Three levels. Six stages. How do you know what's right and wrong?
How do you know what's good and bad? Is that just assumed? Everybody
who gets to the adult phase just wants to go, well you know what's right, everybody knows
what's right, but do they know what's right?
It depends on where you are in this world, where you're born,
and whom you're born to, and who does the raising,
and who does the shaping, and what level of responsibility as an adult you take for
shaping your own from that point on. So now we have three levels,
they're pretty straight forward. Thus, they're fairly easy to remember,
and we've got six stages, two at each level,
so it's just a sequence that unfolds
where we develop a sense of right and wrong, where Kohlberg
was critiqued by Carol Gilligan and others for having
a slant that was predominantly male, valuing male traits in a gender
stereotypic
fashion and really devaluing female traits in a
stereotypic gender role fashion and that's probably legit
but here is the idea. You have
pre-conventional level where you are a little kid,
right? Pre-conventional, that should be pretty easy to
remember. If it's pre-conventional you know what's coming next. So if pre-
conventional is the first stage,
what do you learn in the first stage? You learn what's punished
and what's rewarded. If I say no you can't have a cookie
and you go OK, I'll wait. Then you go good,
that's great, way to go, you get rewarded, you get strokes, you get
approval from the person that is your primary caregiver.
If you have a tantrum and they flip out on you and they put you in time out,
you find out that tantrum behavior is going to be punished. So what's good
is what's rewarded. What's bad is what's
punished. You don't expect toddlers to have a
fully developed sense of morality, right? They have to be taught right from wrong.
What right and wrong is is determined by the society in which they find
themselves,
and the people who raise them have been raised in that society, so they will
typically
reflect conventional values that are found within their own culture.
Cultures vary across the world and across time
and people look at other cultures and say they're crazy, they're mad, or they're bad,
there's something wrong with them but had you grown up in that culture you would have
thought the reverse to be true
because that would have been your world view and what you're critiquing from
this world view
would seem normal and this would seem unusual. The conventional level is the good
boy, good girl
orientation where we start talking about those Kohlberg, or excuse me the Erikson
levels,
right, the stages you went through where you developed a sense of self.
You start off with the world operating on you
and if you get enough good boy, good boy, that's awesome, you're a great girl, way
you're
an awesome kid, I love you, then you have the sense
developing internally that you are good and you have a good boy, good girl
orientation.
Or the flip side of that, if you get punished a lot, right, you're always bad
and I knew you was going to be up to something cause that's the kind of kid you are, then you
get this sense developing that there must be something bad about you, a bad boy, bad
girl orientation. I once saw some parents
back in the soccer realm when I was a
coach and they're sitting on the sidelines as a parent and this
set of parents had a kid on the team and they also had a little kid,
and they go, man, he's mean. He's two and a half, he's mean as a snake
or three or whatever he was, he was running around so he must have been older than two.
Mean as a snake. He threw stuff at his brother the other day
and then I saw the little kid starts ranting, and just grab the side of this...
it was a chain link fence and he's just jerking on it and banging it and they're like look
ain't he mean? Ain't he... well what is he hearing over and over?
You're mean, you're bad, you're violent, you're aggressive,
you and nobody's intervening that I can see
to actually change the outcome. So
it makes sense that this kid is going to see himself as a tough kid,
a bad boy who's probably going to then interact with his peers
in a manner very much consistent with what he heard over and over up to the point that
he developed a sense of self
that would be consistent with what the world is giving him in terms of
feedback.
Well we all learn that you are going to be able to do some things
and not be able to other things. Those things you are not able to do authority
says you can't do. There's the rules.
Rules, you violate the rules, you get thrown out of the game
or you get penalized. You violate society's big rules
you go to jail. We call those big rules laws.
So you learn in school and at home that rules
are there by virtue of authority and you've got kids
that then fall in line with that and say, well I do it cause I'm supposed to do it
because those are the rules
and those kids would be your good girl, good boy oriented kids,
alright, and then you got the other kids who are going to flaunt the rules, those who are
going to break the rules,
find it a little bit of a game to get around the rules, right, because they're
anti-authority but the idea is that you realize there's a set of rules and you're
motivated either to follow the rules
or, the flip side, to get around the rules.
Well, that's the conventional level. That's what people typically operate at.
Post-conventional level - we now move up
in our moral thinking and our moral reasoning to a different level
and Kohlberg didn't think everybody got here.
He didn't think that everybody was able to reason at this higher moral
level. They did what they did because they were either
trained to be a good or a bad kid and because they were either pro-authority
or anti-authority
and that's how they lived their life but you go up one more level and you start
to realize
that rules can be arbitrary
and that rules can be set in motion just simply to keep order
and that order can be a good thing, right?
Thomas Hobbes, without rules and without
government we fall into a state of anarchy and life is nasty, brutish, and
short,
right, so that there are some, there is some collective gain if we all put our
faith in each other to develop some social contracts
that we will not kill, I won't kill you, you won't kill me.
We won't steal. I won't steal from you. You won't steal from me,
right? But a lot of it is just convention.
So driving on the left side of the road, is that wrong
or is that right? (Depends where you are).
Depends where you are. Doesn't matter
whether you drive on the right hand side of the road or the left hand side of the road. It only
matters that everybody else around you agrees,
right? So you go to one culture and they're like, that's crazy, everybody's on the left hand side of the road. They
come over here and go, that's crazy, everybody's on the right hand side of the road.
But what matters is that we've all gotten together and agreed
that we'll be on this side or that side. But that's a social contract
and that can change over time. Laws may be unjust.
Laws may not be in the interest of some people in the society
and those people may not want to obey those laws but they do it from a principal
point of view
but if they're at that level of obeying their own conscience, now they've moved up
yet
one more level to the individual principal consciousness orientation,
abstract ethical principles that somebody operates on.
So I may be able to reason that, yeah, well that law is not really fair for
everybody but,
you know, go with the flow, don't raise any waves, keep going and go on
so I understand it but I don't do anything to change it
but if I put myself out there to be a target of scrutiny or vilification
because I have a principal
that I think is a higher principle and I want to hold to it, that's a different
level and Kohlberg would say most people don't get there which is why you have
leaders
of revolutions or leaders of protests who have that as their guiding principle
and other people then see that courage exhibited and can
go along with it. One interesting
example I saw once on the news was in California. They had these big old culverts, I
think it was LA.
Big flood happened, the thing that's usually fairly empty is filled up with
water and a person is being carried away down it. A citizen jumps in,
grabs them, brings them to the side, and is then promptly arrested for interfering with
emergency activities
because, you know, the rescue people have been called and they came out there
and there's nothing to do because this person just saved them. Well you're not
supposed to be swimming in there anyway
so, picked him up and arrested him. And people are like,
that's crazy, right? He saved the other person's life.
Well then they did what? PR got out of control, they
dropped the charges because they recognized that, yes,
he technically violated the law by being in there to begin with
and interfering with emergency management procedures.
However, the person who arrested him was operating from here,
right, the authority orientation. This is the law, I'm in charge.
I have to arrest you now. Somebody else went and said, oh this is bad,
right, because they were operating here. Let's undo that
outcome because they recognize that it was not only
correct to have done the action but it also was better for the department
to not arrest heroes.