War of extermination. The crimes of the Armed Forces 1941—1944. Unpublished manuscript, University of Munich. Taylor, C. (1989). Cross-purposes: The liberal-communitarian debate. In N. L. Rosenblum (Ed.), Liberalism and the moral life (pp. 159—182). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tugendhat, E. (1993). Vorlesungen u'ber Ethik. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Weber, M. (1956). Der Beruf zur Politik. Soziologie, Weltgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik. Stuttgart: Kroner. Weinert, F. E., & Geppert, U. (1998). Genetisch orientierte Lebensspannenstudie zur differentiellen Entwicklung (GOLD): Report Nr. 2. Erste Ergebnisse der Studie. Miinchen: MaxPlanck-Institut fiir psychologische Forschung. Weingart, P., Kroll, J., & Bayertz, K. (1988). Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Weyrather, I. (1993). Muttertag undMutterkreuz. Der Kult um die "deutsche Mutter" im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer.
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
13 Is Community Compatible with Autonomy? Cultural Ideals Versus Empirical Realities Joan G. Miller
Both in social criticism and in psychological theory more generally, importance is placed on the need to formulate systems that integrate an emphasis on community with an emphasis on autonomy. Such an integration is presented not merely as an ideal but as an empirical orientation that may be observed in individual psychological functioning. The present paper critically explores the extent to which an integration of community and autonomy is achieved by individuals in the domain of interpersonal morality. The paper highlights the need to be aware of culturally-specific assumptions that inform theory and research in this area as well as calls attention to the compromises that occur as community and autonomy are embodied in individual moral outlooks. The paper is organized into four sections. In the first two sections, I critically examine ideals of community and of autonomy offered in recent social criticism and psychological theory and discuss respects in which these same ideals inform work from a morality of caring perspective. The third section presents results from our program of cross-cultural research on interpersonal morality, documenting cultural variability in the ways in which community and autonomy are understood. In the final section, I argue for the need to recognize the tradeoffs that occur as concerns with community and with autonomy are weighted in individual moral judgments and the importance of cultural views of the self and of associated cultural practices in this weighting.
The Integration of Community and Autonomy as an Ideal The view that integrating community and autonomy represents an ideal rests on analyses that identify a lack of community as a deficit of modern individualism and an oppression of autonomy as a deficit of traditional communal cultural forms. The ideal
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form is portrayed as one that retains the respective strengths of individualism and collectivism (i.e., a sense of autonomy and of community) while avoiding their respective deficits (i.e., isolation and oppression of the self) (Guisinger & Blatt, 1994; Kagitcibasi, 1996). One of the earliest formulations of this type of stance is found in Tonnies' contrast of the Gemeinschafi orientation characteristic of traditional rural agrarian societies with the Gesellschaft orientation characteristic of modern industrial urban societies (Snarey & Keljo, 1991; Tonnies, 1971/1931; Tonnies, 1973/1893). Grounded in tradition, the former orientation is seen as one in which relationships are treated as ends in themselves, with these relationships being enduring, immutable, and based on kinship bonds and other in-group ties. The Gesellschaft orientation, in contrast, treats relationships in mechanical terms as means to the realization of individual ends and as based on artificial associations. Tonnies posits an evolutionary stance in which there is societal movement from Gesellschaft through Gemeinschafi to a "new- Gemeinschafi." An ideal form, the new- Gemeinschafi incorporates aspects of traditional notions of community, yet is based upon rational ethics and a commitment to a world-wide rather than a purely local political order. As Tonnies (1971/1931) articulates this vision: This communal natural law would establish as supreme principle that men, as rational beings, are united in narrower or wider circles, collectives and corporations for protection and defense, that thus all would stand up for one, and one for all. Everybody would have a natural right not only of existence but of participation, with corresponding obligations, (p. 207) In the realm of social criticism, a similar type of stance may be found in the work of communitarian theorists (e.g., Baumeister, 1986, 1991; Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985; Cushman, 1990; Sampson, 1977, 1988, 1989; Sandel, 1982; Smith, 1994; Taylor, 1989). This work offers a critique of the flaws of modern individualistic outlooks, particularly as emphasized in U.S. society. Thus, for example, in an ethnographic study of society and character in a contemporary U.S. population, Bellah and his colleagues (1985) noted the relative absence of a sense of commitment to the local and global community. Likewise, Cushman (1990) pointed to the "empty self " that had emerged "because of the loss of family, community, and tradition" and Smith (1994) to the development of an "inflated self" in which goals, such as self-actualization, have come to replace past visions of larger purposes to human existence. It is assumed in these views that extreme individualism gives rise to a range of interpersonal and intrapsychic costs, such as information overload, loneliness, and lack of purpose. Most social critics portray the ideal solution to this cultural problem of individualism as a stance which retains the valuable features of individualism while giving greater weight to community. Thus, for example, the political philosopher Etzioni (1993) por-
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trayed the ideal as a "communitarianism" that embodies local communal bonds and responsibilities to the larger community yet that avoids oppression and protects autonomy. Similarly, Sampson (1989) argued that the "self-contained individualism" of modern American culture needs to be superseded by an "ensembled individualism" which incorporates an openness to interpersonal commitments within an individualistic frame. This same type of cultural critique of individualism is increasingly evident in psychological models of healthy human functioning (Guisinger & Blatt, 1994). In these theories, overly individualistic or overly coUectivist modes of adaptation are contrasted with what are regarded as more adaptive integrative stances. For example, in the domain of attachment, the optimum mode of functioning is portrayed as a "secure" orientation that integrates connection and autonomy while avoiding the isolation of an overly autonomous pattern or the extreme dependence of an insecure resistant pattern (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Similarly, in the domain of parenting, the most adaptive style is portrayed as an "authoritative" mode, an orientation that communicates a sense of control and autonomy while avoiding the excesses of overregulation of autonomy of an "authoritarian" style and the total absence of control and guidance of an "autonomous" style (Baumrind, 1971, 1980). This concern with giving greater weight to community may also be seen in psychological models of motivation. For example, Deci and Ryan (1985, 1991) forwarded a self-determination theory of motivation which maintains that the most adaptive mode of motivation occurs when individuals have so fully internalized social expectations that they subjectively experience them in endogenous terms. In this way, the self-determination theory gives weight to fulfilling role obligations, but emphasizes the importance of doing this in a freely given manner rather than from a sense of social pressure (Chirkov & Ryan, 2001). In terms of critique, questions may be raised about the cultural grounding of the various theories discussed. Although they are formulated as universals, they arguably appear, in fact, to be biased in the direction of Western individualistic cultural views of self. As Kagitcibasi observed "... even the most outspoken American critics of individualism when they propose alternatives, coin new terms that qualify individualism, rather than replacing it with another construct" (Kagitcibasi, 1996, p. 58). Whereas the psychological theories appear well-suited to characterizing the behavior of middle-class European-American cultural populations, there is increasing evidence that they may not fully account for patterns of psychological functioning found in cultural and subcultural populations emphasizing contrasting cultural beliefs, values, and practices (Miller, 2004). Thus, for example, Puerto Rican mothers have been shown to place greater value on the anxious/avoidant pattern of attachment in interpreting this type of behavior as evidence of the child's relatedness to their parents rather than as evidence of the child's dependency (Harwood, Miller, & Irizarry, 1995;
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see also Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott, Miyake, & Morelli, 2000). Work is also indicating that in African-American communities, the authoritarian rather than the authoritative pattern of parenting tends to be associated with most adaptive outcomes (DeaterDeckard & Dodge, 1997). Similarly, among Korean samples, stricter patterns of parenting rather than more autonomous ones are linked to greater perceived parental warmth (Rohner & Pettengill, 1985). In terms of motivation, research has shown that among Asian-Americans, but not among European-Americans, meeting the expectations of parents or of one's social group may give rise to more endogenous forms of motivation than does purely voluntaristic behavior (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999). Concerns may also be raised that the communitarian theoretical frameworks treat the integration of community and autonomy as nonproblematic to achieve. Thus, for example, communitarian social critics tend to pay little attention to possible drawbacks in the integration of community and autonomy which they propose and tend not to consider the possibility that different ideals for such an integration may be formulated. Likewise, the quality of interpersonal responsiveness observed in the psychological functioning of populations who display secure attachment, authoritative parenting, or self-determined motivation tends to be treated as an optimum. Little consideration is given to the drawbacks of these forms or to possible strengths that may be observed in contrasting modes of psychological functioning.
Community and Autonomy in the Morality of Caring Promise of Framework
The justice framework of Kohlberg that has long dominated psychological research on morality gives priority to issues of justice and tends to neglect interpersonal concerns (Kohlberg, 1984). Within the Kohlbergian framework, responsibilities to meet the needs of family and friends are accorded a status that is assumed to be subordinate to that of justice—that is, as superogatory expectations based on beneficence concerns or as personal bonds based on particularistic relationships. Some indication that Kohlberg himself was not fully satisfied with this treatment of interpersonal morality may be seen in his openness to Gilligan's morality of caring perspective in the years before his death (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983). While rejecting many of the cultural criticisms of his model, Kohlberg credited Gilligan with identifying a missing element in his justice theory. The missing element identified by Gilligan was that of community. Whereas Kohlberg's framework emphasized only justice and individual rights, Gilligan's framework provided a needed complement in its attention to responsibilities for meeting
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the needs of others (Gilligan, 1977, 1982; Gilligan, Ward, & Taylor, 1988; Gilligan & Wiggins, 1988). The morality of caring model rejects traditional collectivist approaches to community as oppressing the self, and proposes an integration of community and autonomy. Within the morality of caring framework, conventional rolebased orientations are regarded as flawed. Although they are acknowledged to embody a robust sense of community, this is seen as achieved at the high cost of oppressing the self. As Gilligan characterizes such an orientation: The conventional feminine voice emerges with great clarity, defining the self and proclaiming its worth on the basis of the ability to care for and protect others ... The strength of this position lies in its capacity for caring: the limitation of this position lies in the restriction it imposes on direct expression. (Gilligan, 1982, p. 79) This type of traditional approach to responsibility is also criticized as giving rise to a childlike passivity, insecurity, and the absence of true responsibility for action: The logic of this position is confused in that the morality of mutual care is embedded in the psychology of dependence ... The woman become suspended in a paralysis of initiative with respect to both action and thought. Thus Denise speaks of herself as "just going along with the tide." (Gilligan, 1982, p. 82) In this view, the individual has been forced to abandon care for herself with the resultant psychic costs of feeling manipulated and betrayed. In the first formulations of her theory, Gilligan (1982) made strong developmental claims. In a model paralleling the Kohlbergian scheme, she proposed a developmental progression through a self-interested stance to a conventional conformist approach to a more adequate caring perspective. Although in her later work Gilligan retreated from this developmental position, she has not modified her view that traditional approaches to community are flawed. In Gilligan's model, the morality of caring orientation represents a form that has overcome the deficits both of traditional role-based orientations and of purely selfcentered stances and that may be considered, in this sense, as an ideal. Its structure resembles the post Gemeinschaft orientation in Tonnies' scheme as well as the various ideals posited by communitarian critics. In particular, the morality of caring orientation retains the emphasis on interpersonal responsiveness, identified as a strength of traditional role-based approaches to family and friendship obligations, while avoiding its deficits of loss of self, lack of responsibility, and psychological stress. Emphasis is placed on overcoming what is portrayed as the false opposition between self and other and on realizing that it is possible simultaneously to meet the needs of others and one's own needs: Once obligation extends to include the self as well as others, the disparity between selfishness and responsibility dissolves. Although the conflict between self and other remains, the moral problem is reconstructured in light of the realization that the occurrence of the dilemma itself precludes nonviolent resolution. (Gilligan, 1982, p. 94)
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The morality of caring stance is viewed as a position in which all needs are adequately met—that is, "a new kind of action that leaves self and other intact" (p. 95). As this voice is characterized in the example of a college student, Claire, the fully mature voice of caring allows for both autonomy and responsiveness: Claire is caught... between a responsiveness to others and to herself. Sensing that these modes of response "aren't mutually exclusive," she examines the moral judgment that in the past kept them apart ... Measured against a standard of care, Claires ideal of self sacrifice gives way to a vision of a "a family where everyone is encouraged to become an individual and at the same time everybody helps others and receives help from them." (Gilligan, 1982, pp. 53-54) In presenting this integration of community and autonomy, Gilligan's model forwards a vision that resembles those forwarded by communitarian theorists. In contrast to the purely theoretical character of the communitarian models, however, Gilligan's viewpoint is empirically based. The claim is made that this type of voluntaristic approach to caring is empirically observed in the psychological functioning of women. Contributions and Unanswered Questions
The morality of caring framework represents the most successful challenge ever forwarded to the Kohlbergian justice model of morality within psychology, and continues to have a great influence on research conducted by theorists of moral reasoning. The framework has stimulated considerable interest across different fields within psychology as well as in other domains of social inquiry, including law, education, social work, women's studies, and anthropology. In addition, great interest has been shown in the morality of caring by lay audiences, with the framework giving rise to many applied efforts, such as in educational reform. The cultural appeal of the type of integration of community and autonomy presented by the morality of caring framework, however, has colored the interpretation of research findings in this tradition. Within psychology, there was an initial tendency to accept uncritically the claims of marked gender differences in morality, with initial counterclaims meeting with considerable resistance. Over time, this changed as findings accumulated that showed little evidence of gender differences in morality (see, e.g., review articles by Brabeck, 1983; Thomas, 1986; Walker, 1984). Gradually, in response to these trends, there was greater acceptance by psychologists that few, if any, gender differences exist in moral reasoning. It might have been expected, however, that in response to this weak support for the claim of gender differences in morality, theorists would also have questioned the developmental interpretations made in Gilligan's model—interpretations on which the predictions of gender difference were originally based. However, such a rethinking did not occur. Rather, investigators have
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tended to interpret the null findings as implying only that the morality of caring is present among both men and women and not as also implying that the process account explaining the development of the morality of caring is in some way incomplete or flawed. In a sense, the presence of gender differences has not been treated as crucial to the integrity of the morality of caring model—despite the fact that this represents one of its fundamental claims. Rather, psychological theorists have reacted in a way which suggests that they consider the morality of caring orientation itself as of such importance that it does not matter whether the theoretical account of its developmental origins in childhood remains somewhat unclear in that it does not fit with empirical observations of few gender differences in moral judgment. The cultural appeal of the claims made within the morality of caring framework has also arguably led to a certain confirmatory bias in research undertaken in this tradition. For example, one of the major challenges offered by the morality of caring model to work in the Kantian tradition is in questioning whether morality must meet such formal criteria as impersonality and impartiality or whether it can be affectively grounded and relationship dependent. Gilligan and her colleagues have maintained that the sense of compassion, concern, and "co-feeling" for others which originates in a connected view of self entails a concern for the other's welfare and is not self-serving in character (Blum, 1980; Gilligan & Wiggins, 1988). It is maintained that the caring orientation insures responsiveness to the others needs and is unaffected by the self-interested considerations that also exist in special relationships. Examination of research conducted within this tradition, however, reveals that the claim that responsibilities of caring are not dependent on the nonmoral dimensions of relationships has never been empirically tested. Research has demonstrated that considerations, such as compassion, caring, and empathy, are associated with a sense of perceived responsibility to meet the needs of others as well as with behavioral responsiveness in need situations. However, no studies have been undertaken examining whether responsibilities of caring are diminished by the self-interested considerations that also arise in close relationships. In short, past research has been oriented primarily to confirming the hypothesis that responsibilities of caring exist in close relationships, with little, if any, research conducted that examines whether, contrary to the claims of the morality of caring framework, interpersonal responsibilities are vulnerable to being diminished by nonmoral concerns. Community and Autonomy in Cross-Cultural Perspective In this section, I will review evidence from a program of cross-cultural research that I and my colleagues have undertaken among European-Americans and Hindu-Indians on interpersonal morality, with a focus on understanding the degree to which commu-
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nity and autonomy are integrated in individual moral judgments. Particular attention will be given to the implications of our research for understanding certain limitations of the morality of caring perspective. The argument will be made that tradeoffs occur between autonomy and community, with the type of integration achieved reflecting, in part, cultural views of the self and associated cultural beliefs and practices. The studies to be described were undertaken among middle-class EuropeanAmerican children and adults sampled from New Haven, Connecticut, and among middle-class Hindu-Indian children and adults sampled from Mysore City in Southern India. Data collection in India was conducted by Indian researchers in the local language of Kannada, utilizing standard back-translation techniques. Recruited from a setting that emphasizes relatively traditional Hindu-Indian cultural beliefs and practices, the Indian population represents a cultural population emphasizing what has been characterized as interdependent cultural views of the self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Recruited from a secular urban European-American community, the American population, in turn, represents a cultural population which has been characterized as emphasizing more independent cultural views. It should be emphasized, however, that the present results cannot be assumed to generalize to all collectivist and individualistic cultural populations (Miller, 1994). Rather, it is recognized that somewhat contrasting trends might be observed in comparisons of other collectivist and individualist populations or in analyses that contrast different ethnic or religious subgroups within each culture. All the samples were balanced by gender with no gender differences observed in subjects' responses. To examine a modernization interpretation of the results, in most of the studies data was also collected from samples of contrasting socioeconomic status. This made it possible to assess the extent to which any observed cross-cultural differences could be explained in terms of the greater access to resources and to social support which has been found to be associated with both higher socioeconomic status and modernization (Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield, 1966; Muir & Weinstein, 1962). Lower socioeconomic status European-American subjects were sampled as a population which would be expected, from a modernization perspective, to vary their responses in the direction of those of Hindu-Indians. In turn, higher socioeconomic status HinduIndian subjects were sampled as a population which would be expected, from a modernization perspective, to vary their responses in the direction of those of EuropeanAmericans. No significant differences related to socioeconomic status were observed in the effects. This result provides some evidence to suggest that the present cross-cultural differences do not arise merely from the greater material resources available in the more technologically developed society of the United States, compared to the less technologically society of India. The trends are congruent with findings that inter-
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dependent cultural views of self are maintained even in societies with wealthy economies, such as Japan (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), as well as with arguments that modernization does not invariably lead to Westernization in cultural meanings and practices (Kagitcibasi, 1996; Yang, 1988).
Bases of Interpersonal Responsibilities The research that we have undertaken lends support to the claim that interpersonal responsibilities tend to be viewed in more obligatory terms among a traditional Hindu-Indian population than among a secular European-American population. Our research also suggests, however, that with the greater Hindu-Indian emphasis on duty comes a view of interpersonal responsibilities that is both wider in scope and less contingent than that emphasized among European-Americans. Scope of Interpersonal Responsibilities. To investigate the scope of interpersonal responsibilities, in an early investigation we asked subjects to evaluate hypothetical scenarios which portrayed an individual failing to help someone in need (Miller, Bersoff & Harwood, 1990). The needy party explicitly requested help, the cost of helping was minimal, and the protagonist's reason for declining to help was trivial. A within-subjects manipulation was utilized to vary level of need, with all participants asked to reason about cases involving a life-threatening need (e.g., need for cardiopulmonary resuscitation [CPR]), a moderately serious need (e.g., need for aspirin to relieve a painful migraine), and a minor need (e.g., need for directions on a sight-seeing trip). In turn, a between-subjects manipulation was employed to contrast role: One third of the sample received scenarios involving parent-young child relationships, another third received scenarios involving friendship relationships, and the remainder received scenarios involving in-group stranger relationships. The research revealed that Hindu-Indians view the responsibility to help as extending over a greater range of in-group relationships than do European-Americans. Virtually all Indians maintained that the agent had a responsibility to help, with the only decrement in this judgment occurring in situations involving minor need stranger relationships. In contrast, virtually all Americans judged that the agent had a responsibility to help only in cases involving a life-threatening need. In non-life-threatening cases, Americans perceived less responsibility to help as the need became less and the role relationship more remote. The finding that in both cultures at least some weight was given to need and role considerations is explicable in terms of the unbounded character of positive obligations. As philosophers have noted, it is impossible for an agent to be responsive to
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all needy others, even in situations involving minimal cost to the self, and thus there is a need to delimit the scope of positive obligations (Gert, 1988; Urmson, 1958). Such a process was observed among both European-Americans and Hindu-Indians and may be inferred to be universal. What the results of this study also demonstrate, however, is cultural variability in the ways in which the scope of interpersonal responsibilities is delimited. The U.S. concern with protecting freedom of choice and voluntarism in the context of special relationships leads them to be more reticent than Hindu-Indians to treat responsibilities to others in obligatory terms and to maintain a narrower view of such interpersonal responsibilities. Contingency of Interpersonal Responsibilities. Examining claims made within the morality of caring framework about the imperviousness of interpersonal responsibilities to the types of egoistic affects that commonly arise in particularistic relationships, an investigation was undertaken which tested the dependence of interpersonal responsibilities on liking (Miller & Bersoff, 1998). Samples of European-American and of Hindu-Indian adults were asked to appraise hypothetical scenarios in which an agent failed to help someone in moderately serious need who had requested their aid. A between-subjects manipulation was employed to vary whether the role relationship included family in contrast to nonfamily ties, whereas a within-subjects manipulation was employed to vary whether the relationship was egalitarian or paternalistic in nature: Specifically, in the family condition, participants were asked to reason about both adult sibling and parent-young child relationships, whereas in the nonfamily condition, participants were asked to reason about both work colleague and troop leader/child scout relationships. Liking was varied between-subjects: In half of the cases, the agent and needy party were portrayed as having a warm and affectionate relationship based on their common tastes and interests, whereas in the remaining cases they were portrayed as having never developed a strong emotional bond. Results revealed that Indians tended to judge that the agent had a moral responsibility to help in all cases, with their responses unaffected by liking. In contrast, with the exception of the parent-young child relationship, Americans judged that there was less of a responsibility to help in cases involving low liking, compared to high liking. Examination of participants' response justifications illustrates the contrasting ways in
The present results do not bear on responsibilities to out-group members nor on responsibilities to larger collectives or causes—cases in which it is possible that European-Americans might tend to show greater moral responsibility than Hindu-Indians—such as, for example, responsibility to protect ecological concerns.
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which liking impacted on moral judgment in the two cultural groups. Among Indians, greater emphasis was placed on welfare considerations in cases involving low liking, compared to high liking, whereas the reverse trend was observed among Americans. In short, the absence of liking had the effect of leading Indians to fall back on the importance of welfare considerations, while leading Americans to downplay the importance of welfare considerations. A third study was conducted to explore the possibility that the present trends could have resulted from a ceiling effect. It might have been the case that Indians felt so strongly that there was a moral responsibility to help that there was no room for their responsibility judgments to be diminished by considerations of liking. To explore this alternative interpretation of the results, an independent sample of Indian adults was asked to reason about scenarios in which it was expected that there would be less of a perceived responsibility to help. Involving colleague relationships, the scenarios portrayed extremely low need situations in which aid was unsolicited. Results indicated that fewer Indians judged that there was a responsibility to help than in the original study, with Indians' judgments resembling, in this respect, those of Americans. However, unlike Americans, Indians' assessments of responsibility did not vary as a function of liking. The results of the present investigation call into question the claim that it is possible to achieve a voluntaristic approach to community that is not contingent on the types of nonmoral considerations that commonly arise in special relationships. The results suggest that this type of approach may be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Among Americans, the same emphasis on personal liberties that leads to the development of a voluntaristic view of interpersonal responsibilities also leads to an emphasis being placed on the agent's perceived taste in determining such responsibilities. In contrast, whereas interpersonal responsibilities are relatively independent of matters of personal preference among Indians, they also tend not to be considered voluntaristic in nature.
Responsibility for Action An assumed major limitation of traditional approaches to community is the absence of individual responsibility for action. Consonant with this claim, the research that we have conducted demonstrates that there tends to be less emphasis on individual responsibility for action among Hindu-Indians than among European-Americans. Our research also reveals, however, a tendency among Hindu-Indians for greater sensitivity to be shown to extenuating circumstances. In an early study on this question, European-American and Hindu-Indian adults were asked to evaluate naturalistically generated incidents, involving breaches of either
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justice or of interpersonal responsibilities (Miller & Luthar, 1989). There was little extenuation shown in either culture for the breaches of interpersonal responsibilities. However, in the case of the justice breaches, Indians were more prone than Americans to indicate that the agents were unable to control their actions and should not be held morally accountable. The nature of the cross-cultural differences that we observed are illustrated in a comparison of a sample American and Indian response to the following justice item: This man took some money from me as a loan and never paid me back. He kept telling me everyday that he would return the money but he never did. His business is not doing well. Apparently, he suffered some financial losses. Finally, the man left the city. He went somewhere else without repaying the money I had loaned him. I don't even know where he is now. I think it was wrong of him not to have repaid the money. (Miller & Luthar, 1989, p. 254) Americans appeared to assume that agents should be capable of controlling their behavior in situations like this. As an American subject argued: I think it's basically an ethical issue—that if you take something from someone that you try and repay it. They entered into a contract—it's a breach of contract. People should be expected to respect that principle. I think that this is certainly a big character defect. People like this are just not very realistic and they're probably generally not very responsible, (p. 254) In contrast, Indians tended to place responsibility for actions of this type on others in the situation and to regard the agent's behavior as an unavoidable reaction to situational pressures. As an Indian reasoned: I feel he should not be held accountable because he was facing a bad financial situation. The friend should not have expected that he repay. The friend should have told him "well you are not in a position to pay me now. You pay me when you are in a position to pay me." Then this man would not have left the city. The friend expected him to pay money which he could not do, so he had no choice but to leave the city. (p. 254) A second investigation was conducted with a sample of European-American and Hindu-Indian children and adults in which individuals were asked to appraise justice breaches undertaken under the potentially extenuating circumstances of agent developmental immaturity (e.g., a 10-year-old child throwing a rock at a statue after watching his elder cousin do the same thing), and of agent emotional duress (e.g., an adult assaulting someone who has made fun of his facial deformity) (Bersoff & Miller, 1993). Again, Indians showed a much stronger tendency than Americans to absolve agents of moral accountability for the breaches. The results from these two investigations support the claim that whereas there tends to be less emphasis on individual responsibility for conduct among Indians, there is a greater tendency to adopt a contextually sensitive and less rigid rule-based
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approach to moral judgment. In both cultures, individuals' weighting of contextual factors varied with the contextual factors under consideration. However, in all cases Indians were more prone than Americans to grant contextual exceptions to the applicability of justice rules.
Implications for Self A final perceived limitation of traditional collectivist approaches to community is the assumed oppression of self, associated with the fulfillment of interpersonal expectations that are broad in scope and obligatory in nature. Consonant with this claim, our research indicates that greater emphasis is placed on selfless behavior among Indians than among European-Americans (Miller & Bersoff 1995). However, our work also reveals that with their more relational cultural views, selfless behavior does not appear to have the same aversive social and psychological implications as it does among European-Americans. In a study that we conducted on this question, 90 European-American adults and 90 Hindu-Indian adults were asked to reason about hypothetical scenarios in which an agent helped a neighbor who was experiencing low levels of need (Miller & Bersoff, 1994). A between-subjects manipulation was employed to vary whether the helping was offered: (a) in response to prior reciprocity; (b) in exchange for being paid; or (c) spontaneously. Results revealed that all participants viewed the behavior as more constrained by social expectations in the case in which helping was undertaken spontaneously in contrast to the response to the norm of reciprocity. However, they differed in the extent to which they viewed helping in response to social expectations as congruent with the agents personal inclinations. Americans viewed the act of helping as more reflective of the agents personal inclinations when the agent was acting spontaneously, compared to the response to social expectations. In contrast, Indians viewed helping as equally reflective of the agent's personal inclinations in the two cases. Similar patterns were obtained in state and trait inferences. Importantly, Americans viewed agents as experiencing greater satisfaction in the spontaneous condition than in the reciprocity condition, whereas Indians viewed agents as experiencing equal satisfaction in the two cases. In contrast to these trends, commonality was observed in the inferences which Americans and Indians made when helping was performed in response to a monetary payment in contrast to spontaneous help. In these latter cases, all participants discounted endogenous motivation when behavior was performed in the context of a perceived extrinsic constraint, compared to a more spontaneous case. The present results suggest that agency may be expressed in culturally variable forms. In particular, for Indians there appears to be a tendency for personal incli-
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nations to be viewed as consonant with acting in fulfillment of interpersonal expectations to family and friends. In contrast, for Americans there is a greater tendency for the fulfillment of social expectations to be viewed as in opposition or antagonistic to personal inclinations in such cases (see also Miller, 2003).
