Larry Nucci

University of Illinois at Chicago

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Presidential Address presented at the 30^th annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society: Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development, Montreal, Canada, June 3, 2000

Accounting for moral agency has proven to be a complex and difficult problem for moral psychology. How is it that we move from knowing right from wrong to acting in relation to that moral understanding? Are differences in the tendencies to engage in moral action a function of differences in kinds of people, or differences in kinds of knowledge that people have? Can we even successfully pose such a dichotomy? What I hope to accomplish within this next hour is to examine recent attempts to resolve these questions through work that is being done on what is referred to as the "moral self." My aim is to explore whether the constructs of moral self and moral identity have utility, or whether in fact such constructs are redundant with a structuralist moral psychology, or reductionist and mechanistic.

The effort to define the moral self, and related work on moral identity has been offered as a counterpoint to more traditional conceptions of moral agency framed in terms of personal character and moral virtue. This structuralist alternative to these traditional approaches has its roots in Kohlberg’s (Kohlberg & Turiel, 1971) devastating critique of traditional character education, and his subsequent account of moral development. Therefore, to get us started, let’s look at the notions of moral virtue and character, and the response to virtue theory offered by Kohlberg’s structuralist moral theory.

Socrates, we are told, held the view that, "nobody does wrong willingly: we choose the lesser good only as a result of ignorance" (Nussbaum, 1986, pg. 240). Aristotle, in contrast, rejected this view as simply inconsistent with the phenomena (Nussbaum, 1986). On Aristotle’s account, good and right action are not simply a question of epistemology, but result from being a particular kind of person for whom virtuous conduct is part and parcel of the person’s very being. Essentially all contemporary western virtue theories are grounded in Aristotle’s viewpoint. Aristotle’s approach to ethics begins not with the question of what it means to act morally, but with the more general question, "What does it mean to lead a good life?" Aristotle held that all things in nature are always moving toward a flourishing of their own nature. That is to say, that all living things have a telos. Trees grow up to be grown up trees. The business of leading a good life is to move toward the human telos and to achieve eudaimonia or a flourishing (Nussbaum, 1997). With respect to ethics, the process of flourishing entails the gradual development of virtues, or personal characteristics that will support ethical conduct. In youth, this process involves the building up of habits that in time translate into ways of being that constitute virtuous conduct.

Because Aristotle wrote so long ago, and because most of his surviving works are in the form of lecture notes, rather than the equivalents of articles or books, his ideas have become a sort of Rorschach of the given time period (Nussbaum, 1986). Aristotle’s notion of habit, and his emphasis on the phenomenological, have led to an assimilation of his positions to logical positivism and behaviorist theories of learning and development. His notion of human flourishing has been adopted by utilitarians as in support of the pursuit of happiness, and an ethics based on outcomes. Modern translators of his work, such as Nussbaum (1986), have taken issue with these various assimilations. On Nussbaum’s reading, the child according to Aristotle, is not simply a creature who is causally affected and manipulated, but an active, cognitive being that responds selectively, and whose actions are explained by his own view of things. Thus, Aristotle’s approach to habit formation has more in common with such notions as the construction of cognitive schemata than it does with behaviorist notions of association. This non-behaviorist view of habituation allows for Aristotle to propose a developmental progression in which such habits become subsumed within reasoned judgment. In terms of ethics, the core or master virtue is justice, around which the other virtues serve supporting roles.

The development of the virtuous person, then, involves the cultivation of the right set of habits , ethical values, and a conception of the good human life as the harmonious pursuit of these. Such a person will be "concerned about friendship, justice, courage, moderation and generosity; his desires will be formed in accordance with these concerns; and he will derive from this internalized conception of value many ongoing guidelines for action, pointers as to what to look for in a particular situation" (Nussbaum, 1986, pg.306). Because Aristotle perceived these values and commitments to be trans-situational, he took them to be what the person is in and of himself.

