One basic issue that contemporary reflection on moral development and moral education raises is that of form versus content in morality. Is morality primarily a kind of human judgment that has formal criteria such as universality and prescriptiveness (e.g., principles of justice should be impartially applied to all)? If so, then moral education is a movement toward such judgments. Or is morality a matter primarily of creative life decisions guided by intelligence for certain goals such as self-actualization, usefulness, efficiency or beneficial consequences for the individual and society? If so, then moral education is a matter of helping young people toward this kind of action and decision. The division between a view of morality that can be called formalist and deontological (from the Greek word deon, duty) and a view that can be called content oriented and teleological (from the Greek word telos, goal) is perhaps the basic division among influential normative ethicists today. The view that one takes on this question affects one's interpretation of moral development and moral education.

The present chapter examines this question within the context of our whole project and the limits of the space available here. The question itself has in part been clarified by previous chapters of this book that examined contrasting views on moral education, and it will be further clarified as we proceed in this chapter. Some of the implications of these diverse viewpoints for an interpretation of moral development and of moral education will be apparent as we proceed; others will be analyzed at length in later chapters and volumes of this project. We shall examine this question through contrasting Kohlberg's interpretation of morality, which he himself and others say is formalist, with Brenda Munsey's and Israela Aron's interpretations that are teleological and claim support from John Dewey. At this point of the chapter our purpose is not to adjudicate the critiques each interpreter makes of the other or to explain the differences thoroughly--this can be found in the references that I will cite--but rather to give a rough sense of the contrast. Secondly, we will present a third interpretation of morality which, we suggest, brings us beyond the impasse in which the first two are mired while preserving the valid insights of each of them. Thirdly, we shall discuss briefly different types of values to fill out at least part of the content of the view we propose.

CONTRAST BETWEEN FORMALIST AND TELEOLOGICAL

INTERPRETATIONS OF MORALITY

As Kohlberg's philosophical position has been outlined in the first chapter of this book by Frederick Ellrod, we need not repeat that here. To recall briefly what is most relevant to the concerns of this chapter, we may begin by noting that Kohlberg takes a method somewhat similar to that of Jean Piaget.¹ He saw the cognitive structure basic to modern scientific thinking as consisting in the formation and testing of hypotheses. Hence, in his study of the development of knowledge or genetic epistemology he examined the stages of interaction between the epistemological or knowing subject and the environment through which this structure emerged in the subject in early adolescence.² Similarly, Kohlberg has a view on what constitutes the moral judgment as such, and he examines the stages of interaction between the growing person and his or her social environment through which this structure emerges. Thus what is basic for Kohlberg is the moral judgment rather than moral action. This judgment is not so much an assertion about what is or is not, but rather a way of structuring human behavior. As he writes:

In our view the basic referent of the term "moral" is a type of judgment or a type of decision-making process, not a type of behavior, emotion or social institution. Second, note that stage 6 is a deontological theory of morality. The three primary modes of moral judgment, and the corresponding types of ethical theory, deal with (a) duties and rights (deontological), (b) ultimate aims or ends (teleological), and (c) personal worth or virtue (theory of approbation). Our claims of superiority, then, are claims for the superiority of stage 6 judgments of duties and rights (or of justice) over other systems of judgments of duties and rights. We make no direct claim about the ultimate aims of men, about the good life, or about other problems which a teleological theory must handle. These are problems beyond the scope of the sphere of morality or moral principles, which we define as principles of choice for resolving conflicts of obligations.³

Kohlberg then is defining "morality in terms of the formal character of a moral judgment, method, or point of view, rather than in terms of its content."⁴

A moral judgment is distinct from an aesthetic or a prudential judgment. It is a prescriptive judgment, for it involves a structuring of human behavior that is not simply hypothetical but has a note of obligation or "oughtness" to it. It also has a universality and reciprocity, for it is a judgment such that all persons should make in similar circumstances. These characteristics are found particularly in judgments about rights and duties, or about justice:

In one sense, justice is itself content-free; that is, it merely prescribes that principles should be impartially applied to all. However, we have also argued that the stage 6 form implies justice as equity, that is, as a treatment of persons as morally equal. . . . Second, we have argued that it also implies commutative justice as reciprocity, contract, and trust . . . no principle other than justice has been shown to meet the formal conception of a universal prescriptive principle.⁵

Note that while Kohlberg as moral theoretician adopts a formalist interpretation, as practitioner of moral education he searches for ways of structuring the social environment of the growing child and the child's participation in that environment so that moral judgments will generate content.⁶

The only alternative interpretations of morality of which Kohlberg is aware are those which equate morality with the particular system of the interpreter or those which say that morality is relative. Neither of these seems to him philosophically justified, while his own empirical findings support his view that children's growth is toward that precise kind of moral judgment that he considers as constituting morality.

As a contrasting philosophical interpretation of moral development and moral education, we may call upon two recent critics of Kohlberg who claim Dewey as the source of their own views. Brenda Munsey studies the metaethical issues raised by moral development.⁷ While Kohlberg holds an ethical rule theory, she proposes an ethical act theory. Ethical rule theory presupposes that moral rules are necessary to justify individual moral judgments, and so it holds that one cannot even identify the morally relevant facts without moral rules. Ethical act theory holds that one can identify the relevant particular facts without such rules. For the latter view, ethical rules have an importance as summaries of inherited wisdom, but they are subject to exceptions. They are not, as ethical rule theory holds, constitutive of what it means to reason morally, for on such a basis they cannot admit of exception. Such exception then would not be moral reasoning but some other type of reasoning. Kohlberg's "stage 6 justice defines moral justification. The stage 6 structure is taken to be an a priori criterion for distinguishing justified moral judgments from unjustified moral judgments--there are no exceptions."⁸

For act theorists such as Dewey, particular moral disputes are based on particular factual disputes; and particular moral claims are justified by appeal to particular factual considerations. A pragmatic metaethics would suggest that we begin by showing the first stage of moral judgment that researchers are able to identify, and then map the changes that occur in reference to this structure. This approach assumes that a definition of morality is in principle a posteriori, while Kohlberg's "hypothesis about the a priori structure of sound moral judgment is treated as an a priori hypothesis, defended in terms of merely formal criteria and presumably subject to merely formal counter-arguments."⁹

Israela Aron, another critic of Kohlberg,¹⁰ acknowledges that there are advantages to Kohlberg's formalist position in that he claims to be stimulating moral growth rather than indoctrinating or inculcating particular values. Formalist philosophers, however, restrict themselves largely to metaethics and thus do not deal effectively with substantive issues, while in moral education the teacher is trying to help young people face complex experiences and learn how to make creative moral decisions among the alternatives available. Kohlberg's dilemmas, Aron holds, are too pat and have too little data to be of much service here. For example, in the question whether Heinz should steal the drug necessary for his wife's recovery or allow his wife to die, other alternatives (e.g., taking out a loan, seeking public assistance, organizing a protest against the druggist, etc.) are not considered. Such dilemmas, abstracted from life and oversimplified, may contribute to the formalists' desire to preserve the autonomy of moral discourse, but they are not a tool to help students think creatively or explore new possibilities. Kohlberg's approach is more concerned with the justification of decisions than with the process of decision making itself, while the educator seeks to help the student toward making decisions in real life.

Thus there is need for supplementing Kohlberg's approach with one that deals primarily with the process of ethical decision making. Specifically, Aron suggests that Dewey's work is helpful here. For Dewey, it is the interaction of organism and environment that is the context both for experience and for decision making. The need for decision usually occurs when the habitual response is no longer adequate, perhaps because it no longer fulfills a person's desires or because there are conflicting desires. This situation leads to a suspension of action and to reflection and deliberation. Practical deliberation in this condition of felt conflict in a concrete situation begins with the formulation of the issue; it involves "a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing lines of action."¹¹

The competing lines of action cannot, according to Dewey, be evaluated by an a priori or abstract standard (such as an ultimate principle), but must be assessed in terms of their consequences. These consequences must be construed broadly . . . . Moreover, the consequences of an act include the effects it will have on the character of the deliberator as well as its effects on the physical and social environment.¹²

Principles of the past are indeed important here, although not as absolutes but as summaries of wisdom that are themselves subject to modification. When a final decision is made, it is made not so much by the deliberator knowing intellectually the correctness of his decision as by his feeling the appropriateness of a particular choice from the harmony and unity that it brings. In applying this method for the moral education of children, what is important is giving them practice in deliberation. They may be given actual situations or situations based on fictional or hypothetical case materials, but with enough sufficient data that they can envisage alternatives.

While there is much help in this approach, Aron acknowledges limitations in Dewey's ethical theory. This theory, for example, seems to endorse a highly individualistic morality because it deals with issues that are concrete and it makes moral choice depend, not simply or perhaps primarily on rational considerations, but "on direct emotional perception".¹³ Secondly, there is a degree of relativism in Dewey's position, but he holds that values are not simply a matter of opinion and that there are rational ways of evaluating them through the consideration of consequences (on this see Chapter VI above). Thirdly, "Dewey's denial of the prescriptive power of moral judgments seems to be the most troublesome aspect of his ethical theory."¹⁴ But Aron asks, in defense of Dewey's viewpoint, the following question. If one presents the consequences of a line of action that a friend is contemplating and shows that they are harmful, then what can be added by saying that the line of action is immoral? This may add persuasion, but it is essentially a rhetorical addition and not an additional argument. Aron concludes by encouraging educators to adopt an eclectic approach that would include even Plato, Aristotle, and the existentialists, along with Dewey and Kohlberg.

Kohlberg and his associates are not without response to the above critiques.¹⁵ However, for our purposes here it is not necessary to pursue this debate further. We have wished to present the opposition between an ethical theory that is formalist and deontological and an ethical theory that is teleological and content-oriented: Kohlberg, Munsey and Aron have shown us just such an opposition. This takes us to the core of this chapter and its question: Is there some valid way in which we can move beyond this opposition?

TOWARD AN INTEGRATION OF FORM AND CONTENT

IN MORAL THEORY

We can see that each of the proponents of the moral theories outlined above is defending something of importance in moral activity. Kohlberg is defending the prescriptive and universal character of moral judgments in a way that is, he hopes, beyond relativism. Munsey and Aron are defending the character of moral judgments as creative decisions for some self-defined human good in a complex human and changing environment. What each is defending seems to be part of our moral experience. And yet prescriptiveness and universality seem to be defended in a way that abstains from assertion about the human good or goal, and creative decision making seems to be defended in a way that excludes the prescriptiveness characteristic of moral judgments. The defense of one aspect of our moral experience seems to put in jeopardy the defense of another aspect of that same experience. Part of the appeal of each position lies in the weakness of the other or in the human experience that the other position does not account for; in that sense, they feed off one another.