Conclusions and Implications The research discussed here has demonstrated marked cross-cultural differences in approaches to interpersonal morality. It has been seen that European-Americans maintain a more voluntaristic approach to interpersonal responsibilities than do Hindu-Indians. This is reflected in their tendencies to view responsiveness to others as a matter of personal discretion rather than of obligation. Even more notably, it is evident in their tendencies to treat interpersonal responsibilities as contingent on such nonmoral considerations, such as liking. With regard to responsibility judgments, our studies demonstrate that European-Americans are more prone than Hindu-Indians to hold individuals morally accountable for justice breaches and to downplay the significance of extenuating circumstances that may potentially mitigate such violations. In contrast to Hindu-Indians, European-Americans place more responsibility on agents for regulation of their affective and behavioral responses, and assume that such selfregulation can be achieved at an earlier age during childhood. Finally, our research has shown that European-Americans view a greater tension as existing between self and social role than Hindu-Indians. Thus, whereas European-Americans maintain that greater satisfaction is linked to voluntary, compared to role-based helping, HinduIndians assume that individuals experience the same satisfaction in the two cases. In a striking pattern of results, European-Americans associate negative implications with selfless helping behavior. Thus, an agent's act of helping a friend at high cost to themselves is interpreted as an indication of weakness and is assumed to cause a strain in friendships. This contrasts with the positive attributions made by Hindu-Indians, with selfless behavior viewed as a sign of strength and as deepening interpersonal bonds. It is important to emphasize that the observed cross-cultural differences are not matters of personality and do not imply that individuals from one culture are more caring or empathic than individuals from the other. Where the differences relate to behavior is in the contrasting cultural practices in the two contexts. Thus, for example, the observed cultural differences in voluntarism and in individual responsibility for conduct are reflected in contrasting life-course events, such as typical European-American behavioral practices of dating, moving away from home, and freely choosing a spouse, compared to typical Hindu-Indian behavioral practices of gender segregation, residence with par-
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ents into adulthood, and arranged marriages. Similarly, the European-American tendency to give weight to personal affinity and liking in assessing interpersonal responsibilities has links to the acceptability of divorce and of institutional care for elderly parents in the European-American culture, just as the Hindu-Indian tendency to treat interpersonal responsibilities as more contingent has links to the disapproval of these same types of practices in the Hindu-Indian culture. In terms of implications, our work points to the existence of qualitative variability in forms of interpersonal morality and of self. It suggests not only that the type of duty-based orientation to interpersonal morality emphasized among traditional Hindu-Indian populations differs from the more voluntaristic approach to this domain embodied in the morality of caring framework (Miller, 1994) but also that it differs from conventional role-based approaches to this domain found in modern Western cultural populations. Thus, there was little evidence among Indians of the type of perceived opposition between individual expression and role conformity that has been reported by Gilligan and her colleagues among women maintaining a conventional feminine approach to role expectations. For Hindu-Indians, duty does not take on the same type of perceived aversive quality that it more typically does for European-Americans with their more dualistic cultural views of self. Our work points to the contrasting strengths of the approaches to interpersonal morality emphasized among European-Americans and Hindu-Indians and highlights the value of understanding each approach from a somewhat relativistic perspective. Thus, it was seen that the orientation observed among European-Americans not only has such strengths as an emphasis on individual freedom of choice and on personal responsibility for conduct but also certain characteristic weaknesses. For example, the orientation toward interpersonal responsibilities observed among European-Americans gives rise to a pressure for conformity and a type of insecurity not observed among Hindu-Indians. To the extent that interpersonal responsibilities are seen as contingent on liking, European-Americans experience more pressure to act in a way that ensures that they maintain the others positive regard than Hindu-Indians, for whom there is less discretion about whether or not to meet the needs of in-group members. Because interpersonal commitments are more voluntaristic among European-Americans than among Hindu-Indians, European-Americans may also experience a greater concern about potential isolation and abandonment than Hindu-Indians. Most generally, our results speak to the vision embodied both in communitarian theory and in the morality of caring framework of the desirability of achieving an integration of community and autonomy in systems of morality. The results highlight the need to examine critically the claims that such an integration is empirically achieved in existing moral systems. Contrary to Gilligan's assertion, for example, our results suggest that individuals effect a certain compromise between community and autonomy rather
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than a stance that fully realizes both orientations. Thus, it was observed, that whereas there was greater emphasis on autonomy among European-Americans than among Hindu-Indians, there was arguably a weaker and more contingent notion of community in family and friendship relationships. Importantly, the Indian system not only gives less weight to autonomy but maintains a notion of community that does not extend to out-group relationships. Our results do not directly challenge philosophical efforts to define the integration of community and autonomy as an ideal. The integrity of an ideal does not depend on empirical findings. However, our results highlight the need to examine more critically potential contradictions in this ideal as presently formulated. As was seen, for example, the emphasis on freedom of choice that promotes autonomy in the morality of caring among European-Americans also leads to community being more limited in scope and more contingent on personal preference than is the case in a culture, such as HinduIndia, that tends to emphasize a more interdependent cultural view of self. To the extent that individuals' sense of self and of relationships differ markedly in contrasting cultural contexts, their visions of the ideal may also differ. What constitutes oppression of the self to a modern American may not have this same meaning in a traditional Hindu-Indian context. It must be recognized that although all cultures may adopt a moral position of respect for persons and of responsiveness to community, their embodiments take culturally variable forms.
References Ainsworth, M. D. ; Blehar, M. C , Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Baumeister, R. E (1986). Identity: Cultural change and the struggle for self.NewYork: Oxford University Press. Baumeister, R. E (1991). Meanings of life. New York: Guilford. Baumrind, D. (1971). Current patterns of parental authority. Developmental Psychology Monographs, 4(\,¥i.2). Baumrind, D. (1980). New directions in socialization research. American Psychologist, 35, 639— 652. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. New York: Harper & Row. Bersoff, D. M., & Miller, J. G. (1993). Culture, context, and the development of moral accountability judgments. Developmental Psychology, 29(4), 664—676. Blum, L. A. (1980). Friendship, altruism and morality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Brabeck, M. (1983). Moral judgment: Theory and research on differences between males and females. Developmental Review, 3, 274-291. Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. R., & Greenfield, P. M. (1966). Studies in cognitive growth (pp. 633— 657). New York: Wiley.
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Chirkov, V. I., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). Parent and teacher autonomy-support in Russian and U.S. adolescents. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(5), 618-635. Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology. American Psychologist, 45, 599-611. Deater-Deckard, K., & Dodge, K. (1997). Externalizing behavior problems and discipline revisited: Nonlinear effects and variation by culture, context, and gender. Psychological Inquiry, 8, 161-176. Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum. Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1991). A motivational approach to self: Integration in personality. In R. A. Dienstbier (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 38. Perspectives on motivation (pp. 237—288). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Etzioni, A. (1993). Spirit of community: Rights, responsibilities, and the communitarian agenda. New York: Crown. Gert, B. (1988). Morality: A new justification of the moral rules. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilligan, C. (1977). In a different voice: Women's conceptions of the self and of morality. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 481-517. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C., Ward, J. V., & Taylor, J. M. (Eds.). (1988). Mapping the moral domain: A contribution of women's thinking to psychologicaltheory andeducation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C , & Wiggins, G. (1988). The origins of morality in early childhood relationships. In C. Gilligan, J. V. Ward, & J. M. Taylor (Eds.), Mapping the moral domain: A contribution of women's thinking to psychological theory and education (pp. 110—138). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guisinger, S., & Blatt, S. J. (1994). Individuality and relatedness: Evolution of a fundamental dialectic. American Psychologist, 49, 104-111. Harwood, R. H., Miller, J. G., & Irizarry, N . L. (1995). Culture and attachment: Perceptions of the child in context. New York: Guilford Press. (Series on culture and human development, S. Harkness & C. Super [Series Eds.]) Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Rethinking the role of choice: A cultural perspective on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 349—366. Kagitcibasi, C. (1996). Family and human development across cultures: A view from the other side. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg, L , Levine, C , & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral stages: A current formulation and a response to critics. In J. A. Meacham (Ed.), Contributions to human development {Vol. 10). Basel: Karger. Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224—253. Miller, J. G. (1994). Cultural diversity in the morality of caring: Individually-oriented versus duty-based interpersonal moral codes. Cross-Cultural Research, 28, 3—39.
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Miller, J. G. (2003). Culture and agency: Implications for psychological theories of motivation and social development. In V. Murphy-Berman & J. Berman (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 49. Cross-cultural differences in perspectives on the self (pp. 5999). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, J. G. (2004). The cultural deep structure of psychological theories of social development. In R. Sternberg & E. Grigorenko (Eds.), Culture and competence: Contexts of life success (pp. 11—138). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Miller, J. G., & Bersoff, D. M. (1994). Cultural influences on the moral status of reciprocity and the discounting of endogenous motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20 (5) (Special issue on "The self and the collective: Groups within individual"), 592602. Miller, J. G., & Bersoff, D. M. (1995). Development in the context of everyday family relationships: Culture, interpersonal morality and adaptation. In M. Killen & D. Hart (Eds.), Morality in everyday life: Developmental perspectives (pp. 259—282). New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, J. G., & Bersoff, D. M. (1998). The role of liking in perceptions of the moral responsibility to help: A cultural perspective. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 443— 469. Miller, J. G., Bersoff, D. M., & Harwood, R. L. (1990). Perceptions of social responsibilities in India and in the United States: Moral imperatives or personal decisions? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 33—47.
Miller, J. G., & Luthar, S. (1989). Issues of interpersonal responsibility and accountability: A comparison of Hindu-Indians' and Americans' moral judgments. Social Cognition, 3, 237-261. Muir, D. E., & Weinstein, E. A. (1962). The social debt: An investigation of lower-class and middle-class norms of social obligation. American Sociological Review, 27, 532—539. Rohner, R. R, & Pettingill, S. M. (1985). Perceived parental acceptance-rejection and parental control among Korean adolescents. Child Development, 56, 524—528. Rothbaum, E, Weisz, J., Pott, M., Miyake, K., & Morelli, G. (2000). Attachment and culture: Security in the United States and Japan. American Psychologist, 55 (10), 1093-1104. Sampson, E. E. (1977). Psychology and the American ideal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 767-782. Sampson, E. E. (1988). The debate on individualism: Indigenous psychologies of the individual and their role in personal and societal functioning. American Psychologist, 43, 1522. Sampson, E. E. (1989). The challenge of social change for psychology: Globalization and psychology's theory of the person. American Psychologist, 4, 914-921. Sandel, M. J. (1982). Liberalism and the limits of justice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, M. B. (1994). Selfhood at risk: Post-modern perils and the perils of postmodernism. American Psychologist, 4, 405-411. Snarey, J., & Keljo, K. (1991). In a Gemeinschaft voice: The cross-cultural expansion of moral development theory. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Handbook of moral behavior and development(Vol. 1, pp. 395-424). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, S. J. (1986). Estimating gender differences in the comprehension and preference of moral issues. Developmental Review, 6, 165-180.
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Tonnies, F. (1971). Social norms: Law. In W. J. Cahnman & R. Heberle (Eds.), Ferdinand Tonnies on sociology: Pure, applied, and empirical (pp. 199-211). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Original work published 1931] Tonnies, F. (1973). Durkheim, Emile: De la division du rravail social. In W. J. Cahnman (Ed.), Ferdinand Tonnies: A new evaluation (pp. 252-254). Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill. [Original work published 1893] Urmson, J. C. (1958). Saints and heroes. In A. I. Melden (Ed.), Essays in moral philosophy (pp. 198—216). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Walker, L. J. (1984). Sex differences in the development of moral reasoning: A critical review. Child Development, 55, 677-691. Yang, K. S. (1988). Will societal modernization eventually eliminate cross-cultural psychological differences? In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The cross-cultural challenge to social psychology
(pp. 67-85). London: Sage.
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
14 Is Community Compatible with Autonomy? Some Comments to Joan Miller's Research on Differing Moralities in India and the United States Lothar Krappmann
We have heard a most interesting paper on the different moral reactions of people living in a Western individualistic social context compared to the reactions of people from a traditional collectivist context in India. The paper is based on interviews in which the subjects were asked to reason about the behaviors of individuals in well-designed hypothetical scenarios presenting a helping situation. The agent of the story — either helped or failed to give help to another person, — who was a family member, a close friend or a stranger, — the help was unsolicited or requested, — the need was serious or trivial, — and the act of helping implied high or low costs for the person asked for help. The series of studies addressed the questions: In which situations are the agents judged to have the right to autonomously decide about giving or denying help, and in which situations does the relationship maintained between agent and person in need generate an obligation to give what is required. Contrasting conceptions of interpersonal responsibilities, accountability, self and moral emotions emerge: — Responsiveness to others as a matter of personal discretion — Responsibilities contingent on nonmoral considerations, such as prior exchange and personal liking — Extenuating circumstances are given weight — Tensions are felt between the self and behaviors demanded from social roles
vs.
As a matter of obligation
vs.
Help to group members in any case
vs.
Individuals are never excused much from helping vs. No or little tension is experienced
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vs.
Same satisfaction given under both conditions of help
No doubt, relevant cross-cultural differences were demonstrated by Joan Miller's research which seem to imply a negative answer to the question of whether community is compatible with autonomy. Instead, we observe the priority of autonomy in the case of the Americans who tend to decide for themselves in most social situations whether they are willing to give help or not considering the urgency of the need, their closeness to the person in need, and whether the person requesting help would give help in a similar situation. Only in cases of serious need and within close relationships is help regarded to be obligatory. Although Americans mostly insist on their personal decision about whether help is given or not, in the narrow domain of close relationships, a community orientation seems to prevail because in this domain help is also given in a less urgent need situation. Indians, in contrast, are characterized as behaving in a community-onented way because they tend to help everybody who is a member of the in-group, except for cases of low need situations. This means that everybody who belongs to the in-group receives more or less all kinds of help requested. Outside the in-group, help is only given rarely. Are these relationships outside family, kin, and friendships the social domain where Indians decide as autonomous persons whether they give or deny help? A picture is emerging which is different to the one depicted for the Americans: As a person is mostly interacting with in-group members, help is mostly given because of community. The domain of autonomous decision about help seems to be small, if it exists at all. It would be interesting to learn more about the living conditions of the Americans and the Indians whose reasoning about help was studied. In the case of the Americans, we believe to know what makes them behave and judge the way they are describing their attitudes towards helping others. They do not need many others in order to survive as long as they have work, a spouse, a friend, and some insurances. Thus, supportive behavior can be at their personal discretion. Their overall life conditions will not be much improved if they are friendly and supportive to others. Considering this fact, they are astonishingly friendly to others. Though we learn that the Indians studied are living in a big city, they may still be urban villagers, as Herbert Gans (1962) described Italian immigrants in Boston. They may still be in need of others in many situations in order to deal with problems of daily life and even of survival and, therefore, they are mindful of not loosing somebody who could be urgently required in the near future. Thus, they may give help to their group members because they anticipate that they will need each other again and again in order to overcome misfortune and emergency. They may be so much accustomed to the shared situation of pervasive need that they are not consciously aware that they give
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help because the continuation of their lives fundamentally relies on a permanent exchange of support. I do not know whether I am correct when speculating about the different life conditions of Indians and Americans. I intend to question the absence of an exchange structure in this Indian community. Perhaps the behaviors of these Indians are much more shaped by the necessity to belong to a community based on exchange than the behaviors of Americans. The Indians may not examine whether the person who actually requests an act of help is somebody who helped in the past. This autonomous examination may not be needed because they know that this person belongs to the in-group whose members will mutually help each other when an emergency occurs. The basic reliance on other persons who will always help in exchange for help received may be needed more urgently than in European or North American societies where the well-being of everyone is protected by a legal system, welfare, health institutions, and a social security system. Thus, the main and, obviously, important difference seems to be how many people are included in the circle of those with regard to whom I do not individually examine whether this person is an appropriate candidate for my help. I wonder whether both Americans and Indians know both types of orientation, community and autonomy. They may possess both orientations, but life makes them apply these orientations to social domains which are differently limited: a narrow or an extended range for autonomy and an extended or narrow range for community, respectively. I assume that in both cultural groups there is a domain where one acts without a considered decision because the fact that the person belongs to the group is enough to fulfill the requirement of being eligible for help as well as another social domain where the eligibility must be judged case by case. But these domains are differently extended in the two cultures. The result is that people either mostly help on the basis of an autonomous decision or mostly help on the basis of belonging to a community. Thus, they give the impression that they are either oriented to autonomy orto community. Autonomy and community appears incompatible. Is this the end of the story? I would like to refer to my own observational data on children helping in natural settings, classrooms, and playgrounds (Krappmann & Oswald, 1991). We learnt by our analyses of hundreds of helping situations among 10-year-olds growing up in the city of Berlin, that is, in a Western individualistic society, that helping is an extremely complicated matter. In order to survive in a classroom children are extremely dependent on help, but they also have to consider pragmatic aspects because they cannot assist everybody in every situation. Thus, they examine whether classmates asking for help fulfill the demand that everybody has to equally contribute to overcome situations of need and that nobody exploits others by an unjustified request, by aiming at an unfair advantage, or by misusing the request in order to intrude into a matter which is not his or her job.
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In many cases, children react to these requests for help in a very careless manner which means that they either ignore or deny the demand. Sometimes they may give what is wanted because giving is less costly than rejecting the request. Neither giving help nor rejecting the request expresses community. Furthermore, there is also not much autonomy because we did not find much deliberation about person, kind of request, or extenuating circumstances. The behavior primarily seems to be a reaction to the pragmatics of classroom interactions. These pragmatic reactions, which seem to be unrelated to both community or autonomy, very often were found also among friends who demand something from each other. However, it was also almost only among friends that we discovered serious considerations about a request, its justification, a fair assessment of the circumstances generating the need as well as careful perspective-taking negotiations of the best way to overcome the need. The result, sometimes, was that the help was given in a different way than requested or not given at all—not because of selfish reasons, but because of sincere interest in the well-being of the other. Within these admittedly rare instances of negotiated help among friends, autonomy expressed in the personal judgment about the way of helping as well as community expressed in the demonstrated responsibility for the friend's best relief are combined. I do not have data on the helping interactions of Indian children and adults in natural situations, but I expect that this combination of autonomy and community can be found in India as well. I assume that both types of cultures define domains in which one is allowed to autonomously judge about the help one is willing to give, and other domains where the relationship to others determines how a person reacts to the demands of others. The interaction episodes observed among the 10-year-olds stimulate the question whether there is also a domain of personal interactions in which autonomy and community are intrinsically related. Negotiations of help among friends that were observed demonstrate that autonomy that is not challenged by community, and community that is not challenged by autonomy, are not autonomy and community in the full sense of the concept. Should we find this mutual interdependence of autonomy and community in India as well, the basic difference is not to be found on the level of different moralities, but rather on the level of how many friends we need in order to maintain a good life. References Gans, H. J. (1962). The urban villagers. New York: Free Press. Krappmann, L., & Oswald, H. (1991). Problems of helping among ten-year old children: Results of a qualitative study in natural settings. In L. Montada & H. W. Bierhoff (Eds.), Altruism in social systems (pp. 142-158). Lewiston, NJ: Hogrefe & Huber.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
15 Reasoning About Moral Obligations and Interpersonal Responsibilities in Different Cultural Contexts Monika Keller, Wolfgang Edelstein, Tobias Krettenauer, Jo
o
Fang Fu-xi, and Fang Ge
Moral Obligations and Interpersonal Responsibilities Moral obligations and interpersonal responsibilities have been increasingly differentiated both in the philosophical and in the psychological literature. Moral obligations in the Kantian tradition define duties or obligatory actions that we owe to everybody under all circumstances. They include, for example, the obligation to keep a promise or to be veridical. These obligations have been subsumed under the principle of justice and fairness both in philosophical and in psychological research (e.g., Kohlberg, 1984; Rawls, 1971). On the other hand, expectations and responsibilities in interpersonal relationships refer to concerns about the well-being of another person. In general—at least in the Western cultural context—they define actions that are less obligatory, that we do not owe to everybody equally, and which depend more on the circumstances of the situation. In philosophy and psychology, these responsibilities have been addressed under the topics of sympathy and empathy, prosocial or altruistic concerns, and the principle of beneficence or care (e.g., Blum, 1980; Eisenberg, 1982; Gilligan, 1982; Hoffman, 1984, 2000). In psychology and philosophy, it has come to be increasingly accepted that both justice and care or solidarity are necessary components of morality (Habermas, 1990). Research in moral development has been differentially concerned with the two principles of justice and care. Research in the Kohlberg tradition has focused primarily on the principle of justice (Kohlberg, 1984). The principle of care has been the focus of a program established by Gilligan (1982) as a criticism of Kohlberg's justice-oriented approach, but it has also been in the focus of research on empathy and altruism (Eisenberg, 1982; Hoffman, 1984). The principles of justice and care have been re-
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lated differentially to cognition and feelings, and they have been addressed in empirical research with different methodologies and assessment strategies. In moral dilemmas that were presented to persons in the Kohlberg-oriented justice tradition, predetermined moral obligations or rights conflict with each other. In the famous Heinz dilemma, where a husband has to consider whether he ought to steal a medicine in order to save his wife's life, the right to life conflicts with property rights. In the careoriented Gilligan tradition as well as in the context of research on empathy and altruism, moral obligations or interpersonal responsibilities conflict with selfish needs. Moreover, dilemmas in the Kohlberg tradition were designed to address conflicts outside the reality of everyday life in order to assess "moral competence." In the care tradition, dilemmas were designed to address concerns of everyday life and to establish a stronger identification of the persons with the protagonist in a dilemma. As a consequence of this approach, moral reasoning relative to issues of empathy and care has been conceptualized as more dependent on the context of the particular situation than research concerning the principle of justice. Further, in this tradition, interpersonal feelings, such as sympathy and empathy, and moral feelings, such as guilt or shame, claimed attention as topics of research. In contradistinction to this polarization of the two moral principles, it has also become increasingly clear that moral reasoning about issues of justice and care cannot be separated so neatly. Justice issues are not merely the objects of purely cognitive reasoning processes, but may arouse specific feelings as in the case of justice feelings or motives or a feeling of moral outrage when justice is failed (Montada, 1993). Empathy, on the other hand, requires more than affect when moral choices about conflicting claims are made (Hoffman, 2000). Moller-Okin (1989) has called attention to the fact that Rawls (1971) in his theory of justice takes issues of care in family relationships to be the basic conditions for the development of a sense of justice, comprising cognition and feelings. In many of Kohlberg's dilemmas that were designed to assess justice reasoning, such as the dilemma of Heinz und his dying wife, issues of care clearly play an important role. In our own research (Keller, 1996; Keller & Edelstein, 1990; Keller & Reuss, 1984), we have argued that morality in close relationships requires taking into account both the principle of justice and the principle of care. In close relationships with parents and peers, children learn the meaning of moral obligations like promise-keeping and truth-telling, and of interpersonal responsibilities, such as concerns with the well-being of another person with whom the self stands in an affectively close relationship. Moreover, both in contexts of justice and care, moral decision making is determined by performance conditions resulting from particular aspects of the situation and/or the self which the person considers in order to find a solution (Edelstein & Noam, 1982). Persons in their everyday life do not consider moral obligations as strictly obligatory under all circumstances, but they take the conditions of
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the situation into account when weighing different claims against each other. In situations of conflicting claims involving the self (if only in terms of identifying with a protagonist in a hypothetical dilemma situated in a close relationship), the person interprets the meaning of the situation depending on the particularities of the situation, including both self-interest and obligations or responsibilities toward others. Persons vary in their sensitivity for the moral aspects of a conflict situation, both developmentally and differentially (Rest, 1983). When interpreting the meaning of a situation, they may not spontaneously take into account the moral aspects of a situation, but may be concerned with other—selfish or pragmatic—aspects. They may be sensitive to different types of obligations and responsibilities, and pragmatic-egoistic concerns of the self may achieve priority over obligations and responsibilities in situations in which moral and selfish concerns are in conflict (Nisan, 1984, 2004). Such a broader interpretive framework directs attention from moral competence—the focus of the Kohlberg tradition—to moral motivation (Nunner-Winkler, 1993) and the moral self (Blasi, 1993) in more recent approaches to moral development (see Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004, for an overview). We raise the question about the issues or concerns that persons take into account in their moral decision making in view of individual development, context, and culture.
The Development of Moral Obligations and Interpersonal Responsibilities From a developmental perspective, the criteria defining moral stages represent different interpersonal and moral concerns (Kohlberg, 1984). According to Kohlberg's definition of the preconventional moral stages in the context of justice reasoning at the first stage, the person's evaluation of what is right is motivated by obedience to rules and fear of sanctions of authorities in the case of the violation of rules. At the second stage, interests of the self as well as pragmatic but self-oriented concerns for others are dominant concerns. Only at Stage 3 of conventional moral reasoning empathy and care for others become moral concerns. This theoretical position has given rise to considerable criticism (see Keller, 1996; Keller, Eckensberger, & von Rosen, 1989). Research on empathy and altruism (Eisenberg, 1982; Hoffman, 2000) has provided evidence that empathy and sympathy play a role in young children's moral reasoning. But Eisenberg's research also documented that self-oriented hedonistic reasoning is present in young children's moral reasoning and decreases in the course of development, when the person becomes increasingly aware of interpersonal concerns, and gives priority to them in moral decision making. Similarly, Gilligan (1982) in her first model of a developmental sequence of care reasoning assumed the predominance of egoistic concerns especially at the first stage. Research with younger
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children documented that young children understand the validity of moral rules independent of authority, sanctions, or self-interest (Keller & Edelstein, 1993; Nucci, this volume; Turiel, 1983). On the other hand, it has been shown that young children, even in the case of genuine knowledge about obligations and responsibilities, may be guided by self-interest in their decision making in a morally relevant situation (Gerson & Damon, 1978) and in the attribution of feelings in the case of rule violation serving the needs of the self (Keller, Lourenco, Malti, & Saalbach, 2003; Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988). The experience of necessity to act according to one's moral knowledge and to establish consistency between moral judgment and action clearly has a developmental component (Blasi, 1983, 1993; Keller & Edelstein, 1993; Kohlberg & Candee, 1984)—at least in the Western cultural context (Keller, 2004). In general, these findings show that, developmentally, moral reasoning and decision making is a multifaceted phenomenon, and that young children have various types of concerns when making choices in morally relevant conflicts of everyday life. Thus, the type of situation or the context must be taken into account as an important factor. Developmentally, younger children may be biased in a situation either toward the concerns of self or of others, whether it be the demands of authorities or empathic concerns, because they cannot yet balance different concerns adequately. However, it may also depend on the situation and on the culture on which aspects of the situation the person will spontaneously center, or which aspects will achieve predominance in decision making. Therefore, development, context, and culture must be taken into account in the process of moral decision making.
