Dig Down Deep. Episode 4. Morality And Its Development

 The reason I wanted to talk about this topic today is because I found myself thinking about some questions a lot these days, which are, what is wrong with people? Where the morality of people is and what even is morality? All this news about war, violence, controversies and everything makes you feel sick from the inside, where is the world being led to? And then I realized that I have been asking the wrong questions all this time.

To understand morality we need to understand how it is developed and to what extent can it get developed and is it okay to expect from everyone to behave in a certain moral way?. What is it that makes some people moral and some people amoral? In the year 1958 a psychology student named Lawrence Kohlberg began working on this topic to understand the development of morals of a person at various ages and what factors do they depend upon.

What Kohlberg did was that he took 72 boys from Chicago between the ages of 10 to 16 years as sample, 58 of whom were followed up at three yearly interval for 20 years. What happened with each of these samples was that they were interviewed for 2 hours on the basis of 10 dilemmas, the purpose was to study the reason these boys gave for their judgments in response to the dilemmas and how those reasons tend to change as these boys got older.

Now let me talk about one of the famous dilemmas which he used, called the Heinz dilemma. So in this situation there is a man named Heinz whose wife is suffering from a deadly disease and is in her deathbed. Thankfully a druggist had found the cure of the disease she was suffering from. Now the drug was an expensive one and the druggist wanted to charge 10 times of what was the production cost to make the drug. Heinz was not able to afford the drug because of its high price and he went to everyone he knew to borrow money to buy the drug but ended up collecting half of the money that was required. 

He tried to convince the druggist to sell him the medicine for a cheaper price or give him the medicine for half the money for now and he’ll be paying back the rest of money later but the druggist refused and as he wanted to make money out of his discovery. Now the subjects had 3 options to choose from and you guys can also join in and choose one of the three options which are. Option 1 – Heinz should not steal the drug since he will be breaking the law. Option 2 – Heinz should steal the drug and accept any prison sentence. Option 3 – Heinz should steal the drug but not go to prison as that would be unfair.

I will tell you what the options you chose tell about your moral compass, but before that I want to point out what Kohlberg found out. So, after studying and interviewing the subjects and putting them under various dilemmas at different ages of their lives, Kohlberg found out that the reasons and justifications about morality that people give at different ages of lives constantly change and is dependent on various factors. 

He then studied these factors and was able to deduce six stages of moral development in humans. Now going back to the Heinz dilemma, if you decided to choose the first option which was that “Heinz should not steal the drug since he will be breaking the law.” then you are at the pre conventional phase of moral development. 

The pre conventional phase is made up of two stages the first one being “Obedience and Punishment” which makes you fear the punishment of an act and therefore judge its morality by the degree of consequences one has to face after committing it. According to the person who is in the pre conventional stage, stealing means punishment and prison, hence it would be wrong.

Stage two of the pre conventional phase is called “Self interest” in this phase the morality of a person is decided on the fact that whether his choice is in his favor or if it is unfavorable to him. Everyone has a different viewpoint. If for example someone sees an act of injustice happening to a person who is poor and that someone don’t think that it will ever happen to him because he is rich then he might shape his morals according to that and let it slide probably. 

This phase of Pre Conventional morality is usually found in young kids who are around the age of 10, because their morality doesn’t have a personal code yet. It is shaped by the standards of society and adults with the induction of punishment for a wrong act.

If you chose option 2 at that time which was, “Heinz should steal the drug and accept any prison sentence.” then your morality belongs to the conventional phase. Which is again made up of two stages which is the third and the fourth stage of moral development. Stage 3 is called “The Interpersonal Accord and Conformity” in which a person’s morality is made up of whatever that makes him look good in the society and makes it easy for him to be accepted and appreciated. His morality is based on the approval of others. He wants Heinz to save his wife and go to prison because that would make him a good guy in society and be accepted among people.

Stage 4 is “Authority and Maintaining Social Order” where he respects the law more than anything because he believes that it is important to follow social conventions to maintain a functioning society. In the phase of Conventional morality which is usually followed my most adolescents and adults, the morality is reasoned on the basis of the norms of the group to which a person belongs and he takes the law as the highest authority and doesn’t question it. A person might not be able to drink alcohol in the state of Gujarat and he thinks it is immoral as compared to a guy in Delhi who belongs to a society of different norms. So, the sense of morality is governed by the law and not questioned.

Now if you chose the third option which was that “Heinz should steal the drug but not go to prison as that would be unfair” then you belong to the Post Conventional phase of morality and according to Kohlberg this is the farthest a human can get and around 10-15% of people area able to produce thus kind of abstract thinking. Stage 5 of morality which falls under this phase is called “The social contract” in this stage the person starts seeing people as unique identities and there is a respect towards individual viewpoints. Laws are nothing but a social contract which should consider the individualistic viewpoints of the people as well. Everything is not black and white there can be a grey at times.

This is followed by the last stage of moral development which is called the “Universal Ethical Principle” which makes people base their morality on factors like human rights, justice, etc. It involves the person putting themselves in the victim’s shoes and thinking of their actions because the ethics are supposed to be the same for everyone. At this stage saving a human life holds more value than money or profit. This phase of morality is based on abstract reasoning and questioning.

Kohlberg realized that as a person grows his perception and judgment of morality changes, as he starts to gain different viewpoints and ideas from the people he’s living with. If you relate it with today’s scenario and see the hate around you on twitter, media, in the society that you belong to and you question people’s moral compass, this probably might help to understand where they are coming from. 

In my opinion you cannot judge and expect everyone to have a same opinion and a same set of morals, and the problem happens because we want everyone to be the same, we force our ideologies on them, our thoughts our morals on them, people make a fortune sitting in newsrooms showing you a part of those impositions of ideologies  from two more different groups, be it Hindu Muslim, Black people and White people, Ruling Party and Opposition, Your country vs Other countries, etc, etc.

So, relax, the only way to change people if you really want to do it, is by receiving ideas and sharing them and honestly deciding for yourself what ideas will leads towards harmony and peace and that would be the most moral stage a human could reach.!