The theme of "Man and Nature" is a subject of critical importance to our countries and our world. Professor Schmitz has analyzed for us a number of paradigms of nature that have held sway in the West. Among them was a mechanistic paradigm that was built on science and rejected the classical Western paradigms of nature derived from Greece and from Judeo-Christian religion. He pointed also to a contemporary movement toward a broader paradigm liberated from certain reductionist tendencies derived by some philosophers from science.
In accord with Professor Schmitz's description of current tendencies in the West, I would like to point to ways in which interpretations of praxis, in the sense of man's moral experience, give rise to views on human nature. I will indicate briefly two contemporary views which substitute the moral experience that leads to a classical view of human nature by new interpretations of our moral experience and hence of human nature. These are derived from the kinds of reasoning found in much liberal democracy, technology and the market economy. They discount the reality of human nature in any classical sense as basic to our moral experience, for they associate such notions of human nature with a traditional and conservative ethos incapable of serving as a criterion for issues of human decision in our rapidly changing and enlarging world. To look to human nature in the traditional fashion, they think, would be to look to the past, indeed to the past of a particular people, rather than to the future. They associate such a perspective with cultures that deny human autonomy or limit human freedom.
The two views I will note are associated respectively with an interpretation of the democratic process and an interpretation of reasoning found in technology and a market economy. I will examine these as they are found in psychologists who study human moral development, namely in Lawrence Kohlberg, on the one hand, and in Israela Aaron, who depends on John Dewey for some philosophical assumptions, on the other.1 I wish (1) to characterize these briefly, (2) to defend a more integral interpretation of the foundations of moral judgment than these positions offer (incorporating what is valuable in their positions, but arguing that for an adequate interpretation of our moral experience we must retrieve and develop a classical understanding of human nature), and (3) to answer an objection that may be posed to our position. This means that at present we need both a retrieval and development of our classical understandings of nature.
It should be noted that we are dealing here with only one aspect of morality, which is basically an attitude rather than a judgment, and is inculcated or learned by a whole process of education. Moreover, even this limited topic is presented in only a skeletal fashion, for the paper is a response to some specifically Western interpretations of moral experience and human nature which are based on contemporary forms of experience but seem defective in part. Nevertheless, the question treated can be an issue also for other countries where democracy and technology call into question traditional criteria for moral judgment.
CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO INTERPRETATIONS
OF MORAL JUDGMENT
The two theories studied here to illustrate current interpretations of moral judgment are those of Lawrence Kohlberg and of Isrela Aron. They have been selected because they represent the basic division among influential normative ethicists today in the West into deontological and teleological theories, respectively.2 We shall survey the general character of each and the contrast between them.
Lawrence Kohlberg begins from a certain philosophical understanding of morality. In continuity with Immanuel Kant, he thinks that morality consists primarily in a kind of judgment with certain formal characteristics; they are, namely, prescriptive (rather than, for example, descriptive) and universalizable. That is, they are prescriptions that we can in principle make universal about how people should structure their behavior. He says that:
We make no direct claims 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
Moral judgment is a particular way of structuring human behavior, distinct, for example, from that of aesthetics or prudence.
As a developmental psychologist, Kohlberg asks how universal prescriptive judgments structuring human behavior emerge in the child and adolescent. He finds that these are not innate to the child, but rather emerge through a continual restructuring of the way the child judges conflict situations. There are six stages in this process, and in this development the motives of the growing person become gradually more universal and adequate. For example, initially the child thinks that the physical consequences of action, particularly punishment and reward by others, determine the moral status of an act. Somewhat later the child thinks that moral goodness consists in carrying out what others expect of one in his or her role or position, and in the approval given by others. Only by going through these stages and learning that there are conflict situations which these ways of judging cannot resolve does the growing person come to a universalistic ethics or the view that moral standards are those which are self-chosen and universalizable.4 These characteristics are found particularly in judgments about rights and duties, or about justice. "No principle other than justice has been shown to meet the formal conception of a universal prescriptive principle."5 This restructuring occurs through an equilibration process due to the interaction between the growing person and the enlarging social context.