Obligations and Responsibilities in Close Relationships: The Role of Context In the research presented here, we pursue the development of moral obligations and interpersonal responsibilities in close relationships both in a relationship of equality, such as friendship, and in a relationship of inequality, such as the parent-child relationship. Close relationships are particularly suited to understand the development of moral sensitivity and the development of a moral self (Keller, 1996; Keller & Edelstein, 1993). The development of interpersonal sensitivity and the moral self occur in situations of affective bonding to significant others. Parents and peers are particularly important persons in this developmental process. In the cognitive-developmental tradition, relationships with parents and with peers have been held to represent prototypical relationships of inequality and equality. Piaget (1932/1965) assumed that moral autonomy emerges in peer relationships that are characterized by reciprocity and mutuality. These situations are distinct from the parent-child relationships that are characterized by asymmetry and lead to a heteronomous morality. Based on this assumption, researchers in
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developmental psychology have postulated that moral development is advanced in peer relationships, compared to authority relationships, and that morality in the peer context is of a different quality than in the authority context of parent-child relationships (Youniss & Damon, 1992). Whereas obedience and fear of sanctions have been seen as predominant moral concerns in unilateral parent-child relationships, affective solidarity and empathy were considered predominant concerns in peer relationships, specifically in close friendship. It is more or less implied in these assumptions that the two principles of fairness and care are differentially tied to friendship and parent-child relationships. The domain of friendship has been seen as particularly well-suited to explore the moral meaning of close symmetrical relationships (Bukowski & Sippola, 1996; Keller & Edelstein, 1990). Friendship implies solicitude for the good of the friend, and gives rise to mutual expectations about how one ought to act and feel in order to establish and maintain closeness. However, recent research has shown that children's moral reasoning about parent-child relationships cannot be characterized exclusively by concerns of obedience and fear of sanctions, but need to take into consideration aspects of emotional solidarity that are also characteristic of close friendship (Grundmann & Keller, 1999a; Keller, 1996; Keller et al., 1989; Neuhauser, 1993). Interestingly, these findings agree with Piaget s, who claimed that the morality of the right and the morality of the good both originate in parent-child relationships (see Krettenauer, 1998). We therefore conclude that both the principle of fairness and the principle of care are important aspects of morality in close relationships, including both parent-child relationships and friendship. Piaget s idea of the morality of the good, however, was lost in Kohlberg's conception of the stages of preconventional morality. From a developmental perspective, it has been shown for Western societies that relationships change in the course of development from childhood to adolescence, and that the moral understanding of relationships is a developmental achievement. In parent-child relationships, adolescence is a phase in which equality is established, or at least striven for, by adolescents. Rights and responsibilities as well as personal concerns are negotiated to a greater extent than in earlier phases of development (Grundmann & Keller, 1999b). Adolescence is also an important phase in friendship relations. According to Selman's (1980) stage model of friendship understanding, the young child at the first developmental level is seen as centered on self's concerns. At the second level, issues of promise-keeping and mutual support are crucial in a pragmatic way. As Selman's research and that of others show, concepts, such as trust, loyalty, and intimacy in friendship, are developmentally later achievements that emerge at the third level in adolescence (Keller & Wood, 1989). In this period, the self is closely embedded in the friendship relationship (Keller, 2004). From a socialization perspective, it has been argued that Piaget's descriptions of peer relationships and parent-child relationships represent ideal types. In the reality of
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interaction, peer relationships may be more or less dominated by power structures, and characterized by different aspects of constraint (Krappmann, 1993). Parent-child relationships, on the other hand, may differ with regard to unilateral constraint and the amount of symmetry that is permitted in the negotiation of rules. First, modern or postmodern parent-child relationships differ from the structure of the Genevan family that Piaget knew in the thirties of the past century. Second, empirical socialization research has shown that parent-child relationships can be distinguished according to how much equality they establish, and how much negotiation of rules they permit in morally relevant situations of conflicting claims. This possibility of discourse and negotiation of rules has been related to the moral development of the child. Finally, the structure of relationships is different in different cultures, as we will discuss in the following.
Obligations and Responsibilities in Close Relationships in a Cross-Cultural Perspective The development of obligations and responsibilities in close relationships has rarely been studied in a cross-cultural perspective. First, research has focused more on adolescents and adults than on younger children. Second, especially in the Kohlberg tradition, the focus has been more on moral norms in hierarchically structured relationships than on the development of responsibilities in relationships of equality, such as friendship. Cross-cultural research has shown that cultures give different priorities to justice-related concerns and to interpersonal responsibilities. Comparing Asian and Western cultures, Bersoff and Miller (1993; Miller, this volume) showed that persons from India were more concerned with issues of care, and gave greater priority to interpersonal responsibilities than North American persons. In contrast, persons from the United States were more concerned with moral rules and issues of justice, and gave priority to formal moral obligations. Thus, Indians judged helping to be obligatory, independent of the type of relationship, while North Americans judged helping friends to be more obligatory than helping strangers. Miller suggests that these differences arise from different moral codes where Indians give priority to social duties, while North Americans give priority to individual rights and personal choice. Similarly, Shweder, Mahapatra and Miller (1987) claim that Indians perceive interpersonal responsibilities as duties, while North Americans see them as more voluntary. Cross-cultural findings in the Kohlberg-oriented tradition revealed that the scoring criteria for stages of development derived in the framework of justice reasoning were too narrow to capture the specifics of moral reasoning of persons from different
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cultures (Boyes & Walker, 1988; Eckensberger & Zimba, 1997). However, this deficit may not only result from Kohlberg's Western-biased theoretical framework but also from the fact that the scoring manual for arguments (Colby et al., 1987) was exclusively based on North Americans. Persons from Asian cultures, such as China and India, frequently mentioned issues of interpersonal harmony, concern for others, welfare and mutual benevolence, and harmony with nature which were not adequately captured through the criterion judgments in Kohlberg's scoring manual (e.g., Dien, 1982; Hwang, 1986). The arguments are similar to aspects of interpersonal responsibility described by Miller and Shweder for Indian persons. Miller (1991) has discussed the findings of her research with regard to the debate about gender-specific morality, in which it was claimed that men and women are differentially inclined toward justice or care. She criticized Gilligan's assumptions of a female morality of care because it implies that persons of the same sex from different cultures are more similar in their moral reasoning than are persons within a culture. Given the differences between cultures and the weak effects of gender that have been found within cultures (Walker, 1991), Gilligan's thesis does not appear plausible. Rather, cultural context seems to contribute significantly to moral learning. Cultural differences between Western and Asian cultures have been explained as due to a distinction between individualistic and collectivistic orientations (Triandis, 1990). According to this distinction, it is assumed that persons in Western cultures are taught to value independence and individualism, whereas in Asian cultures, social responsibility toward the group is strongly emphasized (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). More recently, this distinction has been critically debated, and various researchers have emphasized that cultures cannot be differentiated along one dimension (Turiel, 1998, this volume) because cultures are complex systems that contain features of both individualism and collectivism. This is true in particular for modernized societies. In spite of these critical warnings and the finding that the Chinese culture does not seem to represent a typically collectivist society according to the Triandis-scale (Bond, 1996), it seems that relationship values are emphasized more strongly in the process of socialization in China than in the West. Benevolence and concern for the well-being of other members of the community represent moral values both in the Confucian and in the Marxist traditions (Bond, 1996). Parent-child relationships in Western and Asian societies appear to differ due to the functional requirements of life and cultural tradition. Iceland is a highly modernized capitalistic society, but, at the same time, it is family- and child-oriented (Tomasson, 1980). As parents tend to work hard, children develop less controlled by adults. Children, and in particular adolescents, are conspicuously peer-oriented. Historically, living conditions on the stray settlement sheep raising farms of rural Iceland established a high degree of individualism and equality between the generations due to the functional requirements of work on the farm (Edelstein,
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1983). In China, parent-child relationships represent a clear example of relationships of inequality. Family relationships are traditional, and a general pattern of obedience and respect of the child for the parents is maintained throughout life. This is expressed in the concept of filial piety that is the predominant norm in China. Ho (1996) argued that authoritarian moralism is a central characteristic of the Chinese pattern of socialization guided by filial piety. The emphasis is on obedience, indebtedness to parents, and on moral correctness, not on self-fulfillment or psychological sensitivity. But he also argued that the tradition of filial piety is in decline. In his opinion, this cultural change—which today seems to be even stronger than at the time of our research—indicates a radical change in the definition of intergenerational relationships that may lead to a liberalization of traditional constraints and enhance the development of individualism. Rather little is known about whether the meaning of friendship is the same across cultures (Krappmann, 1996). From Western cultures, we know that close friendship is important in the socialization process, and that adolescence is the time where friendship relationships are particularly significant. According to Goodwin and Tang (1996), friendship is the only relationship of possible equality in the Confucian system of relationships in China. On the other hand, Berndt (1993; Berndt & Zook, 1993) speculated that the pattern of intimate friendship that is so characteristic of Western societies may have been—or perhaps still is—less characteristic in Communist China because of the strength of family ties, and a stronger emphasis on peer relations in general rather than on intimate friendship. Whereas Chinese seem to incorporate group structure as part of their self-definition (as has also been described for the Japanese culture), it is an open question whether close friendship has the same developmental significance for Chinese adolescents, as is the case for adolescents in Western cultures.
Moral Reasoning About a Friendship and a Parent-Child Dilemma: An Empirical Study In the research presented below, we examine the question how children and adolescents from two different cultural contexts reason about moral obligations and interpersonal responsibilities in a morally relevant conflict in a parent-child and a friendship relationship. The research originates from a study that assessed the development of sociomoral reasoning longitudinally from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood in Iceland (see Edelstein, Keller, & Schroder, 1990; Keller, 1996). In this study, participants were interviewed about their general understanding of the moral norms of promise-keeping and of close relationships, that is, friendship and parent-child relationships. Furthermore, they had to reason about a hypothetical friendship dilemma as well as a parent-child dilemma.
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The Icelandic study included 121 participants from the city of Reykjavik who were successively tested at the ages of 7, 9, 12, and 15 (and about half of the sample at the age of 19) years. The sample was stratified according to social class and gender. Additionally, persons from three rural communities in Iceland were tested longitudinally at the same ages until the age of 15 years (see Edelstein et al., 1990, for a detailed description). The participants of the Chinese study were assessed cross-sectionally, 80 persons from Beijing at age 7 and 90 persons at each of the ages 9, 12, and 15 years. Parts of this sample were followed up longitudinally. Participants were about equally distributed according to gender and three different school types representing different social classes (workers, employees, and members of the elite, mainly government employed academics). Only the cross-sectional data are analyzed here. The two conflicts presented to participants from both cultures were pretested in order to establish cultural validity. Slight variations were introduced in the task formulations to accommodate the situation to specific understandings of age groups and cultures. Both the friendship and the parent-child dilemma proved culturally valid. In spite of the predominant single child family, Chinese persons had no trouble with the sibling relationship in the parent-child dilemma. If necessary, a cousin relationship was substituted. The interviewers were also permitted to reformulate, elaborate, or ask additional questions for clarification. In the friendship dilemma, which was adapted from Selman (1980; Keller, 1984, 1996), a protagonist had to choose between keeping a promise to the best friend or accepting an interesting invitation from another child who was new in the class. For males and females, the dilemma was presented as a conflict between persons of the same gender. Some aspects made the situation psychologically more complicated, for example, that the meeting with the friend is on their special day, that the old friend appears not to like the new child, and that he or she wants to talk about something that is important for him or her. The conflict, therefore, can be interpreted in terms of different concerns: the hedonistic concern related to the interesting offers made by the friend or the new child; the moral obligation to keep the promise or the arrangement with the friend; interpersonal responsibilities of care resulting from the longterm friendship and the needs and feelings of the close friend; finally, the responsibilities toward the third child who is alone. The participants' understanding of these concerns was explored in the course of a comprehensive interview about the perspectives of the protagonist and the other persons involved (Keller, 1996). The analyses presented here focus on practical and moral choice (is-ought) and reasons for these choices. In the parent-child dilemma (an adaptation from Kohlberg's Judy dilemma, see Colby et al., 1987; Keller et al., 1989), a mother has promised her daughter that she can spend the money she has earned herself, or received as a present, on a movie or a
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concert. At the last minute, the mother claims the money from the daughter because it is needed to buy things for school. The daughter lies about the amount of money and goes to the movie or concert—with the knowledge of her sister. The dilemma focuses on the sister who has to decide whether she should tell her mother the truth or be silent about it when the mother asks her about the sister's whereabouts. Again, the conflict contains different concerns. Beyond the issues of parental authority and the contractual norm of promise-keeping which were emphasized by Colby and Kohlberg (1987), the moral norm of veridicality—not to lie to the mother—and interpersonal responsibilities, such as care or loyalty to the sister, are important concerns in the situation. Since the parent-child dilemma is defined by an authority conflict in which gender plays no constitutive role; it was decided to use the classical Kohlberg dilemma involving females only. Furthermore, the interview strategy, in line with the Kohlberg tradition, focused exclusively on the moral judgment and the reasons supporting it. In addition, however, respondents were asked for justifications that might support an alternative moral judgment of a fictitious third person. In line with this tradition, the family dilemma was (unfortunately) tested only with the 12- and 15-year-olds. The empirical analyses presented below focus on the question whether at different ages participants from the two cultures grant priority to concerns of self-interest, moral obligations, or interpersonal responsibilities when reasoning about practical choices and/or moral judgments in the hypothetical dilemmas situated in the two contexts of friendship and parent-child relationships. Given the different value orientations in the two cultures, we expected that marked cross-cultural differences would be in evidence over time. However, we also expected similarities in reasoning, due to general social-cognitive development in terms of an increasing understanding of the interpersonal and moral meaning of the situations from childhood and adolescence. For the friendship dilemma, we assumed that individualistic concerns were more salient in persons from Western cultures than from the Asian culture. It was further assumed that empathy and altruistic responsibilities toward the third child were more frequent in the Eastern than in the Western culture due to general concerns about group relationships and social harmony. We therefore expected that Chinese persons interpret the friendship dilemma as a conflict between moral concerns, such as obligations and responsibilities toward a close friend and obligations toward the newcomer. For the Icelandic persons, we assumed that responsibilities toward a close friend achieve increasing salience with development. Finally, we assumed that the concerns of close friendship, compared to the concerns of the new child, would be more important for the Icelandic persons than for Chinese persons who may emphasize peer relationships more strongly than close and intimate relationships. In the parent-child dilemma, we expected that obedience to parental authority and truth-telling were more dominant moral values in Chinese persons, compared to
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Icelandic persons, both for children and adolescents. For the Icelandic persons, we assumed that sibling/cousin loyalty and the aspect of promise-breaking (on the part of the mother) will become more important in adolescence when the parent-child relationship becomes more symmetrical, and parent-child conflicts may result in a stronger orientation toward peers. It is an open question, however, whether this type of developmental change occurs in Chinese persons where the norm of filial piety may support obedience to parents even in adolescence.
Reasoning About Obligations and Responsibilities in Friendship Content analyses of arguments in the friendship dilemma included (a) the direction of choice (new child vs. friend) in the context of practical and moral reasoning (What will the protagonist self do/Is this the right choice?), and (b) their reasons offered for the action alternatives in practical reasoning, independent of participants' own choice. In the context of moral reasoning, the alternative option to participants judgment was not systematically explored. If, however, persons spontaneously mentioned justifications for the alternative, they were taken into account in scoring. (E.g., if a participant said, "it is right to go to the friend because they are very close friends, but it is also right to go to the other child because she is lonely," reasons for both options were scored.) Four types of content categories represent theoretically relevant and most frequent reasons for the two options in the two contexts of practical and moral reasoning. Two categories referring to the "new child" indicate self-interest (reference to the hedonistic offers made by the new child) and altruistic responsibilities (helping/being with somebody who is new in the class). Two categories referring to the "old friend" indicate moral duty (reference to a promise given to the friend) and interpersonal responsibilities (reference to close friendship and needs of the friend). Percent agreement for scoring content categories was above 90 percent for all categories in the different age groups from the two cultures. It should be emphasized that special cross-cultural and crosslinguistic efforts were made to validate the content categories used in the comparisons. This makes it unlikely that any of the reported results are due to language. In the following, the main findings for the friendship dilemma will be summarized. All effects discussed in the following are statistically significant effects in loglinear analyses (see Keller, Edelstein, Schmid, Fang, & Fang, 1998, for a detailed description of the statistical methodology and results). The most salient cultural difference that remained stable across development emerged between the altruistic responsibilities of the Chinese toward the third child, compared to self-interest among the Icelanders. The frequency of hedonistic reasons
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among the Icelandic participants did not decrease developmentally, nor did younger Chinese children use this type of reason more frequently than the older ones. Whereas self-interest also among the Icelanders was not perceived as a valid moral reason, altruism toward the new child, on the other hand, was of little importance for them, even in the context of moral reasoning. Over time, altruistic reasons even decreased in number, both in the context of practical and moral reasoning. A closer inspection of the altruistic reasons in the Chinese revealed an interesting developmental phenomenon. The youngest Chinese frequently mentioned the rules of the school or the teachers' requests to help someone who is new in class. Such a rule is part of the ten moral rules of the elementary school, which make it a moral duty to help somebody new in the class (Dobert, 1989). Thus, it seems that altruistic responsibilities are based, at least partly, in obedience to rules and authorities. This corresponds to moral heteronomy as defined by Piaget and Kohlberg, whereas in Western cultures care and responsibility have been seen as an outflow of empathy (Eisenberg, 1982; Hoffman, 1984). Such an empathy-based altruism is valid for older Chinese participants who referred to others' feelings and to generalized norms of helping a person who needs to be integrated into a friendship group. An important context effect in the Chinese sample concerns an increase of altruistic reasons as moral justifications, compared to a decrease of this category in the attribution of motives for the practical choice. This is consistent with the direction of the practical choice in which the majority of 15-year-olds (approximately 90%) from both cultures gave preference to the close friend. However, the Chinese participants seemed to experience intense moral conflict when they opted for the friend. Across development, they interpreted the situation as a conflict between altruism andfriendship, while the Icelandic participants interpreted the situation mainly in terms of a conflict between self-interest and friendship (Keller & Edelstein, 1990). An analysis of feelings attributed to the protagonist/self after making his or her choice (e.g., how does the protagonist/self feel if she stayed with the new child instead of meeting the friend?) revealed that Chinese persons consistently argued that the protagonist would feel bad independent of the direction of the choice. In contrast, the Icelandic persons consistently attributed positive feelings when they opted for the friend (Keller, Schuster, Fang, Hong, & Edelstein, 1996). This can be taken to indicate that the Icelandic participants feel in agreement with cultural values when they give priority to close friendship, while for the Chinese participants, this does not seem to be the case. Even in adolescence, when they give priority to friendship, they feel that the protagonist has failed his or her responsibility toward the new child. Regarding cultural differences in orientation to the principles of justice and care in reasoning about the option "friend," our results both support and modify previous findings. In agreement with the cross-cultural differences, mentioned above, Icelandic
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participants were more frequently oriented toward the contractual aspect of the promise, while the Chinese were more concerned with interpersonal responsibilities toward the friend. Moreover, we had expected a developmental trend for persons in both cultures to become increasingly more sensitive to the interpersonal and moral aspects of the dilemma. Interestingly, a context effect was found in both cultures and across all four age groups: Persons referred to interpersonal responsibilities more often in practicalthan in moral reasoning. Consistent with our expectations, Chinese participants used the category of relationship responsibilities more often than Icelandic participants at all ages, except at the age of 15 years. The Icelandic participants, on the other hand, showed a marked developmental increase in the relationship orientation over time, such that at the age of 15 years no cultural difference remained between the two samples. For the promise orientation, the results were reversed. This category was indeed used far more frequently by Icelandic participants at all ages, and even more in the context of moral reasoning than in the context of practical reasoning. For the Chinese participants, the contractual aspect became increasingly important with time, but even at the age of 15 years this category did not quite reach the salience it achieved for the Icelanders. A more detailed analysis of reasons showed that Icelandic persons frequently used the category of friendship obligation, in which normative and relationship aspects are intertwined. This is true specifically for 15-year-olds reasoning about the special obligation to keep a promise to the best friend. In sum, however, cultural differences in interpersonal and contractual orientations concerning close friendship decreased across time. Again, this supports the notion that in adolescence close friendship becomes a stronger value in both cultures. The particular importance of close friendship both in the Western and the Asian culture is also documented in the choice patterns. In adolescence, participants from both cultures gave preference to the close friend and judged this preference to be morally right. Children in general had opted more frequently for the third child— the Chinese both in practical and in moral reasoning, the Icelanders in practical reasoning only. From a moral point of view, the Icelandic children judged it to be right to meet with the close friend. Thus, in both cultures, adolescents appeared to feel intimately connected with the friend. Responsibilities and obligations concerning how one ought to act toward a close friend achieve the status of central values for adolescents (Bukowski & Sippola, 1996; Keller, 2004; Keller & Edelstein, 1990). But it should be kept in mind that this developmental convergence originates from different values in the two cultures. For the Chinese, friendship becomes a predominant value only over time. For the Icelanders, close friendship is a moral value from the youngest age onwards. But the developmental task apparently is to give this value motivational priority, and thus to establish consistency between moral judgment and practical choice.
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Reasoning About Obligations and Responsibilities in the Authority Dilemma The authority dilemma was assessed at the ages of 12 and 15 years only. In this dilemma, reasons were explored only for the moral judgment and not for the practical choice. Analyses concern (1) the direction of moral judgment and (2) the moral justifications supporting both action alternatives (informing, or not informing, the mother). Three types of reasons were selected as predominant concerns. Informing the mother is justified by normative-moral concerns (truth-telling or not deceiving, and parental authority or respect). Not informing the mother is justified either by the moral norm of promise-keeping (the mother should not break a promise) or by relationship responsibilities toward the sister (affection, helping, friendship). Inter-rater reliabilities for categories amount to approximately 90 percent for cultures and age groups. We analyzed the direction of normal choice and the reasons for two action alternatives of informing, or not informing, the mother about the whereabouts of the sister. Compared to the friendship dilemma, the findings for the parent-child dilemma revealed a different picture of consistency and change in cross-cultural differences (Keller, 2003). Regarding the direction of moral judgment, cultural differences were conserved over developmental time and became even more salient. This was particularly true for adolescents, where the Icelandic participants saliently changed the direction of moral judgment from the position, at the age of 12, that it is right to tell the mother the truth, to the position at the age of 15, that it is right not to tell the truth. This change may be taken to indicate adolescent independence from, or even resistance to, parental authority. Only a slight change in this direction can be observed in the Chinese participants, whereas the majority gives priority to parental authority as the 12-year-olds do. Thus, for the Chinese, filial piety remains a predominant value in adolescence. Normative expectations, including the moral value of not deceiving or obeying one's parents, were emphasized more frequently by Chinese participants than by the Icelandic ones. This difference decreased slightly at age 15, but remained significant between the two cultures. Both contractual and interpersonal reasons were given for the moral judgment not to inform the mother. The contractual aspect of the promise, which the mother had given to the daughter, has somewhat greater importance for the Icelandic 15-year-olds, compared to the Chinese, but this effect does not reach statistical significance. A closer look at the arguments referring to promise-keeping reveals that the Icelandic adolescents begin to establish a more symmetrical relationship between parents and children. From this position, it follows that both sides are expected to acknowledge fairness rules. The Chinese adolescents, on the other hand, emphasized the relationship aspect that the mother will come to understand that she, too, has made a mistake. Interpersonal responsibilities toward the sister constituted the second type of reason for not telling
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the mother the truth. These concerns were used about equally by the 12-year-olds from both cultures. At the age of 15 years, however, this type of reason is mentioned more frequently by the Chinese than by the Icelandic participants. Again, it must be taken into account that the Chinese give preference to the value of parental authority, compared to the value of sibling loyalty as documented by the direction of the moral judgment. In sum, these findings show that parental authority is confirmed more strongly by Chinese persons than by Western persons, while the dilemma appears to be less suited to reveal differences in adolescents' orientation toward justice or care.
Conclusion Overall, the results of our study both confirm and expand the findings from crosscultural research comparing Western and Asian cultures. In these studies, it has been shown that individuals from Western and Asian cultural contexts were differentially sensitive to self-interest as well as to moral obligations and interpersonal responsibilities. In order to disentangle possible effects of culture and development that have received little attention previously, cultural differences were pursued in a developmental framework. This implied including different age groups from childhood to adolescence (7-, 9-, 12-, and 15-year-olds) as well as introducing meaningful contexts of development, such as close friendship and parent-child relationship. The results of the study bear out the necessity to take these factors into account when explaining the development of sociomoral understanding. The findings for the Icelandic participants are consistent with Western socialization theories that postulate a predominantly selfcentered motivation for younger children. Moral knowledge is seen as external to the self, and thus moral motivation may lag behind moral knowledge (Nunner-Winkler, 1993; Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988). Only with the development of a moral self is moral consistency established (Blasi, 1983; Keller & Edelstein, 1990). The idea of increasing internalization of moral values is at the core of socialization theories that postulate a sequence from self-interest to conformity with social values (Hoffman, 1970) and, possibly, to moral autonomy (Blasi, 1993). Our results suggest that this Western socialization model is not universal, and that it does not do justice to Asian persons with whom interpersonal concerns are dominant even in early development (see also Keller, 2004). Consistent with findings from other studies that highlight the concern for social harmony as a salient characteristic of the sociomoral reasoning in Asian societies including China (Boyes & Walker, 1988; Eckensberger & Zimba, 1997), Chinese persons, even in the youngest age group, perceive the friendship dilemma as a conflict between two equally important obligations of friendship and altruism. Among the younger Chinese persons, the culturally prescribed norm of
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altruism has priority over close friendship, both regarding practical choice and moral judgment. This appears to be a result of the intensive moral socialization that Chinese children undergo in kindergarten and elementary school. Taking care of somebody who is new in the group is one of the rules that a morally good student must follow. Interestingly, however, in the course of development, the value of close friendship achieves priority over the culturally prescribed norm of altruism toward peers in the group. Thus, our findings only partly confirm Berndt's (1993) speculation about cultural barriers against close friendship in China. They also support the constructivist approach according to which developmental change does not merely reproduce cultural norms (see also Turiel, 1998, this volume). Individuals, far from being but passive recipients of implicit and explicit socialization through interactions with others, actively construct the meaning of relationships and moral norms. Socialization experiences in family and school are only one source of the construction process of moral sensibility in friendship, a source apparently stronger in young childhood than in adolescence. Biological changes and increasing involvement in peer relationships in adolescence may represent a second source of moral growth. This appears to be general across the two different cultures which otherwise represent different life-worlds. Our findings concerning friendship can be interpreted to the effect that experience in peer and friendship relationships may modify and even transform prevailing cultural concerns and socialization patterns. Comparing the two dilemmas, it is clear, however, that friendship and parentchild relationships represent quite different contexts for moral reasoning. While in the friendship context, cultural differences in moral judgments appear to decrease in adolescence, in the authority context, cultural differences seem to persist or even increase. This finding may be interpreted to the effect that the cultural norm of filial piety represents a moral value of cultural importance so great that it is hard to transcend. The expectation of a relationship of equality between parents and children seems less strong in the Chinese than in Icelandic adolescents. It is an open question how much the norm of filial piety will be transformed in the process of modernization as some authors suspect (Ho, 1996). In the Western world, processes of modernization have changed the unilateral structure of relationships that Piaget had in mind when he emphasized the differences between parent-child and peer relationships. As mentioned above, Iceland represents a society that historically was characterized by more egalitarian parent-child relationships due to the specific life conditions prevailing in settlement farms in the rural past (Edelstein, 1983). When interpreting the meaning and generalizability of our findings, it should be kept in mind that sociomoral reasoning was assessed using only one dilemma in the context of peer and parent-child relationships. Clearly, it would be desirable to vary the conflict situations in order to test for cross-situational stability. In the long run,
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however, we hope that our research data will provide a more comprehensive account of the structure of sociomoral reasoning in the two cultures by taking into account general reasoning about the norm of promise-keeping, friendship and parent-child relationships. A comparison of 19-year-olds from both cultures permits to trace interpersonal moral reasoning about close relationships beyond adolescence. Cultural similarities and differences that were typical of adolescence were conserved into young adulthood (Keller, 2004). Young adults in both cultures revealed a shift from the adolescents' concerns for intimacy in relationship to concerns for autonomy observed in the friendship reasoning of Western young adults (Selman, 1980). However, Chinese emphasized the embeddedness of friendship relationships in the wider society more strongly, while Icelanders emphasized the private nature of close friendship. The present study should be viewed as a first step toward the exploration of the little known territory of the morality of close relationships.
