From The
Golden Rule by Jeffrey Wattles (Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapter
9
Chapter 9
[i]. I am
grateful Daniel Batson, who responded in detail to an earlier version of
this chapter. Though I cannot claim his support for the line of thought
presented here, he helped by giving a seasoned perspective, clarifying
issues, correcting errors, and indicating bibliographic resources.
His many books and articles, including The Religious Experience,
The Altruism Question, and his new book, Religion and the
Individual (1993) have been particularly helpful.
[xiii].
It may be questioned whether Kohlberg's earliest stages represent moral
reasoning at all, rather than rationales for conformity.
Nor is it clear that asking young children how to resolve complex
adult issues such as the Heinz dilemma gives appropriate access to their
moral consciousness. What if
genuinely moral decisions involve a recognition of meanings and values of
relationships, such that mere conformity with authority or with one's social
group hardly expresses what is genuinely moral about young persons'
emerging morality? From the
perspective of a faith that morality ultimately means doing the will of God,
Stage 2 behavior to please parents might show more than merely "preconventional"
significance. Could there be a
spiral pattern in the sequence from parental influence to peer influence,
such that religious "authority" returns, transformed into
cooperation, in the growing adult? What
if moral principles are the propositional forms of ideas which can indeed be
grasped by a child of six? What
if full moral development involves a grasp of spiritual meanings and values,
followed by a supreme commitment to live by them, and, finally, the
integration of the whole of one's life in accord with that commitment?
[xviii].
Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development, 199.
Kohlberg (1981), surprisingly, regarded his procedure, moral musical
chairs (with its built-in appeal to "the prior claim to justice"),
as equivalent to the decision procedures advocated by R. M. Hare (1963) and
John Rawls (1971) (which are not circular in this way).
According to Hare, morality requires the agent to imagine himself in
the position of each person affected by an action and then act so as to
maximize the total satisfaction of desires and interests of those involved.
According to Rawls, agents must act according to principles that
would be selected by a group of individuals that may be imagined to be (1)
ignorant of what characteristics they will have in the society to be
structured by the principles they will choose, and (2) desirous to maximize
their own interests.
[xix].
Kohlberg, with Clark Power, "Moral Development, Religious
Thinking, and the Question of a Seventh Stage," in Kohlberg 1981.
The authors work with stages of faith as developed by James Fowler in
which the highest stage of faith, Fowler's sixth stage, is here set forth as
Kohlberg's seventh stage.
[xx].
One social psychologist who connected the golden rule with the
crucial ability to take the perspective (or role) of other persons was
George Herbert Mead. He
envisioned the golden rule as the rule of conduct for a future global
society, and he gave a social-psychological interpretation of the religious
factor in altruism (see The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead,
ed. Anselm Strauss (1934, p. 19). Mead
taught that our self-concept is generated in large measure by learning to
take the perspective of others on the self.
Social maturity develops along with the capacity for imaginative
role-taking, identifying with progressively wider circles of
persons--family, neighborhood, nation, and with humankind as one family.
Mead, a social psychologist and philosophical pragmatist envisioned
religious living as an extension of sympathy.
For Mead, in the evolution of a universal society, religion plays an
important role, but not a foundational role, since religion is just one of
the factors conducing to this goal; other factors include the logic of
science, the conception of democracy, and the tendency of market exchange to
develop into global trade. For
Mead, the truths of social-psychological responses to others harmonize with
the religious regard for all humankind as one family.
While recognizing that Christianity is not the only religion with a
universal vision, he repeatedly cites the teachings of Jesus.
Mead commented that, in the parable of the good Samaritan,
"Jesus took people and showed that there was distress on the part of
one which called out in the other a response . . . .
This is the basis of that fundamental relationship which goes under
the name of "neighborliness."
It is a response which we all make in a certain sense to everybody.
The person who is a stranger calls out a helpful attitude in
ourselves, and that is anticipated in the other.
It makes us all akin" (Mind, Self, and Society, 272). Religion built along these lines, for Mead, remains limited
to the sympathetic response to distress or to emotional relationships.
It takes social integration of the many dimensions of human
relationships in order to make fully concrete the religious ideal of
humankind as one family.
[xxi].
Gilligan initially set forth women's development as following a different
sequence of stages than Kohlberg's stages for men.