On the other hand, a teleological theory of morality is offered as a basis by some psychologists of moral development. Israela Aron can serve as an example of this position. She 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. However, formalist philosophers restrict themselves largely to meta-ethics and so do not deal effectively with substantive issues. But in moral education the teacher is trying to help young people face complex experience and learn how to make creative moral decisions among the alternatives available. So the moral educator has to use an approach that deals primarily with the process of ethical decision making. Aron suggests that John 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. In situations of conflicting desire, practical deliberation begins with the formulation of the issue. The person rehearses in imagination competing lines of action.
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. . . [T]he 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.6
Principles of the past are important here, not as absolutes but as summaries of wisdom that are themselves subject to modification. There are some rational ways of evaluating values, namely, through consideration of their consequences. It is true that "Dewey's denial of the prescriptive power of moral judgment seems to be the most troublesome aspect of his ethical theory."7 But if one presents the consequences of a line of action that a friend is considering and shows that these are harmful, 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.
Here then we see two quite divergent approaches to the interpretation of our experience of making moral judgments. One of these interpretations is closely tied to the democratic process of making equitable decisions in conflict situations; and the other to the process of reasoning found in technology and a market economy.8 Both discount a more traditional form of moral reasoning based on human nature; or, we may say, they offer new interpretations of human nature based on contemporary experiences. The proponents of both recognize the limits in their own positions and the strengths in their opponents' position. Basically, however, they hold to their own approach as the primary one--though this may profit by being supplemented by the other in some undefined way.
A MORE INTEGRAL INTERPRETATION OF MORAL EXPERIENCE
Is it possible to transcend these viewpoints in a more integral moral theory? Each of the proponents of these moral theories is defending something of importance in moral judgments, but each defends one aspect of our moral experience in a way that excludes the other. Thus the strength of each lies largely in the weakness of the other; in a sense they feed off one another. Is this due to the nature of the case, or is it due to some position they have in common, some premise from which a dilemma arises that results in a parting of their ways?
I would like to defend the viewpoint that it is necessary to accept the reality of a good that fulfills our human nature if we are to explain adequately our experience of moral judgment of right and wrong. To do this, I will 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 the moral judgment, and (3) an objection to this position that is common today along with a suggested answer. All of this will be done in a schematic fashion.
Implied here is the position that we must agree on what constitutes a moral experience before we are able to evaluate moral theory, since moral theory is not an antecedent stipulation of what will be accepted as moral experience, but rather an attempt to explain moral experience to the extent that philosophy claims to do so. Some may claim that my approach is guilty of the naturalistic fallacy, since I argue from experience to what we should and should not do. However, I would argue, as I have elsewhere, that those who make the accusation of a naturalistic fallacy accept an epistemology that is either Kantian or Humean, and that neither of these is an adequate explanation of human knowledge.9
An Hypothesis
How do we critically evaluate the good or value of our actions? We can present our hypothesis on this in three steps. First, we show in our actions and desires that as individuals and as societies we value other persons, certain objectives, relationships and goods, and we show great diversity in what we 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, to ask whether what we are valuing is really valuable, whether there is some basis for our valuing it other than the mere fact that we do so. The answer that this is justified by the consequences is not adequate since it must be asked what justifies the values of these consequences. Nor is it sufficient to answer that we can universalize the judgment that we should act in a certain way, since we should ask what justifies this universalization. Thus, thirdly, our experience of acting for a value and our reflection upon this value may give us access to an insight that takes us beyond the simply factual character of this situation for ourselves or our particular society.
Thus, we have the insight that as human beings we orient our action to values and that we become more fully human if we value certain goods such as respect for another and reject others which appeared pre-reflectively as values to us. There is something constitutive of us as human beings which precedes us as experiencers and choosers of value and which is a criterion or norm for the self-definition of values 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 our norm or criterion as we define our values, because in view of the structure of being which is characteristic of humans, certain attitudes and goals fulfill us whereas certain attitudes and goals diminish us or are regressive.
