Morality in Politics

Lawrence Kohlberg pointed the way to a more just social order. We need his wisdom today more than ever.

Editor’s Note:

With everything feeling a bit… unhinged lately, Mark Braund returns with a piece that steps back from the noise and asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when politics forgets morality altogether? As ever, it’s thoughtful, rigorous, and well worth your time.

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With everything that’s going on at the moment, the title of this post might appear academic: there is clearly less morality in politics today than at any time since 1945.

But when the norms that have kept the world on an even keel for so long are being trashed, when the institutions that encourage diplomatic solutions to international disputes are ignored, and when the fabric of civilization is being stretched to breaking point, it is crucial to remind ourselves that without reference to morals, politics loses its capacity to safeguard majority interests.

I’m not talking about personal morals here, or the misguided attempts by religious groups (and others) to tell people how to live their lives. I’m talking about morality in a wider sense: the way our actions affect those with whom we come into direct contact, yes; but also the way the lives of others are impacted by our political choices, and the way we choose to arrange our societies. If politics pays no heed to moral considerations, civilization loses its foundations and we risk losing our humanity.

Kohlberg’s Moral Stage Theory

The American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was born in 1927. At the age of twenty he was captured and imprisoned by the British while serving aboard the SS Redemption, a ship operated by Haganah, smuggling Jewish refugees through the blockade and into Palestine. While motivated by a desire to help Holocaust survivors find a permanent home in what would soon become Israel, he was also torn by the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral homelands.

It was this experience, and what he learned from the Holocaust survivors he met, that led him to dedicate his life to researching the psychology of moral development, in pursuit of a path towards greater social justice. If more people become better human beings, then perhaps the world becomes a better place for everyone.

If different groups were to coexist peacefully, Kohlberg thought, it would have to be on the basis of a shared morality, one common to all. But the idea of universalism found little support among philosophers, in large part because historical events are more easily explained by moral relativism: the idea that the values and norms of a particular society are the inevitable product of unique cultural experience and therefore equally valid.

To test the possibility of a universal morality, he took as his starting point the work of the Swiss child psychologist, Jean Piaget, and extended it into a theory for the development of moral reasoning through stages that could be observed, or at least imagined, in both children and adults.

His schema proceeded from stage one, the obedience and punishment orientation, which describes the level of moral reasoning usually found in small children, up to stage six, which he termed principled conscience. He then designed a protocol for measuring the process of moral development in individuals and set about interviewing thousands of subjects drawn from different cultures.

He found that the development of moral reasoning does indeed proceed in sequence through a series of stages. People never skip a stage, and when they make the step to a higher stage — usually in response to a moral dilemma they have to deal with but for which they are ill-equipped — they are more content than they were at the previous stage.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, few of his subjects appeared to have fully attained stage six, where moral reasoning is based on universal ethical principles and a commitment to the value of justice. Indeed, some have even questioned whether Kohlberg found sufficient evidence to prove unequivocally the existence of a fifth stage.

Nonetheless, he was able to show that moral development moves through stages, and that some people at least appear to attain an ‘ultimate’ level of moral reasoning. His theory also seems to apply across cultures, though this remains a live debate. And, as you might expect, a strong correlation exists between educational opportunity and achievement and the attainment of higher stages.

His thinking, while conceived as a reaction to the horrors of the concentration camps, was also born of the radical social optimism of the 1960s. Along with the philosopher John Rawls, Kohlberg played a key role in academic efforts to shore up the post-1945 liberal consensus. The conservative backlash of the 1980s and the civilizational backsliding that continues to this day, in no way invalidate his work. He wasn’t telling us what would happen. He was suggesting what could happen.

Enter Sociobiology

All such efforts provoke a reaction, however, and in academia the reaction to Kohlberg came with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson was an entomologist who wondered if discoveries he had made about the changing behaviour of fruit flies over generations might help us better understand the evolutionary origins of human behaviour.

He was also a serious academic, a brilliant scientist and a clever populariser of ideas through his wonderful writing; he didn’t deserve the opprobrium heaped on him by many on the left, who wrote him off as a biological determinist. Unlike genuine biological determinists, of which there are many, Wilson did not argue that human behaviour was necessarily constrained by our evolutionary origins. He simply asked the question: does biology play a role in the way humans make moral decisions? His conclusion was that it surely must.

After the furore died down, Wilson’s work was largely ignored until sociobiology was re-branded as evolutionary psychology by Jerome Barkow, Lena Cosmides and John Tooby in their 1992 book, The Adapted Mind.