Kohlberg’s (Kohlberg & Turiel, 1971) critique of virtue theory was not aimed directly at Aristotle, but at American traditional character education. The traditional view combined elements of Aristotle’s conception of virtue with behaviorist and social learning theory conceptions of socialization. Kohlberg’s critique responded to both elements of traditional character education on four main points.

First, Kohlberg established that the definition of what counts as a virtue varies as a function of cultural and historical setting. A humorous updating of this critique has been offered by Daniel Lapsley (1996) who compared the checklist of virtues from his own elementary school report card, against the list of 23 virtues to be used as core values in character education classes, that had been compiled in 1988 by The Panel on Moral Education of the American Association for Curriculum Development (ASCD). The only virtue that overlapped between the two lists was "courtesy." In addition, the list compiled by the ASCD panel left out 9 of the 11 values in "The Children’s Morality Code," an earlier effort to guide teachers similar to the ASCD list published in 1924 by W. J. Hutchins.

The second issue raised by Kohlberg was the empirical evidence provided by Hartshorne and May’s (1929) research in the late 1920s and early 1930s challenging the assumption that there were such things as character traits. This carefully done series of studies demonstrated convincingly that whether or not a person engaged in a particular form of conduct presumed to be consistent or inconsistent with a particular character trait or virtue depended upon the context. Faced with the evidence from their series of studies, Hartshorne and May were left to conclude that there was no such thing as character. For example, they concluded there were no people with the character trait of honesty. People were honest in some situation, and dishonest in others. These findings of Hartshorne and May were subsequently buttressed by the research conducted in the second half of the century on the related notion of personality traits (Mischel, 1973; Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Sarbin and Allen, 1968). The results of these studies led researchers to concluded that people cannot be accurately described in terms of stable and general personality traits, since people tend to exhibit different and seemingly contradictory aspects of themselves in different contexts. In place of trait theories, contemporary personality psychologists tend to view personality as something one does in particular settings, rather than as something one has independent of context (Mischel, 1990; Ross & Nisbett, 1991).

Kohlberg’s third point builds from these conclusions about personality and virtue. The application of virtues always occurs in context, thus requiring an application of judgment not only as to which virtue is applicable, but often to determine which of two or more competing virtues should hold sway. Actually, this contextual aspect of the application of virtue was anticipated by Aristotle who saw the application of virtue as entailing the use of practical wisdom. Kohlberg’s insight into this issue was to recognize that moral virtue essentially reduces itself to the structures of reasoning that people employ to resolve moral situations.

Kohlberg‘s final point is that moral reason does not emerge spontaneously as a result of environmentally evoked hard wired modules or Platonic forms, nor is the capacity for moral reasoning the result of the gradual building up of habits, but rather the construction and reconstruction of forms of understanding that emerge through processes of cognitive equilibration as outlined within Piaget’s (1932) genetic epistemology.

Kohlberg’s alternative to the morality of personal virtue is his six stage theory of moral development. The brilliance of Kohlberg’s theory is that it offers simultaneous resolution to nearly every conundrum faced by moral psychology. Kohlberg’s structuralist theory accounts for the contextual variation in people’s morality through the application of moral reasoning. Moral maturity is understood as the progressive development of more morally adequate forms of moral judgment. The invariance of personal virtue is replaced by the contextual invariance of cognitive structure, and the telos of eudaimonia or human flourishing is replaced by the telos of equilibration. This is not say that Kohlberg was opposed to the notion of the development of personal goals and projects as a part of self actualization. It was that Kohlberg did not see how one could define that aspect of personal development in any but the most individual of ways, and that such aspects of personal growth were not in and of themselves aspects of morality. In essence Kohlberg agreed with the philosopher William Frankena’s distinct between leading the "good life" in the Aristotelian sense of flourishing, and leading a life that is good in an objectively moral sense. In what is one of the most important of his works, Kohlberg argues in his "Is to ought" paper that the process of equilibration of structures of moral thought moves inevitably toward a philosophically defensible moral ought. In this, Kohlberg is in agreement with the notion that there is but one moral virtue, and that is the virtue of justice. My reading of Kohlberg’s early work is that he viewed the progression toward stage six as culminating in structures of thought that produce decisions that are morally binding upon people. Thus, he ends up in alignment with Socrates view that to know the good is to do the good.