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PART FOUR
Morality, Autonomy, Identity
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
16 Partiality and Identity—Psychological Research on Preferential Behavior Toward Group Members Mordecai Nisan
This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the phenomenon that people show preference to members of their group—in this case their co-nationals—in the distribution of resources. I use the word "partiality" to describe this phenomenon. This subject has been discussed widely in philosophy (see, e.g., Miller, 1995), but has not been given sufficient attention in psychological research. The philosophical study of the issue often starts from the contradiction between the liberal moral assertion that each person should be treated equally irrespective of his or her national (or other irrelevant) group, and the accepted view (manifested in practice) that in many cases partiality is permitted and even called for. The philosophical discussion of the issue asks mainly whether and when partiality can be justified. The psychological study presented here is intended to reveal the bases and limits of partiality behavior through asking people how and under what conditions they j ustify partiality. The philosophical discussion of the topic is generally abstract and quite removed from manifestations of partiality in concrete situations. That is its merit, but it may be also a disadvantage. Encountering partiality in a real situation may sharpen our perception of the phenomenon, but may also distort it. The empirical study presented here involves such a real situation. Israeli Jews were asked to make decisions in difficult dilemmas involving partiality on national-cultural grounds and then explain them. We hope that the decisions and the explanations we obtained shed light on questions such as the following: What is the basis for partiality on national grounds, which seemingly deviates from a basic principle of justice that not only philosophers but also ordinary people advocate? Should we regard it as crude discrimination against members of other groups, prompted by contempt or hostility toward them, or as the outcome of a sense of group loyalty? Does this behavior reflect the rejection of the impartiality principle or the consideration of a moral tenet that is deemed to override the impartiality principle?
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Since this subject is fraught with painful associations from the past and the present, I will begin by describing the most unsettling dilemma that I gave the subjects of the present study. The presentation of the dilemma will not only clarify my operational definition of the term "partiality," it will also compel the reader to confront the issue. After this introductory part, the first section presents two theoretical approaches to the subject of partiality. In contrast to a prevailing tradition in social psychological research, which attributes national partiality to ethnocentricity and hostility, I present an alternative possible explanation for partiality—one that links it with a sense of group loyalty and faithfulness to personal identity. The second section—the empirical core of the study—presents a series of hypotheses that stem from the explanation I propose and provide research findings for testing them. The third section summarizes and analyzes the findings. I conclude that there is indeed strong support for the claim that partiality may stem from an ethical posture, acknowledging and accepting the demand for impartiality, but concurrently investing group and identity loyalty with an ethical consideration that, within certain limits, may supersede the impartiality imperative. The last section discusses several implications of the findings for the liberal perception of impartiality. Here is the basic dilemma presented to the subjects: One day you are summoned urgently to a hospital to give blood. You have a rare blood type. Two patients need all the blood you can donate. One of them is a Jew, like you, while the other is not Jewish. Both patients are about the same age and in the same state of health—there is no basis for choosing between them in terms of the urgency of their treatment. You are asked to decide which of the two will receive your blood. What is your decision? This was followed by a series of open questions: Why? What considerations entered into your choice and what weight did you assign them? Are you fully satisfied with your choice? What, in your opinion is the right choice in this kind of situation? Under what conditions would you decide differently? There were other questions as well. Other dilemmas I presented dealt with partiality toward other groups (e.g., close or distant relatives) and the distribution of other benefits (e.g., financial donations to various causes, hiring and firing workers). In addition, as will be described below, I investigated different variations of the dilemmas to test the impact of certain variables. The dilemma presented above was perhaps the most unsettling in three ways. It involved partiality based on nationality, which we tend to link with chauvinism; it involved blood, a substance that arouses powerful emotions; and it involved a person who might be seen as belonging to a group in conflict with one's own. As mentioned, this article focuses on partiality toward members of one's national group, or co-nationals. This is a topic of intrinsic interest, as it addresses a central problem which has been with us throughout human history (albeit in different forms; see, e.g., Smith, 1986) and which, far from showing signs of fading away, appears to be gaining in intensity. I hope my research will shed some light on this issue. However,
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here, my main interest in this subject is from the viewpoint of moral judgment and decision. In a previous paper (Nisan, 1993), I presented studies on a conflict between what I called perception of the desirable (I used an example involving self-actualization) and moral considerations. Those studies underscored the importance of loyalty to one's identity not only as a mediating variable between judgment and moral behavior (Blasi, 1984) but also as a claim in the face of moral considerations. The dilemma of partiality toward co-nationals reflects a cogent and fairly transparent conflict between, on the one hand, the consideration of impartiality, the perceived pillar of justice, and on the other, as I will argue, a consideration which is of vast importance in day-to-day moral judgments—the "right" of individuals to give expression to their deep feelings to what they perceive to be an essential component of their identity—in this case, loyalty to their group. Partiality dilemmas may be instructive as to the status of identity considerations—their validity, basis, and limits—in moral decisions. This issue appears to be of special importance at a time when authenticity is perceived not only as having moral status but also as being a moral anchor (Taylor, 1992; Trilling, 1972).
1. Theoretical Background The two dominant trends in moral philosophy, the deontological and the utilitarian, view impartiality as an essential demand of morality. Treating all people equally, and avoiding discrimination against people from different groups unless there is a very good reason for it are perceived as a cornerstone of morality (Nagel, 1991). There is broad agreement on this point and no need to elaborate. Nevertheless, some philosophers have pointed out that impartiality should not be taken to extremes. This view is applied not only to partiality toward oneself, which is often presented as a condition of personal autonomy, but also toward one's family and friends; thus, the ground is prepared for allowing partiality toward a more distant, larger group (such as a nation). This view highlights our special obligations to the members of our own group and the positive values that come into play when we are partial toward a person of our own group—the solidarity and loyalty that are thus manifested. On the face of it, the disparity between these two views toward partiality is unbridgeable. This disparity is expressed in philosophical deliberations on patriotism (see Miller, 1995). Maclntyre (1984) distinguished between two different concepts of morality: Universal morality, which demands that the individual make judgments from a vantage point that is detached from the one at which he is situated; and particularist morality, which emphasizes personal attachments and imbues loyalty to the nation with moral meaning. Maclntyre adopts an extreme particularist approach, arguing
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that true patriots are those who may abandon impersonal moral claims and support their own group out of loyalty in the case of a conflict between the two. Other communitarian philosophers, who also stress the moral status of social belonging, may not go as far, but they also underscore values involving loyalty to a group (Sandel, 1982; Taylor, 1992). In recent years, several attempts have been made to reconcile the apparent conflict between these two points of departure (Miller, 1995; Tamir, 1993). The issue of partiality has not been studied in psychology from the moral point of view taken here—but it crops up in studies on such issues as loyalty to one's group, discrimination, intergroup attitudes, and the like (see Druckman, 1994). This research has revealed people's strong tendency, expressed in judgments, feelings, and behavior, to favor in-groups and discriminate against out-groups. Much of this research was carried out in the wake of World War II and was directly or indirectly inspired by the study of the "authoritarian personality" (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). It is only natural that this work was guided by a negative attitude toward national partiality, and almost completely ignored the element of group loyalty. Partiality behavior was generally perceived as an expression of hostility toward foreigners, of egoism, and ethnocentrism. True, Adorno and his colleagues distinguish between genuine patriotism (love of country) and pseudo-patriotism, which they placed on their scale of ethnocentrism. However, this distinction all but disappears in subsequent research in this field (as an exception, see Feshbach, 1991, who finds a clear distinction of this kind in factor analysis and correlations with socialization variables). A similar approach is found in the impressive research program of Tajfel and his colleagues (1981). One of their major findings was a pronounced tendency to show partiality toward one's own group even when that group was "minimal," being based on an experimenter's arbitrary allocation of the subjects to two groups. This research program culminated in a well-developed theoretical framework, which is supported by numerous sophisticated studies. It was found that people not only tend to award more benefits to their own group but also try to enlarge the gap between their group and the other group at the price of forgoing benefits. A central theoretical argument of this approach is that discrimination against the other group has the aim of enhancing the subject's self-esteem through his group identity. The program thus focused on one side of partiality behavior—discrimination against the other group (as opposed to favoring one's own group). This focus is encouraged by the experimental paradigm of the minimal group, where the subject has no historical, cultural, or emotional connection with the group to which he was allocated. Belonging to such a group cannot thus be an element in the individual's identity. In such a situation, partiality behavior obviously cannot be seen as having a good or desirable aspect. A later development of Tajfel's theory, the theory of social identity (Turner, 1987), confers central status on
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social identity, as the name suggests. It thus paves the way for the idea of normative status for partiality behavior toward members of one's own group. The other side of partiality, that of the needs fulfilled by being loyal to the group and giving expression to one's identity, has been a lively topic in social psychology for the past decade. Many studies of the self suggest the existence of a human need to maintain, affirm, and give expression to the self (self-verification, self-affirmation, selfactualization; see Baumeister, 1995; Horenczyck & Nisan, 1996). These studies and the associated concepts did not focus on the issue of partiality; they are rather part of the overall research into the motivations of the self. Nevertheless, they are obviously connected with the issue of partiality. They suggest that a decision on whether to be partial may involve people's motivation to affirm and express their identity and not only, or necessarily, their hostility to outsiders or their striving for self-enhancement.
2. Perception of One's Obligation to One's Group A theme that has not received due attention in social psychological research is the normative status and meaning of group membership to the individual. Do people feel that their group membership or social identity imposes a claim on them and subjects them to duties? Psychological studies treat the inclination to affirm the self as a motivation (see Baumeister, 1995) parallel to people's motivations to enhance the self and to make a favorable self-presentation. In this sense, an inclination to be loyal to your group, to affirm or give expression to your belonging to a group, has no moral status and cannot constitute a justification for partiality behavior. The individual cannot say, "I know that morally I must not be partial toward members of my nation, but since I feel a strong need to affirm my national identity I may allow myself to be partial to my co-nationals." However, both ordinary thinking and philosophical deliberations (e.g., Miller, 1995; Tamir, 1993) suggest that partiality to co-nationals is perceived not only as a need but also as having normative status. That people may perceive loyalty to their national identity as good and desirable is a basic assumption in this article—the foundation for the overall hypothesis of the present research. According to this hypothesis, partiality to a group, including a nation, may derive from a normative belief—a belief that favoring people of your own group (in this case, your nation) is good and desirable and perhaps even a duty. What may be the psychological basis of such a belief? Analogy to the case of partiality to a family member suggests two possible bases for this normative belief: a feeling of special responsibility for co-nationals, and a sense that one should be loyal and give expression to one's identity. The consideration of special responsibility is certainly a decisive—though definitely not exclusive—reason for showing partiality toward a
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close relative or a good friend, or anyone with whom I share mutual expectations of help. A father has a special responsibility toward his family based on a sort of unwritten contract, a commitment by virtue of which he is not only justified in showing partiality toward his family, but is actually obligated to do so. Special responsibility of this kind is not dependent on one's personal feelings for the member of the group; its source is ostensibly in the unwritten agreement with the rest of the group to show partiality toward one another. But can we apply this reasoning to partiality toward one's co-nationals? Psychologically, the decisive question is not whether there is a formal commitment or a social norm, or even an expectation for showing preference to the members of one's group (nor is it a philosophical question, such as whether belonging to a nation, which is forced on me, can impose an obligation on me); the crucial question, rather, is whether people feel that they are in fact charged with responsibility of this kind. Do people feel that not to show partiality toward a member of their nation, unless they have some good reason for it, is tantamount to not upholding their duty? To be sure, feeling this kind of "special obligation" does not necessarily mean that a person will feel obligated to show partiality in a specific situation; in a particular case, the obligation may be overridden by the consideration of impartiality. One can certainly find cases of this sort of special obligation to one's own people. I can imagine that members of a persecuted group share a sense of mutual responsibility at a personal level much the same as toward their family—a moral obligation that is not contingent on their emotions or inclinations. We sometimes find this form of obligation described by Holocaust survivors. They consider solidarity with their fellow survivors to be a categorical imperative. Even though people may feel such an obligation toward co-nationals, however, I do not think that in Western society this is a strong feeling for most people most of the time. This belief is based on some exploratory studies as well as results obtained in the present study, which show that even people who justify partiality toward co-nationals avoid condemning those who do not show such partiality. Yet the failure to meet a special obligation, for example to your family, is perceived as deserving condemnation. Indeed, it seems that in general people do not have a normative expectation that their co-nationals will be partial to them. My conclusion is that an explanation of partiality in favor of co-nationals in terms of a feeling of special obligation to them is at best insufficient, and that we should look for another, or at least an additional, explanation. This should not be construed to mean that I deny that people feel a sense of responsibility toward conationals. The fact that certain actions committed by co-nationals make me feel guilt and shame as well as pride indicates the existence of a sense of shared responsibility within the group. I maintain, however, that this sense of responsibility does not make a claim on us.
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The second way to explain the idea that partiality is desirable is, as mentioned, the sense of obligation to be loyal to your identity. That statement calls for several clarifications which go beyond the present discussion. I will mention only what is essential for our purposes. To begin with, a few words about the use of the term identity (Blasi, 1993; Erikson, 1968). In the present discussion, "identity" refers to people's definition of who they are, their perception of what is of major importance to them, so that if it were to be altered—so they believe—they would be significantly different people. The elements of people's identity offer them directions for action and standards for evaluation and, as such, they constitute the basis of their functioning as autonomous agents. One's self-definition is arrived at through reflection and evaluation. People not only discover the elements of their identity, they also choose and construe them. This does not mean that the choice is made with complete freedom. Some basic elements in the personal realm (such as your face) and in the social realm (such as your nation) are not chosen, but neither are they perceived to be coerced. A person accepts them as part of her identity because they are what constitutes it. She can try to shape them and sometimes even to reject them. However, once accepted as part of one's identity, as its defining elements, they are no longer treated as being external. I would like to note three points: Identity is the basis for people's autonomy, in that it provides a basis for their operation as agents; people accept identity out of choice though not out of absolute freedom; and the individual accepts her identity through a kind of reflection. These three points constitute the basis for feeling obligated to be loyal to one's identity. By the very act of choosing our identity we declare some of our commitments. People's choice of identity is a kind of prudential commitment to themselves: We act according to a plan. Loyalty to identity is perceived as well-considered behavior, as manifesting willpower and tenacity, whereas disloyalty is considered a flaw in the individual's status as an agent. The choice of identity is also a kind of commitment to personal conceptions of the "good," connected with the individual's development and flourishing. Moreover, it signifies a kind of promise to others, a kind of statement: This is me, and in your relations with me you can depend on the fact that these are the plans and principles and attitudes that guide me. Relations between people are relations between identities, between people who are perceived to be committed to plans and principles, between people whom we can trust to be loyal to what they present to us and to themselves. These aspects of commitment to identity were among the reasons given by adolescents for their choices in dilemmas involving loyalty to one's identity (Nisan, 1997). The scenario described an adolescent facing a choice between an action that was described as part of his identity (going to a lecture on astronomy, taking part in a demonstration for Soviet Jewry) and another action that he personally preferred (going to
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a basketball game). The subjects were asked what they thought the protagonist should choose and why, how they thought he would feel if he did not choose the act connected with his identity, and other questions. The results suggested that people are expected to be loyal to their identity: When an action was depicted as important for the protagonist's identity, he was expected to choose that behavior. The grounds given were diverse and not always well-articulated, but they did involve the types of commitment mentioned above. Thus, for example, a protagonist who did not behave in line with his identity was described as being spineless, as not showing responsibility for his future, as thinking only about his own pleasure, rather than "what kind of person he is," as being unreliable, and the like. But what does it mean to be loyal to one's identity; what does it demand from the individual? Interviews about identity and commitment (Nisan, in press) suggest that, in addition to avoiding behavior that is not consistent with one's identity (unless there is good reason for it), loyalty to identity also requires giving it positive expression. Identity is not constituted merely of boundaries which must not be crossed. Its essence is commitments and plans that are supposed to direct the individual's life, to imbue it with meaning and substance. Loyalty to my identity, then, means giving expression, in words and deeds, to what I am committed to, to what I perceive as meaningful in my life. On the face of it, this seems to be a tautology: If something is meaningful to your life it will ipso facto be manifested in your behavior, and if not, it is probably not important to you. However, observing ourselves and our surroundings, and listening to people talking about this issue, teach us that this is not necessarily the case. Components of one's identity—commitments which are truly important to an individual—may be in conflict not only with each other but also with other forces, such as passions, pressures of the immediate environment, and cultural conventions—forces that may steer people away from what their identity calls for. Being loyal to one's identity demands giving it at least some active expression through behavior. To avoid expressing one's identity will often be considered a disavowal of oneself and consequently as not worthy. The last link in the proposed theoretical framework is the nation's place in the individual's identity (we need not embark on a historical discussion of the evolution of the nation and its place in people's identity; see, e.g., Smith, 1986). Psychological studies have sought the basis for people's attachment to their group, putting forward explanations covering the gamut from evolutionary to learning to functional terms (see Feshbach, 1991). Such explanations treat one's attachment to one's group as an inclination, a kind of emotion, but do not elaborate on the reasons and justifications that people offer for incorporating this attachment into their identity. After all, you can acknowledge the fact of your attachment to a group, but still evaluate it as undesirable and thus reject it. Indeed, some people take just this attitude toward their (sometimes
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strong) attachment to their nation. However, many people accept their attachment to their nation as a constitutive element of their identity. Most of them will not be able to adduce well-developed grounds for this, but those who can usually mention the aspects that are put forward by philosophers dealing with this issue (see Miller, 1995; Tamir, 1993). There is no need to repeat them here; a few comments will do. From the psychological point of view, we can indicate a number of bases for the place of one's nationality in one's identity. The first is an "objective" basis, which is embedded in reality. National belonging is nowadays one of the most potent influences on people's thinking, feelings, and needs as well as their daily life. The nation determines the span of the options that individuals are presented with at every stage of their life. Second is a historical basis: The nation—its history, heritage, and culture—is perceived as a common group framework extending from the past to the future, a framework that provides the temporal dimension needed for self-understanding and for feeling a sense of belonging that transcends the here-and-now. Third, the acute need to belong to a society, intertwined with the need for cognitive clarity and self-definition, leads people to look for belonging at a fairly generalized level. The fusion of all the bases I have mentioned brings many individuals to define themselves in terms of their nationality. Indeed, this fusion does not allow the individual to ignore his national belonging; doing so would be a distortion of reality. When an individual's nation has no status in her personal identity, it is often—though surely not always—the result of an intended and active denial. Even if the bases I have cited are "invented," it is clear that, in most cases, the nation—this "imagined community" (in the phrase of Anderson, 1983)—is quite substantial in the individuals life. Since it is taken for granted, one becomes aware of it only under specific circumstances, as when threatened. It follows from the above discussion that a person's attachment to his national group is likely to provide him with ethical reasons to be partial to this group. People are not always able to articulate these reasons cogently, but even a vague conception is enough to give them psychological substance. These considerations are a counterweight to the consideration of impartiality, whether because they justify our "right" to maintain our identity and our autonomy as agents in the face of a far-reaching moral claim, or because they demand that we be loyal to our identity and express it through partiality in favor of our co-nationals. Many people, it would seem, do not consider such partiality necessary and justified. They do not consider impartial choice to be a denial of their identity; their group loyalty may be outweighed by other considerations which they deem more important, or they may feel that it is not essential for them to express their national identity on this particular occasion. Yet to others, or in other situations, the choice of partiality appears justified and even desirable. I would like to note two features of the feeling of group loyalty as an ethical reason for showing partiality. First, the feeling is a considered one. It is not merely some form
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of being swept along by the group or conforming to it, although that situation also exists and is common. Individuals consider their national identity as presenting them with an ethical claim. Second, in itself, the feeling of loyalty to a group does not have negative implications toward other groups. Although helping a member of my group means showing partiality to him over someone else in need, it does not necessarily feel this way psychologically. Loyalty to my group, like loyalty to my family, need not involve feelings of hostility toward other groups or people.
3. Proposing and Testing Hypotheses Arising from the Theoretical Framework In this section, I examine and enrich the theoretical framework presented above by offering and testing some representative propositions or hypotheses which may sharpen our understanding of the nature of choices in favor of a co-national. The hypotheses presented below were tested in a series of studies with individuals of various ages, ranging from late adolescence (16 to 17) to age 55, who defined themselves as nonreligious (I decided not to study religious individuals because their moral considerations and justifications are inextricably intertwined with religious rules and principles). Most of the studies used questionnaires that presented dilemmas in which the subjects had to decide how to divide a resource among two or more people, one or more of whom were from the subject's national group, while the other or others were from a different national group. The dilemmas appeared in several variations, investigating the effect of different variables. Generally, the subjects were asked not only to choose how to divide the resources but also to supply reasons for their choice. Our subjects did not, and were not intended to, constitute a representative sample; the study did not set out to present data on the frequency of partiality, but rather to understand the phenomenon. Still, to satisfy the reader's curiosity, I will note that in one of the more "representative" studies, in which 123 secular Jewish individuals were tested on the dilemma presented at the beginning of the paper (the "blood dilemma"), 49 percent opted for partiality and 51 percent chose impartiality.
3.1 Two Hypotheses About the Moral Nature of Partiality Dilemmas (1) People perceive partiality behavior toward co-nationals as good and desirable, and justify it in terms of a right and even an obligation to be partial in such a case. This is the basic argument of the present project, and its rationale was discussed above. To test this hypothesis we analyzed the reasons given by the subjects for their choices in the
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"blood dilemma" presented in the beginning of this chapter. The analysis was carried out by naive judges, that is, people who were unfamiliar with our theoretical framework. The judges were asked to classify the responses into categories of their choosing, in addition to two categories which we offered them: considerations of benefit and considerations of hostility toward the other group. These two types of consideration play the major role in psychological explanations of group discrimination, as discussed above. After the categories were set up, two judges classified the responses according to the categories. There was high agreement among the judges, and the categories covered about 85 percent of the reasons. Not one of the reasons for partiality was based on hostility. Only 2 percent of the reasons were classified as egoistical considerations (related to self-benefit). Nearly all the reasons for showing partiality could be divided almost equally into three categories. Approximately one third of the responses fell into the category of obligation to one's own group. This category included reasons specifically mentioning that preferring one's co-nationals is an obligation or worthy behavior, such as "It is my obligation to help my own people first," or "This is how I must act in such a situation." Approximately one third of the reasons fell into a category that we labeled "responsibility." Reasons in this category clearly reveal a sense of special responsibility to co-nationals by either explicitly mentioning the term "responsibility" or using other terms. Examples of this category are "I feel a responsibility to save the life of a member of my own nation," or "The poor of your city come first" (a Talmudic statement well known to the subject population). Finally, about a third of the reasons fell into a category that we labeled "identification with one's group." Here, the reasons emphasized identification, solidarity, closeness, and a sense of common destiny, as in "I feel loyalty to and identification with my nation," "I help people I feel close to," or "This is how I demonstrate my solidarity." Three points are noteworthy in connection with these findings. First, the subjects felt a need to justify their choice. The choice to be partial is not perceived as a natural one that needs no explanation. Underlying the reasons was the subjects' feeling that partiality is a normative deviation that requires an explanation; that they must justify the departure from egalitarianism. Second, the vast majority of the subjects justified their partiality in normative terms as good and desirable, and not in utilitarian terms as generating satisfaction or being beneficial. Third, partiality was rarely grounded in unworthy reasons of putting the self ahead of the other, or hostility. It might be argued that the subjects were offering socially acceptable (or politically correct) reasons. Indeed, this might have been a factor in their choice of justifications, but even if it is, it shows that the subjects are aware of the moral aspects of partiality and that the categories mentioned above have an ethical status for them. I will return to this theme later.
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(2) People who opt for partiality do so not only in dilemmas involving their own conationals; when they face a partiality dilemma where an individual from another nation must choose between a co-national and someone from a different nation, they will opt for partiality here too. If indeed decisions in partiality dilemmas are made on the basis of moral considerations, we would expect people to apply the same criteria in all similar partiality dilemmas, whether they involve co-nationals or not. This is a basic requirement of a moral judgment. If the permission or obligation to show partiality is considered universal, this will attest that the tendency to prefer members of one's own group does not stem from a particular ethnocentric bias, but is anchored in moral considerations. This hypothesis was tested by presenting subjects with the partiality dilemma described at the beginning of this chapter, where a person has to decide whether to give his blood donation to a co-national or a person from another nationality who needs the blood urgently. For half of the subjects (randomly selected), a Jewish donor had to choose between a Jew and an Arab in Israel, while for the other half an English speaker in Quebec had to choose between an English speaker and a French speaker. The results showed a surprising similarity in the responses of the two groups. In the EnglishFrench version of the dilemma, 54 percent of the subjects thought that partiality was the right choice, compared to 59 percent in the Jew/non-Jew version. The findings thus support the hypothesis that partiality decisions rest on universal moral considerations and are not necessarily unique to choices involving a co-national of the subject.