After Wilson’s experience, the authors were at pains to explain how some adaptive behaviours — things wired into us early in our evolutionary development and which may have benefitted us back then — should now be seen as maladaptive, as they prove unhelpful in the modern world. Unfortunately, many of the subsequent popularisers of evolutionary psychology were not so circumspect, some even going as far as to excuse rape as an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary origins.

More recently, Jon Haidt, who is active here on Substack with his efforts to save Gen Z from the deleterious effects of social media, but is also one of the leading moral psychologists working today, summarised much of the work done on the subject since Kohlberg’s death in his fascinating book, The Righteous Mind, published in 2012.

Reason and Emotion

Haidt criticised Kohlberg for seeking purely rational explanations for moral decision making when that process clearly also draws on emotions, which are generally accepted to be evolutionary adaptations. Of course, unless you attribute the human capacity for reason to some metaphysical origin, it must also have roots in evolution, even if it is generally considered a consequence of cultural advance.

Haidt goes on to describe why people who Kohlberg would argue have attained different stages of moral development, necessarily hold conflicting political views. His work is motivated by a desire to tackle growing polarization in politics, though he and his colleagues have conceived a framework quite different from Kohlberg’s to explain the connection between moral sentiments and political views.

We may never get there, but Kohlberg’s stage theory does indicate a path towards universal social justice via a steady improvement in the capacity for moral reasoning among individuals. But I’ve always been acutely aware that my own moral sense is largely shaped by one particular emotion: empathy, especially when the suffering of others is avoidable and is a consequence, direct or indirect, of the actions of other people.

Carol Gilligan, who worked with Kohlberg in the 1960s, became concerned that his thesis failed to take into account gender differences. She suggested that men and women have different moral ‘voices’. Men are generally concerned with rights and justice while women are motivated by the notion of care for others. Her ‘ethic of care’ argues that morality does indeed have its roots in empathy. And her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, is essential reading.

Fear and Loathing

But empathy is just one of many emotions that direct behaviour. Fear is another, and an adaptive (and irrational) fear of difference is clearly at play in growing support for the racist immigration policies of parties of the far right. If people aren’t encouraged to reflect rationally on their moral and political choices; if, instead, they are given licence to indulge their base emotions by cynical politicians, then is it surprising so many vote for racists like Donald Trump?

There’s another problem with putting all our eggs in the reasoning basket: unless we accept Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development and properly invest in creating conditions in which more people can move further up the ladder, the application of reason can deliver dreadful outcomes.

If, for example, you believe that white people are superior to non-whites, and as a result non-whites should be denied economic opportunities and other civil rights, then it is perfectly rational, as the National Party in South Africa did from 1948, to implement a policy of apartheid that reduces most of the population to non-citizens. Our faith in reason is worth nothing without some recognition of the moral ambition implicit in both Kohlberg’s stage theory and Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care.

Both reason and emotion clearly play a role in how people construct their moral world view, as well as shaping their political preferences. But Kohlberg showed that evolutionary influences on the human mind do not condemn us to behave immorally.

The emotions that lead to competitive, aggressive and excluding behaviours can be moderated and even reversed, given a positive formative environment and the development of sufficient reasoning powers. The more people that attain higher levels of moral reasoning, the more likely it is that democratic politics will deliver leaders and governments committed to building a better world.

Moral Exemplars

Nonetheless, the power of bad actors like Trump, who encourage people to be the worst version of themselves, is immense. Lawrence Kohlberg was more interested in the idea of moral exemplars: people who, through the way they conduct themselves, prompt others to seek a higher level of moral reasoning.

People he cited as such exemplars included Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas More, Henry David Thoreau, Janusz Korczak and Andrea Simpson. It says something about how far we still have to go that I can find no reference to Ms. Simpson, a mental health worker and anti-war activist, anywhere on the internet except the article in which Kohlberg wrote about her.

Unless we find a way to persuade more such people into politics; people with a moral vision for the future who are prepared to face down elite power and implement the social and economic changes required to rebalance society in favour of majority interests, progress is unlikely.

Kohlberg may not have proved beyond doubt the existence of a universal morality, and even if he had, there remains the question of how to create the conditions in which more people might further develop their powers of moral reasoning. But he did find evidence that we all have a great deal in common in terms of how our moral beliefs develop, and in doing so he helped articulate a fundamental aspect of our common humanity.

The evidence he uncovered strongly suggests that given the right conditions, all humans naturally aspire to a world in which justice and equity provide the foundation for social relations. We must build further on his discoveries to ensure that those who benefit from current arrangements are prevented from extinguishing this immense potential for good before it’s too late.