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Abstract
By maintaining that moral functioning depends upon four components (sensitivity, judgment, motivation, and character), the Neo-Kohlbergian account of moral functioning allows for uneven moral development within individuals. However, I argue that the four-component model does not go far enough. I offer a more accurate account of moral functioning and uneven moral development. My proposal retains the account of sensitivity, divides the judgment component into a theorizing component and a reasoning component, and eliminates the motivation and character components.
The dark side of these many possibilities of uneven development is that no one gets everything right. The perfectly good person is an idealization. On the bright side, no one gets everything wrong. There is some good in everyone.
Notes
1. The superficial similarity to Kohlberg’s stages can mislead. For one thing, only some of the Kohlbergian stages and Neo-Kohlbergian schemas correspond with each other (Narvaez & Bock, Citation2002, pp. 300–311).
2. To call processes ‘independent’ is not to deny that they can influence each other, but only to maintain that they can develop and operate separately. See the ‘Individuating Principle’ below.
3. Indeed, what one takes to be fact rather than fiction is also theory-relative.
4. Moral theories and schemas differ in certain ways, but their differences are not relevant to this paper.
5. Overlap is common; some concepts are in several clusters.
6. Several tests purporting to evaluate a person’s level of judgment with respect to intermediate concepts and concrete rules have been developed, driven by the desire to assess the teaching of profession-specific codes of ethics: dentistry (Dental Ethical Sensitivity Test, Dental Ethical Reasoning and Judgment Test), business (Multidimensional Ethics Scale, Virtue Ethics Scale), nursing (Ethical Reasoning Tool), medicine (Ethics and Health Care Survey Instrument).
7. Some thinkers reserve virtue terms such as ‘courage’ and ‘temperance’ for perfect exemplars, but I take virtue terms to refer to threshold concepts.
8. I argue below that these are the three components of cognition.
9. I shall not argue for the claim that rules and concepts vary independently of each other.
10. This is a simplification. Kohlberg actually thought that people at a stage used that stage’s theory half of the time and a smattering of other theories the rest of the time.
11. Aristotle called this the ‘practical syllogism’. I am not claiming that reasoners engage in inner monologues, stating premises and conclusions, or even that they could produce these premises and conclusions upon demand. My claim is about how the reasoning process could be modeled rather than a claim about the process itself.
12. This phenomenon is sometimes called ‘weakness of will,’ but since I deny the existence of the will, I prefer the term ‘incontinence’.
13. This objection does not challenge the empirical evidence for a separate character construct, but merely opposes its inclusion within a model of moral functioning.
14. I accept the existence of character traits (Kamtekar, Citation2004; Miller, Citation2003; Sabini & Silver, Citation2005, Sreenivasan, Citation2002) and reject the situationist critique (Doris, Citation2002; Harman, Citation1999).
15. This worry is raised and addressed, although not completely eliminated, elsewhere (Thoma & Bebeau, Citation2013).
16. Contemporary psychology and philosophy are quite divided about when perception, theorizing and reasoning take place. Do they take place step by step when an agent encounters a situation, or do they take place simultaneously? Or do they not take place at all in the encounter, but only afterward when the agent is called upon to explain or justify his or her action? There is much research and speculation about this, all pointing in different directions, none of it conclusive. Luckily my claims are independent of the order of things.
17. An important point of disagreement is that I take the credibility of the DIT to be undermined by the fact of uneven moral development. The DIT purports to determine an overall level of moral development for each person. That would be plausible only if uneven moral development were rare, yet it is obviously common. Of course, a thorough critique of the DIT is beyond the scope of this paper.
18. Huck Finn’s ambivalence over turning his friend and runaway slave over to the authorities is an example of this (Bennett, Citation1974).