Why should it be necessary that one aspect of our moral experience be defended at the expense of the other? Is it due to the nature of the case, or is it due to something possibly faulty in each of these positions, some premise that they have in common from which a dilemma arises that results in a parting of the ways? I suggest that the latter is the case, and in defending such a position I am in accord with the hopes expressed by Kohlberg, Munsey and Aron that their dialogue will lead beyond their present impasse.¹⁶ To support another viewpoint, I would like to present (1) an hypothesis about the basis of morality that helps to integrate the above views and account for the divergence between them (2) a brief phenomenology that supports this interpretation of morality and of the moral judgment (e.g., that I should respect certain values or that in these circumstances I should concretely do this or that), and (3) an objection to this position that is common today and a suggested answer to it. I should note that this articulation of the position I am suggesting and my defense of it will be apparent only at the end of these three sections. In the first section, I am primarily sketching this viewpoint as an hypothesis. It is particularly in the second section that an elaboration of this position and argument for it is offered. But these sections must be completed by a consideration of, and answer to, objections some moralists base on human creativity and diversity.

It may forestall certain misunderstandings if I first make several notes on the character of the argument I am presenting. Initially in the hypothesis and later in the brief phenomenology I present the view that the context in which people act and judge morally is not only the consequences of the act being considered or an equilibration process of moral judgments progressively more universal, but what can be called the constitutive human good and the subject's orientation to this. The subject acknowledges that the act at stake is morally incumbent upon him or her because what is involved is an integral dimension of the constitutive human good and the subject's orientation to this as integral to his or her identity.

Some philosophers may consider this argument as an instance of the naturalistic fallacy, since I may appear to be drawing moral ought from what empirically is. I would see the argument as different from this. Moral theory--and viewpoints on the naturalistic fallacy are elements of moral theory--is secondary to moral experience: to be good theory it must explain the moral experience. Thus if we can agree on a phenomenology of moral experience, then there is some basis for us to evaluate moral theories--namely, on their ability to explain what is happening in moral experience. Moral theory is not prescriptive in the sense that it stipulates, antecedent to moral experience, what will be accepted as such.

As a matter of fact, there is a sense in which people generally do deduce moral obligations from facts. As Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist, notes:

What all sacred symbols assert is that the good for man is to live realistically; where they differ is in the vision of reality they construct. Probably the overwhelming majority of mankind are continually drawing normative conclusions from factual premises (and factual conclusions from normative premises, for the relation between ethos and world view is circular) despite refined, and in their own terms impeccable, reflection by professional philosophers on the `naturalistic fallacy.'¹⁷

The reason many contemporary philosophers have difficulty in accepting this may be that they attempt to explain it within the context of either an empiricist or a Kantian epistemology (or some descendent therefrom), both of which are too restrictive to be able to explain this moral experience adequately. The present book's treatment of how we establish the moral "ought" is found in Chapter IX to which I would refer the reader.¹⁸

A final preliminary clarification concerns the use of the terms "good" and "value". By common dictionary definition "value" designates

an amount considered to be a suitable equivalent for something else (e.g., fair price or return for goods or services) . . . monetary or material worth . . . worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor; utility or merit . . . a principle, standard, or quality considered worthwhile or desirable.¹⁹

Thus the word initially reflects the estimate of the one who values something. By extension we speak of his values, her values, our values, and their values. The word "good" today seems to have a more objective meaning initially. It signifies:

having positive or desirable qualities; not bad or poor . . . serving the end desired; suitable; serviceable: a good outdoor paint . . . not spoiled or ruined; able to be used: The milk is still good . . . in excellent condition; whole; sound: a good tooth . . . superior to the average: a good student.²⁰

Our view is that we can critically reflect upon and evaluate what we actually desire or value so that we have sufficient grounds to say, e.g., that education or health or religion or beauty is a real value for the child's development. These terms "value" and "good" overlap. One current author acknowledges this overlap, because while he opts to restrict the word "value" to designate "a general form of good that can be participated in or realized in indefinitely many ways on indefinitely many occasions",²¹ he uses "good" to designate both a particular objective or goal considered desirable and a general form of good. Our main concern here is not the distinction between value and good, but the critical grounding of value or good.

An Hypothesis

Our hypothesis can be presented in three steps. First, we do show in our actions and desires that we value other persons, certain objectives, attitudes, relationships, goods. We experience something in these that attracts us, and we act in a positive manner in their regard. We show great diversity in what we value, in the goals we pursue, and in what we experience as being of value. This is antecedent to moral judgment; it is the context in which moral judgments arise. Secondly, we reflect upon our action and our desires or upon the values we are seeking in these actions and desires to ask whether what we are valuing is really valuable, whether there is some basis other than our actually valuing them that is the basis justifying our valuing them. After reflection, what we estimate as a value appropriate for us may, of course, not be the same as what we pre-reflectively accept as a value. An answer here that consequences justify our valuing of something does not seem to go deeply enough--since we can always ask at this level why some consequences are thought to be fulfilling and others not, and what justifies this viewpoint. An answer that we are structuring our behavior in terms of these values does not seem to be adequate, even though a whole society may agree among themselves to so structure their behavior. For example, a society of sadomasochists may agree to inflict and receive certain sufferings from each other equitably, but we cannot help but ask further whether this is a true human value by which they are structuring their behavior.

Thirdly, then, our experience of acting for a value or a good and our reflection upon this good and our experience may give us access to an insight that gets us beyond the simply factual character of this situation for ourselves or our particular society. We may have the insight that as human beings we orient our action to values or goods and that we become more fully human if we value certain goods, such as respect for the worth of another, and reject others that appear pre-reflectively as values or goods, such as subordinating others wholly to our own private desires. It may be revealed to a sadomasochist, for example, through reflection that, while inflicting pain appears good, tenderness is better or genuinely good, i.e., in accord with rather than contrary to the way human beings should relate to each other as human beings. If, on the other hand, we self-define our values just as a sadomasochist community may do, and we are willing to prescribe are universally action in accord with this, we are perverting something constitutive of us as human beings which precedes us as experiencers and choosers of value and which is a criterion or norm for self-definitions of value that enhance our humanity. We can call this a constitutive human good, namely, both the human attitude (e.g., respect for truth, for others, for self) and the term of such an attitude, that is a norm or criterion for us as we define our values, because having the structure of being we have as human, certain attitudes and goals fulfill us and certain attitudes and goals diminish us or are regressive.

There is a whole class of actions that are oriented primarily not to the development of the one who acts but to some product outside the agent--such as a house to be built by a carpenter. Here the immediate criterion of the value of the act is the product rather than the development of the agent. Considering the agent superior in value to such products of human activity, however, would be one of the elements of a constitutive human good; and so engagement in such action should itself redound to the development of the agent as well as of the society which he serves. What we have said about the constitutive human good has more immediate reference to actions or attitudes described by the traditional moral virtues and interaction with others in accord with them than to actions oriented to external products; but it embraces these latter as well. There is then, we suggest, a constitutive human good as horizon for--and deeper meaning and criterion of--our human actions, and as the basis on which we can communicate with one another about issues in this area. Most basically, we are more fully human if we self-define our goals and values in a way that enhances this than if we seek to arbitrarily create or define such a good in accord with our present choices or values. It is what we as human persons (see Chapter XII below) can be or become at our best as this relates as horizon and meaning to our present choices, actions and experiences of value.

We can take as an example here the injunction that is basic to Kohlberg's sixth stage, namely that we should treat others in a way that is just and fair. Such a judgment can be looked at from different perspectives. From the hypothesis offered here, the value realized by this injunction is part of the constitutive human good. There is a worth in every human being as human that is distinctively greater than that which belongs to a plant or an animal as such. The worth that others have as human beings has a claim upon our acknowledgement and upon our action and attitude toward them. The worth of others entails certain consequences about how I should act toward them and how I should not act. This claim that "others' worth as human "has upon me is not contradictory to my own basic inclination as a human being, since in part I am constituted as human through being a social being, that is, through being oriented not simply toward my own fulfillment but also toward that of others and toward a community that embraces us both. Thus I am not fully human or mature if I consider others only from the viewpoint of my own advantage or the advantage or disadvantage of my society. There is something constitutive of the human person in virtue of which adopting an attitude of respect for others accords with his or her development, maturation or perfection.

This is contrary to an individualism that interprets social living simply as a means toward the realization of individualized goals or interests. It is also opposed to a collectivism that so exalts the good of the collectivity as to reduce individuals within it simply to the status of instruments for this good. Rather the position we offer recognizes that the good of society is the development of the individuals within it. The institutions of the political community are to serve a common good that redounds to the good of individuals.

Neither Kohlberg nor Munsey and Aron acknowledge such a basis for the moral order, or so it seems. Kohlberg makes no claim to say anything substantive about what the goals of human living are or what constitutes the good life. In fact, he equates statements about goals and the good life with relativism and indoctrination, and avoids such statements because he wants to avoid moral education that is relativistic and indoctrinative. On the other hand, while Munsey and Aron do make the good or fulfillment of the moral agent and even society the context of decisions in life, they deny anything in moral judgment such as a categorical imperative. Moral norms are only summary statements of the wisdom of experience, and always subject to exception. These authors reject anything like a constitutive human good, unless this is to guide one's life by self-defined goals. The "good" for them ends up meaning only what individuals or societies judge to be good through an examination of consequences of the proposed action. The denial of a constitutive human good as the foundation of the moral order is common to these positions.

This common refusal to adopt such a basis for the moral order leads to weaknesses in the position of each. The universalizing that Kohlberg, as theoretician of morality, sees as a formal criterion of the moral judgment, is the result of a process of equilibration through which a young person passes in successive stages of moral judgment, each of them giving way to one that more adequately structures human behavior. Without denying the reality of such equilibration, we can ask what the good is that provokes this continual restructuring of the moral judgment toward the stage six judgment. For him, as for Rawls, it is not (as we shall note at greater length below) the constitutive human good, that is, the fulfillment appropriate for us as human beings--before we judge or choose--that encompasses the worth of another as human and my orientation as a human being to respect that worth. Such a basis would legitimate both universalizing the moral judgment of the sixth stage and the prescriptive force of such an injunction, since this is what it means to be human. But without an acknowledgement of this human good, the prescriptive force to which Kohlberg concludes is simply hypothetical rather than absolute. If one wants a social order that is equilibrated, then one should act and judge equitably, treating all as equals. Further, Kohlberg lacks sufficient justification for his definition of what constitutes the moral judgment if he is unwilling to make a statement about what constitutes the human good or humanity in this area of human living. Similarly, the universalizing that he wishes to preserve as a criterion of moral judgment lacks foundation if he is unwilling to judge how it is appropriate for human beings as such to act toward one another. Only if it is a constitutive human good that provokes the equilibration process, and if it is acknowledged to have this significance, can Kohlberg defend the universality and prescriptiveness of the moral judgment.