3.2 Two Hypotheses About the Boundaries ofPartiality (1) Partiality is perceived as justified only when it is meant to improve the welfare of group members; it will not be perceived as justified when it is meant to affect the welfare of the other group adversely. This hypothesis derives from the nature of the ethical justification of partiality based on responsibility to, and solidarity with, one's group. It applies to improvement of the welfare of one's own group, but not to harming the other group. I would expect that the major finding ofTajfel (1981), that subjects strive to enlarge the gap between their group and the other group even at the cost of reducing the benefits to their own group, should hold only in artificial groups like those he created in his experiments, where moral reasons for partiality do not hold. This hypothesis was tested at the most basic level by asking subjects to choose between two alternatives for distributing resources: (a) awarding an equal sum of money to two retirement homes, one for Jews and the other for Arabs; or (b) awarding the same amount of money to the Jewish hostel as in the former alternative, but a smaller amount to the Arab hostel. The subjects were also requested to give reasons for their
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choice. As expected, the decisive majority chose the first alternative and vigorously disqualified the second. This finding contrasts with the choice made in a different dilemma, where the subjects were asked to divide a given sum of money between two homes for the elderly, one for Jews and one for Arabs. In that study, slightly more than half the subjects awarded a larger amount to the Jewish hostel. In other words, subjects who make choices based on partiality do so when this improves the welfare of their group, but not when it reduces the welfare of the other group without improving the situation of their own. (2) The inclination to be partial is stronger in situations where benefits are distributed and peoples welfare is improved than in situations in which people are deprived of benefits and their welfare is adversely affected. The rationale is similar to that of the first hypothesis. Since improving people's welfare is—in Kantian terms—an imperfect duty, while refraining from harming people's welfare is a moral obligation, one would be more likely to being partial in distributing rewards than in taking rewards away (when it is unavoidable). To test this hypothesis, we have to compare the inclination to show partiality in situations of distributing resources and depriving people of resources, making the situations as similar as possible in terms of the value of the resources in question. It is no simple matter to construct such situations, especially in light of the fact that even if we are dealing with similar amounts of money, loss has a greater weight than profit (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). We did not go into these hard problems in designing our study; our comparison involved choosing to be partial (and justifying this choice) in stories that appear symmetrical with respect to the gain or loss of benefits. Thus, in a representative study, the choice involved either hiring or firing a person in a privately owned business, with the subject having to choose between two people identically qualified for the position, one of her own nationality and the other of a different nationality. Whereas about half of the subjects showed and justified partiality in the positive version of the dilemma (hiring a worker), fewer than a quarter of the same subjects were ready to so choose and argue in the negative version (firing a worker). In the positive version, the most frequent ground for partiality was that, since what is involved is the owner's private property, he may divide it as he wishes, and if he feels closeness and responsibility toward his own nation, he may show partiality to a co-national. In the negative versions, on the other hand, the most frequent response was that no discrimination must be shown, because it is not fair, because both people have the same "right," and the like. The responses showed that the apparently parallel situations were not, in fact, perceived as symmetrical. Thus, in the case of dismissal from employment, subjects treated the individual's past on the job as a consideration in favor of his
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keeping the job— a consideration which does not exist when a person is newly hired. Such a consideration is inherent in every situation in which one deprives people of something they already have. This hypothesis undoubtedly merits more thorough study.
3.3 Two Hypotheses About the Personal Nature of Decision in a Partiality Dilemma (1) A partiality dilemma is perceived as allowing—from a moral point of view—for personal factors to play a role in the decision made. People recognize that there is no one right decision in such dilemmas—a decision that is determined by the "objective" data of the situation and applies equally to everyone. Factors, such as one's level of identification with the group and her sense of her current "balance" of fulfilling her "obligation" to her national identity (Nisan, 1993), are perceived as morally valid considerations in a partiality dilemma. Hence, different decisions may be perceived as right or acceptable. To test this hypothesis, we presented subjects with the "blood dilemma" and asked for their decision and their reasons for it. We then told them about a person who had made the opposite choice, and asked whether they condemned that choice. Only about 35 percent condemned the opposite choice, with the proportion higher among those who were against partiality than among those who were in favor of it. The subjects were also asked to explain why they did, or did not, condemn the judgment which conflicted with theirs. The majority of the answers mentioned the relative importance of the considerations pro and con for the decision maker as a reason for not condemning him ("Apparently he considers the matter of nationality very important." "He considers the principle of nondiscrimination more important than his commitment to his nation."). These results suggest not only that partiality dilemmas are considered to be amenable to different judgments but also support the claim that these judgments are seen as stemming from considered thought and not as ignoring ethical considerations. (2) The internal moral conflict entailed in a partiality dilemma is not resolved by a person's decision. If indeed such a dilemma involves two moral considerations—impartiality and loyalty, neither of which invalidates the other—we may expect that once the individual has chosen either way, he will feel uneasy about his choice. The unease will arise from the fact that the individual has violated a consideration that he accepts as morally valid. Such a feeling would constitute evidence of the moral nature of the decision. It would also show that the decision to be partial derives from a desire "to be good" and to be loyal to one's identity, not from a disregard of moral and ethical considerations.
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To test this hypothesis, we asked subjects who had responded to a partiality dilemma the following two questions: "Are you wholeheartedly satisfied with your judgment, and why?" and "Did your decision require a compromise? How? Why?" The combination of a negative reply to the first question and affirmative reply to the second was considered a sign of internal conflict. About 34 percent of all the subjects showed signs of conflict regarding their choice, with the percentage being far higher among those who had chosen partiality (45%) than among those who had not (18%). The feeling of conflict, then, derives primarily from nonacquiescence to the moral demand for impartiality. The explanation for this difference may be either that the subjects who chose impartiality lacked a sense of commitment to their national identity, or that they considered the violation of the moral demand for impartiality to be far graver than not acceding to a claim which is not obligatory and which can be satisfied on some other occasion. An analysis of the overall answers of those who opted for impartiality supports the second explanation. There were clear signs of a sense of commitment to national identity among the majority of those who showed impartiality, but they did not consider it to be a sufficient reason for discriminatory behavior. This explanation is also reinforced by the reasons brought by the subjects, which reveal both a perception of the seriousness of discrimination and the lack of a feeling of strict obligation to show partiality.
3.4
Two Hypotheses About the Connection Between Partiality Behavior and Group Identity
(1) The more central the group in the individual's identity, the more that individual will be inclined to display and justify partiality toward its members. The rationale for this hypothesis seems quite clear: According to the conception presented above, the place of the group in an individual's identity constitutes the major justification for partiality to this group. For our purposes here, we shall say that a group is more central in a person's identity the more that person considers membership in this group to be an essential element of her identity, such that a change in that membership will make her a different person. This description of identity emphasizes the individual's conscious perception of the importance of the group in how she identifies herself. On the face of it, this hypothesis is superfluous: Partiality seems to be already contained within this description of group identity. This is not necessarily the case, however. Individuals may view their group as being central to their identity yet not view partiality as a requirement or even an expression of that identity. The argument that there is a connection between identity and partiality is therefore empirical and needs to be investigated (beyond the preliminary study described here). To test this hypothesis, we investigated the importance of the group (in this case, nationality) in the identity of participants who had already made a judgment in the
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blood donation dilemma. The participants were presented with a list of personal attributes (gender, religious belief, facial appearance, political orientation, morality, nationality) and for each of them were asked to state how much (on a scale of 1 to 6) they would change if that attribute alone were radically altered. As expected, the stronger a person's national identity, the greater the inclination to show partiality. Nevertheless, there were subjects who considered the group very important for their identity, and yet showed no partiality toward members of their group, and vice versa. The relationship between identity and partiality was further investigated by asking our subjects to evaluate the partiality behavior of people belonging to another nationality. If identity is considered a valid reason for partiality, it should also work in the case of others, especially among people with a strong group identity. It is hypothesized that people for whom the group is an important component of their identity will be more attentive to the centrality of the group in other people's identity as well, and more receptive to the rationale we suggested for partiality to the group. In contrast, people for whom the group is less important will tend to interpret partiality in others as stemming from selfishness or even hostility toward the out-group. This hypothesis was tested by asking our subjects to evaluate a choice made by an English speaker in Canada to give his blood donation to another English speaker rather than to a French speaker who needed it. Here, too, an association was found between the importance of the group in the respondent's identity and a favorable evaluation of the choice for partiality. (2) Partiality would be considered more justified when shown by a person with a strong group identity than by one with a weak group identity. According to this hypothesis, we are more inclined to accept partiality shown by a French speaker in Quebec if that person possesses a strong rather than a weak identity as a Frenchspeaking Canadian. Partiality shown by a person possessing a strong group identity is interpreted as giving expression to his commitment to the group, a virtue considered good and desirable, and accepted as a valid reason for partiality. This is not the case with partiality shown by an individual with a weak group identity—his behavior is less likely to be attributed to group identity and commitment. This hypothesis goes beyond the correlation between strength of group identity and partiality; it suggests that a strong group identity is accepted as a good reason for partiality. The hypothesis was tested by presenting different subjects in the same sample with two versions of the blood dilemma. In one version, the individual who showed partiality was described as having a strong national identity, while in the other story that individual was said to have a weak national identity. The subjects were asked to evaluate the act of partiality on a scale ranging from condemnatory to praiseworthy. A clear-cut difference was found between the two groups in evaluating the act of partial-
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ity. The evaluation tended toward the favorable in the case of the person with a strong group identity and toward the unfavorable in the case of a weak group identity. The findings suggest that people's evaluation of partiality is dependent on the meaning conferred on it: When partiality behavior is attributed to an intention to express one's group identity, people tend to evaluate it positively, while when it cannot be interpreted in this manner (because the person in question lacks a strong group identity), they will tend to evaluate it negatively. The negative evaluation can stem from the judgment that the act of partiality lacks proper justification, or from attributing it to a hostile attitude. At this stage we have no data to decide between these alternatives. The findings on the association between strength of group identity, on the one hand, and the choice and evaluation of partiality, on the other, undercut the argument that partiality is based on a special responsibility which individuals feel toward members of their group. Such a special responsibility should not depend on the strength of the individual's group identity.
4. Partiality Reconsidered in Light of the Findings Preferential behavior toward a member of my group over an outsider can certainly arise from hostility, especially if I do not like the outsider. Some will say that outsiders are rarely liked and, therefore, judgments in a partiality dilemma can never be divorced from a negative attitude toward other groups. I do not want to dispute this pessimistic view of human nature, which occupies a respectable place in the history of human thought and is supported in no small measure by human history. However, alongside this conception we find another, which takes the opposite approach; here, the claim is that partiality behavior in favor of people in my own group may result from a feeling of connection and a positive attitude toward them. Our study derives from the second approach. It suggests that partiality often stems from people's feeling of obligation to be loyal to their group identity, which overcomes the feeling of obligation to be impartial, a feeling which accompanies them (as a sense of unease) even if they choose partiality. The study shows that people harbor a preference for their own group, which clearly differs from hostility to outsiders. Whereas the conception of hostility explains partiality as deriving from separation from, and rejection of, the outsider, the positive conception explains it as deriving from attachment and attraction; and, more important for our purposes, whereas the conception of hostility attributes partiality to egoistic considerations, the positive conception attributes it to a moral consideration, a belief that partiality is sometimes desirable. Although these two considerations are not entirely reconcilable, they can converge not only in our heart but also in our mind. It is probably Freud who is responsible, in
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no small degree, for people's inclination to believe that it is impossible to eradicate hostile impulses and emotions. But Freud also pointed out our ability to restrain and moderate such impulses (and, at the same time, how easy it is to fall into the trap of self-deception). When asked to furnish explanations for their partiality, our subjects tended to offer ethical considerations rather than ones based on a negative attitude toward the other group. It is hard to deny that such explanations are influenced by social desirability, but it is also hard to deny the important role of the ethical consideration of loyalty to the group in partiality behavior. Let us imagine a situation in which someone is asked to make a donation to a member of his group who is in distress, without partiality being involved. In this situation, only the positive consideration—helping a member of the group—is operative. The probability of a donation being made in this situation seems to be higher than that of a donation being made to someone in similar distress but belonging to a different group. This comparison suggests that the consideration of loyalty to group identity is quite potent. Any attempt to understand partiality without this consideration will be flawed. The subjects' explanations suggest that there are three levels of ethical justification for partiality. At the first level, subjects are content to point out the "natural" basis for partiality—their strong attachment to their group. On the face of it, this conception lacks a normative aspect, but a closer examination shows that in many cases such an aspect is latent. Explanations of partiality in terms of attachment to the group may often be interpreted as use of the language of rights. It is as if the subject was saying, "My attachment to my group is so fundamental that limiting it would be an infringement of my freedom; and I do not think that such an infringement is justified in the present case." The subject seeks to limit the demand for impartiality. At the second level, the subjects mention the social basis for partiality: Belonging to the group imposes on me a special responsibility toward the members of my group, even if it is not anchored in laws or explicit expectations. Our interviews show a far higher frequency of a conception of special responsibility than I had originally thought existed, but I still think that this conception differs from that of special responsibility in the contractual sense (see Scheffler, 1994). Generally, the feeling of responsibility toward a conational lacks the aspect of a hidden contract and is based more on a one-way perception on the part of the individual, which is not conditional on a countercommitment or profit. On the third level, the subject mentions the personal basis for partiality: my duty to be loyal to myself, not in order to preserve my identity but because it is good and desirable to act this way. This level involves the conception of authenticity that Taylor (1992) discussed. The three levels seem to be intertwined, since all three are bound up with the importance of the group in the individual's identity. Indeed, it is not always easy to ascribe a particular answer to a specific level, but there are many cases in which the distinction
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between the levels seems quite clear. While on the first level partiality is perceived as based on peoples right to express beliefs and feelings which they believe to constitute their identity, on the second level it is perceived as based on a moral obligation toward one's group, and on the third level as based on a major demand of their perception of the good—the demand for authenticity. While on the first level avoidance of partiality is seen as diminishing my autonomy, on the second level it is perceived as disloyalty to the group, and on the third level as disloyalty to oneself. Accordingly, on the first level impartiality toward one's co-nationals produces a sense of frustration, on the second level it produces a sense of guilt, and on the third level a sense of shame. Different conditions may strengthen or weaken the demand for partiality on each of the three levels. Thus, for example, factors and conditions that strengthen one's attachment to his group (such as a national memorial day) should have a greater impact on the choice of people whose partiality is based on first-level justifications; the urgent need of a group member should especially influence tendencies that stem from the second level; and outside pressure not to prefer co-nationals should have a greater effect on the third level (where the pressure will be perceived as a test of the individual's authenticity and integrity). Needless to say, on all levels the obligation for partiality may yield to other demands, though perhaps not in the same way. How should we treat these findings about the normative status of partiality, the rinding that people perceive partiality as good and desirable to the point where it even overrides the moral requirement of impartiality, a cornerstone of morality? One possibility, probably the first that occurs to psychologists, is that we are dealing with a frightening moral distortion, considering the number of people holding it and its sophistication. In this view, partiality rests on a basically tribal egoistic propensity, which is successfully disguised as a moral virtue through the claims of loyalty to one's group and identity. According to this view, the moral justification of partiality is no more than a rationalization of personal needs, interests, and attitudes that do not go along with moral expectations. I cannot and do not wish to refute this possibility, which raises the notorious problems of defining and identifying rationalization and "bad faith." Yet, confining myself to the set of data I have presented, I maintain that the findings lead us to a different interpretation of the partiality choices and justifications. They lead us—as I have said repeatedly—to view them as stemming from a genuine moral judgment and as having a firm basis in the mind of the respondents. In addition to the broad picture that arises from the present studies, I will mention three more specific findings which make it less plausible to interpret the choice of partiality as resting on rationalization and, at the same time, support seeing it as stemming from a moral point of view. First, we found that many people who have chosen to be partial feel conflicted about their choice. The conflict implies not only that these subjects believe that they
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have violated a moral demand for impartiality but also that their final choice of partiality has not brought them to invalidate that demand in this situation. Awareness of this kind is incompatible with rationalization as it is generally understood in psychology—as being based on denial or suppression. Second, we found that subjects accept and justify partiality by people of other nationalities as well—we may say that they universalize the perception of partiality as accepted or even recommended. This endows their partiality with a moral property that seems to go beyond what we consider rationalization. Third, we found that all the types of reasons that are brought in favor of partiality are raised not only by people who show it but also by subjects who take the opposite tack. Taken together, these findings make it reasonable to treat the choices for partiality in our studies as based on genuine moral decisions rather than sophisticated mass rationalization. This does not rule out the possibility that an ethical approach of this kind can serve as a cover for hostile inclinations. Indeed, some of the interviews gave me the feeling that the subjects were putting on an impressive mask to cover an ugly face; however, the mask did affect these people's choices. The above discussion gives rise to the psychologically fascinating conclusion that an attitude of impartiality, which demands equal treatment of all, and an attitude of partiality, which allows or even obligates people to be partial to a member of their own group, are not always mutually exclusive, or even two poles on a single continuum. This sounds paradoxical for two reasons. First, from the linguistic viewpoint, impartiality means the negation of partiality; second, from the pragmatic standpoint, the choice in a partiality dilemma (such as those we presented to our subjects) appears dichotomous—you can choose either to be partial or to be impartial. However, the two attitudes are not necessarily in conflict as values or as moral stances. As mentioned above, those of our subjects who chose partiality did not deny the validity of the principle of impartiality. Most of them declare a commitment to it, yet even though they may feel unease after opting for partiality, they believe that they have made the right decision. If it is indeed the case that these two competing considerations—loyalty to the group and impartiality—are not two ends of one continuum but rather two independent claims, we can imagine people with different combinations of both. A particularly interesting combination is that seen in individuals with a high commitment both to their group and to nondiscrimination—that is, liberal nationalists. Do such people exist? Our interviews found that they are not so rare. In fact, this combination is welldescribed and analyzed in the philosophical literature (e.g., Miller, 1995; Tamir, 1993). It is the task of psychologists to clarify the difficulties, costs, and processes involved in this seemingly self-contradictory attitude. It is seen as self-contradictory primarily because in many situations the nationalist and the liberal approaches do, in fact, lead in two contradictory directions.
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Psychologists have studied the nationalist attitude (not necessarily under that name) largely in its negative aspect: nationalism based on hostility toward, and rejection of, outsiders. Our discussion highlights nationalism of a different kind, which, although recognized by those who mercilessly exposed nationalism of the former kind (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950), has not received the attention of psychologists. Our study shows a psychological basis for nationalism that is built on attachment and loyalty to a group but, at the same time, also highlights the dilemma of nationalism in a liberal society. An individual's identity-based connection to, or identification with, a group or a culture is not limited to the mere awareness of belonging to the group or being involved in its culture. A central element in the sense of group identity is a sense of responsibility and commitment to the group. It is this commitment which invests belonging with its depth and meaning as part of a person's identity. There can be no conception of identity, in the sense of who I am and what is meaningful for me, without commitment. If identity gives people a sense of meaning in their lives and affords them a sense of "home" (Erikson, 1968), it is because of the commitment entailed in it. Without commitment, there is no basis for a feeling of continuity, meaning, and "being at home." However, commitment calls for expression, and for most people the kind of expression called for is behavioral rather than solely cognitive or emotional. It is this inner demand for expression of one's commitment to the group, and the idea that this is a test of loyalty to one's identity, that raises the dilemma of the liberal nationalist to the level of behavioral conflict. After all, it is very probable that the expression of commitment to one's nation will clash with an attitude of impartiality, and this attitude seems to be a salient component of our subjects' identity. Unintendedly, the conflict of liberal nationalists thus attests not only to their commitment to their group but also to their commitment to impartiality. And just as we refer to their "national identity" we can also refer to their "liberal identity." Universalist liberals, who deny that national identity has a moral claim that can override the principle of impartiality, seem to have a different problem, which is also highlighted by our study. As might be expected, those of our subjects who chose to show partiality toward their own nation were more likely than those who opted against partiality to approve such behavior by people of other nationality (e.g., English speakers in Quebec). A probable understanding of this finding is that subjects who show partiality toward the members of their own group are more sensitive and attribute more importance to considerations of group identity, whether their own or that of a person from a different group. If this understanding is correct, then a universalist liberal may have a problem in our multicultural world in which many people have strong commitments to their groups. This may be what Mead meant when he said, "We cannot attain international-mindedness until we have attained a higher degree of national-mindedness." (quoted by Feshbach, 1991)
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5. Conclusion In contrast to the dominant "surface approach" to the issue of partiality, our study suggests a "depth approach." A surface approach to partiality views it as the direct result of a negative attitude toward another group. According to this approach, partiality reflects the individual's interests. It can be said that, according to the surface approach, showing partiality is a first-order behavior which derives directly from an inclination or an attitude. A depth approach to partiality, on the other hand, suggests that partiality behavior may derive from moral considerations related to people's feeling of an obligation to be loyal to, and express, their group identity. According to this approach, partiality may be the result of factors which conflict with considerations of self-interest and immediate satisfaction. The surface approach suggests the existence of a broad chasm—perhaps too broad to be bridged—between those who show partiality toward their group and those who do not. However, this conception is not consistent with our daily experience, in which people who show partiality, and people who do not, respect each other and display mutual tolerance. This respect and tolerance are explained by the depth approach. They are based on a common denominator possessed by both groups: respect for loyalty to one's identity. Consequently, our evaluation of a specific decision to favor an in-group member depends on the identity of the person we are evaluating, on whether the decision is based on giving the upper hand to the consideration of loyalty to the group, or plain discrimination. Moreover, the study suggests that, at the level of identity, the disparity between those who show partiality and those who are impartial (within the same cultural framework) may not be as deep as might have been expected by the sharp division between them. Both groups, for the most part, feel a commitment both to impartiality and to group loyalty. It is only because of this that those who show partiality accept clear limits to it, while the impartials show acceptance of partiality in certain conditions. The limits of partiality (and of impartiality) signify the accepted range in the culture for giving expression to one's identity in a given domain (an issue beyond the present chapter). At the same time, they remind us of the danger involved in identitybased behavior. A high degree of faith in people's good will is required to rely on a person's identity as a guide to behavior, even when it is regulated by the culture. To evaluate the dangers involved in preferential behavior, we should look clearly and carefully around us. Such observation immediately reveals a major danger involved in a propartiality attitude: the danger of ignoring the distress of people of other groups, and even worse, xenophobia. It would not be proper to conclude this work without warning—out of concern and fear—against that danger.
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Acknowledgments I wish to thank Tsipi Shemaya for conducting part of the research presented above. I am grateful to Gus Blasi and Jen Glaser for incisive comments on this chapter.
References Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Row. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London: Verso Editions and NLB. Baumeister, R. F. (1995). Self and identity: An introduction. In A. Tesser (Ed.), Advanced social psychology (pp. 51—97). New York: McGraw-Hill. Blasi, A. (1984). Moral identity: Its role in moral functioning. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Morality, moral behavior and moral development (pp. 128—139). New York: Wiley. Blasi, A. (1993). The development of identity: Some implications for moral functioning. In G. G. Noam & T. E. Wren (Eds.), The moral self (pp. 99-122). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Druckman, D. (1994). Nationalism, patriotism and group loyalty: A social psychological perspective. Mershon International Studies Review, 38, 43—68. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton. Feshbach, S. (1991). Attachment processes in adult political ideology: Patriotism and nationalism. In J. L. Gewirtz & W. M. Kurtines (Eds.), Intersections with attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Horenczyck, G., & Nisan, M. (1996). The actualization balance of ethnic identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 836—843. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263—291. Maclntyre, A. (1984). Is patriotism a virtue? Kansas, NE: University of Kansas (Lindley Lectures Series). Miller, D. (1995). On nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, T. (1991). Equality and partiality. New York: Oxford University Press. Nisan, M. (1993). Balanced identity: Morality and other identity values. In G. G. Noam & T. E. Wren (Eds.), The moral self (pp. 239-268). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nisan, M. (1997). Perceptions of the desirable in adolescence. Unpublished paper, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Nisan, M. (in press). Commitment and uncertainty—a view from psychology. In Y. Cohen (Ed.), In search of a Jewish Paideia. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. [In Hebrew] Sandel, M. J. (1982). Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Scheffler, S. (1994). Families, nations, and strangers. Kansas, NE: University of Kansas (Lindley Lectures Series). Smith, A. D. (1986). The ethnic origin of nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Tajfel, H. (1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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Tamir, Y. (1993). Liberal nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taylor, C. (1992). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trilling, L. (1972). Sincerity and authenticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, J. C. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. New York: Blackwell.
Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
17 Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts Larry Nucci
Rights are central to any notion of morality because they confer the status of personhood on the individual. In the words of Alan Gewirth (1982), "the ultimate purpose of the rights is to secure for each person a certain fundamental moral status" (p. 5). As such, rights confer not only freedoms upon the individual but corollary duties upon others to respect those rights. Understanding how conceptions of rights emerge would, therefore, appear to be critical to an understanding of moral development. The issue of human rights is complex, however, and philosophers, social scientists, and political leaders disagree about the nature and importance of rights. In Gewirth's (1982) treatment of the issue, the two general objects of rights are identified as "freedom" and "well-being" which are viewed as the necessary goods of human action. A common critique of the concern with rights is that they are excessively individualistic, and even egoistic. This notion is in the writings of Karl Marx (Fromm, 1973), and in the critiques of Western views of self and morality offered by some proponents of culture theory (see especially Sampson, 1985; Cushman, 1991). The Marxist version of this view holds that within societies which focus upon individual rights, individuals have rights, but not duties for the common welfare. Thus, within capitalist societies, economic inequalities remain refractory to moral appeal because efforts to get people to share their property are seen as violations of basic rights. This interpretation has been exploited in recent years by totalitarian communist states as a defense against international criticisms of their human rights policies. China, for example, lays claim to a conception of rights which de-emphasizes personal freedom in the service of the general rights of well-being (e.g., reduction of mass starvation and poverty), and criticizes the United States for its emphasis on freedom by pointing to the economic inequalities and racism as evidence of a lack of human rights (well-being) within the United States.