Unfortunately, Kohlberg’s theory does not fit the phenomena. Kohlberg acknowledged early on that there were certain minor contradictions with his theory regarding the binding nature of stage six. He mentions in some of his early work the well known contradiction between the principled moral positions of Thomas Jefferson, and his relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings. Kohlberg explains this contradiction as evidence that persons knowing what is morally right may not have the will to act on that knowledge if they are under great social pressure. Kohlberg saw this as particularly the case when a person takes a moral stand at variance with generally held social convention. Kohlberg dealt with this type of contradiction by invoking the construct of "ego strength" - a psychological notion quite divergent from his structuralism.

The problem of social pressure came up again in the results of Milgram studies on authority and social conformity when it was found that a portion of subjects judged to be stage six moral reasoners were nonetheless willing to go along with social authority and continued to shock the supposed "learner" in the study to the point where the shocks caused great pain and discomfort and posed physical danger to the person supposedly receiving the shocks. This study is often cited as evidence that moral development is associated with moral behavior because proportionately more post-conventional reasoners resisted the authority than did subjects with lower stages of moral judgment. However, the fact that any post-conventional reasoners went along with the authority would seem to be a problem for the theory. Moreover, the fact that a considerable number of people at lower developmental stages resisted the authority, suggested that personal features other than moral stage may have been involved in guiding people’s behavior.

Gus Blasi (1983), provided the first comprehensive review of the relationship between moral stage and behavior that looked not simply at post-conventional reasoning but at the entire developmental progression. Blasi’s review concluded that there was in fact a general trend for moral behavior to be associated with developmental stage; that in fact, people at higher stages of development were less likely to engage in various forms of moral misconduct than were people at lower stages. This was particularly the case if one looked at forms of behavior that had moral consequences for the welfare of others. Nonetheless, the power of the association was far less than perfect, and suggested that other factors beyond moral judgment, as assessed by Kohlberg’s stages, were involved in generating moral actions.

These results led some followers of Kohlberg to generate multi-factor models of moral reasoning (Damon & Gerson, 1978; Rest, 1983). With some variation in the exact number of steps, a distinction is drawn in these models between the deontic evaluation of the morally right thing to do, and evaluation of whether or the moral judgment, once made, poses a responsibility for action upon the person. In these formulations, then, Kohlberg stage accounts for the judgment of moral right and wrong, while some other factor accounts for the actual judgment that one is personally responsible to act in a manner consistent with that deontic moral judgment.

As I stated a moment ago, it was Blasi who presented the first comprehensive review of the judgment-action research on Kohlberg’s stage theory. It was also Blasi who offered the first effort to fill in the perceived missing step between moral judgment and action by bringing in the connection to the moral self, and more particularly to moral identity (Blasi, 1984). Blasi’s approach builds from Erikson’s work on identity formation, but is most heavily influenced by Loevenger’s theory of ego development. Loevenger’s theory can be read as providing for a compatible bridge to Kohlberg in being constructivist and transformational, rather than logical positivist and behavioral. Employing Loevinger as a starting point, Blasi began to look at the possibility that the link between moral judgment and action lie in the degree to which morality and moral concerns were integrated into the person’s sense of self. The basic idea here is that from moral identity derives a psychological need to make one's actions consistent with one's ideals. Thus, in Blasi's (1993) words, "self-consistency is the motivational spring of moral action" (pg. 99). In a similar vein, Clark Power (Power & Khmelkov, 1998) redefines character as the specifically moral dimensions of self. Like Blasi, Power states that the motive for moral action is not simply the direct result of knowing "the good", but from the desire to act in ways that are consistent with one's own sense of self as a moral being. As Power puts it, "Individuals may undertake a particular course of action, even at some cost, because they want to become or remain a certain kind of person" (Power & Khmelkov, 1998). In contrast with the traditional character construct, the approach taken by Blasi, and joined now by Anne Colby & Bill Damon, Dan Hart, Monika Keller & Wolgang Edelstein, Gil Noam, and Clark Power "does not attempt to replace moral ideas with a set of non cognitive personality characteristics: it sees personal identity as operating jointly with reason and truth in providing motives for action" (Blasi, 1993, pg. 99). Thus, one's moral "character" is not something divorced from moral cognition, and the complexity that it entails.