Munsey and Aron begin with the agent making creative life decisions in a way that is self-defined, but the context for decision that they present seems to lack the universality and prescriptive force that humans generally acknowledge is present in moral judgments. Once more, since they deny that there is some good that is constitutive for human choice, the kind of necessity they reach is hypothetical. That is, if people value such and such a goal, then they should take certain kinds of action and avoid others. It is not their rejection of a formalism that is the source of the limitation of their position, but rather their rejection of a constitutive human good. They highly esteem openness to contingencies and varying circumstances, and they want to leave any moral norm or goal open for possible exceptions. But the effect is that for them "good" ends up meaning only what individuals or societies judge or choose to value; it is no deeper than that. They are open to any human choice, but not open to the view that to be human entails that one define one's values in a way that promotes a constitutive human good. There seems then in this case to be no sacredness or necessity, importance or obligatoriness to the moral order--nothing that differentiates it from consumerism in a market economy or choices among interest groups in a democratic society. We shall show later that the proper defense of the scope and creativity of human choice does not depend upon the denial of a constitutive humanity or human good.

Perhaps it is the desire to preserve human autonomy that leads both these positions to the foundations they offer for moral decision or judgment. If so, they may be asserting that there is at least one constitutive factor in the human subject, namely, to be autonomous. We for our part are suggesting that this autonomy or self-definition that we see in human decision and moral judgment has its setting in a human person or subject who has certain potentialities, structures or orientations as a human being that cannot be denied, overlooked or rejected if one wishes to define one's goals in a way that will lead to fulfillment. Thus human autonomy is not absolute, nor is it the only constitutive factor of being human (see Chapter IV on freedom and moral choice). If it is given priority over every other aspect of being human, what results is not simply an alternative way of being human but a diminishment of the agent's human being and of the humanity of the society in which he lives.

The dichotomy between a formalism and a kind of teleology represented by consequentialism would appear to stem from a denial that there is a constitutive humanity in the moral agent and a good that completes the agent as presiding over the moral life. If this good or constitutive humanity is acknowledged, then formalism and consequentialism are transcended and given their proper context. An acceptance of this is an enlargement, not a denial, of the foundations that Kohlberg on the one hand and Aron and Munsey on the other offer for the moral order. Since such acceptance is more properly philosophical than psychological, psychology as a contemporary empirical discipline cannot as such defend this position. But it need not deny it, and in any case the psychologists we are studying acknowledge the need for philosophical judgments in their psychological work.

A Phenomenology

In support of the hypothesis we have presented, we may ask what is really happening when we acknowledge the rights of another person to be treated with respect and fairness and when such acknowledgement affects our attitudes and actions. This would be recognized both by Kohlberg and by Munsey and Aron as an occasion for moral judgment and decision. The question is whether their interpretations of what is happening here are adequate or whether they are to some extent reductionist. Kohlberg would rightly point out, of course, that different things are happening at different stages of the child's, adolescent's or adult's moral development. But as a moral philosopher he does recognize a mature stage in this development, and it is of that stage that we are asking our question. What actually happens when we make a judgment acknowledging the rights of others at this point? A brief phenomenology can help us here toward seeing whether a formalist, a consequentialist, or a view such as we have offered above best interprets this experience.

Let us take the instance of someone in the United States facing a decision whether to discriminate against blacks in hiring for a job or in regard to voting rights. In circumstances where he has the physical power to discriminate he may decide not to because the law is now opposed to this, or because he would lose economically through such discrimination or because he would be subject to violence in revenge for his action. Or he may decide not to because through role-taking, that is, putting himself imaginatively in the place of the other and through universalizing the resultant judgment, he may opt for a social order that treats all with equity when it comes to such matters; after all, he would not like to be on the receiving end of such discrimination. This latter approach is the result of an equilibration process that results in a moral judgment with the formal characteristics of universality and prescriptiveness, whereas the former approach was a consequentialist one. However, in addition to these reasons and even as his primary reason he may judge that he ought not to discriminate against others due to their color because he thinks that they have a right to be respected and treated equally with others in such matters simply by the fact that they are human beings. As persons they, like the agent, are masters of their own actions and lives, with their own human dignity and the essential worth that goes with this, and with their own human fulfillment toward which they are moving. This calls for respect that precludes subjecting them to discrimination with all the indignities that this involves. The necessity or prescriptiveness present in a judgment to this effect is not simply physical, economic, aesthetic, conventional, of a civil contract, utilitarian or consequentialist, or resulting from role-taking and universalization. It is properly a moral necessity, that is, one that comes from the recognition of the right the other has as a human person and a correlative duty that I have to respect this. Unlike the other bases given above, it has more than a hypothetical prescriptive force, namely, that I should act in a certain way if I want certain consequences or a certain kind of society.

To judge in this fashion is not to abstract my being a human person from all the other dimensions of my existence or to abstract the humanity of the person whose rights I am considering from other aspects of his existence. It is rather to judge the situation on grounds that both include more than the secondary considerations and that are rooted more deeply. This judgment is rooted in the essential worth of the other as a human being and how I should act if I am to come up to the standard appropriate for a human being. If I so judge, I am neither judging in a way that is separated from the values to be realized, nor selecting those values for realization because of certain desirable consequences, role-taking, or universalizing a judgment through a process of equilibration. Rather they are values or an order of good that the other has a right to, and which I as a human being have a duty to respect. If I act contrary to this (e.g., through rape, torture, slavery, manipulation, or discrimination on the basis of color in distributing voting rights or job opportunities), I am acting contrary to what constitutes human worth and human fulfillment, both mine and that of the one whose rights I reject.

Language is supportive of this interpretation of what is happening. For if a person so respecting another is challenged to justify his action, he speaks of the natural or the human rights of the other based on his human dignity or worth, thus indicating that the basis of the injunction is more than consequences, law and order, or role-taking and universalization. (The process of moral reasoning involved in such cases is treated in Chapter VI above). It is a constitutive human good of the other that must be acknowledged and respected, and it is a constitutive human good of the moral agent to accept the claims that others have upon him since he is a social being.

Of course, there can be other phenomenologies offered to interpret what is happening here, and presumably both Kohlberg and Munsey and Aron would offer alternative interpretations. As Kohlberg holds that his own view of stage 6 finds support in the philosophical position of John Rawls', A Theory of Justice,²² it may be relevant to reflect briefly here on that position. Rawls seeks to defend a social order that is fair in the distribution both of civil and of socio-economic goods and rights. He seeks to induce people to accept a foundation for such an order by inviting them to assume an original position in which they would choose the basic principles that are to govern the distribution of goods in their society. What basic principles would they set up if they did not know their own talents or where they as individuals would fit in the socio-economic scale? They would have a concern that the principles would be in their favor through being in favor of the least advantaged. Rawls considers that there are two principles such a group would establish in the original condition. First, "Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all." And secondly, "Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity."²³

Without analyzing these principles further, we should note that the original choosers are operating out of their own interests. As D. F. Scheltens comments:

It is important to keep in mind that the dialogue partners do not yet hold any moral principles. The latter too are suspended. On what basis then will the partners of the original position determine the choice of the principles of justice? They are led only by their own interest: "In choosing between principles each tries as best as he can to advance his interests" (p. 142); ". . . the parties are severally disinterested, and are not willing to have their interests sacrificed to the others. . . ." (p. 129); ". . . they are not bound by prior moral ties to each other" (p. 128). Thus the original position is a pre-moral one, in which the parties in question still have to decide their principles of justice or their ethical principles.²⁴

Rawls actually recognizes that when all in a society try to live by these principles of equity "then individually and collectively their nature is most fully realized and within it their individual and collective good."²⁵ However, it is not from the fulfillment of their human nature that he derives his principles:

On p. 585 he asks whether the principles of justice should not be deduced "from the notion of respect for persons, for a recognition of their inherent worth and dignity." Yet Rawls answers this question negatively: "The notion of respect for the inherent worth of persons is not a suitable basis for arriving at these principles" (p. 586).²⁶

While Rawls' formulation of the original condition may be persuasive and helpful for encouraging people to take an impartial stance, if it is presented as a phenomenology of what is actually happening when people acknowledge the rights of others it is rather unhistorical and artificial. It is true that it may represent the basis for such acknowledgement on the part of those who have not got beyond individual interests as a basis for social life. In this way, according to Edmund Sullivan, it defends the ideology of liberalism: "The essence of liberalism is a vision of society made up of independent autonomous units who cooperate only when the terms of cooperation are such as to make it further the ends of each of the parties."²⁷ Of course a society built on this principle would entail no more than hypothetical necessity in its recognition of the rights of others; that is, they should be respected insofar as this respect furthers my self-defined interests or goals.