There is, of course, a whole class of actions which 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. However, considering the agent superior in value to such products of human activity would be one of the elements of a constitutive human good; hence, engagement in such action should itself redound to the development of the agent as well as of the society which he serves.
An example, which we will develop more fully later, is found in our treatment of other persons in a way that is just and respectful. From our viewpoint the value realized by this action and the judgment enjoining it is part of the constitutive human good. There is worth in all human beings and this has a claim upon our acknowledgement and upon our action and attitude toward them. The claim that anothers' worth as human has on 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, a being oriented not simply toward my own fulfillment but also that of others and toward a community that embraces us both.
Neither Kohlberg nor Aron acknowledges such a basis for the moral order. Kohlberg makes no claim to say anything substantive about what the goals of human living are or what constitutes the good life because he equates such statements with relativism and indoctrination. On the other hand, while Aron does make the fulfillment of the moral agent and even society the context of decisions in life, she denies anything in moral judgment like a categorical imperative. The good for this position ends up meaning only what individuals or societies judge good through an examination of consequences. The denial of a constitutive human good as the foundation of the moral order is common to these positions.
Their common rejection of such a basis leads to weaknesses in their positions. Since Kohlberg does not give a basis for the universalization of moral judgments toward which the developing person moves other than the process called "equilibration" itself, the prescriptiveness he attains in such judgments is only hypothetical. That is, all should act in such a way if they want such and such a kind of society. Only if it is a constitutive human good which provokes the equilibration process and if it is acknowledged to have such a significance can Kohlberg defend the universality and prescriptiveness of the moral judgment.
On the other hand, since Aron begins with the agent making creative life decisions in a way that is self-defined and calls only upon consequences to justify choice, the kind of necessity in the decisions this position reaches is only hypothetical. That is, if people value such and such a goal, then they should take certain kinds of action and avoid others. For such a position, "good" ends up meaning only what individuals or societies judge to be such or choose to value. Perhaps their valuing of the autonomy of the human agent--as well as the influence upon them of a liberal democratic society always choosing between interest groups, and of a technological society in a market economy choosing among goods on the basis of consequences--obscures for them the presence of a constitutive human good in moral judgment, choice and action. As we will argue later, their differences from one another could be overcome if they accepted the reality of such a good as presiding over the moral life.
A Phenomenology
In support of the hypothesis we 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 by both Kohlberg 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, of course, rightly point out 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 acknowledge the rights of others at this point? A brief phenomenology can perhaps help us here toward insight into whether formalism, consequentialism or a view such as we offered above best interprets this experience.
We can take the instance of a white person in the Southern United States in the mid to late 1960's facing a decision whether to discriminate against blacks in hiring for a job or in supporting voting rights. Such a person could experience the movement toward offering blacks civil rights as against his tradition, as aesthetically repugnant, and as threatening the purity of his stock. Also, if he were to join the civil rights movement, he could be thought a traitor by his own people. In circumstances where he could discriminate, he may nevertheless decide not to do so 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. On the other hand, he may decide not to discriminate 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 which results in a moral judgment of certain formal characteristics (universalizable and prescriptive) whereas the former approach is 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 race because he thinks that they have a right to be respected and treated equally with others simply by the fact that they are human beings, even though they are not of his own group. As persons they, like the one hiring, are masters of their own actions; they live with their own human dignity and the essential worth that goes with it; they are moving toward their own human fulfillment. 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 or aesthetic, conventional or civil, utilitarian or consequentialist, or the result of role-taking or universalization. It is properly a moral necessity, that is, one which comes from the recognition of the rights which the other has as a human person and a correlative duty the moral agent has to respect this. Unlike the other bases given above, it has more than a hypothetical prescriptive force, namely, that he should act in a certain way if he wants certain consequences or a certain kind of society.