General issues in the construction of self. While the notion of the moral self has its roots in Blasi’s work, cognitive theories of moral identity are not constrained by Loevenger’s theory of ego development. If we look more broadly at cognitive accounts of self, we see that the construction of personal identity is itself multifaceted, incorporating values and social roles from a number of contexts. Research on the development of children's conceptions of self (Damon & Hart, 1988; Harter, 1983) provides evidence that with age, children construct increasingly differentiated notions of themselves as actors within different contexts or domains. These differentiated constructs emerge as a result of children's efforts to interpret their differential competence, and involvement in various areas of activity (academic, making friends) and a corresponding tendency with age to assign meaning to those levels of competence and commitment. Harter (1983) has suggested that development of self-concepts may very well entail a reiterative process whereby a child's initial attempts to construct an integrated notion of self (e.g., in terms of characteristic behaviors) is followed by a period of differentiation (e.g., good at some things, bad at others). These differentiated general descriptions are then incorporated within a higher level of integration (e.g., general traits), which are then subsequently differentiated. This process eventuates at the most advanced levels of development in a conceptualization of self in multidimensional and contextual terms (Broughton, 1978; Chandler & Lalonde, 2000; Damon & Hart, 1988).

The inherent complexity of self-definition has its counterpart in efforts at self-evaluation. Current evidence, supports the proposition that we construct both a general sense of self-worth, and domain-specific evaluations of our own competence (Byrne, 1984; Harter, 1985, 1986; Rosenberg, 1965). This in turn suggests that it is possible for us to have a positive view of ourselves, while still having a sense that we are not very good in a particular area of performance. In other words, it may be that we can feel good about ourselves if those areas of performance in which we are not so great, are not terribly important to who we are. As a way of beginning to think about how this might apply to the area of morality, let's look for a moment, by way of analogy, at the highly researched area of how children apply their sense of self to academic performance. It turns out that there is little evidence to suggest that a students' view of themselves in terms of academic capabilities (academic self-esteem) is necessarily tied to students' general sense of self-worth (Harter, 1983; Marsh, Smith & Barnes, 1985). For students for whom school matters, performance in school has a relation to the students’ self esteem. For those for whom school matters little, their academic performance has little relationship to their more general sense of self esteem.

Those of you in the audience with teenagers already knew this without hearing the results of research. The question is whether something like this can be operating with respect to morality. If we move from the area of academics back to the issue of the moral self, one can see both parallels and differences. One significant difference is that people aren't as free to discount their moral selves as they are to discount other aspects of their personal endeavors such as their performance in mathematics, or the dance floor (Power & Khmelkov, 1998). This is because morality is inherent in human interaction, and engages us in binding "objective" ways. Perhaps, however, the objective or binding nature of morality may be overstated as a basis for presuming its centrality in the construction of personal identity. Whether one attends to the moral implications of events may be more compelling than whether one develops skill as a dancer, but it may not attain the same degree of salience or centrality for everyone. There is no reason to assume that the basic process of constructing the moral aspect of self is fundamentally different from the construction of other aspects of personal identity. Thus we should expect interpersonal variations in the connection between self and morality.

This assumption of interpersonal variation in moral identity has not been extensively researched. However, recent work by Agusto Blasi (1993) and his colleagues has provided evidence that some individuals let moral notions penetrate to the essence and core of what and who they are, while others construct their central defining features of self in other ways. This is not to say that morality is somehow absent from many people, but rather that the moral aspects of self may be subjectively experienced in different ways Blasi (1993, pg. 103) puts it this way, "...several individuals may see morality as essential to their sense of self, of who they are. For some of them, however, moral ideals and demands happen to be there, a given nature over which they feel little control. In this case moral ideals exist next to other characteristics, all equally important because they are there. Others instead relate to their moral ideals as being personally chosen over other ideals or demands, sense their fragility, and feel responsible to protect them and thus to protect their sense of self."

