Image Source: Nayef Jihan
Let’s talk about moral development. (No wait, don’t leave! Stick with me.)
Lawrence Kohlberg was a psychologist who specialized in the theory of moral development. His teachings are widely criticized for their misogynistic undertones (as he didn’t believe that women could reason as men do), but the underpinnings are still relevant today.
He posited that humans go through three main levels (two stages to a level) of moral development:
Preconventional: Very little understanding of morality. Basically want to avoid punishment but can’t reason why exactly there are punishments. Dogs and babies can grasp this level.
Conventional: Rely on authority figures (parents, school, government, religion) to assign rules to live by.
Postconventional: Able to reason and develop internal moral compass.
Most people make it to the conventional stage during their school years. They understand that punishment results from breaking the rules, and they inherently accept the authority of those who issue the rules. Initially, the rules are from parents: make your bed, put away your toys, don’t hit your sister. As they get older, they absorb rules from religious leaders (respect your parents or God’ll punish you), teachers (don’t backtalk or you’ll go to the principal’s office), and/or governmental authorities (obey the speed limit or you’ll get a ticket). Kids tend to accept these rules without question, at least until teenage rebellion hits and they start to wonder why they really have to return home by 9pm on a weekend when they don’t even go to bed until midnight.
(Still with me? There’s a point coming up!)
By the time people start to question the rules set by their parents, Kohlberg proposed that most people will start to question other “truths,” kind of like how children learn about the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Tooth Fairy concurrently. Here’s the problem: we have “moral” authorities that we are conditioned to respect inherently well into adulthood and presumably forever: religious leaders* and law enforcement.
We are seeing an over-reliance on authorities for morality now, in adults. In an interview with The Interrobang, Penn Jillette said:
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
Kohlberg believed that all adults would eventually reach this level of universal morality, knowing that we shouldn’t do bad things because, well, we shouldn’t want to hurt others. We shouldn’t have to rely on an external moral authority (religious or governmental laws) to stop us from doing bad things; we should simply know better. Think of it as the golden rule, but for everything in the world.
I believe that most adults get stuck somewhere between the conventional and postconventional stages. People love to harp on individual rights (I shouldn’t have to wear a face mask! I’m not afraid of getting sick! You’re violating my rights and I am inconvenienced!), believing that they know what’s best for themselves. Unfortunately, they aren’t able to see the bigger picture, that sometimes we have to do things we don’t always want because it’s the right thing to do. Scott Charles posted an excellent example of the sixth stage of moral development to Twitter:
I wear a mask because if the experts are correct, I could potentially prevent someone from getting sick and dying. If the experts are wrong, the most I’m out is the inconvenience of wearing a piece of fabric on my face.
I often wonder who raised some of y’all.
He wears a mask, knowing that it could be violating his individual rights, because he knows that it’s the right thing to do.
This thinking also applies to the Black Lives Matter movement and defunding the police. Jason Lewis, a Minnesotan politician, was recently lambasted on Twitter for retweeting a news article of a black bear wandering in the city and writing, “But by all means, let’s abolish the police! Would love to see a ‘social worker’ take care of this one.” This type of thinking demonstrates an over-reliance on law enforcement as the ultimate authority of community order. If he were to reason just a moment longer, he might realize that there are other community services, such as animal control, who are better equipped than police officers to return a bear safely to the wild.
If people are unable to understand why they should wear a mask in public or how society could happily function without a militarized police force, they have not been able to develop a fully functional moral compass.
* I don’t have a problem with religion in general; rather, I have a problem with people who use their religious beliefs to demean, belittle, or otherwise dehumanize the other (people who don’t ascribe to their flavor of religion).