On the basis of a study that she did, she proposed the following
scheme. (1) "an initial focus on caring for self in order to
ensure survival" (2) "a new understanding of the connection
between self and others" in which the concept of responsibility is
associated with a "maternal morality that seeks to ensure care for the
dependent and unequal"; and (3) realizing that the self, as well as the
other, merits care, a new sense of morality remains focused on
"relationships and response but becomes universal in its condemnation
of exploitation and hurt" (In
a Different Voice [1982], 74). Research
has not, on the whole, supported Gilligan's initial generalizations, and she
now talks about justice and caring as concerns for both men and women.
[xxii].
Erikson 1963. Erikson challenges the assumption that the sense of trust and
the other virtues are achievements, "secured once and for all at
a given state. In fact, some
writers are so intent on making an achievement scale out of these
stages that they blithely omit all the "negative senses (basic
mistrust, etc.) which are and remain the dynamic counterpart of the
"positive" ones throughout life" (Erikson 1963, 273-274).
[xxiv].
Erikson 1964, 243; quoted in Conn 1977, 261.
Unconscious, moralistic rage, for Erikson, justifies a call for
advanced techniques of self-scrutiny.
[xxxi].
Wispe, 1986, 314; Wispe has campaigned for a conceptual and
terminological distinction between sympathy and empathy, a campaign that has
had only marginal success among experimental psychologists.
See Hoffman 1984 for a highly differentiated account of stages of
development of empathy, combining affective and cognitive factors in many
stages of development. The
terms "empathy" and "sympathy" have a variety of
meanings in the literature, and researchers disagree about how similar the
feeling of empathetic person to the feeling of the other person, and about
the extent to which "empathy" (as the etymology implies)
specializes in emotion or feeling (pathe).
Note also that talk of imagining oneself in another person's
situation implies a cognitive concession, an acknowledgement that what one
desires to grasp is a bit out of reach because it is a possibility, not an
actuality--how would I feel if I were in that situation, or how would
the other person be affected if I were to do a particular action?
[xxxiv].
Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious," in The Standard
Edition, vol. 14, p. 169, cited in Katz 1963, 60.
[xli].
Hughes, Carver, and MacKay 1990, 112.
[xlii].
It would be interesting to investigate how this program could be
adapted to, e.g., Japanese culture, in which communication is less verbal.
[xliii].
Burrow, The Social Basis of Communication, London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927, p. xvii; cited in Katz 1963.
[xliv].
Douglas Adams of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
California, has pioneered the use of dramatic role reversals in response to
works of art. For example, his
students take the positions of individuals represented in sculpture, move to
embody the vectors in a painting, and discuss their experiences.
[li].
Wispe 1986, 317. Nancy Eisenberg has found that subjects who report feeling
very upset by witnessing another's suffering, often do little to help, and
when they do help, they appear often to be motivated more by desire for
personal relief than by concern for the one suffering.
She has found that these more egoistical "altruists" tend
to be compliant and non-assertive. Furthermore,
those who feel bad from self-concern are less altruistic; while those who
feel bad out of concern for others show enhanced altruism (Eisenberg and
Strayer 1987).
[lii].
"Arousal," of course, is a term that covers many phenomena.
Arousal can be produced by extraneous environmental factors that
impede altruism. It is not
difficult to guess the effect of heightened pedestrian and traffic flow,
abundance of visual stimuli, and a constantly high noise level on altruistic
behavior (Moser, 1988). Nor
will we be surprised at the following report:
[Princeton Theological Seminary students were] asked to prepare and
deliver a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan and then to
deliver their talks in another building, requiring a short walk between
campus buildings. Darley and
Batson used the walk as an analogue of the road between Jerusalem and
Jericho, and to complete the scenario, positioned a student confederate
along the way who was slumped over, shabbily dressed, coughing and groaning.
Darley and Batson wanted to see how much the students would help the
"victim." The factor
that made a large difference in helping behavior was the time pressure put
on the subjects. (Rest, 17)
Moreover, arousal may connote
the positive mobilization of one's powers stimulated by a good mood.
People who feel good as the result of succeeding at a task, thinking
happy thoughts, reading "elation" statements, receiving unexpected
gifts, or finding money, subsequently show increased altruism.
See David Rosenhan, "Focus of Attention Mediates the Impact of
Negative Affect on Altruism" (1980).
[liii].
See Paul Rigby and Paul O'Grady, "Agape and Altruism: Debates in
Theology and Social Psychology" (1989), p. 726.
See Batson 1986 for evidence that even in situations where it was
easy to reduce personal distress by escaping from the distressing situation,
subjects with a high degree of experimentally induced empathy tend to show
an accompanying high tendency toward helping behavior.