Morality and the self.

This variability in the centrality of morality within one’s personal identity is of interest for the present discussion only if there is also evidence that it matters for moral action, and that it serves as a bridge between moral judgment and behavior. Here the evidence is less than compelling. What is usually presented as evidence is some association between personal definition, and prosocial conduct. Hart and Fegley (1995), for example, studied the moral identities of a group of inner city adolescents who exhibited a high degree of community service voluntarism, and care for others. These adolescents were identified by community leaders, teachers, and churches as youth who had done such things as organize youth groups, and work in homeless shelters. They and a comparison group of adolescents from the same community were asked to generate a list of all of the important characteristics that they could think of that described themselves as they are in the present, the person they were in the past, the person they dreaded becoming, and they kind of person they would ideally like to become. What Hart and Fegley (1995) assumed was that persons whose actual selves incorporate a subset of their ideal selves will be more driven to realize the goals of the ideal self, than persons whose ideal self and actual self are unrelated. What they discovered in their study was in line with that hypothesis. Two thirds of the adolescents high on voluntarism and care, and less than a third of the comparison adolescents exhibited overlap between the characteristics of their actual and ideal selves. Moreover, there was very little correlation between these adolescents’ moral stage, as measured within the Kohlberg framework, and their involvement in community service.

A second, widely cited illustration of the connection between moral self and conduct is Colby and Damon’s (1992) study of moral exemplars as recounted in their book "Some do care." What they report are a series of biographical sketches which purport to demonstrate that the decision to become active in community service, or civil rights activities are linked to the ways in which these individuals constructed their own personal identities. As with the Hart and Fegley (1985)study, Colby and Damon report that their morally exemplary people ranged widely in their Kohlbergian stage of moral development from lower conventional stages to post-conventional.

These two studies, and other similar ones lead one to the conclusion that moral development seems to matter little when it comes to moral action, and that what does matter are the qualities of the person. But there are several problems with such a conclusion. First, it is not clear that the actions described constitute moral conduct. If, for example, I volunteer to work in a soup kitchen because it will increase my chances of getting into my college of choice, is my voluntarism moral? If I volunteer because it will make me feel good about myself, rather than because I feel compelled to volunteer in order to alleviate the suffering of others, is my action moral? Without knowing why I volunteered, one cannot know to what extent I either did or did not engage in moral deliberation. This holds both for those who volunteer as well as those who do not. After all, one third of the volunteers in Hart and Fegley’s study, did NOT display an integration between their ideal and actual selves, and one third of the subjects who did NOT volunteer, DID display this sort of overlap between their actual and ideal self descriptions. Finally, it is worth noting that the kinds of self descriptions generated by adolescents in this sort of study are very general in nature. These global self descriptions can hardly reflect an individual’s goals within specific contexts.

Second, one can come to moral conclusions at any Kohlbergian stage of moral development. Colby and Damon recognize this, but do not provide convincing evidence whether there is or is not a linkage between the moral decisions of the person’s they studied, their self definitions, and their actions.

Actually, the only work that I know of that has tried to systematically explore the relationship between moral identity and motivation for moral action has been done by Blasi and his colleagues, and their findings and interpretations are much more nuanced that reported in most other research. Blasi and Glodis (1995) examined whether people who define morality as a central part of their personal identity experience a sense of "personal betrayal" when they act in opposition to those moral values. They hypothesized that such a sense of personal betrayal would be more evident in person's whose sense of identity stemmed from their own active efforts at becoming the person they were, than among persons whose identity emerged from a relatively passive, unreflective acceptance of themselves. In their study, they asked 30 women to indicate an ideal that they considered to be very important to their sense of self, one that she cared deeply about, and to which she was deeply committed. Among the ideals listed were: friendship, caring for others, morality and justice, self-reliance, and improving one's mind and knowledge. Six to ten weeks later, each of the women was presented with a story in which a fictional character chooses a course of action advantageous financially and career-wise, but which compromised her ideals. The compromised ideal in each case was the one listed by the subject as a central value in her earlier interview.

