Moral Foundations Theory and Child Custody
I've been studying Moral Foundations Theory and reading this morning from
Moral Foundations Theory begins with the idea that "Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.” (p. 368)
While traditionally, Kohlberg and Gilligan tended to tap into Justice and Care as the foundation of research into morality. This led to what Haidt and his line of researchers would call "truncated" views of morality emphasizing rational codes of conduct that reduce harm to others.
Kohlberg himself posited three levels of moral development each having two stages. These are described below:
I. Pre-conventional level: (Good v. Bad / Right v. Wrong) (1 to 10 years of age) (Obedience to Authority and Self Interest)
Stage 1: Punishment and Obedience Orientation—unquestioning deference to power
Stage 2: Instrumental Relativism—reciprocity and sharing present but not as qualities emerging from higher order constructs of loyalty, gratitude, or justice.
II. Conventional level: (Us v. Them) At the conventional level maintaining the expectations of one's family, group, or nation is perceived as valuable in its own right—this attitude "is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining, supporting, and justifying the order…." (10 years of age to Adult) (Relationship with Others and Society / Religion)
Stage 3: Interpersonal Concordance with ("Good Boy—Nice Girl" Orientation) Approval by one's group / "conformity to stereotypical images" of one's tribe or group dictates morality—moral psychologists define morality as "a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation." When looked at historically, "morality evolved as a device for intergroup competition." (Green, Joshua (2013). Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them. New York: Penguin Books, Kindle Edition at p. 23) The close association between religion, morality, and social cohesion (and social conflict between groups and religions) seen throughout the world is both a key theme in our own constitutional history and the ongoing history of the world.
Before the advent of written history some 10,000 years ago, i.e. in prehistoric times, cooperation within one's group was keep to survival and wellbeing.
Darwin wrote: "It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man [and women] and his children over the other men [and women] of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men [and women] will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another." (Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 1, 1871, p. 166, London: John Murray, Albemarle Street—"The predisposition to religious belief is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature. Emile Durkheim, an agnostic, characterized religious practice as the consecration of the group and the core of society. It is one of the universals of social behavior, taking recognizable form in every society from hunter-gatherer bands to socialist republics.
Its rudiments go back at least to the bone altars and funerary rites of Neanderthal man. At Shanidar, Iraq, sixty thousand years ago, Neanderthal people decorated a grave with seven species of flowers having medicinal and economic value, perhaps to honor a shaman. Since that time, according to the anthropologist Anthony
F. C. Wallace, mankind has produced on the order of 100 thousand religions. religion is superbly serviceable to the purposes of warfare and economic exploitation…. religion is superbly serviceable to the purposes
of warfare and economic exploitation." (Wilson, E. O. (1978). On human nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press at pp. 169 and 175))
Stage 4: Law and Order Orientation. Here "right behavior consists of doing one's duty, showing respect for authority and maintaining the given social order for its own sake". (p. 46)
III. Post-Conventional (Autonomous, or Principled Level). Here there is an attempt to transcend the parochialism inherent in conventional moral reasoning and one's identification with the group. (Adult) (Relationship with Others, Society, and One's Ideological Self / Spirituality)15
Stage 5: The social contract. Here there is an effort to live according to the law which has universal application for the good of the many even when some personal sacrifice is involved. "This is the 'official' morality of the American government and Constitution." (p. 47)
Stage 6 (Universal Ethics). Here one has developed a universal internalized principles of "justice, reciprocity, equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human being as individual persons." (p. 47).
This framing of the problem is part of the problem. Both Maliah and Micah's time with their Mother can be positive and refreshing. Ultimately, it's a choice that is being made about their ability to learn or remain fixed in relational grief. Successful mourning is achieved when the survivor is able to “accept both that a change has occurred in his external world and that he is required to make corresponding changes in his internal, representational, world and to reorganize, and perhaps to reorient, his attachment behavior accordingly.” (Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss: Sadness and depression. New York: Basic Books at p. 18, Citing Freud, A. (1960). Discussion of Dr. John Bowlby's Paper. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 15, 53-62).
As put by Graham et al. (2011) "Kohlberg certainly noticed that people sometimes justified moral judgment by referring to group-level moral concerns such as authority, loyalty, and tradition, but he thought that such thinking was immature and conventional--a part of the "law and order ethos of Stage 4. With sufficient opportunities for role-taking, adolescents were said to move beyond Stage 4 and to begin using postconventional reasoning based on an understanding of justice." One major criticism of Kohlberg's research however is that it "enshrined politically liberal ideals as developmental endpoints (Hogan, Johnson, & Emler, 1978; Shweder, 1982; Sullivan, 1977; for related critiques, see Puka, 1994). This critique was backed up by the demonstration that liberals routinely obtained higher principled reasoning scores on the Defining Issues Test, but that conservative students rose to liberal levels when told to "respond as a left-winger would" (Emler, Renwick, & Malone, 1983). Conservatives could reason at the "higher stage" but were not doing so presumably because they had different priorities in their moral reasoning. Despite these critiques, the notion that "true" moral concerns involve considerations of harm or justice exclusively has persisted in psychological research."
"Cross-cultural research on moral judgment has revealed that Turiel's definition of the moral domain woks well among educated and politically liberal Westerners, for whom harmless offesnes are rarely condemned, even when they are disgusting or disrespectful (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). Issues of Loyalty, Respect, and Purity are broadly considered highly relevant to issues of justice and morality for the vast majority of cultures and people throughout the world and for at least half the the United States at this time. Morality to such persons extends beyond "avoiding harm to others" or "doing the right things to ensure fair treatment for all" to the protection of "social institutions of family, community, and country". This is where the functionalist definition of morality quoted above came from, namely:
"Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.” (p. 368)
These values are broadly categorized as Individualizing and Binding with the moral foundations questionnaire. Below you can see the correlational strengths in the questionnaire to these two superordinate values and their components.
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