We suggested, on the contrary, that the dynamism at the root of the equilibration process leading to the acknowledgement of human rights is a specifically human orientation at the core of our being that includes the acknowledgement of the worth of others and a concern for their fulfillment as part of its horizon. This dynamism and the affectivity (treated in Chapter III above) and activity in accord with it include these elements because as humans we are social beings and other persons have both intrinsic worth and worth for us. A dynamism of this character is part of our constitutive humanity, and thus a social order based on the dignity of all human persons is part of the constitutive human good. There is a basis beyond our individual interests or the interests of our society for a social order, namely the basis of the worth and dignity of human persons. Indeed, it seems evident that some of our institutions in the United States and in other countries are based on the inherent worth and rights of the human person rather than on the foundations that Rawls and Kohlberg provide. As T. A. Spragens writes:

It seems fairly clear that the idea of natural rights has had a very profound operational significance in the context of limitation on governmental power, civil liberties and so on, which American courts have imposed and guaranteed. It also has had operational significance in the nation's political culture. Any empirical theory of democracy which does not incorporate such realities would strike many of us as rather inadequate.²⁸

It is recognized by an increasing number of contemporary philosophers that the real basis for justice is indeed the intrinsic worth of the human person. For example, Ernest Barker holds:

The idea of Justice, which is the impersonal source of law, is the value and worth of individual personality. . . . The intrinsic value of each personality is the basis of political thought just as (and just because) it is the basis of moral thought; and worth of persons--individual persons, all individual persons--is the supreme worth of the State.²⁹

David Norton agrees:

Each person qua person possesses natural entitlements in virtue of his worth, a worth that is (for actual persons) both potential and actual. As a perfection of a kind, each person's potential worth is absolute, while his actual worth is qualified by degree. Because it is qualified by degree, actual worth furnishes differential entitlement, while worth as pure potential establishes a lower limit of entitlement that is alike for all.³⁰

Aron and Munsey also would give a different phenomenology in their interpretation of what happens when we respect the human rights of others than the one we gave. They would interpret decisions to respect the rights of others as occurring within a consequentialist search for fulfillment on the part of the agents. But, as we indicated above, this does not seem to represent what actually occurs in more mature human beings when they respect the rights of others; and, as Aron admits, it entails not an absolute exigency to respect the rights of others, but only a hypothetical necessity, that is, provided we want the consequences of such manifestations of respect. The exigency, we would hold, most basically derives from good or value constituted by my human being as social and the intrinsic dignity or worth of others as human. It has a deeper root than self-defined values; rather, a human being shows greater maturity or completeness as a human being when he or she relates to others in a way that accepts this absolute exigency that derives from the human good. We must evaluate "consequences" as moral criteria in the way that Edward Purcell evaluates "what works" when used as moral criteria: "The test of `what works' was essentially delusive and circular, for practical efficacy was not an objective criterion. Utility as a rationale demanded an answer to two questions: useful for what and what was the justification of that purpose."³¹ What I wrote in another context on the human good may help to clarify our present evaluation of the adequacy of Aron and Munsey in the question under consideration:

If consequences are good because they help one grow toward the human good, then action is good more because it relates one to the human good in accord with reason than because it has good consequences. Similarly, an action contrary to this human good is morally evil more because it is against the human good proper to man in this action than because it has bad consequences for him and society, immediate and remote. To divorce consequences from the human good (and this includes the common good as well as individual human good) as a moral norm is to leave us without criteria for discerning good from bad consequences. To give them priority over the human good as norms is intrinsically contradictory, since their value depends upon their relation to the human good.³²

Of course, both Kohlberg and Munsey and Aron would hesitate to accept the phenomenology given above because it would appear to suppose that we can make ontological statements about what constitutes being human. I acknowledge that it does involve such a supposition and that ontological statements are beyond the capacity of empirical psychology as such. However, to assert that we cannot make such statements is a philosophical position, and both those who use a formalist and those who use a consequentialist basis for their study of moral development in children are in fact making philosophical judgments about what it is to be and to act humanly. A phenomenology such as that which we presented above is leading many contemporary philosophers to assert that we do in fact know something of what it means to be human and that this is basic for moral judgment. For example, W. D. Hudson writes:

Can we say that there is a logical connection between what any man finds it intelligible to regard as a good man and what he believes man to be? If so, there would be that much connection between fact and value at least. And should we not be entitled to go on and to say that, if we could settle what man is, we could demonstrate what he ought to do? At the very least, the connection between what we take man to be and what we find it intelligible to consider morally good or bad, obligatory or disobligatory, seems to me to call for closer considerations.³³

Similarly, G.J. Warnock writes:

It appears at least enormously plausible to say that one who professes to make a moral judgment must at least profess that what is in issue is the good or harm, well-being or otherwise, of human beings--that what he regards as morally wrong is somehow damaging, and what he regards as right is somehow beneficial.³⁴

The epistemological question, namely, that of the validity of such knowledge, is a serious one. But as we see from above, a number of modern philosophers no longer consider an empiricist or a Kantian epistemology able to explain what actually happens in the moral judgment. This question is treated elsewhere in this volume, and specifically in Chapter IX.

An Objection and An Answer

Some modern moralists would claim that the interpretation we have offered to the effect that there is a constitutive human orientation or intentionality and a constitutive human good represents a pre-modern anthropology. For example, Paul Taylor would characterize this as an ethics based on an "essentialistic conception of happiness":

because it presupposes that there is such a thing as an essential human nature. . . . Essentialist philosophers view the good for man as an ideal of human perfection, a perfection which is uniquely suitable to characteristically human capacities. When this conception of happiness is used as the standard of intrinsic value, that standard becomes identical with the essentialist's standard of human perfection or virtue.³⁵

In the modern world we are much more aware than previously of the great diversity among cultures and people. This diversity comes from human self-making and creativity in different environments. To assert the existence of a constitutive human good appears to many to be a rejection of the evidence that what is good for human beings depends upon this diversity and self-making that characterize human existence.

In answer to this, we fully acknowledge that modern evolutionary biology, psychology and cultural anthropology do support a great pluralism or diversity of interpretations of the good life and its dependence upon the creativity and self-making of human beings in differing environments. What these sciences have discovered has significance for philosophical anthropology and for ethics because they show us something of what it means to be human; their findings modify earlier anthropology and moral theory. Through showing us that the structure of human as well as of animal life is pluralistic in a way that is correlated with the spontaneity of the organism or of human beings in interacting with diverse environments, they show us that what is considered the human good is historically conditioned. We do not dispute this, but we contend that this pluralism is compatible with there being intrinsic standards of the human good and that it reflects different opinions about those standards. Human beings' interaction with an environment or world is correlated with the environment itself, with the spontaneity and freedom of the subjects, and also with a distinctively human potential. Spontaneity and adjustment to the immediate environment do not of themselves assure that the resulting choice and action will enhance the humanity of the agent or assure him to be morally good. It is worthwhile showing briefly that there is much in the sciences mentioned above that supports this viewpoint or even presupposes it in a way appropriate to the limits of these sciences.

(a) Biology. Man is an animal, and so the findings of evolutionary biology show us something about human nature as well as about animals. The human zygote takes twenty-three chromosomes from each parent with the accompanying genes that are determinants of hereditary traits. Thus there is a commonality among human beings as well as diversity, and this diversity and commonality exist not only among human beings living at the present time but also among those and human beings who lived in the past, even the distant past. It is characteristic of human beings to interact with an environment, but the way such interaction, according to one theory, may benefit a lower organism shows that there are standards such interaction must fulfill if it is to be beneficial. C.H. Waddington shows us, for example, how the horse of the present time has evolved from an animal closer in size to the fox with much less developed lungs and limbs compared to the horse of today. It is more the phenotype (namely, the organism identified on the basis of behavior) than the genotype (namely the organism identified on the basis of its genetic constitution) that is the unit of evolution. To explain the evolution of an animal, e.g., the horse, one must call upon such factors as the challenge presented by the environment (e.g., that posed by enemies of the horse in the Tertiary period), the spontaneous response of organisms to these challenges (e.g., the horses' strategy of running away rather than standing and fighting), and the feedback of both the environment (e.g., through the survival of the horses that became proficient at this strategy) and behavior (e.g., the mating of horses that have genes capacitating them for this response and thus enhancing the capacity of their offspring) on the genetic system. These affect the gradual changes in this system resulting in a population of organisms that show an appropriately altered phenotype.³⁶ Granting that the continued life of the species horse is good for it and better than extinction, the aforementioned responses of horses were appropriate to the environment and to the horses' potential, and thus were beneficial to them.

Recently biologists and specifically sociobiologists have found in this reality a basis not only for the diversity of human beings but for their unity, and have built a moral theory on this. While this has led to a reductionist interpretation of human behavior on the part of some representatives of sociobiology, that is not the case with all. For example, Mary Midgley concludes her evaluation of sociobiology by stating that "All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like," and the "traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature."³⁷ We can make moral judgments adequately only if we admit claims appropriate to the fulfillment of human nature. Thus contemporary evolutionary biology is not contrary to, but within its own limits, supportive of the existence of a constitutive humanity and human good. In fact, it presupposes this.

(b) Developmental Psychology. Recent developments in psychology get beyond the earlier nurture vs. nature disputes and support the view that the development of human beings is due to the active interaction of the growing person with his or her environment or world in a way that leads to a progressive restructuring of the self, of knowledge and of moral judgment. It is a part of being human that there is in the person a "tendency for new characteristics to emerge from previous, global characteristics" and a "tendency (for behavior) to become hierarchically organized, . . . for earlier developments to be continuously subsumed under later developments."³⁸ This new orientation in psychology is a break with reductionist approaches which characterized much of academic psychology through this century.³⁹ With this, however, developmental psychologists presuppose the reality of human nature that sets standards and criteria for what may be understood as development and what as regression or failure to develop. For example, Kohlberg recognizes that it is through the subject's active restructuring of his or her moral judgments that he develops, but he accepts that some forms of moral judgment are more adequately and maturely human than others. Piaget finds that the individual cognitive subject restructures his mode of knowing the environment through interaction with that environment, but he presupposes that some cognitive structures are more advanced than others. Erikson shows the personality structure of the adult to be the result of the growing person's restructuring of the self through stages of interaction with an expanding social environment and stages of unfolding inner potential, but he holds that some personality structures are more appropriate to the adult than others. For example, the mature person should be characterized by generativity, i.e., a sustained interest in the development of the next generation in spite of its costs. All this supports the viewpoint that we offered.

It may be particularly appropriate here to recall that Erikson's work supports the existence of constitutive principles of human development. Although there remain elements of Freud's mechanistic metapsychology in his work, Erikson's findings call for kinds of constitutive principles of human development that transcend Freud's reductionism. While Freud interpreted later forms of ego development as epiphenomena, simply as secondary manifestations of the energies or motivation of the id and the ego's service of the id, Erikson acknowledged emergents in human development that cannot be reduced to their origins or to the sum of their parts.⁴⁰ The growing person interacts with his or her social environment more out of search for meaning than by being driven through displaced energies. And in this interaction the child develops new forms of relatedness (e.g., basic trust) and modes of being (e.g., imaginative projections in the child of about three years old that enable him to become "a part of a larger whole, which is his relatedness to himself and the world around him"⁴¹). There is a schedule for maturation and structure formation and the need for suitable experiences being offered to the child at successive stages of his or her growth to support such formation and maturation. Erikson's findings suggest that we should go further than he himself in getting beyond present concepts of ego, id and super ego as used by many psychoanalysts, for they presume "that there is no such entity as a human person aside from the sum of these subdivisions of the psychic apparatus."⁴² His findings also support our giving consciousness a more central place than did Freud or behaviorism, for it is through consciousness, and specifically freedom (see Chapter IV above on freedom and moral choice as well as chapters in the companion volume, Psychological Foundations of Moral Education and Character Development, edited by R. Knowles), that the individual has some, though limited, control over his life to can change himself and his circumstances. All of this presupposes the reality of a human nature that sets standards for the way the growing subject interacts with his or her environment and the way the social environment interacts with the child.