What Blasi and Glodis (1995) found was that some of their subjects tended not to see the situation as relevant to their ideals. Instead they focused on the pragmatic consequences of the decision presented in the scenario, and expressed feelings of satisfaction with the protagonist's pragmatic choice. Others, on the other hand, saw the situation as entailing a serious contradiction of their ideals, and expressed such feelings as shame, guilt and depression over the protagonist's choice to violate those ideals. The feelings expressed by subjects in the study were a function of whether their own sense of identity was one for which they were actively involved. Subjects whose ideals were not experienced as passively received from outside influences, but rather as central concerns to be pursued were those who reported the most distress in response to the scenario entailing a contradiction or betrayal of those ideals.

Now it is important to note that in discussing their findings, Blasi and Glodis avoid claiming that it is essential for a person to have constructed a moral identity of this sort in order for someone to act in morally consonant ways. They recognize that morality may be viewed as important for other reasons, such as social approval, or simply out of concerns for the objective consequences of actions. The latter, of course, is a way of saying that individuals might act morally simply for moral reasons. They also suggest that such intense personal involvement may not be implicated in many day-to-day moral interactions that don't entail dilemmas pitting one's pragmatic self interests against the needs of someone else. The authors suggest that one's personal identity may only become at stake in cases requiring substantial subordination of other motives. Of course, whether one views such situations as placing the self at risk, are a function of whether morality exists as an ideal central to one's self definition. Blasi (1993) asserts that moral and other ideals are chosen as core values because they are understood to be important. As Blasi puts it, "to some extent personality is shaped by what one knows to be worthy of education and commitment" (Blasi, 1993, pg. 119).

Blasi's work is provocative in that it may be seen as linking Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia (self flourishing) to the work that has been done on moral cognition. It also implies that constructivist assumptions of how one generates moral knowledge are also important to the active construction of the moral self, and consequent moral responsibility, and character. But all of this work on the moral self and moral identity leaves open a set of important and as yet unanswered questions:

What I want to propose is that the shortcomings of present efforts to integrate some account of personal agency, and perhaps self and identity with moral judgment can be overcome if we let go of Kohlberg’s account of moral development, and move toward a more contextualized structuralism, and a more contextualized view of moral identity. Kohlberg’s resolution of the shortcomings of classical views of character formation, bound up all forms of judgments of social right and wrong within a single developmental system which moved progressively to a point where morality triumphs over convention, personal interest, and pragmatics. What we have come to realize is that what Kohlberg treated as a single structural system was in fact several systems, or domains of social judgment, of which morality was one (Turiel, 1978, 1983, 1998). We now have extensive evidence that concepts of morality center around issues of fairness and human welfare, and that they emerge as distinct from conceptions of societal convention at very early ages (Nucci & Turiel, 1978; Smetana, 1989). Moreover, both morality and convention are distinct from a third conceptual framework concerning issue of personal prerogative and privacy that I spoke of at the JPS symposium several years ago (Nucci, 1996). Each of these domains: morality, societal convention, and the personal undergoes structural developmental changes with age. Each, however, is a distinct conceptual framework with an independent developmental course and sequence.

We now know that Kohlberg’s formulation of moral development captured typical age-related coordinations of moral and non-moral concerns for children and early adolescents, and for adults within modern cultures. What he failed to recognize is that people’s moral judgments could be employed in simple situations in the absence of recourse to other social concepts, and that contextualized social judgments by people at all ages, including childhood could be dominated by moral considerations or by non-moral ones. In other words, understanding moral decision making requires a much richer appreciation of how moral and non-moral social factors are evaluated in context.