Language supports this interpretation of what is happening. 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 for the injunction is more than consequences, law and order, or role-taking and universalization. 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 Aron would offer alternative interpretations. Kohlberg holds that his own view of the sixth stage of moral development finds support in the philosophical position of John Rawls in his book, A Theory of Justice.10 Rawls seeks to defend a social order that is fair in the distribution both of civil and of socio-economic goods and rights. He does so through inviting people to assume an original position in which they would choose the basic principles which are to govern the distribution of goods in their society. If they did not know their own talents and where they would fit in the socio-economic scale, they would be concerned that the principles be in their favor through favoring the least advantaged.
Without following him further into the details of his proposal, we can acknowledge that this approach may be persuasive in encouraging people to take an impartial stance, but 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 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; and in this way, as Edmund Sullivan writes, 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."11 Of course, a society built on this principle would entail no more than hypothetical necessity in its recognition of the rights of others. The same is true for a society based on consequentialism.
Another difficulty with consequentialism is the following.
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 his 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.12
We suggest then that neither Kohlberg's nor Aron's moral theory is adequate as an interpretation of what is happening in our moral experience, and that the approach we presented, namely, one that makes use of our human orientation toward a constitutive human good, is more adequate in interpreting our moral experience. Moreover, it overcomes the dichotomy between a deontological moral theory such as that of Kohlberg and a teleological moral theory such as Aron's and Dewey's consequentialism. Thus we claim that what our moral experience reveals about human nature is contrary to the views of those who interpret our moral experience in a manner that rejects any continuity with a classical view of human nature, and yet that this is needed in order to overcome the inadequacy of their own interpretations of moral experience and human nature.
An Objection and an Answer
Many contemporary moralists would claim that the interpretation we have offered represents a premodern 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.13
In our world we are much more aware than previously of the great diversity among cultures and peoples. This diversity comes from human self-making and creativity in different environments. To assert the existence of a constitutive human good may appear to many to be a rejection of the evidence that what is good for human beings depends upon this diversity and this self-making that characterize human existence.
In answer to this, we fully acknowledge that modern experience and physical and human sciences do support a great pluralism of interpretations of the good human life, and the dependence of this upon the creativity and self-making of human beings in differing environments. This has significance for philosophical anthropology and ethics, because it shows us something of what it means to be human, and these findings modify an earlier anthropology and moral theory. What is good for human beings is historically conditioned. We do not dispute this, but we contend that this pluralism is consistent with there being intrinsic standards of the human good. What is good for human beings is intrinsically differentiated according to different ages of the person, differences of sex, and differing circumstances, and there are even different opinions about the standards of the human good.
This, however, does not eliminate unity. Biology supports a unity to human nature within its diversity, because it shows us that the human zygote takes twenty-three chromosomes from each parent with the accompanying genes that are determinants of hereditary traits. The resulting diversity and commonality among human beings exists not only at the present time, but also among human beings living today and those living in the distant past. It is appropriate for human beings as well as for lower animals to interact with a specific environment and to do so with a spontaneity that reflects the interest of the agent. However, for this interaction to be beneficial, it is important that it be correlated with a distinctively human potential and not simply with a specific environment and spontaneity.
Developmental psychologists also support the view that the development of human beings is due to the interaction of the growing person with his or her environment in a way that leads to a progressive restructuring of the self, of knowledge and of moral judgment. With this, however, seems to go a presupposition of 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 the subject develops through the active restructuring of his moral judgments, but he acknowledges that some forms of moral judgement are more adequately and maturely human than others. Jean 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. Erik Erikson shows that the personality structure of the adult is 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 of this supports the viewpoint that we offered.