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The issue of egoism arises from the identification of freedom as a basic aspect of rights. As Gewirth (1982) puts it: "There is a general human right to freedom because freedom is a necessary condition of purposive action." (p. 15) Dworkin (1977), in contrast, has held that there is no general right to freedom. Dworkin's (1977) argument is made in terms of constraining freedoms of individuals for the common good. In ways similar to the concerns raised by Marx, Dworkin sets out examples, such as requirements for the common defense, rules necessary for social organization, and so forth, which illustrate the need to constrain the freedom of individuals. Reconciling the notion of freedom as basic to human rights with moral and social requirements for constraints on personal freedom would appear to require an empirical justification for a need for freedom as well as an account of how that need for freedom is integrated within, and constrained by, moral obligation and legitimate social regulation. For his part, Gewirth (1982) is quite skeptical of the role which empirical evidence can play in this discussion. "Although Thomas Jefferson following a long tradition, wrote that 'all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,' it does not seem true in the sense that they are born having legs. At least their having legs is empirically confirmable, but this is not the case with their having rights." (p. 43) Gewirth goes further by suggesting that evidence of claims individuals make of their primary interests or needs can not serve as the basis for rights since this does not deal with why rights would not be particularistic ones that match inequalities as suits the differences among individuals (e.g., relative intelligence, social position). In offering this critique, Gewirth (1982) anticipates the sorts of "rights claims" Wainryb andTuriel (1994) describe men in traditional societies making in relation to their wives and daughters. Such "rights claims" based on their gender status establish a set of "universal inequalities," and as such conflate privilege with moral worth. Despite Gewirth's misgivings, his argument, and any analysis of human rights, ultimately draws upon assumptions about human nature that are the subject of empirical study. In this chapter, I extend the arguments set out in previous work (Nucci, 1996, 2001; Nucci & Lee, 1993; Nucci & Turiel, 2000) to sketch out an empirical and theoretical case for a psychological claim to freedom that provides a nonparticularistic general substrate for the construction of moral understandings of human rights. In so doing, I also hope to be able to allow for an account of contextual and cultural variations in the particular content of rights claims without reducing the core features of the psychological sources of rights concepts to collectivist cultural constructions. The basic claim to a general human right to freedom is based on the assumption that freedom is a necessary condition for agency (Gewirth, 1982). If we look to the social sciences for evidence of a general human tropism toward agency, we find that there is convergence within contemporary studies of human development around the view that all rational persons experience themselves as agents capable of
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts decision making and the initiation of action (Crapanzano, 1990; Geertz, 1984, Stern, 1985). But, this view of agency is in, and of, itself rather empty. For while it recognizes that aspect of self as the subjective initiator of action, what James referred to as the T , it says nothing about elements of the self that comprise one's unique identity; the self as "object," or what James referred to as the "me." For agency to have meaning, the agent must have a sense of self as having a personal identity distinguishable from others. It is around this point that disagreements within the social sciences begin to emerge. For some culture theorists, there is a curious unwillingness to extend the individual's sense of agency to include a sense of self as a discrete social being with a bounded personal identity. Indeed, the view of self as individual has been characterized by some culture theorists as a peculiar Western construction (Geertz, 1984), reflecting a particular set of political beliefs and values (Cushman, 1991). These extreme social constructivist positions (e.g., Cushman, 1991; Geertz, 1984) embrace a psychological relativism in which personhood and the individual are cultural variants rather than expressions of some underlying set of psychological realities. Such efforts to marginalize personhood to a particularistic cultural construction have been read as stemming from an overreaching and overextension of analyses of culture as accounts of the psychological structures of individuals (Spiro, 1984). This reductionism has not gone unchallenged. Spiro (1993), for example, in his overview of extant anthropological accounts of "self" concluded that although notions of "self" are culturally variable, all cultures contain some differentiated view of the self, and members of all cultures appear to hold idiosyncratic views of themselves as distinct persons with particular interests. In line with Spiro's (1993) observations, the position that will be developed in this chapter is that individuals seek to maintain a differentiated personal identity—a discrete and unique definition of the self—in order to instantiate their subjective experience of agency. In order to do so, people lay claim to areas of behavioral discretion and privacy in what has been referred to as the personal domain (Nucci, 1996; Nucci & Lee, 1993). A working hypothesis is that the effort to carve out a personal domain constitutes the psychological source of the general claim to the human right to freedom. At the level of the individual, the bounds of this general claim to freedom are framed by conceptions of the boundaries of the personal domain in relation to the individual's understandings of interpersonal moral obligation and social conventional and legal regulation (Nucci, 1977; Tunel, 1983). Thus, at the level of the individual's conceptual frameworks there is no contradiction between Gewirth's (1982) assertion of a general human right to freedom and the social and interpersonal (moral) constraints upon freedom recognized in Dworkin's (1977) analysis of human rights. As described thus far, however, the personal domain remains an abstraction in
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danger of reification. People do not have a "personal domain" in the sense that "people have legs." The personal domain is the name given to a conceptual framework that individuals construct in context. This context includes the individual's conceptual frameworks of morality and societal organization (and conventional regulation) as well as the particulars of setting and culture. A corollary of this position is that our view of "self" should not be confused with romanticizations of the individual as a wholly autogenerated system (Smith, 1994). Selves are always culturally and temporally situated. What is being recognized, however, is that basic requirements for psychological integrity include the establishment of an arena of personal choice and privacy. From this, it follows that we should be able to find evidence across cultures that children and adolescents actively seek to carve out a personal sphere of actions. Because of the situated nature of these constructions, however, we should also see evidence of contextual as well as broader social and cultural variation in the specific content of what is considered to be personal, and corollary variations in the specific content of rights pertaining to freedom. The nature of such contextual and cultural variations are not all of one type, and not all variations in the content of the personal constitute variations in the fundamental freedoms essential to agency. Such fundamental freedoms would refer back to the underlying psychological requirements for the establishment of personal boundaries for the self as object and related requirements (for personal agency, continuity, and uniqueness) for establishing a sense of self as subject (Damon & Hart, 1988). Candidates for such basic elements would include decisions regarding one's own body, along with freedom of expression, communication, and association (Nucci, 1996). We may distinguish among at least the following five forms of variation in claims to personal liberty. This list, which may not be exhaustive, was drawn from philosophical analyses of human rights (Dworkin, 1977; Gewirth, 1982) and recent studies of cultural and contextual variations in personal concepts (Miller & Bersoff 1992; Smetana, 2002; Smetana & Bitz, 1995; Wainryb & Turiel, 1994). These forms of variation reflect increasing degrees of tension in the equilibria between personal freedoms, and authority and/or the general welfare. Thus, the latter variations pose the most substantive challenge to our understandings of the relations between individual psychological processes and culture. These five variations are as follows. (1) Surface Variation. Actions that people may consider personal, and which map onto basic elements for the maintenance of autonomy and identity (e.g., freedom of expression), but that are not in, and of, themselves fundamental to the maintenance of agency (e.g., choice of hairstyle). (2) Competence-Based Freedoms. Freedoms granted to rational adults that are not provided to children or to others considered incapable of rational decisions in the service of their own interests (e.g., grossly intellectually impaired adults).
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(3) Context-Specific Suspension of Liberties. Acts which are considered personal in most contexts, but which are regulated by conventions serving social organizational purposes within a restricted setting. (4) Variations in the Relation Between Concerns for Freedom and Welfare. Instances where personal choice is in conflict with the welfare of others (e.g., property rights vs. distributive justice). (5) Variations Reflecting Social Hierarchy. Variations in the personal freedoms accorded to people based on their position within a social hierarchy. I will discuss these five variations within the context of recent work exploring the development of conceptions of personal issues. To begin this discussion, I will turn to a brief overview of research which has explored some of the basic assumptions underlying the claim that individuals carve out an arena of personal choice and privacy, a personal domain, as conceptually distinct from issues of morality and convention.
Studies of the Personal Domain Children's and Adolescents' Concepts of Personal Issues Our initial work set out to determine whether the personal emerged as a spontaneous category within the course of normal child development. The first of these studies, exploring whether children treat a class of actions as personal, were conducted with middle-class children in the United States (Nucci, 1981; Nucci, Guerra, & Lee, 1991; Nucci & Herman, 1982; Smetana, Bridgeman, & Turiel, 1983). Children in these studies ranged from 6 to 18 years of age. Findings from these studies demonstrated that children make a conceptual distinction between actions they consider to be within their own discretion and acts that are legitimately subject to moral or conventional regulation. Acts that the children and adolescents considered to be personal matters were choice of friends; the content of personal diaries, phone calls, and letters; choice of hairstyle; and form of play during free time. Developmental interviews determined that children justify maintaining control over personal matters as integral to their ability to maintain personal identity and autonomy (Nucci, 1977). Age-related changes in the structure of children's justifications were isomorphic with their conceptions of self and personhood (Nucci, 1977). With the exception of Nucci and Herman (1982), each of these studies was conducted with middle-class white populations. Half of the Nucci and Herman (1982) sample were suburban working class 10-year-old African-Americans. No effects for race were found in that study in the tendencies of children to identify issues as matters of personal choice (Nucci & Herman, 1982). Similarly, no class effects were found in
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the tendencies of suburban North American mothers from families with incomes ranging from $20,000 to over $100,000 to provide areas of personal choice to their preschool-aged children (Nucci & Smetana, 1996). Moreover, the results from a doctoral dissertation of parental disciplinary practices indicate that urban middle-class African-American parents of children 4 to 10 years of age do not discipline children who defy parental authority in making personal clothing selections (Trosper, 1997). The African-American parents in the study treated the issue of clothing selection (wearing the same clean T-shirt day after day) as a personal matter important to the child's individuality and autonomy. In contrast, the parents remained firm in the face of children's moral, conventional, and prudential transgressions and engaged in varying forms of discipline in response to such transgressions (Trosper, 1997). Thus, it would appear that children and parents across a wide range of the North American middle class differentiate among conventional, moral, and personal matters.
Early Childhood Interactions and the Personal
Our developmental assumption is that children construct their notions of the personal out of social interactions with others. We have begun investigating this assumption by examining the at-home interactions between children, siblings, friends, and parents. Observational research examining the at-home interactions between American mothers and preschool-aged children (Nucci & Weber, 1995) has provided evidence that middle-class mothers act in ways indicative of a conceptual differentiation between children's areas of personal choice and matters of moral and social regulation and prudence. Mothers displayed systematic differences in their responses to children as a function of whether the issues in question were ones within the child's personal domain. This differential overall response pattern was carried through in mothers' tendencies to negotiate in response to children's resistances to the mothers' behavioral requests for a given social action. Mothers almost never negotiated with children regarding moral, conventional, or prudential forms of conduct. On the other hand, nearly one quarter of the interactions around personal issues involved negotiation and concession on the part of the mothers. Also interesting is the degree to which negotiations took place in the context of mixed events. Over 90 percent of the observed mixed events involved overlap between issues of convention or prudence with the personal domain. Mothers engaged in negotiation with their children in the context of such mixed events approximately half of the time. The study also provided evidence that children play an active role in relation to their mothers, and provide feedback in the form of requests and resistances to their mothers that afford the mothers information regarding the child's claims to areas of personal
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts control. This feedback is not simply a generalized resistance to adult authority (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Kuczinski, Kochanska, Radke-Yarrow, & Girnius Brown, 1987), but a delimited set of claims to choice over a personal sphere. This is most evident in cases of mixed events, and suggests that mothers open to their children's feedback have direct access to information about their own children's needs for a personal domain. Smetana's (1989, 1996) work on adolescent-parent conflicts indicates that similar types of child resistance to adult control over what children view as personal continues throughout development as children move away from status as dependents and subordinates to status as adults. (I will take up the issue of adolescent-parent conflict below in the section dealing with competence as a source of variation in rights to freedom.)
Studies of Personal Concepts in Non-American Settings If the personal is a basic or fundamental conceptual framework, then we should see cross-cultural evidence of personal concepts among individuals. Cross-cultural work directly examining the personal outside of Western or "modern" settings is fairly recent. Each of these studies has examined some facet of reasoning about personal issues within the context of cultural settings that are ostensibly collectivistic in orientation, and, thus, less likely to support the individualistic orientation implicit in the identification of actions as personal matters. In the first of these studies, Joan G. Miller and her colleagues (Miller & Bersoff, 1992; Miller, Bersoff, & Harwood, 1990; Miller & Luthar, 1989) examined American and Indian children's, adolescents', and young adults' judgments of areas of personal discretion and moral obligation. These researchers discovered that some issues American subjects viewed as matters of individual choice and discretion were viewed by Indian subjects as matters of interpersonal moral obligation. These results indicated that the specific content of what is considered personal is subject to cultural and contextual variation. Findings of contextual and cultural variability were also reported by Wainryb and Turiel (1994) in their study of decision making within Druze Arab and Israeli families. However, Wainryb and Turiel (1994) also found evidence that subjects in both cultures treated a set of issues as personal matters. The initial study directly examining whether children and adolescents outside of the United States maintain a set of issues as personal matters was conducted in Northeastern Brazil (Nucci, Camino, & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1996). In the study, 240 children and adolescents from two social classes and three ages (6 to 8, 10 to 12, 14 to 16 years of age) were interviewed about which matters children should be able to control themselves and which should be regulated by parents or the social group. The items used in the study were ones selected by the Brazilian researchers in the project as ones that fit the theoretical definitions of the moral, conventional, and personal categories. The
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four personal items (keeping a diary private, maintaining a conversation with a friend private, choosing a hairstyle, choice of friends) were designed to correspond to hypothesized underlying fundamental elements pertaining to one's ability to illustrate or express the self, and to choose who one designates as an intimate. This study also reported findings that children and adolescents differentiate among personal, conventional, and moral issues. As in the other non-American studies, however, culture and class effects were also reported. A companion study conducted in Brazil examined mothers' views of whether children and adolescents should be accorded areas of personal discretion and control (Nucci & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1995). The general pattern of the Brazilian mothers' responses to the sorting task, in which mothers were asked to indicate whether a specific action should be one the mother should control, was up to the child, or was negotiable, was in line with responses obtained with United States samples. Brazilian mothers tended to treat personal items as matters that should be up to the children, but compliance with moral and conventional norms as matters that the mother should not simply leave up to the child. Thus, the Brazilian mothers, like their North American counterparts acknowledged an area of personal behavioral choice for their children. More recently, studies conducted with adolescents and adults in Colombia (Ardilla-Rey & Killen, 2001) and with preschool (Yau & Smetana; 2003) and adolescent children and parents in Hong Kong (Yau & Smetana, 1996) reported that children and adolescents reasoned about issues of conflict with their parents and teachers as issues of personal jurisdiction. Justifications which the children and adolescents gave for their judgments of these issues centered on personal autonomy, and thus lent support to the interpretation that these adolescents held a differentiated set of concepts about the personal. What is also interesting is that the patterns of family conflict in these collectivist settings matched those observed in studies of American adolescents and their parents. The results of these studies are all consistent with the position that areas of personal choice and discretion are maintained by individuals across a range of cultures. The studies also point toward cultural variability in the extent to which classes of people are accorded personal discretion, and in the content of what is included as falling within the area of individual choice. These issues of cultural variability will be taken up below in subsequent sections.
Personal Freedom as a Basic Psychological Need
The argument that I have been advancing (Nucci, 1996; Nucci & Turiel, 2000) is that the personal is not an invention of Western culture, but a psychological necessity for
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts the establishment of the social self. While there is little research that bears directly on this issue, a wealth of clinical data has demonstrated that disruption in the formation of personal boundaries damages individual psychological health (Masterson, 1981), and suggests that there are basic psychological limits to the extent to which others (including society) can impinge on the private lives of individuals. In fact, contemporary anthropology has moved away from romanticisms about the "group mind" or collective consciousness of so-called primitive peoples and has instead focused attention on cultural influences in individuation (Crapanzano, 1990) and on the definition of personhood (Shweder & LeVine, 1984). We have begun to examine this issue directly in a study examining whether parental overcontrol of the personal domains of their adolescent children is associated with the expression of symptoms of psychopathology in the children. There is a wellestablished literature indicating that parental dominance and intrusiveness is associated with depression and expressions of hostility on the part of adolescents (Kobak, Sudler, & Gamble, 1991). These expressions of pathology are not limited to children reared in Western households. For example, there is an emerging literature documenting the relation between parental control and eating disorders among Asian adolescent girls (Ahmad, Waller, & Verduyn, 1994; McCourt & Waller, 1995). One limitation of the clinical literature is that studies of parental intrusiveness into the lives of children is not guided by a theoretical frame that clearly identifies appropriate and inappropriate areas of parental involvement. Instead, such work has tended to use global indices of parental style, such as Baumrind's (1971) division of parenting types into the permissive, authoritative, and authoritarian where permissive and authoritarian represent the polar extremes of parental control. The work of Smetana (1989, 1995, 1996) on adolescent-parent conflict has provided clear evidence that exertion of parental authority is resisted by adolescents primarily in cases where the parent is interpreted as attempting to control actions the adolescent views as within his or her personal sphere. In her more recent work, Smetana (1996) has discovered that maladaptive family patterns, what she refers to as tumultuous families characterized by intense adolescent-parent conflicts, result from parental rigidity in response to their children's assertion of freedom of choice in the personal area. These maladaptive patterns were evident both in her samples of North American and Hong Kong families. Smetana's findings are concordant with the theoretical distinctions we have drawn, and with the basic premise being advanced here, that it is overcontrol of the personal, and not the use of parental authority per se, that would be associated with psychological problems in children. As an initial step toward exploring the relationship between parental overcontrol of the personal, and adolescent psychopathology, we conducted a survey study (Hasebe, Nucci, & Nucci, 2004) with a sample of 170 high-school students from a
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North American Midwestern suburb and 125 high-school students from Akita City, Japan. Akita City is a medium sized urban center located in a rural surround, roughly analogous to Modesto, California. The student samples from each country were quite similar in terms of the social class backgrounds of their families, and the composition of their communities. Thus, the study design reflected an attempt to control for social class in exploring the impact of culture. Students were presented a paper and pencil measure (Parental Authority Index—PAI) designed by the investigators similar in structure to the Family Decision Making Checklist (Dornbusch et al., 1985). The two sections of the PAI presented the students with identical lists of 41 behaviors or decisions that they might engage in. In the first section of the measure, students were asked to indicate for each item who they thought shouldmzke the decisions about a given topic. Students provided one of five responses ranging from "I should be the one to decide this without having to discuss this with my parents," through "My parents and I should make this decision together," to "My parents should be able to decide/tell me what to do about this without discussing it with me." In the second section, students responded to the same items using a similar five-point scale. This time, they evaluated each item in terms of who actually would make the decision (e.g., "I would be the one to decide this without having to discuss this with my parents."). The 41 items within the instrument comprised three scales: Personal Domain Scale (PDS), Prudential/Conventional Domain Scale (PCDS), and Overlapping Domain Scale (ODS). Items were included within a given scale on the basis of their theoretical fit with the scale definition, and the psychometric criteria discussed below. Initially, the measure also included prototypical moral items. However, these elicited no variance in subjects' responses (virtually all subjects treated such issues as entirely within parental authority), and, thus, they were eliminated from the final version of the instrument. Consistent with prior research (Nucci et al., 1996; Smetana, 1989), preliminary analyses indicated that adolescents made similar judgments regarding parental control over prudential and conventional items, and these items were subsequently collapsed within a single (PCDS) scale. The resulting three scales corresponded to areas of adolescent conduct consistent with parental behavioral control (PCDS), negotiated parental control (ODS), and parental intrusion associated with psychological control (PDS). The latter two scales represented refinements of the Smetana and Daddis (2002) measure by separating prototypical personal items from those that are ambiguously within the personal domain. Psychometric properties of the PAI were initially determined with a sample of 230 American adolescents. Nine items comprised the American version of the PDS of each index. The PDS had a Cronbach Alpha of .86. Seven items comprised the PCDS that had a Cronbach Alpha of .91. The third scale of the PAI, the ODS contained 18 items involving mixed events that entailed an overlap between the personal and either social
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts convention or prudence. The Cronbach Alpha for this scale was .90. A factor analysis including all 41 items, employing varimax rotation, indicated that the two "prototypical domain" scales, the PDS and PCDS, were orthogonal to one another. As would be expected, items from the ODS loaded to some degree on either the PDS or PCDS. However, when the items of the ODS were analyzed separately, they all loaded on a single factor. The study participants were administered a Japanese or American version of the PAI (described above) along with the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; Derogatis, 1994; Derogatis & Spencer, 1982). This paper and pencil measure contains 53 items describing psychological problems (e.g., nervousness, shakiness inside) and asks subjects to indicate (on a five-point scale) how much they were distressed by each problem within the past seven days. Clinicians generally employ this measure as an intake instrument that allows for a quick screening of nine psychological disorders: depression, anxiety, hostility, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, somatic symptoms, psychoticism, paranoid ideation, and phobia anxiety. The last three scales (psychoticism, paranoid ideation, phobia anxiety) provide indications of severe psychological disorders that were not the focus of the present study and were not included in any of our analyses. Results from the PAI were concordant with prior work and revealed the following: - Adolescent scores for Idealized Control (who should control the adolescents' behavior) were lower than their reports of Perceived Control (who does control the adolescents' behavior) of overlapping and conventional/prudential issues. This is consistent with the general trend for adolescents to wish for more autonomy over such issues than they perceive being granted by their parents. - Scores for Idealized Control over personal domain issues did not change with age. Within the high-school age group of this study, control over the personal domain is generally viewed as within the adolescents' purview. Scores for conventional/ prudential and overlapping issues were lower with age across samples for both the Idealized and Perceived ControlIndices. This conformed to the general finding that adolescents claim greater control, and experience their parents as providing less control over such issues as children become older. - The above patterns were the same across cultures. Analyses of the relationship between parental control and psychological symptoms revealed the following. In both countries, adolescent judgments of Idealized Control were unrelated to their self-reports of psychological symptoms. There were, however, positive correlations between parental control scores and symptoms for Internalizing Disorders (i.e., depression, anxiety, somatization) and Perceived Control. However, in neither the case of United States or Japanese adolescents was this due to perceived exertion of parental control over prudential or conventional issues. In
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both cases, negative associations with parental overcontrol occurred with the Personal Domain, and in the case of Japanese participants there was an associated effect with increased parental control over overlapping issues. There were some differences in the expression of symptoms by gender and culture, but the main finding of an association between overcontrol of the personal and internalizing symptoms of psychological problems was similar for adolescents across cultures. The results of this survey study (Hasebe et al., 2004) with American and Japanese high-school students are consistent with the notion that a personal domain of choice and privacy has roots in a set of basic psychological needs for the establishment of agency and a sense of personal authority over oneself as an individual. The correlations between psychological symptoms and the exertion of parental authority held only for issues that constituted areas of overlap between the personal and areas of prudence or convention. There were no connections between adolescent pathology and parental control over prototypical personal issues, or issues that touched on the broader conventions of the culture. Thus, the connection between parental overcontrol and psychological symptoms in adolescence is not a function of a generalized parental orientation toward control, but to intrusions within the child's personal sphere. The particulars of the present study are ones that are applicable to the Japanese and American middle class. Given that the available cross-cultural data on adolescent-parent conflict (Yau & Smetana, 1996), and family conflict patterns (Smetana, 2002) points toward a more generalized set of developmental and psychological dynamics than can be attributed to the impact of Western culture, there is reason to believe that similar patterns of psychological distress associated with parental overcontrol may be evidenced among adolescents from a wide range of the world's cultures.
Summary and Conclusions This section of the chapter has summarized a part of the case that can be made that the individual construction of a personal domain of choice and privacy generalizes across cultures, and is not restricted to persons who live within Western or "modern" societies. The research findings reported here are consistent with the view that persons seek to establish such areas of control in order to maintain a differentiated personal identity and sense of personal agency. Children, adolescents, and adults from the American and traditional cultures have been found to identify a class of behaviors and issues as outside of the legitimate sphere of social or moral regulation. Mothers from Western and traditional cultural settings recognize and foster their children's claims to areas of personal choice and privacy. Across cultures, as children mature and move toward adult-
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hood, they lay claim to a broader range of issues and actions as personal matters. Research on adolescent-parent conflict with American and Chinese samples has indicated that these shifts associated with adolescent claims to freedom are the source of most family conflicts. Anthropological accounts of adolescent-parent conflicts in 160 cultures have provided evidence that such conflicts are widespread (Schlegel & Barry, 1991). Finally, we are beginning to obtain evidence that parental overcontrol of personal issues is associated with symptoms of psychological problems in their adolescent children.
Variations in the Rights to Freedom Having reviewed the general empirical case that can be made for a psychological claim to freedom, let me turn now to specific discussion of cultural and contextual variations in corresponding rights which have freedom as their object. Before entering that discussion, let me briefly review the hypothesized connection between the personal domain and moral conceptions of rights. This relationship was set out in Nucci (1996, p. 53 f.) as follows: The personal provides the source and the conceptual justification for the individual's claims to freedom. Such claims to personal liberty do not in and of themselves constitute a moral conception of rights. Personal concepts provide the basic datum (i.e., the psychological necessity of the personal sphere) requisite to extend the moral conceptions of justice and beneficence (source of rights whose object is well-being [italics added]) to include a conception of rights (whose object is freedom [italics added]) ... The thesis here is that personal concepts inform the construction of morality by extending conceptions of harm and welfare to include the psychological requirements of personal freedom. Because the personal sits in an interactive relationship with constraints upon personal freedom established by societal convention and interpersonal moral obligations, the content of rights claims will be bounded and subject to variation. What has been suggested (Nucci, 1996) is that moral discourse (both internal and public) transforms individual claims to freedom into mutually shared moral obligations. This view of morality has much in common with Habermas' (1991) attempts to account for postconventional morality through idealized forms of discourse. It is the historically situated generation of individual claims to freedom reflecting ahistorical basic psychological needs that both stimulates moral discourse and provides the potential critique of the status quo. Thus, we should expect variation among cultures reflecting the ways in which discourse communities resolve the rights claims of individuals in relation to the needs for group cohesion and organization. I will turn now to a discussion of some of those variations.
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Surface Variations A considerable amount of cultural and regional variation in what people treat as personal matters represent minimal or nonconflictual differences in the treatment of issues as matters of convention rather than personal choice and vice versa. These variations take place along the edges of a framework in which the critical or basic elements of personal freedom are recognized and given expression. As an illustrative example, consider the issue of freedom of self-expression as it relates to clothing or hairstyle choices. While most young people within the United States view clothing selection and hairstyle as matters of personal choice, they do so within a conventional framework which requires them to be clothed, and which prescribes somewhat different forms of clothing for men and women. Regional variations and historical shifts in conventional styles of dress affect the range of variations which individuals may employ as a mode of self-expression. Among today's urban youth, for example, these avenues for self-expression have expanded into the use of body piercing, brightly colored hair, and tattoos. Despite the words of a lyric popular among American youth in the 1980s that, "You've got to fight for your right to party," it would be hard to argue that one can extend basic human strivings for self-expression and happiness into a basic human right to party at will or to sport green hair. That is to say, that while one can draw the connection between, for example, the desire to have green hair and underlying psychological requirements for the construction of agency, it does not follow that agency is tied to a particular mode of expression. The broadening or narrowing of particular acts as content for the personal domain rather than matters of conventional regulation forms the basis of well-documented generational shifts in values, which leave intact intergenerational shared norms of fairness, respect for others, and concern for human welfare (Block, 1972; Collins, 1992). These shifts in values also form the basis of prototypical adolescent-parent conflicts (Smetana, 1989) generally resolved as a normal feature of the child's growing up. The gradual shifts in content between what is considered personal rather than matters regulated by convention can have considerable impact upon individual life space as well as cultural or societal structure without having substantive impact upon the availability and experience of basic human rights. Cataloging such variations within a culture forms the basis for the "style" sections of contemporary newspapers. These forms of variation also comprise the focus of anthropological descriptive work analogous to ornithological classifications of varieties of bird species. While attention to such variation has great value for enabling communication across cultural lines, and for informing educational and political systems within pluralistic societies, identifying such surface variations in the boundaries between the personal and conventional does not provide a source of insight into the more substantive ways in which culture and context may interact with, and perhaps shape, conceptions of human rights.