In particular, we must acknowledge a "specific knowable and instinctive human nature" and "some instinctual and maturational tendencies . . . common to the species as a whole."⁴³ Freud accepted the existence of instincts (at least in the sense that the id is instinctual), and in accepting them also acknowledged that there is such a reality as human nature. In this he is joined by developmental psychologists, ethologists and behavioral geneticists, though not by existentialists such as Sartre or by behaviorists such as Watson and Skinner. However, Freud's understanding of instinct is very defective. This notion has been difficult to specify, particularly since it is now recognized that none of man's behavior is totally independent of learning or culture. For this reason one can no longer define the instinctive in man as totally dissociated from experience. A more modest definition is needed of the instinctive than that offered in the past, one that even some behaviorists recognize as existing in man. We may, as Yankelovich and Barrett note, accept D.O. Hebb's definition:

The term `instinctive' will be used to refer to behavior other than reflexes in which innate factors play a predominant part. Empirically, this is behavior in which the motor pattern is variable but with an end result that is predictable from a knowledge of the species without knowing the history of the individual animal.⁴⁴

In this definition of the instinctive, even such human developments as language are included. Thus this descriptive definition releases the instinctive from being confined to blind drives, and "places the phenomenon of the instinctual within the world of significant meanings."⁴⁵

The human being then is a subject who not only does but must restructure himself through interaction with the environment for the purpose of actualizing his being. This actualization of his being as an intrinsic lure calls forth the subject's activity. Human nature here then is not simply that which precedes human action and explains the kinds of action that are distinctive of him. Rather the actualization of his humanity faces the subject as a possibility in need of actualization, a possibility that has not only distinctiveness but also a possibility that demands variety according to the environment of nature and history, differences of age, sex and many other individuating circumstances. The human good is achieved only through an historical process that rightly involves great pluralism without relativism.

Even with the above said, many would still feel the creativity and self-definition we find in men and women to be opposed to a pre-given human nature. Such a reservation may find support in Erikson's analysis of adolescence. In our pluralistic and changing socio-cultural environment, the possibilities that face a young person in life styles, world views, occupation and marriage are quite varied. As a distinctive task of this stage the young person must shape his own identity. The adolescent "from among all possible and imaginable relations . . . must make a series of ever-narrowing selections of personal, occupational, sexual and ideological commitments."⁴⁶ For this purpose, the young person is in need of "a system of ideas that provides a convincing world image." As Erikson writes: "It is in adolescence . . . that the ideological structure of the environment becomes essential for the ego, because without an ideological simplification of the universe the adolescent ego cannot organize experience according to its specific capacities and its expanding involvement. . . ."⁴⁷ But Erikson seems hesitant to say that the young person needs some ontological understanding of what constitutes humanity and its good. To this extent at least, it may appear to many that developmental psychology does not support the view we have advanced in this chapter.

It is true, we must agree, that the active self-definition that is so much a part of modern Western experience and so central to the task of adolescence has for many philosophers been an argument against considering certain orientations, goals, values, relationships and attitudes as normative for man because they are correlated with a human potential. But is not this viewpoint a misinterpretation of our human self-definition? Is not the meaning of adolescence, for example, found largely in the fact that it is a stage of the person's orientation to a good or kind of be-ing and relatedness that is specifically human, a good or way of be-ing on which man's completion or actualization as human depends? I suggest that this is the case for the following reasons.

There is a certain parallel between the adolescent's knowledge of the world about him and his self-definition at this stage. Piaget shows that at adolescence the cognitive subject has developed a structure of knowledge that capacitates him for simple scientific reasoning. By formal operations, the young person can construct the physical world about him through making and testing hypotheses. Scientific knowledge does involve a cognitive construction of the physical world through the use of mathematics. While many have concluded from this that we do not know the structure of the physical world itself in any real fashion, for Piaget man's cognitive construction of the physical world in science is the means by which we reach structures actually present in this world. From the fact that Piaget grounds the formal operational period in the young person's development of the schemes of the actual and the possible, I have argued elsewhere that it is the knowledge of being that enables the young person to advance to this mode of knowledge.⁴⁸ Thus the condition of possibility for his cognitive construction of the physical world in science is his knowledge of being; the constructivist character of this knowledge is not counter to or independent of his knowledge of objective reality or reality as being. Moreover, the knowledge that makes science possible is not only constructive or structuring knowledge, but also discrimination of qualitative differences in the world by perception and insight.

If this is the case, can we say that the adolescent's construction of his personal life through the choices he is called upon to make is adverse to, or independent of, his orientation to a good or a way of be-ing appropriate to him as human? In his consideration of alternative life styles, occupations, marriage or the single life, the adolescent is evaluating possibilities of human life. He makes his decisions within the context of his human possibilities and their actualization. True, the growing boy or girl lives human life within a particular environment, both physical and socio-cultural, and correlated with individuated potentials and opportunities. But human life itself, as is evident in Erikson's study of stages leading up to adolescence, has certain kinds of defining possibilities and calls for certain kinds of relationships, values and attitudes for its fulfillment.

The manner in which the adolescent or youth orients himself toward the good that completes him as human differs in part from that of the child. Correlated with the formal operational period of his cognitive development, the adolescent presents to himself hypotheses or possibilities of human living that are not limited to adjustment to the present. A greater degree of openness and reflective intentionality is possible and normative for him, as an adolescent. His construction of his life at this stage depends more than earlier on his own knowledge, his own evaluation of possibilities, and his own interests and choices. The consequent freedom which is or should be present in his decisions is no guarantee that he will make decisions that will truly enhance his life as human and that are fitting to him and others. He can as easily, and perhaps more easily, make decisions only on the basis of his unreflected present likes and dislikes or those of his peer group, etc. The possibilities for good or evil are in any case larger in adolescence and youth than they were in childhood, and his responsibility is greater than at earlier stages of his growth. In later adolescence he is given more responsibility for himself and others in his society. The fact that the life he leads as an adult is due to his own construction manifests the manner of his orientation toward his fulfillment as human, rather than the disengagement of choice from a good that is proper for human beings.

In fact, if there were not some ways of living humanly that had intrinsic value, that enhanced and actualized a person and contributed to his completion as human, then how much meaning would there be to the choices that adolescents or adults make? If an understanding of themselves as human beings and of the human world in which they live does not offer them criteria for their choices, they seem to be left with only the criteria of their own sub-culture or their own interests. To see these latter bases as the adequate context of a young person's decisions is to reduce severely the meaning that is present in this stage of life; it is to distort rather than explain the problems and, indeed, the mystery that encompasses them during periods of decision in adolescence and youth. It is to deny that there are right or wrong decisions, or good and better decisions, and to settle for decisions that are successful or unsuccessful by some immediate criteria, pleasurable or painful, conventional or unconventional. On this basis there would be no moral meaning to adolescence and its choices, for moral meaning occurs within the context of man's orientation to the specifically human dimension of living and what is intrinsically valuable for that living.

Neither Erikson nor those who accept his basic interpretation of adolescence conclude from the fact that the adolescent has to construct his life--that there is not a character to human life that constitutes a context of meaning and a norm for the identity that adolescents form. It is essential for the adolescent to gain as deep an understanding as he can about who he is and about the full dimensions of his environment as human, as well as about what his environment is as a member of a particular society and culture. Without this he cannot know what his possibilities are as a human being and thus the meaning and norms for his choices in life. What he needs then is not only an `ideological simplification of the universe' or `a convincing world image',⁴⁹ but the truth that is available about the human dimensions of his environment and his possibilities and relationships within it. The fact that the youth constructs his life makes not less but more necessary his understanding of the real dimensions of his humanity and what fulfills it.

(c) Cultural Anthropology. Most anthropologists at present reject relativism.⁵⁰ Clifford Geertz, as a good example, acknowledges a unity of human nature; indeed, anthropology presupposes this. He does not affirm a unity of nature as did the enlightenment view of man, namely, by stripping away diversity. This view is defective, because it held that the great variety among men "is essentially without significance in defining his nature. . . . [and] consists of mere accretions, distortions even, overlaying what is truly human--the constant, the general, the universal--in man."⁵¹

Counter to this view is the empirical finding that humans do not exist unmodified by the customs of a particular place and time. On the other hand, Geertz does not avoid relativism "by seeking in cultural patterns themselves the defining elements of a human existence which although not constant in expression, are yet distinctive in character."⁵² Seeking in cultural universals the unity of mankind is another way of looking for the lowest common denominator of humanity, and this is not what we want. Most human behavior is the vector outcome of both intrinsic and cultural controls, and so Geertz adopts an interactive view of man as do Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson. It is in man's career that we best discern his nature, for it is through this that his innate capacities are transformed into his actual behavior.⁵³ Culture is one, though not the sole determinant of this career, and thus cultural particularities themselves can be made to reveal natural processes.

Geertz understands culture not so much as complexes of concrete behavior patterns but "as a set of control mechanisms--plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what the computer engineers call 'programs')--for the governing of behavior."⁵⁴ Man is the animal who most needs these "extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering his behavior,"⁵⁵ since he does not have such programming from his instincts or genes save in a most general way. We can see this particularly in childhood practices in many areas of the world, but this is not to deny that there is in the subject an active self-structuring agency that the culture has to take into account and adjust itself to, as Erikson has shown so well.⁵⁶ Culture is not simply an ornament of human existence but its essential condition. (See Chapter X below on the moral environment.) An indication of this is found in the fact that man's physical evolution and cultural evolution overlap rather than being wholly sequential. Man's physical evolution (e.g., the anatomy of the thumb, the representation of the thumb on the cortex, and the size of the brain) is in part dependent upon man's development and use of tools, which, by a feedback process, affected in turn even the evolution of man's central nervous system, the shape of his thumb, and the size of his brain. The development of his tools created for man a new environment, and:

By submitting himself to governance by symbolically mediated programs for producing artifacts, organizing social life, or expressing emotions, man determined, if unwittingly, the culminating stages of his own biological destiny. Quite literally, though quite inadvertently, he created himself.⁵⁷

The recognition of diversity in cultures, then, while opposed to an ahistorical interpretation of humanity and morality, contradicts neither the unity of human nature nor the reality of the human good as a criterion of moral choice. To deny this is to consider all cultural conditionings and all human behavior as morally equal, for it is to abdicate a criterion for judging morally that is other than particular customs, cultures and conditions. On the other hand, we must acknowledge the dependence of values on culture as well as on man's intrinsic drives and potential; no other view does justice to the cultural diversity of which we are aware. Yankelovich and Barrett express this well:

The whole lesson of modern anthropology has been that man, even among the most primitive cultures we can find, is ever and always the value-seeking and value-driven animal. There is no necessary conflict between ethical values (superego) and instinct (id). Like any other synergistic structure, values are the joint product of the instinctual and the cultural. The ethical and moral dimensions of man's life have a thoroughly natural basis not reducible either to infantile origins or to social custom. The reality of the ethical, as difficult as it may be to define and clarify, belongs as a primitive concept in any new metapsychology.⁵⁸

There is in this the realization that the culture in which we live can distort as well as support our search for, and interpretation of, true human values. In fact, we have suggested that what is lacking in Kohlberg's view may be partially due to the influence of a democratic process where so many political questions become those of a conflict of interests. Thus he tends to interpret moral judgment somewhat restrictedly in this context. Similarly, we suggest that the interpretations of moral decision by disciples of Dewey may in part be limited by the model of technological intelligence that is used, for in this model it is means rather than human ends or goals that are frequently given primary importance. The final part of this chapter will be relevant to this influence that the culture can have on our interpretation of values.