The figure on the overhead (Figure 1) presents this more contextualized structuralist view of moral decision making. As you can see, morality is but one factor that enters into consideration of any social situation in which morality might be implicated. How one reads the situation, and how one arrives at a socio-moral judgment is a factor of the individual’s reading of the salience of the moral and non-moral elements of the situation, and the individual’s level of conceptual development within each implicated domain of social knowledge.

An example of the utility of this approach for understanding the relations between moral reasoning and behavior is provided by Smetana’s (1982) research on pregnant women’s reasoning about abortion. What she found was that women’s judgments about abortion depended upon their treatment of the issue as a matter of personal choice and privacy, or a moral issue involving the life of another person. Most of the women who chose to have an abortion also viewed the issue as a matter of privacy and personal choice. For these women their reasoning about abortion was uncorrelated with their reasoning as assessed with a Kohlberg interview. Conversely, most of the women who treated abortion as a moral issue went to term with their pregnancies. Their reasoning about abortion was assessed to be the same as the level of moral judgment they displayed in a standard Kohlberg assessment of moral development. Smetana also looked at the women’s religious affiliation. She found that Catholicism among her subjects was associated with the tendency to go to term with a pregnancy. However, this aspect of personal identity and religious values was mediated through the treatment of abortion as a personal or moral issue. It was the latter set of choices, and not religious affiliation that predicted the woman’s decisions regarding abortion.

Thus, the reading of an issue as falling within in the moral domain, appears to be the critical variable in predicting the force of moral judgments upon moral actions. The salience of morality varies across social situations, and the assessment of salience is indeed the wildcard in this formulation. To some extent, it is established by the "objective" situation. Usually what people mean by context is this external configuration of elements. But, context is also internal, and is affected by the relative point in development the person has reached within each conceptual system, the person’s informational assumptions, the person’s position within the social hierarchy, his/her social roles, and a series of idiosyncratic elements such as the person’s mood, whether or not he not she had a good night’s sleep, just had a fight with his wife, and so forth.

Some recent work by Turiel (in press) and Wainryb (Wainryb & Turiel, 1994) nicely illustrates how where one sits in the social hierarchy affects how one reads the morality of social practices. In most of the world’s cultures, men sit in positions of relative power in their relations with women. Men, for example, are accorded more decision-making authority over every day decisions. Men tend to view these privileges as rights, and expect obedience from their wives and daughters as a matter of duty. That is to say, that men are inured to the apparent inequities involved, and prioritize the non-moral conventional elements of their cultural practices as more salient in the interpretation of the social situation. Women in these situations, tend to see the same "objective" facts quite differently. They are more likely than the men to see the inequities inherent in the social practices and to prioritize morality over social convention.

That social roles blind us to the "objectively" moral elements of the context is not new. Nicholas II, last of the Russian tsars as described by John Lawrence (1993) in his history of Russia,

Talk about moral identity! I leave it to you to decide whether or not poor Tsar Nicholas was a person of character.

And we can take this a bit further. All of us lead lives that are multifaceted. We are parents, spouses, children, teachers, researchers, scholars of different sorts. Some of us are community volunteers, some are not. each of these role relationships places different demands upon us that have different mixtures of moral and non-moral elements. The self-same person, to use Michael Chandler’s phrase, can appear to employ morality in inconsistent ways across these contexts. This was the very essence of Hartshorne and May’s discoveries. And, what are we to make of this? Has our moral identity shifted? Or, is it the case that as the self-same person the salience of morality shifts with the context? Let me give you an example. I have a graduate student currently conducting a dissertation of the ethical decision-making of CEOs with small businesses engaged in international commerce. These businessmen are faced daily with decisions about whether or not to bribe governmental officials, hire children, and a host of other ethical concerns. Each of the CEOs in her pilot responded to at least some scenarios solely in terms of pragmatics, that a comparison sample of graduate students responded to in moral terms. Are we to decide from this that CEOs are less ethical than graduate students? Well, as it turns out, there are no differences in evidence in the way the CEOs and graduate students evaluate non-business situations.