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Competence-Based Freedoms
Philosophical analyses of rights, including Gewirth's (1982) claim to a general human right to freedom, include allowance for constraints on the rights of persons, such as children, who do not have the rational competencies presumed to be shared by most adults. In line with these philosophical caveats, empirical work has demonstrated that the relation between what individuals can claim to be personal and what they are permitted by social authority to control is related to perceptions of individuals' competencies. This is most clearly evident in the freedoms granted to children by adults. A part of the interpersonal negotiation resulting in children's autonomy is comprised of a give-and-take between adults and children over the child's capacity to carry out activity in ways that do not pose undue risks for the child's health and safety. While there is considerable historical and cross-cultural variability in the conceptions adults maintain regarding children's capacities to generate reasoned judgments, and in the dangers or risks posed to youth (Aires, 1962; Bingham, 1997; Nucci & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1995), there is general agreement that developmental factors preclude children from assuming all of the rights and privileges accorded to adults. From the child's point of view, understanding these issues of personal well-being comprises an additional conceptual frame from which the child evaluates her personal authority in relation to objective nonsocial prudential considerations (Tisak & Turiel, 1984). Studies of children's and parents views of parental authority over children's prudential actions (impacting the child's welfare) indicate broad-based agreement between parents and children on the legitimacy of parental authority over children's actions having prudential implications (Nucci et al., 1996; Smetana, 1989; Smetana, Braeges, & Yau, 1991; Smetana, Yau, Restrepo, & Braeges, 1991; Tisak & Tisak, 1990). There is also cross-cultural evidence for a gradual age-related shift in the tendency for children, as they enter adolescence, to assume authority for decision making over actions regarded during childhood as prudential matters, and for parents to gradually relinquish control (Nucci & Milnitzsky-Sapiro, 1995; Nucci et al., 1996; Yau & Smetana, 1996). In early childhood, parents in middle-class homes in the United States and Brazil allow children to control decisions over clothing choices, food preferences, playmate selections, and forms of play (Nucci & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1995; Nucci & Smetana, 1996). In middle childhood these choices expand to include later bedtimes and greater range of motion. In adolescence and young adulthood (college age), the range is gradually expanded further until it reaches equivalence with adult areas of free choice (Nucci & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1995; Smetana & Asquith, 1994; Smetana & Gaines, 1999). These shifts are not entirely without conflict, however (Smetana, 1989, 2002), and are associated with cultural and social class variation (Nucci et al., 1996; Yau & Smetana, 1996). The general pattern that emerges from this work on adolescent-
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parent relations is that there is a gradual increase in the range of issues that adolescents assume as matters of personal choice rather than subject to parental authority. Parents generally lag behind temporally in their recognition of areas within which adolescents should have decision making, but nonetheless accord adolescents a wider degree of freedom than they give to younger children (Smetana & Asquith, 1994). The typically conservative position parents take in comparison with their children's assertions is based on parental concerns that their children have not achieved either the social competence to engage in appropriate choices nor the wisdom to act in ways that are prudent (Smetana & Asquith, 1994). These views are magnified within more traditional cultures and among members of lower social classes. In a study conducted in Brazil (Nucci et al., 1996), we found that Brazilian children differentiated among moral, conventional, and personal issues. However, we also found social class differences in the age at which the majority of children consistently identified a set of issues as personal. Middle-class children tended to claim an area of behavioral discretion at an earlier age than lower class children. By adolescence (age 14 to 16), however, there were no social class differences in children's judgments of items as ones that should be up to the children to control nor were there class differences in justifications given for why an action should be a matter of discretion. By adolescence, across classes, the majority of subjects justified control over personal issues in terms of personal rights and the need for personal privacy. These findings with children were in line with outcomes of our interviews with lower and middle-class Brazilian mothers from the southern (modern) and northeastern (traditional) regions of the country (Nucci & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1995). When asked whether there were things that children of ages similar to their own should be allowed to make decisions about, the majority of lower class Brazilian mothers of adolescents, and middle-class mothers of children and adolescents from both regions of Brazil responded affirmatively. This affirmative response was similar to that provided by American mothers of young children in the Nucci and Smetana (1996) study. The majority of lower class mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children from both regions of Brazil, however, responded in the opposite direction. When asked to give reasons for their responses, lower class Brazilian mothers of young children gave prudential (risks to the child) and pragmatic reasons. That is to say, that they felt that it would be either too dangerous or impractical to give young children decision-making authority over their actions. In contrast, like American mothers of young children, Brazilian middleclass mothers of children and adolescents and Brazilian lower class mothers of adolescents gave reasons supporting their child's emerging autonomy, agency, and personal competence. Similarly, the majority of lower class mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children did not think that parents should allow a child as old as theirs to have his or her own opinion about things, while a majority of all other mothers felt that children were en-
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts titled to opinions of their own. In the view of the lower class mothers of young children, their youngsters had not matured sufficiently to have the reasoning capacity to form personal opinions. Brazilian mothers who had responded affirmatively to the proposition that children should have choice about some things, spontaneously listed activities or issues similar to those listed by American mothers. As reported by Smetana and Asquith (1994), the list of items left up to the child increased as a function of child age to include issues mothers had previously viewed as matters of prudence. In adolescence, mothers extended the child's personal areas of choice to include academic and occupational decisions as well as extending the adolescent's range of motion (where the child is permitted to be without seeking parental permission) and control over personal time. The criteria mothers used to decide whether an issue should be left up to the child were the same across region and social class. These criteria included concerns for the child's safety, whether it contributed to the child's competence, was developmentally appropriate, and a matter of the child's private or personal domain. This (Nucci & Milnitsky-Sapiro, 1995) study with Brazilian mothers demonstrated that beliefs about children's personal choice are not confined to mothers from individualistic cultures. Across social classes and geographic regions, the Brazilian mothers expressed beliefs that children require areas of choice for their personal growth. The manner in which these beliefs were expressed, however, varied as a function of the mothers' underlying assumptions about the nature of their children's needs and capacities. Middle-class mothers, particularly from the southern "modern" region of the country, held views of young children essentially like those of mothers of the American middle class. According to their view, children are to be treated as individuals from infancy and given opportunities to exercise choice to enhance their individual talents and personalities. This middle-class view was at variance with those of the more traditional lower class mothers, who viewed the limited cognitive capacity of infants and young children as indicative that they were not yet to be accorded the same discretionary authority granted to adolescents and adults. Nonetheless, even these traditional mothers valued the eventual emergence of individuality and agency in adolescence, and distinguished the adolescent's rights to personal behavioral control from those moral or conventional zones of behavior that are the shared responsibility of parents and others. In sum, the findings from these two studies conducted in Brazil demonstrate that children raised outside of the frame of American or European society construct understandings about personal issues, and that parental beliefs about children's personal choice are not confined to mothers from "individualistic" cultures. Across social classes and geographic regions, the Brazilian mothers expressed beliefs that children require areas of personal discretion for their personal growth. The research also shows that
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there are culture and class differences in the age at which the personal is fully accorded to children. These differences appear to stem from cultural assumptions about the nature of children's needs and capacities. As demonstrated in other research (Dix & Grusec, 1985; Wainryb, 1991), the informational assumptions that parents have about the nature of children, such as whether children benefit from corporal punishment, have a powerful impact on how they treat their children. Such variations in informational assumptions about children not withstanding, we found in our study that even the mothers from more traditional regions of Brazil valued the eventual emergence of individuality and agency in adolescence. In both of the Brazil studies as well as a number of other studies which have included social class as a variable (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993; Wainryb & Turiel, 1994), there were social class variations in the ways in which children and adults responded to personal issues and to conventional norms. In the Brazil studies discussed above, lower class children were more likely to sustain social conventions and the positions taken by parental authority, and less likely to claim issues as personal than were middle-class children. Similarly, lower class mothers from two separate regions of Brazil were more likely to assert parental authority over children's areas of personal decision making than were middle-class mothers. These findings raise an interesting set of questions regarding efforts to account for children's social development in terms of enculturation into particular cultural frames. In the parlance of culture theory, the lower class children and mothers in these studies were "collectivistic" in comparison with their "individualistic" middle-class Brazilian counterparts. We had anticipated such differences to emerge between the responses provided by mothers from the northeastern and southern regions of Brazil. These two regions reflect quite distinct, though overlapping cultures. What we were surprised by was the fact that class differences within regions were greater than observed differences between regions. This regional pattern was also observed by Haidt and his colleagues (1993), who also noted that social class and not region accounted for the greater group differences in their Brazilian data. Moreover, the Haidt group (1993) reported that overall social class differences in concepts of morality and convention were greater (irrespective of nationality of sample) than the between country differences they observed for comparisons between samples from the United States and Brazil. These social class findings raise the possibility that the impact of social class on children's social development results from a set of conditions associated with hierarchy and the distribution of social power and privilege that cut across cultural groups. Other work (Kohn, 1969; Turiel, 1996; Wainryb & Turiel, 1994) examining the impact of social stratification on children's socialization has suggested that differential distributions of privilege and power associated with social class results in adjustments in the ways in which parents interact with their children. That work has suggested that
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts parental readings of their own ability to make autonomous decisions, and their reading of the instrumental value in their own lives of either autonomy or obedience and caution in dealing with authority, are associated with the tendencies of parents to afford children opportunities for personal choice versus attempts to control children's decisions on pragmatic grounds. How such parental views translate into the ways in which they interact with their children, and how the more general social environments associated with social status affect children's social interactions with respect to construction of a personal domain should be the subject of future research. Among issues that might be examined would be how social class affects privileges and the amount of discretionary power afforded children, and the risks involved in acting counter to persons in positions of power. While the studies discussed above discovered social class differences in children's tendencies to claim actions as personal, the studies also found that development affected children's claims to the personal as well. Though class differences were found in children's judgments of personal issues, by adolescence there were no social class differences in the tendencies of Brazilian children to claim a set of actions as personal and beyond legitimate parental or societal control. Similar age-related shifts were reported for Brazilian mothers' treatment of children and adolescents. These results are indicative that the process of social development is responsive not only to social interactions with others as emphasized in cultural theory accounts of development (Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987) but also to the individual's own psychological needs and interpretations of the social world (Nucci, 1996; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987). The importance of informational assumptions regarding the competence of children in the willingness of adults and societal authority to afford children sovereignty over their personal areas raise an interesting set of questions regarding how similar assumptions might impact the rights of adults. The roots of the English word paternalism are in the Latin pater, or father, and refers to "the care or control (of others) in a manner suggestive of a father looking after his children" (Smith, 1995). Constraints placed on the rights of women, the retarded, the very aged, and the psychotic stem largely from assumptions regarding the competencies of such adults. Generally, society justifies the constraints placed on such adults in terms very similar to the ones employed by parents as justifications for constraints placed on the personal areas of their adolescent children. In contemporary societies, these assumptions are now the subject of considerable debate, often without the benefit of empirical research which might bear on such assumptions. For example, there is considerable discussion within the United States regarding the reproductive rights of mildly retarded adults for whom the likelihood of direct genetic transmission of retardation to their children is minimal. Investigating the competencies of such adults through social science would appear to be an important contribution to social discourse.
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Context-Specific Suspension of Liberties
One of the issues raised by Dworkin (1977) in his critique of claims to a general right to freedom is that social life includes contexts which require diminution of generally held rights. A prosaic example, and one for which there is developmental research, is compulsory schooling. Children in virtually every advanced country in the world are required to attend school not only for their own individual betterment (a prudential reason) but as a way of protecting the general welfare of society. Thus, the rights of individuals are subordinated to the needs of the social group. Moreover, schools as institutions maintain constraints on individual behavior that are not maintained in other contexts (Smetana & Bitz, 1995; Weber, 1996). Two studies have looked at how children and adolescents reason about their areas of personal discretion in school settings. The first of these (Weber, 1996) looked at how young children in their first year of formal schooling view personal freedom in home and school contexts. Weber (1996) reported that children were generally accepting of constraints on behaviors at school that were matters of free choice at home (e.g., going to the bathroom without adult permission) as legitimated by the instructional functions of school classrooms. However, even in school contexts, children drew lines around what they considered to be personal matters (e.g., choice of friends) outside of the legitimate intrusion of school authorities. In a study examining similar issues with older children and adolescents, Smetana and Bitz (1995) examined the ways in which students of 10, 12, 14, and 16 years of age viewed school rules and authority. Among the rules presented for consideration by the students were ones regulating moral conduct, general social conventions, and prudential behavior. The students were also asked to consider rules maintained by many American schools which restrict conduct, such as public displays of affection (e.g., kissing a boyfriend/girlfriend) that would be considered personal acts in other contexts. Smetana and Bitz (1995) labeled such norms as contextually conventional. Smetana and Bitz reported that while students generally granted schools the authority to regulate prudential, moral, and conventional issues, they drew boundaries around teacher authority, and maintained the view that teachers have no right to regulate actions they consider personal. Children were consistent in claiming personal jurisdiction over such issues as who to associate with, how to spend lunch money, and choice of hairstyle. As expected, adolescents were less likely to grant legitimacy to teacher authority regarding personal or prudential areas of conduct. What is more interesting for the present discussion is how students treated the contextually conventional issues. The majority of children younger than 14 years of age granted teachers authority over such issues. Adolescents, however, were equivocal in their judgments of the legitimacy of contextually conventional school rules. About half of their sample treated such issues as purely personal matters outside the legitimate
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts purview of teacher authority. What Smetana and Bitz (1995) also discovered was that student misconduct was associated with appropriation of contextually conventional behaviors to the adolescent's personal domain. As one might expect, adolescent evaluations of these rules were the strongest predictor of misconduct entailing transgressions of such norms regulating contextually conventional behaviors. Moreover, this form of misconduct was the second most prevalent form of misbehavior reported in the study. What is perhaps more impressive was the finding that the variables examined in the study accounted for nearly 40 percent of the variance in student misconduct in the moral domain (i.e., actions entailing harm to others or to property, theft, etc.). The ability of individuals to make contextual adjustments to specific rights claims is an essential element for societal functioning. Without the ability of individuals to subordinate their claims to autonomy for group purposes, there could be no social institutions, such as orchestras or team sports. What emerges from the Smetana and Bitz (1995) results is that some adolescents appear to have difficulty in making such adjustments in nonvoluntary settings, such as school. It also appears that the inability to make those adjustments is associated with difficulties in regulating their own conduct in other areas. The nature of contextual adjustments is that they are circumscribed by setting and time and do not entail a permanent suspension of liberties. Perhaps the centrality of autonomy issues in adolescence makes adjustment to such nonvoluntary contextual shifts a difficult issue for that age group. What is needed to fully understand these issues, however, is research examining concepts of contextual variations in social regulation of the personal, which systematically explores the interactions among development, culture, and whether the context is voluntary or involuntary.
Variations in the Relation Between Concerns for Freedom and Welfare Related to context-specific variations in personal liberties are instances where personal choice is in conflict with the welfare of others. The prototypical case is the inherent tension between individual property rights and distributive justice. Developmental studies looking at young children's concepts of distributive justice (Damon, 1977) have generally shown that young children prior to age six, typically have difficulty sharing their property with others. Interviews with young children (Smetana, 1981) have revealed that although children prior to age six believe it is wrong for one child to have all of the goods (e.g., toys) common to a classroom, a child is not thought to be obligated to share his or her own personal possessions with others—even in situations of scarcity. On the contrary, young children maintain that it is up to the individual whether or not he or she wishes to share their toys or candy with someone else. While observations of young children have provided evidence of children's spontane-
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ous helping behavior (Eisenberg, 1982), sharing behavior is a very rare occurrence among children under the age of six (Bronson, 1981; Murphy, 1937). The usual explanation for this lack of sharing is that young children are egocentric and incapable of taking others' points of view into account. This view, however, seems at valiance with findings that children as young as 3 years of age evaluate an individual's appropriation of all public goods to be wrong (Smetana, 1981), and take strong stands against children who do not engage in turn-taking (e.g., with swings) (Nucci & Turiel, 1978). An alternative explanation for this phenomenon regarding the sharing of personal goods is that young children view it as their right not to share their private property. Only after they have constructed a sense of fairness, as entailing just reciprocity, do children evaluate sharing of personal goods as morally obligatory, and then only under conditions of relative scarcity (e.g., if theirs is the only toy available). Observations of at-home interactions between American mothers and their 4-yearold children (Nucci & Weber, 1995) provided some evidence that American children receive mixed social messages about sharing personal property. Although this aspect of the observational data was not systematically analyzed, we observed that mothers would sometimes intervene in disputes between children where one child wished to play with a toy owned by another by asking the child owner to share. (Much and Shweder, 1978, report similar sharing social messages in American preschools.) However, mothers were inconsistent in their provision of these sharing messages. At other times, the mothers would intervene by saying that it was up to the child owner to decide whether to share or not, and that the child asking to play with the toy had no right to expect the other child to share. Similar inconsistencies occurred over the sharing of food. The ambivalence and inconsistency shown in the mothers' interventions stems from the inherent ambiguity entailed by the need to respect the individuals rights to personal property, and the interpersonal moral concerns for welfare and fairness. Damon (1977) reported that the pattern of developmental shifts in children's judgments about distributive justice moved from the egocentric perspective of preschool-aged children, to a view of fairness in terms of direct reciprocity at age eight, followed by concerns for equity at approximately age ten, and the coordination of equality and equity considerations by age twelve. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, writing in the 1960s, noted that societal concerns for distributive justice within the United States seemed to break down into two ideological camps, with one group (conservatives) emphasizing equality and another group (liberals) emphasizing equity. The availability at a societal level of both perspectives of distributive justice evident in the course of child development indicates that conflicts between views of the nature of what is fair with respect to the distribution of goods, and respect for individual property are not readily resolved, and are subject to considerable cultural variation. There is cross-cultural evidence that conceptions of personal choice and interpersonal obli-
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts gation do vary by cultural setting (Miller & Bersoff, 1992; Miller & Luthar, 1989; Miller et al., 1990), suggesting that equilibria between personal rights to freedom, and concerns for interpersonal welfare and fairness, may not have universalizable solutions. Evidence of such variation, however, is also evidence for the universality of the claim to a general human right to freedom rather than the reverse.
Variations Reflecting Social Hierarchy The final set of issues I wish to take up regarding personal rights are variations that result from social hierarchy. In recent years, there has been a tendency for cultural psychologists (Greenfield & Cocking, 1994) and some anthropologists (cf. Shweder, 1990) to view stratified social systems as reflecting a traditional collectivist cultural orientation. In contrast with the emphasis on equality and individual autonomy presumed to characterize so-called modern "rights-based" societies, collectivist cultures are said to place greater emphasis on duty, and to playing one's role in a social hierarchy. Stratification of society, however, is not simply associated with duties, but is generally associated with a differential distribution of privileges and freedoms. Shweder (1990) has argued that whereas Western societies and Western morality focus upon moral equivalencies among people, traditional societies place greater emphasis upon differences among people, such as age, gender, and class, which lead to differential rather than equal moral status among people. As noted by Gewirth (1982) (a Western neoKantian philosopher), this conflation of social position with degree of personal freedom accorded to individuals leads to rights claims which establish sets of universal inequalities. For example, in most of the world's cultures, men are accorded greater social power and personal freedom than women. The dominant ideologies sustaining gender-based inequalities tend to contain within them a form of the naturalist fallacy in which these relative positions are deemed to be concordant with the universal nature of things. Not surprisingly, descriptions of such cultures tend to portray members as viewing their lot within the social system as fixed and appropriate. That is to say that the kinds of claims to personal freedom being discussed in this chapter are not presumed to be salient for members of these more traditional cultural groups. Instead, an orientation toward group goals, and a morality based on respect for authority and hierarchy, is said to prevail (Haidt et al., 1993; Shweder, 1990). In a talk given at the 1983 SRCD meetings in Toronto, Richard Shweder told a story of how a devout Hindu Indian woman explained to Shweder s wife how she accounted for the many misfortunes of her life. As Shweder recounted, the woman began with the statement, "I must have been a very bad person in my last life." When his wife asked the woman to explain what she meant, the woman responded, "Well,
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to begin with, I was born a woman." The woman in Shweder's story fits a view of traditional people as generally accepting of their lot in life and as defining their social reality in terms spelled out by their resident culture. Placing sets of rights claims in the hearts of traditional collectivist people is, thus, viewed as a form of ethnocentrism. The picture, however, is not as clear-cut as this portrait of contented collectivist peoples would have us believe. A new generation of anthropologists has emerged who are conjoining cultural description with feminist social critique (Abu-Lughod, 1981; Appadurai, 1988; Strauss, 1997). These anthropologists have taken the veil, so to speak, from the face of cultural descriptions which have ignored the discontent that has percolated within individual women beneath the surface of the dominant cultural patterns and symbols. Research in the spirit of these more differentiated anthropological accounts has been recently conducted by Wainryb and Turiel (1994) who have looked at the ways in which Druze Arabs view the relative decision-making power of men and women in family contexts. What Wainryb and Turiel discovered was that Arab men and boys have relatively greater degrees of authority and autonomy than do their women, and, moreover, the men view their greater autonomy in rights-based terms. The men also saw the women's and girls' lesser roles as concordant with their gender prescribed duties. Wainryb and Turiel (1994) also found expected tendencies for Arab women to accept the legitimacy of male authority and autonomy within the conventions of their cultural frame. However, the women also expressed views that existing social arrangements denying women's autonomy are unfair. In other words, at an individual level, the women were cognizant of a set of rights claims to personal freedom being denied them under the present cultural arrangements. Similar kinds of findings have been reported among Hindu women in India (Neff, 1997). The picture that seems to be emerging is far more complex and differentiated than the global portraits of culture which have dominated the field in recent years. Contrary to the simple dichotomies that have been drawn between rights-based cultures on the one hand, and duty-based cultures, on the other, the claims to individual freedom, and needs for collective responsibility, appear to be present in all of human society. The variations that emerge would appear to reflect more or less equilibrated systems for bringing both collective norms and duties, and individual claims to freedom, into harmony (Turiel, 2002).
Conclusion This chapter has explored some of the recent work that has been done examining the emergence of claims to personal freedom in individuals, and their relation to moral and societal considerations. Such empirical findings do not serve as a substitute for
Culture, Context, and the Psychological Sources of Human Rights Concepts philosophical analysis, but as a source of empirical support for assumptions regarding the underlying sources of the construction of conceptions of a "general human right to freedom" (Gewirth, 1982), and for related arguments. The empirical work indicates that there is both evidence for a psychological basis for claims to basic human rights, and considerable contextual and cultural variation in their expression. The approach taken here, however, is divergent from the notion that descriptive analyses can pretend to be value neutral. The recent effort by social scientists to avoid the implications of the value laden nature of our work through relativist cultural pluralism is not only morally problematic but empirically in error. There simply is no evidence in support of the contention that the desire for basic human rights is confined to one particular cultural group, social class, or gender. The title of a symposium organized by Richard Shweder and Unni Wikan at the 1996 American Anthropological Association meetings perhaps best captured the dilemma faced by efforts to conduct studies of culture that respect differences, while not obscuring moral universals. The title of their session was "The concept of'culture': Moral pluralism or racism in another guise." Perhaps even more troubling is the way in which honest efforts by social scientists to accurately portray cultural differences are being abused by totalitarian political leaders. Consider the following from an editorial in The New York Times: Overhanging the whole subject of human rights is the manipulative theory that different nations and cultures view human rights differently. The leading articulator of that notion is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who uses it to justify his lawless treatment of anyone who gets in the way of his power. Mr. Lee likes to talk of distinct "Asian values," as if Asians preferred tyranny. (Anthony Lewis, New York Times, June 23, 1997, p. A17, "It tolls for thee.") There is no evidence for a people who prefers subjugation to fair treatment, or who do not stake a claim to a general right to freedom.
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Morality in Context W. Edelstein and G. Nunner-Winkler (Editors) © 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.
18 To Forgive and Forget Avishai Margalit
Pray you now, forget and forgive. (King Lear, IV)
1. Introduction: On Contexts The title of our conference is "Morality in Context." This is a sufficiently broad title to be safely ignored. But I do not want to ignore it. I would like to discuss the relation between two contexts. One can be roughly described as the religious context of morality, or, in short, as religious morality. The other is the autonomous context of morality, one which does not refer to a Divinity to justify moral beliefs and principles. An important claim of Anscombe (1970) is that central concepts in present-day ethics, which purport to be autonomous, actually have religious or theological roots rather than any autonomous underpinning. This claim of Anscombe is not solely the historical assertion that all ethics originated in religion. Her claim is that the supposed transition from a religious to an autonomous context of morality is purely imaginary. The basic concepts in ethics can be justified only by religion or theology, although the people who use these concepts are unaware of the religious assumptions that justify their use. We are speaking about Western ethics, and about the religious morality known as the Judeo-Christian ethic. The combination of "Judeo" and "Christian" is more of a problem than a solution. But I will try to reduce the vagueness of the term "JudeoChristian" by seeing it as applying to two texts: the "Old Testament" and the "New Testament." The counterargument to Anscombe's claim is that religion did indeed play an important part in shaping religious consciousness in Western culture as well as important concepts in ethics. All this, however, is true of "the context of discovery" rather than "the context of justification" of the use of these concepts in autonomous ethics. Reichenbach's distinction between "the context of discovery" and "the context of justification" is taken from the field of scientific inquiry. The idea is that it is necessary The original text on which this chapter is based was delivered at the Ringberg Conference on Morality in Context (1997) and revised for a first publication under the title "Forgiving and Forgetting" in The Ethics of Memory by Avishai Margalit, pp. 183-209, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.
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to distinguish between the historical and psychological factors that causally lead to scientific discoveries and the justifications for scientific theories. There is a story that Paracelsus, one of the greatest alchemists, was witness one night to a conjunction between Venus and Mercury, and as a result decided that mercury is the cure for syphilis—a cure that was used by doctors for centuries. Obviously, Paracelsus' strange "heavenly" discovery cannot serve as a justification for the use of the remedy. The question facing us now is whether the distinction between discovery and justification can be useful not only in the context of the philosophy of science but also in the context of ethics. Does the idea of discovery have any meaning in ethics? Is the fact that all of humanity now considers slavery to be evil a moral discovery? I do not want to stretch the analogy between scientific and moral discovery too far. All we really need it to distinguish between the genesis and the methods of justification of moral concepts. The claim is that the genesis of a concept does not necessarily provide it with a justification. According to this view, Anscombe's thesis suffers from the "genetic fallacy." It confuses the context of discovery (genesis) with the context of justification. I myself believe that the relation between the two contexts—the historical context of religious morality and the autonomous context of secular morality—is too complex to be captured by the simplistic distinction between discovery and justification. An important problem in using moral concepts that stem from religious sources is that the people who use them are in the grip of pictures coming from religion and theology. For autonomous morality, a critique of these pictures is needed in addition to the critique of methods of justification, in order to avoid smuggling in nonautonomous justifications. Although I said at the outset that I take quite seriously the title of this conference, "Morality in Context," I actually intend to discuss what might better be called, following Bernard Williams (1985), "Ethics in Context." At first glance, the difference is only between the use of a term from the Greek ("ethics") and one from the Latin ("morality"), but Williams suggests a substantive distinction between the two terms. He prefers to use the term "morality" only for one particular type of ethics, the ethics of duty. In this usage, the term "ethics" covers a broader range involving attempts to answer the Socratic question, "How should one live?" I will thus discuss "ethics in context" rather than the restricted sense of "morality in context." Specifically, I intend to examine the relation between forgiving and forgetting in the context of ethics. Forgiveness is a fraught concept whose link with religion is clear. I am interested in considering what is involved in the transition from forgiveness in religious morality to forgiveness in autonomous morality. Forgiveness is not a fashionable concept in present-day ethics, mainly due to its link with religion. Memory and forgetfulness, in contrast, have become very fashion-
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able. Particularly fashionable is the idea of the collective memory of minorities, nations, and ethnic groups, with memory playing a central role in their politics of identity. My talk will focus on the connection between forgiving and forgetting in the context of microethics, that is, in the ethical evaluation of individual behavior. I will only secondarily touch upon macroethics, which deals with groups and institutions. The relation between forgiving and forgetting in the context of macroethics has been sharply outlined in the relation between amnesty and amnesia. There is no doubt about the close etymological relation between the two terms, but there is some room for doubt about the nature of the moral and political relations between them. These relations have recently become a burning issue, especially in countries that must judge the crimes of former regimes (such as the countries of the former Soviet bloc, South Africa, Argentina, and Greece). At any rate, forgiveness is a thick concept that combines both facts and religious values. If there are any concepts at all that Anscombe's thesis is supposed to apply to, then forgiveness is certainly a prototypical example.