In this section we first of all presented an hypothesis of a constitutive human dynamism or thrust and a constitutive human good as normative in morality, with the suggestion that if Kohlberg, Munsey and Aron would accept this, they would overcome the dichotomy that divides them. An acknowledgement of this would give a basis for the universality and prescriptiveness that Kohlberg sees as the criteria of moral judgments. It would give also a context for a teleological approach since the value of consequences of human action are secondary to, and dependent upon, the constitutive human good and humanity that this fulfills. We defended this hypothesis by the use of a phenomenology of moral judgment, using the case of what actually happens when we treat others justly out of a moral conviction. Finally, we presented the objection to such an interpretation that may derive from the diversity of human cultures and the creativity and autonomy of human moral experience. Here we showed that to acknowledge the reality of a constitutive humanity and human good is not specifically the view of a pre-modern philosophy. Rather, it is supported by contemporary interpreters of the evolutionary process, human development and cultural diversity inasmuch as they understand these processes in the context of an interaction between an organism or humankind and the environment or world, for this interaction presupposes and supports a unity in human nature and its constitutive fulfillment or good, as well as a pluralism consistent with this.

TYPES OF VALUES

It may be helpful here, in view of our whole project, to consider certain types of value since an essential part of moral education is an education in values and in the capacity to choose among them. By `value' here, we do not mean primarily what an individual or society in fact chooses or toward which they have a positive attitude. Rather, we mean some thing, act, attitude, relationship or person or group that has instrumental or intrinsic worth because of its humanity or because it enhances our humanity--in short, because of its relation to the constitutive human good. The affective reaction we have to this reality should give us access to its value, as is shown in Chapters III and VII of this volume. This was acknowledged by classical philosophy; for example, Thomas Aquinas notes that: "[T]he virtuous man judges correctly about the goal of virtue, because as each person is so does the proper end seem to him, as is said in Ethics, 3. Therefore for judging rightly about what is to be done, i.e., for prudence, it is required that man have the moral virtue."⁵⁹

But we usually or frequently cannot trust our affective reaction so totally that in important matters we can do without a critical reflection by which we compare a projected action, relationship, etc., with what we have previously called the constitutive human good. Does it enhance this good or support it, or does it diminish it for ourselves or for others? Is it appropriate for me in my particular circumstances, even if it does enhance the human good? (See Chapter VI above on how we make concrete moral decisions.) For values the primary point of reference then is the human person, as we have seen previously. This view is not egocentric, since it calls for respect for the worth of other persons. Nor is it anthropocentric, for the constitutive human good which is the perfection of our humanity may well involve, as religions hold, a larger than human good. That is, the human person is called to value and seek his human good within the context of a relationship to God as the ultimate horizon of human development.

Within this context, we now ask how we might distinguish some major types of human values. Of course, there are many different ways in which we can classify values.⁶⁰ In examining books on this topic, one finds almost as many ways of dividing types of values as there are books.⁶¹ At times it does not seem that this division of values into types is of much practical benefit in reference to moral education, because some divisions aim more at theoretical inclusiveness than at practical relevance. If our interest here is more the latter than the former, then it would seem helpful to offer first some suggestions on what endangers valid insight into human values in our time, then present a viewpoint on types of values that may be helpful in these circumstances.

The Threat of Nihilism

If there is validity to what we have written so far in this chapter, it is of overriding importance in our time that we acknowledge the claim of a human good upon us that precedes our choices and individual or social interests--namely, one that is appropriate to the human dynamism or intentionality from which our choices and interests come, and that is the value to which we should adapt our choices and interests if these are to promote our real human development. The danger that threatens this attitude in our time is perhaps primarily one that lies close to a central strength of our modern western culture, namely, its spirit of creativity shown in our institutions and technology. To many in this culture it seems that values are most basically the creation of human beings in varied cultures, and that to be human is most basically to create the values we will live by. Iris Murdoch describes a type of current reflection on values as follows:

The center of this type of post-Kantian moral philosophy is the notion of the will as the creator of value. Values which were previously in some sense inscribed in the heavens and guaranteed by God collapse into the human will. There is no transcendent reality. The idea of the good remains indefinable and empty so that human choice may fill it. The sovereign moral concept is freedom, or possibly courage in a sense which identifies it with freedom, will, power . . . the guarantor of the secondary values created by choice. . . . It must be said in its favor that this image of human nature has been the inspiration of political liberalism.⁶²

In this perspective freedom and creativity are set in opposition to the givenness of values; claims upon us come most basically from acts of our will rather than from human values that precede our choice. This viewpoint seems to be present in both Kohlberg's interpretation of moral judgment as deriving from an equilibration process and in Aron's and Munsey's interpretation of moral choice as deriving from a person's autonomous action after a consideration of consequences. In practice, for most people this creativity and freedom attaches itself to interests they have--antecedently and unreflectively--in a particular kind of activity. "Business is business", "art for art's sake", "that's politics", "it's all right as long as it doesn't hurt anyone" are all contemporary phrases that reflect human engagement in different areas of human activity where freedom and creativity may be evident for self-defined values, but where the values sought are not subjected to critical examination. This results in a disintegration of the person, and a subjection of the worth of the person to the achievement, products, or pleasures, that these particular types of activity offer. It is to subvert the human good and therefore results in a loss of a sense of the worth of the person.⁶³

The view that we are ultimately creator of our values and modern practices that reflect this view lead to nihilism and, perhaps, express it before this nihilism is conscious. To quote Nietzsche on the nature of nihilism:

What does nihilism mean?--That the highest values devalue themselves.

The aim is missing: "Why?" finds no answer. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of "in vain" is the nihilists' pathos--at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.⁶⁴

It is described differently by different authors, but all recognize a void at its center.

The nature of the void called nihilism is described, with varying degrees of clarity, as the "loss of the centre", an "encounter with nothingness", the "incapacity to escape boredom," the "lack of a proper philosophy of life". Most writers revert to Nietzsche's terms: the loss of sense and purpose, the devaluation of all values, the sense of nothingness.⁶⁵

The source of this in modern western culture seems to be the premise that there are so many conflicting claims to truth about reality that each claim is itself undermined by objections from others. Claims to a truth about life that would give a ground for values are undermined particularly by modern science and historicism. All of this shows that "The deeper one looks, the more our valuations disappear--meaninglessness approaches! We have created the world that possesses values!"⁶⁶ Thus the view that our creation is the source of our values ends in a sense of meaninglessness and nihilism. This attitude has in the last hundred years spread from humanists to very wide sections of the population in the west.

Thus if one puts creativity and freedom at the source of human values, the result is a sense of meaninglessness and nihilism. Human beings know that they are not--by way of their choices and interests as such--the creators of value in any ultimate sense; a life led on the illusion that they are leads to a void. If, on the other hand, one recognizes that basic human values are given antecedently to our choice, this need not result in creativity and freedom; witness many traditional cultures that are custom-bound. However, these cultures do frequently sustain a strong sense of meaning in people's lives. The acknowledgement of human values as claims on our choice and interest, rather than as creatures of our choice and interest, can itself lead to creativity and can be freely given. For example, at the foundation of the United States was the acknowledgement of certain God given human rights that it was the function of government to protect. This free acknowledgement led to the creativity evident in establishing structures likely to defend such rights. Freedom then is more properly itself or more humanly perfect when it acknowledges such values than when it takes it upon itself to create such values. Creativity contributes to human life and value when it is exercised within such acknowledgement. This is true in individual life as well as in political, economic, cultural and social life.

Relationships Among Human Values

In our culture where the loss of the recognition of human values as antecedent to, and criteria for, human freedom and creativity, leads to a sense of meaninglessness, there is a need for a renewed sense of the primacy of the human good or human values. And in our non-traditional culture where calls from values of all sorts constantly bombard people because of the pluralistic society in which we live, there is need for some integration of values. The following three areas of reflection seem to me to contribute toward such a restoration of a sense of the human good and the integration of varied values. These reflections are no more than an initial sketch, but they may contribute to an understanding of the relation of the human good and moral choice.

In the first place, the insights of developmental psychology and specifically those offered by Erik Erikson seem to contribute both toward a restoration of the sense of the priority of human good over human choice in a way that is appropriate to our time and toward an integration of varied human values. This is the case because Erikson's analysis uncovers a schedule of unfolding potentialities in the growing person and an interaction between the social environment and the growing person correlated with this maturation. It is then a value for the society around the child to support its development in a way appropriate to its maturing capacities. And it is a value for the child to interact with his or her expanding social environment in a way proportionate to individuating circumstances and gifts, but also in a way that contributes to the emergence of strengths or virtues that lead toward the maturity which Erikson calls generativity.⁶⁷ This theme will be developed more fully and appropriately in the psychological volume in this series. Here we simply want to note that the virtues the growing person is called to develop throughout his interaction with society and the care that society is called on to take in reference to the growing person, all form a kind of integrating principle for values that are truly human because they enhance the constitutive humanity of both child and caring agents.

Secondly, if we mean by types of values the different general forms of good "that can be participated in or realized in indefinitely many ways on indefinitely many occasions,"⁶⁸ we could divide them as follows: knowledge, life, play, aesthetic experience, sociability or friendship, practical reasonableness and religion.⁶⁹ However, without underestimating the validity of this distribution, our earlier phenomenology of non-discriminatory action perhaps gives us a context for a more concrete and personal division. What was the human value involved in such an instance that gave rise to a moral obligation in the given circumstances? We noted that this value was both the worth or dignity of the other and the orientation that is part of the agent's humanity as a social being toward relating to others in society through giving and receiving and through mutual respect. The principle on which we identified this value involved an object pole and a subject pole. The other with his worth as human in himself and as part of the horizon or the good that completes the individual agent is the object pole here; the subject pole is the orientation proper to the agent to relate to other human beings through respect, justice and, let us add, love.

