Today I wanna talk about Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.

I've spent the last two years in therapy, working through my CPTSD.  Therapy, especially trauma therapy, is a process wherein we build ourselves consciously with the help of an impartial observer.  We discard the experiences we've had that no longer serve us, determine which qualities are part of the person we want to become, and take steps to become that person.  For this reason, I honestly feel everyone should be issued a therapist at birth; the fact that we don't have a person on call to monitor our psychological development and health, in the same way we have a doctor to monitor our physical development and health, is kind of madness, don't you think?

But we don't have that.  We have to construct our identities piecemeal, over the course of our whole lives, and find what guidance and assistance is available in our immediate area.  We get stuck and don't develop for years, decades - some of us get stuck for our whole lives, never outgrowing the scars of our upbringing.  Maintaining psychological health is as much a conscious process as maintaining physical health, but we're not as good at maintaining our brains, because we don't get as much help or guidance on it. We're constantly bombarded with information on keeping our bodies healthy, but our system does not want us to keep our minds healthy, because our dysfunctional capitalist society requires consumer puppets who believe themselves to be incomplete and inadequate without external validation.

My therapist has spent the last two years breaking down my ingrained scars from a lifetime of societal and personal trauma, and it's left me with a pretty good roadmap toward building myself into who I want to be.  One of the guides I've found is Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who refined earlier theories of moral development in children.  Kohlberg outlined six stages of moral reasoning that we generally move through as we age.  We don't go through all of them - most of us get stuck at a given level and never move on from it without a lot of conscious internal work.

Kohlberg wasn't interested in moral questions, eg., "what is the right thing to do?"  He was interested in how we answer those questions, eg., "why do we do the right thing?"  Our reasons for doing the right thing, whatever we believe it to be, change as we grow and our brains develop, and they change in a very predictable way.  We can't skip stages - we develop from one to the next when we encounter a moral question that our existing framework can't answer.

Preconventional morality

Stage One: "Obedience and punishment"

In our first stage of moral development, seen in very small children and domesticated animals, we do the right thing because we fear punishment.  A child's moral reasoning is as simple as "it's bad to steal" or "mom says don't hit people."  At this point, we don't question the moral statements we hear - all our morals are received from others with no internal analysis.

Stage Two: "What's in it for me?"

At this stage we begin to individualize and seek rewards.  We see things in terms of how they might benefit us, but in a narrow way that doesn't consider our relationships with people or our reputation.  Our brains haven't yet developed enough to have much societal perspective on our actions, so we think in simple quid pro quos, and our morality is extremely relative to our position and current feelings.  We aren't motivated by moral principles so much as the immediate chance of benefit or detriment to ourselves.

Conventional morality

Stage Three: "The golden rule"

Conventional morality is typical of both adolescents and adults.  Many of us spend our lives in stages three or four and never run into issues that require more refined judgments.  At stage three, beginning at early adolescence, we have entered society and feel it's important to conform to society's views and expectations.  We judge the morality of actions by evaluating their effect on our relationships, and our evaluation now includes elements like respect, gratitude, loyalty, etc.

Stage Four: "Authority and social order"

At stage four, we find it important to obey laws, social conventions and rules because we believe they support a functioning society.  We believe that rules and laws exist to protect society as a whole, and we no longer require individual approval, as in stage three, but our morality is still dictated by an outside force, in this case the laws and mores of the society we're in.  We have expanded our sense of community to include not just our immediate family and friends, but the larger communities we might be a part of - we think about how our actions reflect upon others in our demographics, other people like us or in similar situations.  Most people fall somewhere between stages three and four, depending on the situation.

Nihilism

At this point in our development, if we choose to continue developing - and moral development is always a conscious process, a self-initiated refinement of our thinking - we encounter a roadblock.  There's a kind of hole in between stages four and five, which Kohlberg theorized as Stage 4.5.  At this point, which many of us get to right around the time we enter college, we have become disillusioned with the rules and laws of the society we're in.  We have come to realize that society's structures and laws do not necessarily support the greatest good of the whole, but are often constructed to benefit specific individuals.  We begin to believe that the entire moral framework is suspect.  We become disaffected with the arbitrary nature of law and authority, and begin to view society at large, the moral system itself, as culpable.

A lot of people - people who accrue a lot of power in our society, because the capitalist system advantages narcissistic and sociopathic behavior - never get out of this 4.5 hole.  They lapse into nihilism, believing that no one operates on moral principles, that laws and rules are made to control and subjugate others and so the only success must come from operating amorally within this framework.  They have learned that morality cannot come from an external source, but have concluded from this that morality must be bullshit, because they haven't yet developed their inner self enough to have a moral standpoint independent of society.