Now at this point, I can begin to hear the chorus of concern that a contextualist structuralist account of moral development and moral reasoning is relativistic. Well, yes, it is in the sense that an honest moral psychology does not presume that morality is always prior to non-moral concerns. However, it is not relativist in its view of the moral, nor in its assumptions about the directionality of individual or social practices when moral concerns are taken into account.

Let us take the case of the hierarchical status of women as a case in point. The moral arguments of the women are not made on the basis of consensual agreement. They are based on non-relativist moral arguments of inequities, harm, and injustices. Those men open to hear the arguments of women are not simply persuaded by the fact that many of the women seem to agree on a particular point, but by the non-arbitrary and non-relativist force of morality itself.

The question for moral psychology is how to account for when we prioritize morality, and when we don’t. What I am saying is this, whether or not we act on the basis of our moral judgment is a function of whether or not we are attending primarily to the moral aspects of a situation, and we render a moral judgment. There is no second layer to it.

Given that morality operates independently of our other social cognitive systems, we can expect morality to guide our actions at any point in development. This is why correlations between moral stage and behavior are often so meaningless. Domain theory unfortunately undoes Kohlberg’s unified moral stage telos.

However, domain theory opens up a second possibility that moral reflection is a capacity available in different forms at all points in development, and that people at all points in their social growth can evaluate social situations from a moral point of view. This is not to say that the moral reflections of a typical four year old are the same as those of a typical adult. But, that the capacity to attend to prioritize the moral is available at all ages.

This opens an interesting possibility for the role of self and identity in the construction of one’s morality. It has to do with the very nature of moral openness. Whether we are born male or female, tsar or serf will affect our reading of the moral meaning of situations. Within those broad social categories and social roles we also operate as individuals. We are capable of independently assessing the moral meaning of practices and social events. Just as these larger external forces shape our view of things, so also do our own individual biases, opinions, and interests alter our orientation toward the morality of social situations. Who we are as individuals, and not simply "where we sit" in relation to the social system affects the way in which we read the salience of the moral elements of situations. It is this reading of the moral weighting of the situation that impacts moral action. In this way, we can argue that identity affects our moral actions. Of course, we can and do make decisions in context that we come to regret. We may even engage in actions that shake our belief in ourselves as moral actors. But this can only come after the fact, and does not constitute "moral" motivation. I think that Blasi’s work speaks directly to this point when he notes that this sort of moral identity crisis is rare.

If self and identity are a matter of connecting up who we were, with who we are, and who we are becoming, then the possibility exists that we can construct notions of ourselves that allow us to be more or less open to changes in our moral orientation - both in a developmental sense - and in terms of the ways in which we frame or attend to the moral and non-moral elements of given situations. It is possible that we can so define ourselves that we freeze our morality in dysfunctional ways.

I have already spoken of tsar Nicholas as an example of someone whose sense of himself so tied him to a conventional moral system that he was unable to respond to the moral contradictions inherent in his own position. But, it can work the other way as well. One can become so focused on a sense of moral outrage and so identified with a moral cause as to become a one-dimensional moral zealot such as the anti-abortion extremists, or the animal rights zealots who in their sense of moral purpose engage in acts of violence in the name of morality. Consider the following description of Nicoli Lenin by a former Marxist, Berdyaev:

If instead of adopting a static moral identity, we remain open to the ways in which we attend to moral components of social life, then the possibility exists that we will be open to moral disequilibration. In essence, we can be more or less open to moral self-improvement - not only in the sense of development, but in the ways in which we frame the moral meaning of social events or relationships. When we change those ways in which we orient toward the social world, we change a part of who we are. The direction of change will generally be toward the moral. That is because the dialectic between moral concerns for fairness and harm to person’s, and non-moral considerations such as social hierarchy is not an arbitrary one - so long as we are open to hearing the moral voice in the dialogue. When this occurs we are simultaneously altering how we think morally, and the person in and of himself. They are complementary aspects of one and the same thing. And, perhaps, this is how best to think of moral teleology, and the notion of moral flourishing.

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