The value we are speaking of here is not exhausted by the specific relation of justice to an individual other. It involves also a community ordered in justice and love and an attitude on the part of the subject toward the formation, support or reformation of such a society or political order that respects the rights or dignity of all the individuals within it. Thus we largely agree with the positions of Kohlberg and Rawls we summarized earlier, though we differ from them through grounding justice in the dignity of the human person and our orientation as social beings to respect that dignity. This value involves too those special relationships of friendship and in particular, that are found in a marital relationship and the family; all of these are human values or integral dimensions of the human good that fulfills man. Developmental psychologists show us that individuals must restructure themselves progressively through childhood, adolescence and early adulthood if they are to freely and consistently appreciate this dimension of human value. We should note that the modern world is tragically marred by unbelievable atrocities committed against this basic human value; we see this in the many millions killed, tortured, and maltreated, in concentration camps and elsewhere in the twentieth century.

Using this same basic principle of an integral dimension of the human good to identify other basic types of human value, we can specify another as body or bodily values, namely that order of our life that is primarily physical and our orientation to its preservation and enjoyment, and to growth in it. This could include values external to man such as property that is instrumental in supporting our physical life, as well as our orientation toward these external goods within our orientation to the preservation and enhancement of our life. Food, clothing, shelter, energy, much of our technology, means of transportation, healthy environment, etc., and the money that can purchase these come to mind here. This includes also and even more than external goods the goods internal to the human person such as life, health, physiological maturation, physical skills, pleasure, physical exercise and play, etc.; many of these are both intrinsically valuable and instrumentally valuable. There is a certain priority in time that these values enjoy over the values of human relationships, because it takes a certain physiological development and other developments on this level before the individual is able to appreciate and honor human relationships such as those we described above.

There are, of course, human relationships essential for the child from the first moment of his existence, such as the mutuality of mother and infant; these are largely expressed through the mother's caring for the infant's specifically physical needs and the infant's responding to her as he responds to the goods of the physical order being offered him or her. This instance of the parent caring for the child shows us that this level of bodily values is frequently or even commonly caught up into a more fully human level. For example, we build a museum or a school; food is consumed in the context of human companionship; parents provide food for their children; individuals and a political community seek to feed the poor, clothe the naked, heal the sick; bread and wine are used as sacramental signs. Thus activities directed toward such physical or bodily needs are animated by, and expressive of, a person's or society's orientation to the values of knowledge or beauty, the values of human relationships, and religious values. However, in our society marked by consumerism and hedonism the pursuit of possessions and satisfactions of physical needs or desires frequently crowd out awareness of the deeper human values needed for our human fulfillment. It is engaged in at the cost of the denial of justice, love, beauty, knowledge and, many of us would add, God.

We may roughly associate a number of values such as knowledge, beauty, identity, aliveness to values, and many forms of play as a third generic type of value which we may designate personal or self values as distinct from bodily and social values. There is obviously a melding of one type of value with other types, but there is a family of values that is not primarily bodily or social. These are goods that are far better to have, other things being equal, than not to have; they are dimensions of the constitutive human good that enhance human be-ing, and by the orientation constitutive of being human we tend toward these values or goods. There is an object pole here such as truth or beauty and a subject pole such as knowledge and aesthetic appreciation and creativity. Many human skills can be included here that are enhancing for the person to exercise as well as being instrumental for others, such as skills exercised in many different professions and occupations in life. Not all of these values are on the same level. For example, some areas of truth and knowledge are more centrally human values, or of intrinsic worth, and they enhance human existence more than others. There has to be choice among these values, of course, for one cannot equally seek them all. There is a legitimate and necessary pluralism among individuals and societies in the ways that these values are appreciated, ordered and expressed. Engagement in the pursuit of these values may and frequently is, as we said in reference to bodily values, expressive of and animated by concern for social and religious values. Unfortunately in our culture, which is so oriented toward the external, these values are frequently given little prominence in the lives of many people.

We may add that moral values can be understood as personal values that reach the root of the human self; they are far more closely related to the self than, for example, some areas of knowledge (e.g., of the physical sciences). Or moral values may preferably be understood as pervading all genuine human action rather than as a distinct generic order of values. They are present whenever a person orients himself freely toward the constitutive human good in accord with practical reason. For example, personal integrity, justice, honesty, courage, openness to the deeper human values are included here as the subject pole that represents a responsiveness to human values as they are appropriate to the individual person. (See Chapter V on moral character.) Fidelity to conscience that is formed by practical reasonableness or, if properly understood, love, may sum up the aspect in which these values can be considered personal or self values. Realistic appreciation of these values obviously calls for a certain restructuring in the normal human life so that the individual does not give prime importance to his individual and material needs.

In the estimation of most people in history, there is a fourth basic type of value that we can designate as religious. Here the object pole is found in the Sacred or, in western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in God as understood as transcendent yet immanent personal being. The subject pole is found in human openness to the Sacred or God, as found in faith, trust, and love, and in liberation from what subverts such openness. There is an intrinsic worth or dignity in the Sacred or God that merits or deserves our acknowledgement. For those who believe that God is the source and goal of all values, God and relation to or communion with him is the apex of fulfillment for human life. Moral values may be understood as implicitly religious since the absoluteness that is a characteristic of certain moral injunctions (e.g., not to directly kill an innocent person) and the sacredness of the other that is the basis for certain moral injunctions are themselves participations in the Sacred that is God. (For a treatment of the relation of morality and religion, see Chapter IX.) According to Christians and many others, love of God is not opposed to appreciation and pursuit of human values in history, but is the ultimate meaning of the human search. Man is meant for more than simply human values, which are participations in a larger and ultimate value. For human beings to acknowledge this, however, calls for a conversion or enlightenment that is a gift of God to those who are open to it.

Thirdly, and finally, one may wonder what value the physical world around us has when we take as criterion of value the constitutive human good. Does this mean that the physical world has only an instrumental value for man; is it without intrinsic value? Certainly we find many traditional societies that look upon the physical world not only as something usable, but as a whole order of reality with which they have a tie of kinship. Thus they respect it and its inner dynamism and beauty, for they consider that they came from the same womb as did nature. St. Francis of Assisi called nature "sister". It is particularly our utilitarian civilization that has reduced it to the status of a quarry that is used but need not be respected.

In recent years there has been, fortunately, a reaction against a simply exploitative approach to the physical world. Many are adopting a viewpoint that we are part of this physical world and that we should preserve with it an ecological balance while we use it. There seems to be more than sentimentalism to this new or renewed attitude, and our approach to value in this chapter supports it. We have not developed an egocentric criterion of value, for we acknowledge man as a social and indeed a religious being, and so we acknowledge that we are oriented and must orient ourselves to a constitutive human good that involves other human beings and God himself.

How does the physical world fit into this picture? In a way analogical to our experience of our own desires and the human dynamism from which they come, we can recognize that the physical world is shot through with intentionality or dynamic inner directedness toward being. (Chapter III in this book also affirms this.) The world is not simply a machine that moves as part mechanically moves part. Teleology is evident in animals for they seek food, sex and play. It is evident also in the very organisms of both animals and plants, since in organisms there is an inner orientation to growth, to reproduction, to the preservation of their being and resistance to what threatens this being. The part of modern evolutionary theory that ascribes this process to chance and natural selection alone has had to suppress evidence for this teleology.⁷⁰ Teleology is also evident in the non-living world for here too the pull of a molecular or larger structure is operative in the movement of matter. The characteristics of a machine are no longer adequate as an explanation even though this is all that physics may describe. This does not mean that we have to be panpsychists in order to acknowledge the presence of purpose,⁷¹ but rather that we need to accept the existence of teleology in physical reality that has neither consciousness nor life.

Classical philosophy recognized that each being seeks or holds on to its being in some real though analogical sense. The contemporary study of physical reality by the physical sciences manifests, as Koestler and others bring out, that physical things strive for an order of being that is larger than their own individual being. One conclusion we may draw from this is that it is not opposed to a recognition of the goodness or value of animals, plants and non-living physical reality to use them for human purposes. This too can be a fulfillment for such physical beings. Though this is not without loss, loss is frequently involved in a reorientation to a more than immediate purpose; and we have no basis for ascribing to animals, plants, and non-living physical reality the kind of intrinsic worth that we ascribe to human beings and that prohibits us from subjecting their good to our own.

We can and, it seems, must hold that there is an intrinsic value--or goodness, if some would wish to reserve the term "intrinsic value" for human beings specifically--in physical reality and an orientation in this reality toward such goodness or being. It befits us to respect this and indeed admire it, for it is admirable. It befits us to be basically at peace and harmony with this order, not only because that is a way to respect our own being, but also because it is a way to respect the degree of being had by physical reality below the human scale. This attitude of respect is one of the ways that many of our contemporaries seek to achieve an approach to human life and reality at large that is integrative in the sense that it seeks a fulfillment proper to human beings in a way that subordinates rather than excludes lesser values.

In conclusion, we have in this chapter sought to show that an integration of a constitutive human good and a distinctive moral choice offers a better basis for moral judgment and creative life decisions than either Kohlberg's deontology or Aron and Munsey's consequentialism taken alone. In fact, we have suggested that the view we have developed provides more adequate foundations for the efforts of these psychologists and educationists to promote the moral education of children and adolescents: that it integrates the valuable work they have already done while overcoming the dichotomy between their views.

DeSales School of Theology

Washington, D.C.

1. See L. Kohlberg, "From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy and Get Away with It in the Study of Moral Development", in Theodore Mischel, ed., Cognitive Development and Epistemology (New York, Academic Press, 1971), pp. 152, 154.

2. See, for example, Jean Piaget, "Piaget's Theory", Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology, ed. Paul H. Mussen (3rd ed., New York: Wiley, 1970), vol. 1, 722.

3. Kohlberg, "From Is to Ought", pp. 214-215.

4. Ibid., p. 215.

5. Ibid., p. 221.

6. See L. Kohlberg, "Educating for a Just Society: An Updated and Revised Statement", in Brenda Munsey, ed., Moral Development, Moral Education, and Kohlberg (Birmingham: Religious Education Press, 1980), pp. 463-464 where he speaks of two forms of participation helpful to the moral education of high school students: "participation in the outside community . . . (and) real power and democratic participation in the governance of the high school itself. The general educational rationale for both is still best given by Dewey's . . . theory as this has been elaborated in the psychological theory of Piaget. . . . According to both, the fundamental aim of education is development, and development requires action or active experience. The aim of civic education is the development of a person with the structures of understanding and motivation to participate in society in the direction of making it a better or more just society. This aim requires experience of active social participation as well as the learning of analytic understandings, of government, and the moral discussion of legal and political issues."