It's easy to confuse this point as similar to Stage Two's moral relativism, but it's more subtle than that.  At Stage Two we perceive morality as entirely in reference to ourselves.  At this stage, we have concluded that if morality is relative, it must be fake.  In order to get out of this pit, we need even one thing we believe in.  We need just one solid moral principle that we feel completely committed to regardless of what our society or communities say.  We can build an identity and a moral framework from one single pillar.

Post-conventional morality 

Again, we move from one stage to another when we run into a moral dilemma that isn't satisfied by our current level of moral reasoning.  We can consciously inspect ourselves and determine the fundamental principles that drive our behavior, and determine whether those principles are indeed things we want to support.

Stage Five: "The greatest good for the greatest number"

At stage five we are capable of employing abstract reasoning to justify behavior.  We understand that laws can be unjust and the morality of a given action depends upon context, and we see laws as social contracts that can be changed when they do not promote the general welfare.  We strive for the greatest good for the greatest number of people in our society, and achieve these goals through majority decision and compromise.  Supposedly, our democratic government is based on stage five reasoning.  In reality, most people do not operate consistently on either stage five or six.  We may aspire to this level of moral thinking, but when we encounter challenges, we revert to more simplistic perspectives.

Stage Six: "Universal principles"

Stage six is more theoretical than practical.  At this level, we make moral decisions based on abstract reasoning using moral principles that never change - we have formulated universal precepts that we apply to all situations.  We do the right thing because it is right, not because it avoids punishment, is in our interest, is expected of us, or is mandated by law.  Kohlberg insisted that stage six exists, but was not able to find much evidence for either individuals or societies who consistently operate at this level.  The theory is that at this level, laws are not required, because every individual in the society self-regulates according to a universal moral sense.

Free-floating thoughts

Mental health applications

I don't think I'm unique in my need to determine a moral perspective in order to be a person.  It feels critical to my mental health and my further growth to determine what I believe.  I fell into that 4.5 hole hard, and still fall back into it often - I can tell when I've slipped because I start repeating fatalistic things like, "Nobody gives a shit, nobody tries, nobody cares about anything but themselves, and the system fosters that behavior so the system is inherently destructive and oppressive," etc.  This is my own personal hell, and the news cycle offers me plenty of evidence to support this viewpoint.  That's the trouble - to get out of this nihilistic pit, you have to decide to.  You have to choose to see the world differently, because if you're just stacking up evidence, you will always find more evidence that the world is nothing but cruel chaos.

But there are other things to see, and the way we see the world affects what behavior we put out into the world.  This means that we materially change the moral quality of the world by our moral behavior.  We choose what world we want by living as if that world already exists.  In my opinion, we should do this consciously, not out of kneejerk unexamined conclusions.  It's easy for me to decide that the world is full of shit and wants me dead, because that's the toxic narrative my damaged brain wants me to believe.  The disease doesn't want a cure.  My damage doesn't want me getting healthy, and neither does our damaged society.

I had to get all Archimedes on this shit.  To lever myself out of this hole, which for me was a suicidal hole, I had to find a place to stand, one single moral precept to commit to.  I had to decide that something was worth believing, and build a foundation on that one pillar.  Yours is probably different from mine, and that's okay.  To quote "Dogma," it doesn't matter what you have faith in, only that you have faith.  It doesn't matter what you choose to believe, only that you decide that believing something is meaningful.

I'm an atheist and a bit of a butt about supernatural ideas, especially internally (my internalized butt, you could say), and so I needed something bulletproof that couldn't be punctured by adverse events.  I also needed to tighten my focus, as it were.  I needed to stop thinking about universal principles and societal improvement; I was driving myself insane trying to find solutions to the world's problems without first addressing my own.  Absurdism became my guiding structure in this attempt, specifically Camus's great essay The Myth of Sisyphus.  I've linked this here before, and I bang on about it a lot, and that's because it is in many ways my Bible.  My one moral pillar is this: hope is suicide.

I'll get into that more deeply in another context, because it's a controversial statement, but the important thing about that perspective is that it focuses on the now, on the work that's before us right here.  It requires that I cease obsessing about the future, about whether or not I'll succeed, about failure or a need for triumph.  I simply focus on what I'm doing.  The end isn't promised and doesn't matter.

Affirming our moral principles allows us to prioritize our concerns and let go of concerns that don't serve us.  We are taking responsibility for our effect on the world, and thereby setting down the burden of everyone's effect on the world - by outlining our areas of concern and control, we accept that we cannot control everything, and cease to punish ourselves for failing to do so.

An adolescent society

The other fascinating thing about Kohlberg's work is that it's fractal in application - we can see this developmental process in individuals and also in societies, from the micro to the macro level.  We can plot the development of our society's moral framework, and the breakdowns come exactly where we would expect.