2. The Genealogy of Forgiving and Forgetting One checks how good a tree is by examining its fruit and not by exposing its roots. But if one wants, as I do, to uncover the religious pictures underlying our concepts of sin, forgiveness and forgetting, we must search for the roots of these concepts. When I say a "picture" I mean a model—a collection of familiar ("medium-sized") objects that can provide a metaphorical model for a concept. The expressions that describe a picture are "dead" metaphors whose metaphorical quality escapes the user. Users are in the grip of the picture if they are not aware of its metaphorical nature and cannot think of any alternative way of saying what the picture expresses. The protest "But how else could it be?" is the hallmark sign of being in such a state. Thus, for example, the idea of sin as a bloodstain and of purification and atonement as the removal of the stain form a picture. In the verse, "Though your sins are scarlet, they may become white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18), the metaphorical nature of the picture is quite clear, but in the verses, "There is blood on your hands; wash yourselves and be clean. Put away the evil of your deeds" (Isaiah 1:15—16), the picture takes over and the metaphorical quality of the washing disappears. Seeing the hold of the handwashing picture on Lady Macbeth is enough to convince the spectator of how difficult it is to escape its grip. The Hebrew word used in the Bible to mean "forgive" is salah, but the root SLH is used in the Bible only for God's forgiving human beings. It is not used there for one
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person's forgiving another. The prevalent term in the Bible for the latter purpose is naso, meaning "to bear" or "to carry." This term is interesting because it presents an alternative picture of the sin as a heavy burden. The forgiver shares the sinner's burden of bearing the sin. Unlike the root SLH, which apparently originally meant "to wash," the idea of bearing a sin presents a totally different picture. But not only human beings participate in bearing the burden of a sin. God too can bear the sins of individuals, as in the psalmist's declaration, "and You bore the iniquity of my sin" (Psalms 32:5; literal translation), or of the collective, as the psalmist continues, "You have borne the sin of Your people" (Psalms 85:3; again in literal translation). Yet it is not only human beings and God who can carry iniquities. This burden can also be carried by the scapegoat: "The goat shall carry all their iniquities upon— itself into some barren waste." (Leviticus 16:22) Wittgenstein makes the following remarks about the ritual of the Day of Atonement in which the High Priest places the sins of the Israelites on the goat and sends it into the wilderness: The scapegoat on which one lays one's sins, and who runs away into the desert with them—a false picture similar to those which cause errors in philosophy. (Wittgenstein, 1993) What is misleading in the picture of the scapegoat? Why does Wittgenstein, in spite of his high regard (general esteem) for mythology, see the picture of the scapegoat as a bad myth? Bad myths are made up of superstitions—that is, beliefs about supernatural causal mechanisms (Kenny, 1984). Bad philosophy, metaphysics, is also based on superstitions of this sort—Wittgenstein offers the example of the mind as a mechanism. The picture of the scapegoat suggests theurgic magic, which, in some supernatural causal way, is supposed to displace our sins onto the head of the goat. The problem is not the actual use of magic, as long as the magic action or religious ritual is conceived only as the expression of a wish to be cleansed of sin. But when it expresses a belief in the causal efficacy of the action it creates a bad picture: "Baptism as washing—there is a mistake only if magic is presented as science." (Wittgenstein, 1983) When the action does not merely express a desire for purification, but is seen as causing purification, it becomes a superstition. What else is bad about the model of a goat as carrying human iniquities? It is not the crudeness of the picture that bothers Wittgenstein. On the contrary, when some of these pictures are refined, they may be more misleading than in their crude state. For example, Wittgenstein believes that the picture of thoughts as being in the head is less misleading than the picture of thoughts as being in the mind. What bothers him is not that a picture is crude, but that it is vague. This means that the associations arising from the picture are confused and confusing. In the case of the scapegoat, the picture of carrying sins acquires a supernatural causal overtone of carrying the congregation's iniquities into the desert. The picture of
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the scapegoat is misleading because of the feelings (emotions) we link to the picture. A goat is not an appropriate model for carrying sins as a metaphor for forgiving them because it is not a creature that we see as "expressing innocence," even if it actually is an innocent creature. The "servant of God" of whom Isaiah says, "the Lord laid upon him the guilt of us all," is compared not to a goat, but to a lamb and a ewe. These are animals that, unlike the goat, are seen as representing innocence. One must separate the sheep from the goats. The scapegoat has entered Western culture as a creature which people blame and punish for sins it did not commit—sins which were actually committed by those doing the blaming and punishing. But the scapegoat, even if totally blameless, is not a symbol of innocence. He generally represents radical otherness—the different, the totally strange and threatening. This is why it is so easy to place blame and sin on him. This change in the picture of the scapegoat upon entering Western culture is not a coincidence. It shows that the goat was always a bad model for the idea of forgiveness and carrying sins. There are thus two different levels on which we test a picture. One is the cognitive level: Does it represent or strengthen illusions? The other is the emotive level: Is it linked to appropriate feelings? The picture of the scapegoat fails both tests.
3. Forgiveness: Blotting Out the Sin or Covering It Up? I will now contrast two religious models of sin and forgiveness which still permeate the concept of forgiveness in present-day autonomous morality: forgiveness as blotting out the sin and forgiveness as covering it up. Blotting out a sin means forgetting it absolutely. Covering it up means disregarding it without forgetting it. When the psalmist asks God to "wash me, that I may become whiter than snow" (Psalms 51:7), the meaning of his request is immediately clarified: "Blot out all my guilt." (verse 9) In the blotting-out model, forgiving is manifested in forgetting. As Jeremiah put it, "for I will forgive their wrongdoing and remember their sin no more" (31:34). The one who forgives and forgets is God, since it is only against Him that we sin ("Against thee, thee only, I have sinned"; Psalms 51:4). Sin alienates man—both the individual and the collective—from God. This alienation is expressed as forgetting: "The Lord has forsaken me; my God has forgotten me." (Isaiah 49:14) In order for man to be able to return to God, God must forget the sin and remember the sinner. Isaiah follows his lament with a very telling expression of Gods remembering: Can a woman forget the infant at her breast, or a loving mother—the child of her womb? Even these forget, yet I will not forget you. (verse 15)
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The comparison between the God who remembers man and the mother who remembers the child of her womb is interesting. In Hebrew, the words rehem ("womb") and rahamim ("mercy") stem from the same root, RHM. Mercy is returning those who is far away to their source—the womb. Therefore, the act of remembering is an act of mercy and grace. Forgetting thus plays a double role—forgetting the person who has sinned and forgetting the sin itself. This double role is connected with another important biblical picture of sin and forgiveness—the model of the Divine book. Isaiah calls it "the book of the Lord" (34:16). This book is sometimes seen as containing the names of those who are destined to live, as opposed to those who are blotted out from the book because of their sins (i.e., doomed to oblivion). After the Israelites have sinned with the Golden Calf, Moses pleads with God: "If thou wilt forgive them, forgive. But if not, blot out my name, I pray, from thy book which thou hast written." (Exodus 32:32) And God answers: "It is the man who has sinned against me that I will blot out from my book." (verse 33) There are actually two conceptions of the Divine book. One is that of an account book in which sins are written on the debit side: "All is on record before me; I will not keep silence; I will repay your iniquities." (Isaiah 65:6) This account book lists deeds on both the credit side and the debit side. The other conception is of a book which contains a list of names. The names of those who are destined to live appear on the list, while the names of those who have been condemned to die are blotted out: "Let them be blotted out from the book of life and not be enrolled among the righteous." (Psalms 69:28) In Divine bookkeeping, sins are listed as liabilities and good deeds as assets. Those whose balance is positive are listed in the book of life. The plea for forgiveness is thus a plea for forgetting in the sense of blotting out liabilities. This picture of forgiveness is expressed most clearly in the New Testament (Matthew 6:12), where the Greek verb for forgiveness is a word meaning cancelling a debt. There are thus four different pictures of forgiveness in the Bible: as carrying a burden, as covering up, as blotting out, and as cancelling a debt. The first three pictures can be seen as increasing degrees of forgiveness, as expressed in the literal translation of Psalms 32:1—2: bearing one's transgression, covering up one's sin, and not taking one's sin into account—ceasing to hold one guilty. The fourth picture, of forgiveness as cancelling a debt, can be interpreted as any one of these levels: bearing part of the debt, ignoring the debt even though it still exists, or wiping it out completely. It seems to me that there is an opposition between forgiveness as covering up and as blotting out the sin. This opposition is the difference between the ideas of forgiving and forgetting. We will return to an evaluation and critique of these two pictures in a little while.
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4. Forgiveness as a Mental State, and the Duty to Forgive Forgiving means overcoming anger and vengefulness. This is so in reference to the God of the Bible: "He will not contend forever, or nurse his anger for all time." (Psalm 103,9) This is the God who forgives and is full of mercy. And God says about himself: "I will not continually nurse my wrath." (Psalm 30,6) But overcoming anger and vengefulness can also take place without forgiveness. Jacob did Esau wrong, cheating him of their father's blessing. As a result, "Esau bore a grudge against Jacob" (Genesis 27:41). Esau planned revenge: "The time of mourning for my father will soon be here; then I will kill my brother Jacob." (verse 42) When Rebecca, the mother of Jacob and Esau, hears of this, she warns her beloved son Jacob to stay away "until your brother's anger cools. When it has subsided and he forgets what you have done to him, I will send and fetch you back." (verses 44— 45) The way Rebecca believes that Esau will overcome his anger and his drive for revenge is not by forgiving Jacob, but by forgetting his deed. She knows that Esau is quick to anger, and therefore takes care to give his anger a chance to cool, so that over time he will forget what has happened. Esau's overcoming of his anger and vengefulness is thus not an act of forgiveness, which would have moral significance. Esau is expected to lose his vengefulness not as the result of a decision, but naturally, in the course of time. Thus, not every act of overcoming anger and vengefulness can be called forgiveness. If it occurs through simple forgetfulness, it is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is a conscious decision to overcome one's anger and vengefulness. Forgetfulness may in the last analysis be the most effective method of overcoming anger and vengefulness, but since it is an omission rather than a decision, it is not forgiveness.
5. Forgiveness as a Gift or a Duty In the Old Testament there is no duty to forgive. The New Testament does contain an explicit exhortation to forgive: For if you forgive others the wrongs they have done, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, then the wrongs you have done will not be forgiven by your Father. (Matthew 6:14—15) The idea is that there is no one who does not need forgiveness: "The world contains no man so righteous that he can do right always and never do wrong." (Ecclesiastes 7:20) And even if the individual did not sin personally, he still needs forgiveness due to original sin. Since "one misdeed was the condemnation for all men" (Romans 5:18), we are all sinners, or at least we are all in a state of guilt. Therefore, we all need for-
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giveness, and so we must all be capable of forgiving. This is the view of the New Testament. Maimonides legislates the noncommittal rabbinic suggestion of the requirement of forgiveness as follows: It is forbidden to be obdurate and not allow oneself to be appeased. On the contrary, one should be easily pacified and find it difficult to become angry. And, when asked by an offender for forgiveness, one should forgive with a sincere mind and willing spirit. Even if one had been much vexed and grievously wronged, he is not to avenge nor bear a grudge. (Maimonides, 1974) This is a forceful exhortation to forgive, which places an obligation on the person who was wronged to forgive the offender when the latter is sincerely repentant. The passage gives the impression that forgiveness is not an act of loving-kindness, but a moral religious duty. I believe that the present-day autonomous morality of duty has made it difficult to imagine combining duty and loving-kindness. Forgiveness is not a supererogatory act, in the sense that one who forgives is praiseworthy, but one who does not is not blameworthy. Moral religious duties are of the sort that exist in societies with a welldeveloped institution of gift-exchange. It would seem that that very idea of a gift as something that is bestowed gratuitously does not fit in with a normative expectation for compensation with a counter-gift. For then, how does gift-exchange differ from ordinary economic transactions? This question has vexed many anthropologists from the time of Marcel Mauss. I do not have a simple answer to offer. A more complex answer will have to include at least one central component: Gifts are intended to form or strengthen social ties between the original giver and the one who returns a gift. Economic transactions are intended to provide goods and services for utilitarian purposes. Therefore, a central aspect of gift-giving is often the nonutilitarian nature of the gift—for example, its decorative function. In the Bible, gifts to others and offerings to God can both be denoted by the same word, minha. And there is indeed a clear element of gift-exchange in the conception of offerings in the Old Testament. The idea I want to propose is that the duties involved in forgiveness, both those of the one who asks for it and those of the one who bestows it, are similar to the duties involved in gift-exchange. The purpose is to restore the personal relationship that existed before the offense occurred. But there remains a difference. Forgiveness, unlike ordinary gifts, is not intended for forming or strengthening a relationship, but rather for restoring it to its previous state. Rejecting a sincere plea for forgiveness is like rejecting a gift. A weighty justification is need in both cases. Consider this famous example:
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The day came when Cain brought some of the produce of the soil as a gift to the Lord; and Abel brought some of the first-born of his flock, the fat portions of them. The Lord received Abel and his gift with favor; but Cain and his gift he did not receive. Cain was very angry and his face fell. (Genesis 4:3—5) The traditional Jewish Bible commentators felt that gifts should not be rejected arbitrarily. The rejection of a gift needs to be justified. Gifts impose obligations: the obligation to accept the gift (unless there is a good reason to reject it) and the obligation to return a gift (in a gift-exchange society). I am claiming that the obligation to forgive is like the obligation not to reject a gift—an obligation not to reject the expression of remorse and the plea for forgiveness. As we have seen, the religious context of sin and forgiveness suggests a variety of pictures of how sins can be forgiven or forgotten. The most important pictures, for our purposes, are those of blotting out and covering up. The picture of blotting out depicts forgiving as absolutely forgetting the sinful act. This is an attempt to restore the personal relationship between the offender and the forgiver to where it was before the sin occurred. The picture of covering up, in contrast, suggests disregarding without forgetting. The traces of the sin remain, but the offended one does not punish or take revenge against the offender. When we are not satisfied with something we have written, there are two ways of erasing it: deleting it or crossing it out. In deletion the written material is totally erased, while in crossing out traces of the error remain under the line. Blotting out is analogous to deleting; covering up is like crossing out. I shall argue that the picture of covering up is conceptually, psychologically, and morally preferable to the picture of blotting out—that it is better to cross out than to delete. In short, I argue that forgiveness is based on disregarding rather than forgetting the sin. 6. Returning The person asking for forgiveness hopes for the erasure of the sin. He prays that God will undo the past. This wish for the past to be undone has even infiltrated into the secular notion of forgiveness, in the form of a plea for the absolute obliteration of the evil that was committed. As long as what is involved is only the wish of the person seeking forgiveness, there is nothing wrong with a wish. But when there is a theurgic belief that the past can be undone through atonement, this is an illusion. There is a good reason why Calvinism is so adamantly opposed to the very idea of forgiveness, since it sees this as an attempt to manipulate the Divinity. The Calvinist notion of predestination was intended to affirm a sovereign Divinity whose will cannot be influenced by magical manipulations or the "emotional blackmail" of manifestations of penitence.
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But Calvin did not write the Old Testament, and there forgiveness is God's response to the sinner's repentance. Many of the biblical pictures of repentance are associated with the heart: For example, Jeremiah's exhortation to the Israelites to "circumcise your hearts" (4:4) and to "wash the wrongdoing from your heart" (verse 14). But the central metaphor is that of returning. The sinner who has become distanced from God because of his sin now returns to Him. The first step in correcting the wrongdoing is not God's forgiveness, but the sinner's act of returning. The first penitent was Cain: "Cain said to the Lord, Thy sin is too great to bear!" (Genesis 4:13) God partially forgives Cain—He does not enact the judicial principle that a murderer must be punished by death: "Expiation can not be made on behalf of the land for blood shed on it except by the blood of the man that shed it." (Numbers 35:33) But God's forgiveness of Cain does not involve erasing his sin. On the contrary, the way in which God protects Cain is to "put a mark on him, in order that anyone meeting him should not kill him" (Genesis 4:15). The mark of Cain has turned into the haunting picture of the mark of the criminal (murderer) which cannot be erased. The mark of Cain outstandingly highlights the tension between forgiveness and memory. Forgiveness that involves a mark of Cain is not true forgiveness. The question that arises here is: What is the appropriate relation between forgiveness and memory? But first let us return to repentance. Repentance in the Old Testament has several components: remorse, confession, fasting, prayer, and even customs related to bereavement, such as tearing one's clothes and wearing sackcloth. (This is, for example, how King David acted when he repented for his sin with Bathsheba; II Samuel 12.) Of all these characteristics, the crucial step is remorse. The question is why remorse should be considered a reason for forgiveness, and why remorse is so essential in reestablishing the relationship between the forgiver and the offender. Remorse offers us a nonmagical (i.e., noncausal) model of undoing the past. Although it is impossible to undo what has been done—the evil deed—since the past cannot be changed, it is possible to change the interpretation of the past. By expressing remorse, the offender presents himself in a new light, a light which can be projected onto the past. His ability to feel remorse attests that he is not basically evil, even if the act that he performed was a very bad one. The sinner does not deny the badness of his deed, as then he would not be expressing remorse, but his very assumption of responsibility for the deed is supposed to create a rift between the act and the doer. Thus, an offender can be forgiven even if the offense cannot be forgiven or forgotten. In this view, remorse accords with the idea that forgiveness is not obliteration of the sin. These remarks about the role of remorse in correcting wrongdoing should be enough to show why I prefer the picture of covering up the sin to the picture of blotting it out. Remorse is preferable because it does not involve the magic of an atonement offering.
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Another argument against the picture of forgiveness as blotting out the sin is that it is incoherent. If it is necessary to forget the sin totally in order to forgive, we are faced with a contradiction. It is like Philip Roth's injunction, "Remember to forget." This is discussed in the following section.
7. Can Forgetting be Intentional? We have no trouble distinguishing voluntary and involuntary muscles. The test of whether a muscle is voluntary is whether I can make it work directly and immediately, without the mediation of any other muscles, just like that. Leg muscles are voluntary; heart muscles are not. I can obviously cause my heart to beat faster by starting to run, but this does not meet the criterion of a voluntary muscle. Fakirs are supposed to be able to make all their muscles voluntary through practice. This would mean that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary muscles is empirical rather than conceptual. But we need not be concerned about fakirs because we do not particularly care whether the difficulty of making an involuntary muscle work is a conceptual or an empirical one. It would seem that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary applies to mental acts as well. I can voluntarily think of a white elephant, but I cannot follow the instruction not to think of a white elephant. Forgetting cannot be voluntary. Just as I cannot voluntarily avoid thinking of a white elephant, I cannot decide to forget something just like that. And so if forgiving involves forgetting, it would seem that one cannot decide to forgive. Thus, forgiveness would not be a coherent concept. What then is forgiveness? Members of a jury often hear inadmissable evidence that they are not supposed to know about. If the judge asked the jurors to forget this evidence, this request would merely guarantee that they would remember it. Then what should the judge actually tell the jury? What the judge generally says is that the jury must disregard'the inadmissible evidence, that they must not make use of this evidence as a reason for their verdict. The judge cannot request that the information should not (causally) influence the jurors, but he can ask them not to use it as part of their justification of the verdict. At first glance, it would seem that this is all we can ask in the case of forgiveness as well. That is, all we can ask is that the one who was wronged should not take the offense into consideration as a reason for future behavior toward the offender. Forgiveness is the decision that the injury is not "admissible evidence," that it is no longer a reason for action. We have not offered any reason why the offended one should consider the injury as "inadmissible evidence." The matter we are discussing is solely the question of what
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constitutes forgiveness. And the answer to this question stresses that forgiveness is the product of a voluntary decision in the practical realm. Forgiveness is an example of what Joseph Raz calls "exclusionary reason"—that is, "a reason against acting for certain reasons" (Raz, 1975). In our case, forgiveness is an exclusionary reason against reasons for action that rely on the injury to the forgiver committed by the offender. Forgiveness is like a promise that commits us to disregard certain reasons for action. According to this interpretation, "I forgive you" is a performative act, just like "I promise." And the act that is performed is that of accepting the commitment to refrain from using certain reasons—in the case of forgiveness, reasons that are supposed to justify hostile or cold behavior toward the person who caused us injury. Thus, forgiveness is first and foremost a policy—the policy of adopting an exclusionary reason with regard to someone who has wronged us. This view accords with the picture of covering up rather than the one of blotting out. "Covering up," which is manifested as disregard, is a matter for decision, while forgetting is not. Therefore, forgiveness, which is voluntary, should not be tied to forgetting, which is involuntary. If forgiveness really is a decision to adopt a certain policy, then this view has a conceptual as well as a psychological advantage. The conceptual advantage is that it does not require us to do something that is involuntary; the psychological advantage is that the request to forget highlights the necessity to remember, while the request to disregard does not. The antithesis to the view that forgiveness is a policy based on disregard rather than forgetting is examined in the following section.
8. Forgiveness The antithesis is that forgiveness is not a policy, but a change in the mental state of the one who was wronged. This change requires forgetting the injury. Since forgetting is not voluntary, neither is forgiveness as a change in one's mental state. In other words, I cannot decide to forgive just like that. Rather, I undergo a shift in the mental state required for forgiveness. But this fact is not an argument against forgiveness any more than it is an argument against forgetting. Strengthening one's heart muscles through exercise is the result of a decision, even though it is not a direct decision to voluntarily activate one's heart muscles. The same is true of forgiving and forgetting. Both require an indirect approach. At any rate, in this view, forgiveness is not a policy of adopting an exclusionary reason. Such a model is appropriate for pardon, if anything, but not for forgiveness, which has a significant psychological component. There are indeed biblical pictures of God forgiving people in the role of a judge or a king—that is, as one for whom for-
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giveness is merely pardon (disregarding the sin in the sense of not punishing it). But the model of forgiveness as a policy does not fit the picture of God as forgiving on the basis of past memories—for example, Jeremiah's picture of God saying to the Israelites: "I remember the unfailing devotion of your youth, the love of your bridal days, when you followed me in the wilderness." (2:2) In this case, forgiveness is not pardon, but the restoration of an intimacy which was lost because of the sin of betrayal. Forgiveness of this sort is not a policy, but rather the act of overcoming resentment and vengefulness, mastering one's anger and humiliation (Murphy & Hampton, 1988). Such an act is the result of effort rather than a decision to do something just like that. One can stop even a longstanding habit such as smoking just like that, but one cannot end one's desire to smoke just like that—this desire can only be modified gradually. The word "forgiveness" denotes both a process and an achievement, just as the word "work" denotes both the process of working and the work that is accomplished. The forgiver makes a conscious decision (in paradigm cases) to enter into a process whose end result is forgetting the injury and restoring his relationship with the offender as if the injury had never occurred. The decision to forgive is a decision to act in disregard of the injury, but as long as the offended one retains any "scars" of the injury, the forgiveness is not complete. Only the decision to begin this process is voluntary; the end-result of complete forgiveness is not voluntary any more than forgetting is, and so it cannot be guaranteed. There are elements of forgetting that can be voluntary, such as the decision not to brood about the injury, but forgetting, itself, is involuntary. Total forgiveness is thus total forgetting—that is, blotting out rather than covering up. The decision to forget, however, does entail remembering—otherwise the forgiveness has no meaning. "Natural" forgetting of an injury is not forgiveness, and has no moral value. But the end-result of forgiveness must be the restoration of the original relationship between the offender and the forgiver, and this can be achieved only when the forgiver no longer feels any resentment or desire to avenge the injury. Forgiveness, as a policy, touches upon the reasons or the decision to disregard the reasons involved in the injury, but forgiveness as overcoming means mastering motives, such as resentment and vengefulness, which stem, whether consciously or not, from the injury. Forgiveness, in the complete sense, is overcoming all the traces and scars of the act to be forgiven.
9. Second-Order Forgiveness And now for the synthesis: If the nation of overcoming resentment is understood properly, we can see that the idea of forgiveness as a policy does not contradict the idea of forgiveness as overcoming
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resentment. This is because overcoming resentment does not require forgetting. When we have been seriously wronged, we are liable to develop resentment against the one who wronged us. The decision to forgive is an expression of a second-order desire not to act upon our first-order feelings of resentment or vengefulness (Frankfurt, 1988). This does not mean that the first-order sense of resentment or desire for revenge has disappeared, but only that the second-order desire has won out and we do not act on our resentment or vengefulness. We do not forget, but we do forgive. We do not forgive out of a duty toward the offender; I believe that there is no justification for a duty to forgive, even if the offender is sincerely repentant. At most, we may have a duty toward ourselves: We do not want to live with feelings of resentment and the desire for revenge. At this point, one may ask, both in the religious and in the autonomous moral context, whether there are any unforgivable acts. If a torturer took a woman's son and gave him to his dog to be torn to pieces, should the mother ever forgive the murderer? Ivan Karamazov believes that she ought not forgive (Fyodor Dostoyevsy, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter VI). At any rate, I do not see any secular justification for the religious duty to forgive. In this case Anscombe is right. I claim that if there is a duty to forgive, it is a duty toward ourselves. And there certainly is no duty to forget as a duty toward ourselves, precisely because the question of who we are depends on our not forgetting things that are important for our lives. Forgiveness must not come at the price of estrangement from our past or from our identity. The requirement to forget as a condition for forgiving seems unethical to me. I see the model of blotting out as not only conceptually and psychologically flawed but also morally wrong. Forgiveness depends on us. It is not a matter of moral luck, in which it can occur only as the end-result of a psychological process that is not under our control, in which resentment is overcome only through forgetting. Forgiveness requires two elements. The first is adopting an exclusionary reason against reasons based on the injury done to us, as a rule for our behavior toward the person we have forgiven. The second element is a second-order desire to overcome our first-order motivations of resentment, anger, vengefulness, and insult stemming from that injury.
10. The Final Twist There is another subversive move that we must remember in regard to the genealogy of forgiveness. This is Nietzsche's move in reference to the genealogy of religious morality itself (Nietzsche, 1966, 1967, 1974). To Nietzsche, forgiveness is not the
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overcoming of resentment, but its religious embodiment, since religious morality is, itself, based on resentment. Nietzsche's notion of ressentimentis a psychological process in which the weak person who cannot actively respond to an injury compensates himself through an imaginary spiritual revenge. The weak person tends to understand the injury done to him, toward which he feels ressentiment, in terms of evil. The description of the injury done to them as a moral wrong is the slave morality of those who are unable to respond in a healthy way through positive action. Religious (Judeo-Christian) morality, including the idea of forgiveness, is nothing more than impotent hatred, with religion as its outstanding manifestation. As I see it, magnanimity is, indeed, necessary to protect us against poisonous resentment, but overcoming resentment is not a religious matter, certainly not in its Judeo-Christian form. This reminder of Nietzsche's should not be forgotten in any discussion of the genealogy of forgiveness. Should we also forgive Nietzsche for not allowing any place for forgiveness, but only for simple generality? We will leave the question open. References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1970). Modern moral philosophy. In G. Wallace & A. D. M. Walker (Eds.), The definition of morality. London: Methuen. Frankfurt, H. G. (1988). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. In H. G. Frankfurt, The importance of what we care about (pp. 11-25). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kenny, A. (1984). Wittgenstein on the nature of philosophy. In A. Kenny, The legacy of Wittgenstein (pp. 38-60). Oxford: Blackwell. Maimonides (1974). Mishneh Torah: Vol. 1. The book of knowledge. Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers. Murphy, J. G., & Hampton, J. (1988). Forgiveness and mercy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond good and evil (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (1967). On the genealogy of'morals (Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. (1974). Thus spoke Zarathustra (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Viking Press. Raz, J. (1975). Practical reasons and norms. London: Hutchinson. Richards, N. (1992). Forgiveness. In J. Deigh (Ed.), Ethics andpersonality {pp. 223-243). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the limits of philosophy. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1983). Remarks on Frazer's "Golden bough"(bilingual edition, ed. by R. Rhees). Retford, Nottinghamshire: Brynmill Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1993). Philosophical occasions (1912-1951) (bilingual edition, ed. by J. C. Klagge & A. Nordmann). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
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