7. See Brenda Munsey, "Cognitive-Development Theory of Moral Development: Metaethical Issues", ibid., pp. 161-181.

8. Ibid., p. 165.

9. Ibid., p. 174.

10. See I. Aron, "Moral Education: The Formalist Tradition and the Deweyan Alternative", ibid., pp. 401-426.

11. Ibid., 412. This is a quotation from John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library, 1930), p. 179.

12. Ibid., p. 413.

13. Ibid., p. 420.

14. Ibid., p. 421.

15. See Bill Puka, "Kohlbergian Forms and Deweyan Acts: A Response", ibid., pp. 429-454.

16. See articles by Puka and Kohlberg, ibid.

17. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 130, 141.

18. See also the study of the epistemological question in my book God's Work in a Changing World (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, l985), chap. 9, "Developmental Psychology and Knowledge of Being", pp. 287-314. As noted there, our knowledge of reality is explained in contemporary psychology, on the one hand, by perception that is studied by experiments on people discriminating shapes, etc. (e.g., James and Eleanor Gibson), and, on the other hand, as mediated by the cognitive subject's equilibration process via assimilation and accommodation of the environment to cognitive schemes (Piaget). It can be shown that both perception and equilibration processes--and insight mediated by these--are present in our knowledge of reality or being. One thing that this means is that when we make a factual judgment about what is, we are already dependent upon human action (i.e., the equilibration process). And since our human action is for the human good or value, because it is for our human being in the sense of the protection, enhancement, actualization of our being, etc., our judgments about facts are already dependent on our orientation to, and action for, values. For example, our judgment about the meaning of the fulfillment or flourishing of our humanity reflects not only knowledge dependent upon perception, but knowledge dependent on our values and action for values. It follows that in being derived from our knowledge and judgment of what is, the prescriptivity present in moral judgments is in part derived from our value knowledge. Thus the exigency that exists in the moral judgment is not without basis in our judgment about what our humanity is. There is not the fact-value dichotomy that much contemporary moral philosophy claims, unless one's epistemology is Kantian or empiricist. Further development of this theme can be found in Chapter III.

19. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), p. 1414.

20. Ibid., p. 567.

21. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 61.

22. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). See the statement by Dwight Boyd, "The Rawls Connection", in Munsey (ed.), Moral Development, p. 185, that Kohlberg holds that "the central achievement of Rawls' theory is that it represents the first clear systematic justification of the principles and methods of decision we call `Stage 6', which were only partly articulated by Kant."

23. Ibid., p. 302.

24. D.F. Scheltens, "The Social Contract and the Principal of Law", International Philosophical Quarterly, 17 (1977), 331-332. The enclosed quotations are from Rawls' book.

25. Ibid., p. 528.

26. Ibid., p. 335.

27. E. Sullivan, "A Study of Kohlberg's Structural Theory of Moral Development: a Critique of Liberal Social Science Ideology", Human Development, 20 (1977), 362.

28. T.A. Spragens, The Dilemma of Contemporary Political Theory: A Post-Behavioral Science of Politics (New York: Dunellen, 1973), pp. 105-106.

29. E. Barker, Principles of Social and Political Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 123. This is cited by Scheltens, art. cit., p. 338.

30. David Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 311.

31. Edward Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), p. 268. Also see Victor Ferkiss, The Future of Technological Civilization (New York: Braziller, 1974) for a similar critique of liberal society. For example, he writes: "Reform liberalism today lacks . . . a vision of the good society because it is liberal and focuses on means rather than ends." (p. 62).

32. J. Farrelly, Human Sexuality: A Critique, chap. 5 in Farrelly, op. cit., p. 102. Perhaps it is relevant here to note that elsewhere I support the view that there are occasions when it is morally permissible to act directly contrary to an immediate dimension of the human good to which a human act is oriented when the full human dimension of the good to which it is directed cannot be preserved from serious harm by lesser means. See J. Farrelly, "The Principle of the Family Good", chap. 4 in Farrelly, op. cit., pp. 77-91. In this specific matter I differ from the position presented by Joseph Boyle on moral reasoning in Chapter V above. We hold much in common concerning moral reasoning--such as our acceptance of the human good as basic to moral reasoning and choice and our rejection of consequentialism. Perhaps the different adjectives we use to designate the human good--he uses "entire" or "total" or "integral" while I use "constitutive"--reflect somewhat different reactions against consequentialism. While his reaction seems primarily focused on the difficulty of comparing one human good with another in consequentialism, my reaction is primarily focused on the self-defined character of the good in this theory. Thus he insists that the basic principle of the human good demands that we not undertake action against one or another human good, while I insist that it demands that we not act against the constitutive human good. I would interpret an amputation of a gangrenous leg to preserve the health of the whole body as morally permissible action against one dimension of the human good to preserve a larger dimension of the same kind of human good. And on analogous grounds I would defend the moral permissibility of contraception in some circumstances. He would accept the moral permissibility of the amputation, although he would describe this as not being direct action against a human good; and he would judge contraception differently.

33. W.D. Hudson, The Is-Ought Question (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 29.

34. G.J. Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 967), p. 57.

35. Paul Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction (Encino, Calif., Dickenson Pub. Co., 1975), pp. 132-133.

36. See C.H. Waddington, "The Theory of Evolution Today", in Arthur Koestler and J.R. Smythies (ed.), Beyond Reductionism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 357-395.

37. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 166.

38. Richard Lerner, Concepts and Theories of Human Development (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1976), p. 117.

39. See Bernard Rosenthal, The Images of Man (New York: Basic Books, 1971) for a critique of reductionism in modern psychology.

40. See D. Yankelovich and W. Barrett, Ego and Instinct: The Psychoanalytic View of Human Nature (Revised) (New York: Random Books, 1970), particularly chapter 17, "The Core of Reconstruction".

41. Ibid., p. 314.

42. Ibid., p. 323.

43. Ibid., p. 317.

44. Ibid., p. 377. The quotation is from D.O. Hebb, Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (New York: Wiley, 1949), p. 166. Italics added.

45. Ibid., p. 375.

46. E. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 245.

47. Ibid., pp. 31, 27.

48. See "Developmental Psychology and Man's Knowledge of Being", cited in footnote 18.

49. We go beyond Erikson's formulation in one place by what we say here. Largely because of the formulation Erikson gives there, which is weaker than some he gives elsewhere, Peter Homans argues that while there is some `theological coloration' in Erikson: "his formulations are also clearly psychological in character. For this reason we may say that Erikson has created a system of psychological meaning which both assimilates and secularizes (repudiates) traditional theological meanings. Identity-formation is the assimilation and secularization of the activity of justification by faith." See Homans, "Protestant Theology and Dynamic Psychology", Anglican Theological Review. Supplemental Series, #7 (Nov., 1976), 135. Also see his article, "The Significance of Erikson's Psychology for Modern Understanding of Religion", in P. Homans (ed.), Childhood and Selfhood: Essays on Tradition, Religion and Modernity in the Psychology of Erik Erikson (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 264-292. For an interpretation of Erikson as bringing together "an Aristotelian essentialism and a more modern evolutionary and adaptive point of view", see Don Browning, "Erikson and the Search for a Normative Image of Man", ibid., pp. 264-292.

50. See Clifford Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man", in The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 37.

51. Ibid., p. 35.

52. Ibid., p. 37.

53. See ibid., p. 52.

54. Ibid., p. 44.

55. Loc. cit.

56. Waud Kracke, "A Psychoanalyst in the Field: Erikson's Contributions to Anthropology", in Homans, Psychology and Childhood, pp. 147-188, shows the strengths and weaknesses of Erikson's anthropological studies.

57. Geertz, ibid., p. 48.

58. Yankelovich and Barrett, Ego and Instinct, p. 326.

59. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, 58, 5. His reference is to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics.

60. Nicholas Rescher orders classifications of values according to whether these classifications refer to subscribership to values, the objects valued, the sort of benefit at issue, the sort of purposes at issue, the relation between subscriber and beneficiary, or the relation of the values to other values. See Rescher, Introduction to Value Theory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), chapter 2.

61. See, for example, Louis Lavelle, Traite des Valeurs, Tome Second, Le systeme des differentes valeurs (Paris. Universitaires de France, 1955); Donald Walhout, The Good and the Realm of Values (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978); J. N. Findlay, Values and Intentions: A Study in Value-Theory and Philosophy of Mind (London: George Allen & Unwin, LTD, 1961); Georg H. von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); John Finnis, Natural Law, chapters 3 and 4.

62. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 80-81.

63. See David Norton, Personal Destinies, p. 216 for a comparison of this modern widespread approach with Aristotle's "eudaimonism" expressed by his assertion, "No one chooses to possess the whole world if he has first to become someone else", "Aristotle's words (Nich. Eth. 9.4. 1166a) epitomize a radical disparity between moral sensibilities of his time and our own. For surely the motto of our time runs, `Show me how to possess the whole world and I will become whomever you please.' . . . The precondition of eudaimonia is the unique, irreplaceable, potential worth of the person. It is his readers' sense of this personal worth on which Aristotle relies in his confident assertion that no one would wish to exchange himself, even `to possess the whole world.' Today we are without this sense, and rush to exchange ourselves at the prospect of the most trivial rewards. To persons who have no knowledge of who they are, much less of anything in the way of irreplaceable personal worth, nothing is to be lost by such exchange."

64. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), pp. 9, 318.

65. Johan Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), pp. 16-17.

66. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 326.

67. See E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963), chapter 7, "Eight Ages of Man", pp. 247-274.

68. Finnis, Natural Law, p. 61.

69. Ibid., chapters 3 and 4. See also G. Grisez and R. Shaw, Beyond the New Morality: The Responsibilities of Freedom (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1974), chapter 7.

70. See Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (New York: Random House, 1978), ch. 11, "Strategies and Purpose in Evolution", pp. 205-222 for a documentation of this coverup and evidence for teleology. He notes (226): "The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past. Causality and finality are complementary principles in the sciences of life; if you take out finality and purpose you have taken the life out of biology as well as psychology."

71. Koestler notes that interpretation of physical phenomena by statistical probability works because there is a tendency in random phenomena toward order. He notes a half-dozen words that different physicists and others have coined to describe this reality, and adds (270): "What all these theories have in common is that they regard the morphic, or formative or syntropic tendency, Nature's striving to create order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, as ultimate and irreducible principles beyond mechanical causation."