A very basic society with pre-conventional morality operates on extremely simple models of power and compensation.  A limited tribal framework might be like this - I don't wanna talk out of my ass about other cultures, so let's just use the Orcs in the videogame "Shadows of War" as a good example of this kind of morality.  In this warlike society, obedience comes out of fear of punishment or hope for reward, and individuals don't feel much devotion to the structure as a whole.  In many ways, human society before the twentieth century operated pretty consistently on this level.  That's not to say that higher moral reasoning wasn't going on, or that it wasn't relevant to the structure or operations of Western societies, but that the society's moral tone as a whole, the aggregation of every individual's moral behavior and the interactions between cultures, was at this more basic developmental stage.   We had not yet as a society begun to refine our moral sense to abstractions - we were still arguing about which colors of humans should count as humans. (In some supposedly civilized places, we still fucking are.)

Focusing in on America here, because that's what I have experience with, as a culture I would say we hit Stage Three around the time we started having conduits for cultural interaction that were not either very local or very individualized.  Sometime in the 20s, perhaps - as film became a thing, as music became something that everyone could buy, as the reach of media outlets began to include more than just one town or one single perspective, we began to have that pre-teen sense that society as a whole mattered, that society's norms could be codified.  We began to conclude that anyone not following our own social norms was morally wrong - see the Red Scare, the Cold War, the way we treated Europeans even while fighting alongside them.  American culture became fixated on the "golden rule" and the underlying idea that what's good for me should be good for you; I should treat you how I would like to be treated, without considering your needs, because all people should have the same needs - those who need things I do not need are dangerous deviants.

By about 1955 we've hit Stage Four - authority and social order-driven morality.  The enforcement of the WASP social order as "default" has attained such cultural dominance that it's got the force of law.  As the Civil Rights movement gets underway, the backlash is driven by concern for the social fabric of society, by a fearful clinging to "order" and an insistence that our moral code is inviolate, unquestionable, descending straight from God via the Pope and the President.

This top-down control exerted by the "moral majority" takes us inevitably into the Stage 4.5 nihilistic pit.  By the 80s, disillusionment has convinced most regular Americans that the system is not even trying to work for their benefit, that the corruption is endemic and the intention has always been to create inequality and benefit the deeply immoral ruling class.  As a society, we conclude that moral government, conscious morals-driven decisionmaking on a societal scale, is impossible, that politicians are corrupt by nature, and that all we can do is protect ourselves, preserve our own interests.

Like many people who fall into this nihilistic hole and never get out, spending their lives opportunistically profiteering off anyone foolish enough to hold a firm moral belief, our society has spent the last 40 years in Stage 4.5.  Our current government is perfect evidence of this - a constant back-and-forth between two parties that serve no one, Republicans who think only of their own profit and power and Democrats who hold no moral perspectives at all, but lean on the mechanics of government to avoid having to take a divisive stand of any kind.  We have fully immersed ourselves in the idea that moral governance is impossible.  We're told so every day, to keep us from attempting change.

What we're seeing now - Me Too, Black Lives Matter, etc. - is an enormous cultural shift that says, "We have to decide what we believe and start living by it.  We have to take a position.  We can't keep living like nothing matters."  Many previously underrepresented groups now have media access in the form of the internet, and they are doing what our leaders have never even tried to do - establishing moral principles and trying to change our laws to represent those principles.  Principles like "all men are created equal," but y'know... like really.  Like all men, and women, and everyone else.  Principles like "everyone deserves to have their basic human needs covered by a government that accepts everyone's fair financial input to accomplish it."  Principles like "we made all this money and government shit up anyway, so how about we change what we do with it so that it actually helps people, instead of just making big piles of it to enhance our flagging masculinity?"

As a culture we're having a breakdown much like the one I've been going through for the last two years, trying to find a rock to stand on, a moral precept to believe in, and live by it.  It's hard, it's frustrating, and it's painful, scary work when you're working against a nihilistic capitalist culture constantly using every means at its disposal, including high-end military weaponry, to enforce its right to plunder and pillage both globally and domestically.  But it's necessary.  It's meaningful.  We are trying to grow out of adolescence as a society, trying to step out of that nineteen-year-old horseshit attitude where nothing matters and we have no responsibility for our actions.  We're trying to grow some fucking balls here, grow the fuck up.  We are the progenitors of our culture, the parents of our society, and we have a huge opportunity, right now, to shape the kind of people we'll be in the future - if we're ready to seize it. 

But this isn't like college.  If you don't get your shit together in college, what happens - you drop out?  Take a year off, see Europe?  Your mom gets mad?  If we don't pull up our collective pants and sort our shit out as a society, there's no dropping out possible.  There's no "let's just try this again next year."  We're out of next years.  Like real life, we have to learn fast, on the fly, while trying to keep surviving.  We have to think fast, together, and grow fast, and we have to discover a level of courage and compassion that we've never imagined in ourselves, or we will all die.  We have to find a moral framework and start to act on it, or we all die, of disease, of famine, of flooding, of hurricanes, of fascist bullets and governmental abdication.  That's it, that's the whole deal.  Fix our hearts, or die.