The human being 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 which as an intrinsic principle evoques the subject's activity. Human nature then is not simply that which precedes human action and explains what kinds of action will be characteristically human. Rather the actualization of one's humanity faces the subject as a possibility in need of actualization, a possibility that is distinctive but also 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. Freedom should characterize the way the person should orient him or herself to the human good, but it does not offer a basis for the ultimate definition of what this fulfillment or good is. The fact that the life a person leads as an adult is due to his own free 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. If there were not some ways of living humanly which had intrinsic value, which enhanced and actualized a person and contributed to his completion as human, there would be minimal meaning in our choices. In fact, nihilism would be the inevitable result.14
Most anthropologists today reject relativism. Cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz recognize that culture is an important determination of the human career for the individual, for a society and for mankind as a whole. They hold that culture, in the sense of "a set of control mechanisms--plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what the computer engineers call `programs')--for the governing of behavior,"15 is an essential condition of human existence. Man's very physical evolution in part depends upon it, because such things as the anatomy of the thumb, the representation of the thumb on the cortex, and the size of the brain depend upon man's development and use of tools, which by a feedback process affected even the evolution of man's central nervous system. While we must acknowledge the dependence of values on culture as well as on man's intrinsic drives and potentials, and so the historically conditioned character of the human good and morality, this recognition 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 conditioning and all human behavior as morally equal, for it is to abdicate the criterion for judging morally which is beyond particular customs, cultures and conditions.
CONCLUSION
We have argued that interpretations of praxis in the sense of man's moral experience have in our time led to views of human nature which agree with one another in rejecting classical views of human nature but cannot agree on the proposals they make. We have also argued that for an adequate interpretation of moral experience, we need to acknowledge and understand human nature, particularly in the sense of a constitutive human good that is the goal and criterion of our moral activity and judgments. This view of the human good and human nature is not exclusively wedded to the customs of our differing cultures. It orients us to the future more than to the past. It calls for change, but for change which can be shown to favor a genuine human development, rather than simply acquisitiveness. It promotes harmony, not primarily with the cycles of physical nature, but with the development of the human community, indeed, a world-wide human community. Promotion of such a community has its own costs because, while the human good allows us to treasure our own cultures, it is counter to particularisms or exclusivisms. Perhaps it is in this sense that we one can say in our time that this harmony with nature is harmony with God at work in the world, that is, with the "way of the gods."
De Salles College
Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
1. See L. Kohlberg, "From Is to Ought: How the 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), and L. Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), vol. I. See Israela Aron, "Moral Education: The Formalist Tradition and the Deweyan Alternative," in Brenda Munsey, ed., Moral Development, Moral Education and Kohlberg (Birmingham: Religious Education Press, 1980), pp. 401-426. For an evaluation of current views on moral education, see F. Ellrod, George McLean, D. Schindler and J. Mann, ed., Act and Agent: Philosophical Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development (Washington, D.C., University Press of America, 1986). The present chapter is an adaptation of my contribution to that book, with the permission of the editor.
2. See Wm. Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
3. L. Kohlberg, "From Is to Ought," p. 154.
4. For the stages, see, e.g., Kohlberg, "Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach," in Thomas Lickona, ed., Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Re- search, and Social Issues (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), pp. 34-35.
5. "From Is to Ought," p. 221.
6. Aron, "Moral Education", p. 413.
7. Ibid., p. 421.
8. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) for a division of prominent current models for ethical decision making along these lines.
9. See "Developmental Psychology and Knowledge of Being," chapter 9 of my book, God's Work in a Changing World (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 287-314. One thing I show there is that when we make a factual judgment about what is, we are already dependent upon human action (i.e. an equilibration process). Since our human action is for the human good, our judgments about facts are already dependent on our orientation to, and action for, values. For example, our judgment about what the fulfillment or flourishing of our humanity means 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 our humanity. There is no fact-value dichotomy, as much contemporary moral philosophy claims, unless one's epistemology is Kantian or empiricist.
10. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).
11. E. Sullivan, "A Study of Kohlberg's Structural Theory of Moral Development: A Critique of Liberal Social Science Ideology," Human Development, 20 (1977), 362.
12. God's Work, p. 102.
13. Paul Taylor, Principles of Ethics. An Introduction (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Publ. Co., 1975), pp. 132-133.
14. See Johan Goudsblom, Nihilism and Culture (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).
15. Clifford Geertz, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man," in his, The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 44.