World of Love Appendix B: Pros and Cons of Stage Development

I have used Kohlberg's stages of moral development as a kind of complex root metaphor. While I note at points Kohlberg's own comments on the higher stages or the philosophic significance of his research, these are not central to this course

I have been interested primarily in one aspect of stage development: the way the research supports the hypothesis that all of us go through a succession of expansions of the boundaries of the personality to take in each time a larger environment so that at each stage the personality must be reorganized to fit the larger demands of the new environment.

I could have used Robert Kegan's five stages of ego development, or James Fowler's stages of faith. Their work builds on Piaget and uses Kohlberg. I decided to use Kohlberg because his seven stages seem to give a better trajectory for projecting our imagination toward the ultimate expansion of the personality to the cosmic/transcendent/ecstatic dimension. As I've suggested, the further we extrapolate the more wrong we probably get, yet the exercise is fruitful.

Also, I selected Kohlberg's stages because initially I wanted to step back from stages of religious faith. I wanted to start with what has been discovered by scientific research and then draw out its implications for faith.

It should be noted in passing that the numbers six or seven are not magic or inevitable. Some list ten stages; others consider that there are only four or five. By postulating intermediate stages, such as 3/4 and 4/5 as stopping places for some people, it is not hard to expand the number. And there is no reason why we should be rigidly welded to any particular number. However, for now, I am still persuaded that the seven stages Kohlberg describes give the most normative (usual) path which people actually do follow, and for the reasons given. There are crises precipitated by, for instance, starting school, entering high school, entering college or taking full-time employment, middle age, etc. These enlarge the environment and so press on the boundaries of the personality.

Criticisms

It is important at this point, to note some of the criticisms of Kohlberg and of stage theory in general. Partly this is because we tend to get captured by systems which seem to explain so much and enter into an idolatrous relationship with them, where we cut or stretch everything to fit the system and so distort reality itself.

Another purpose of the critique is to point out to the critics that there is so much truth in stage development that they should direct attention to improving the research methodology and defining what it can and cannot do, rather than just knocking it and declaring it dangerous on the basis of what it has been in the past. Many modifications have been made and they will continue to be made. What has been a useful instrument in understanding human development will become more accurate and helpful.

Dykstra’s Critique

ome of the most telling criticisms of Kohlberg from the religious perspective are those of Craig Dykstra, a Presbyterian minister and professor of Christian education, in Vision and Character, A Christian Educator's Alternative to Kohlberg ¹

Dykstra is correct in believing that a system of morality cannot be built on justice alone, that, in this respect, Kohlberg's test dilemmas and the narrowness of his Kantian focus do not yield an adequate system of ethics nor a well-rounded approach to moral education. The Kantian objectivity of Kohlberg's stage 6 seem to us too calculating and formal. We want to see people develop also in empathy, feeling, ability to give and receive love. We want to see them, as Berdyaev insists we should, also employ imaginative creativity in ethical decisions.

This is why I have pressed the point that "expansion" is only one pole of growing godward. One may balloon out like a Darth Vader to a comprehensive viewpoint and yet remain callused toward individuals. I have tried carefully to indicate that there must be growth in both basic polarities of life or one is experiencing only pseudo-growth and is actually living in one or more stunted and twisted demonic self-systems.

These are the polarities of (1) expansion (inclusiveness) vs. inner unification and (2) the objectivity involved in autonomy vs. commitment involved to loving and being loved. So obviously the strategy of growth must include more than basing one's life only on the implications of taking in a continually larger perspective of time, space and people.

Objectivity is essential, to look at moral issues from the standpoint of all the people involved to see how it affects them as well as oneself in moral reasoning in the public sphere. There are no solutions to racial prejudice or the economics of poverty unless objectivity plays a role. To lift one's head above immediate feelings to see clearly and calculate carefully becomes one foundational exercise in public policy-making. It is only one of the aspects of personal decision-making but it is an essential one.

Dykstra is wrong, I think, to complain that the moral dilemmas by which Kohlberg tests moral reasoning also lead one to deal with morality as problem-solving which turns people into objects and eliminates the depth of mystery in people and relationships. Having been tested myself, I can testify to the fact that the dilemmas actually become a gateway into deep reflection on the inexhaustible depth of any moral problem. In fact, the moral dilemmas snag the person's emotions, some more than others, and drag us into confrontation with unexamined presuppositions and consequences. They make us think, they make us feel, and Dykstra to the contrary not withstanding, they make us exercise imagination.

Just one example: the lifeboat dilemma. There are three men in a lifeboat with a bad storm coming. One is the captain who is the only one who can navigate and who is expected by his social role to make the decisions relating to survival. One is a young, strong seaman who can row. The third is an old man with a badly injured shoulder. The story is crafted to convince the test subject that two can survive the storm but only two. The question: What should the captain do?

The subject is asked to put herself in the place of the captain, to face the alternatives and make a decision.

In a conference on post-formal stages in 1987, I compared memories with an Indian woman on our responses to this dilemma when we were tested. She had made a report to the conference on how, in the testing of people in India, the structure of stage development is found to be the same as in other countries, but the content has some differences.

Especially, she noted, Indians tend to put a higher value on reverence for life itself, because of the importance of ahimsa (non-harm) in Indian religion and philosophy.

We found that both of us had given the same answer to the lifeboat dilemma. Both of us contended that the captain should not order anyone overboard, that the three should enter into dialogue about what to do (while rowing, I suggested), and that they should attempt all to survive together even at risk to the lives of all. Both of us, essentially I think because of our religious faith, went a step further. We said that it is possible that even if all three died in the attempt, one or more of them in the final hours might achieve a such a state of spiritual development that these few hours would be of more value than all the years of a longer life.

This dilemma has been criticized as being badly crafted. If there had been twelve in the lifeboat the answer we gave would have been less applicable. It would be impossible for twelve people to reach a consensus on staying together. But then, it would also be much harder to argue that with one fewer person survival would be substantially more certain.

More important, however, I am arguing with Dykstra the point that the dilemmas however badly crafted engage the imagination and become moral education as well as testing. We are forced to enter into the dilemma not only objectively but to a certain extent as one who is morally responsible and involved as a participant.

The notion that there are values to be considered beyond the greatest good for the greatest number comes into consideration from Kohlberg's stage 6 on. Actually, our answer to this particular dilemma was, I would guess, a stage 7 answer for which no scoring manual exists. This does not mean either of us has reached stage 7.

This brings us to two other important points which I have suggested are true of the stages: (1) That each of the stages, from the lowest to the highest is already present as an influence in our lives to some degree from our earliest years, and (2) that the lower stages continue to exert influence upon us throughout lives, however high we reach..

I think the latter is easier to establish than the former. I have indicated it is possible through the brain's ability to form structures out of undigested input from the environment. The more difficult question is how the higher stages might exist among primitive tribal people who have no universal perspective embodied in individuals or societies near them. How do they even imagine beyond stage 3? The structures of stages 6 and 7 are sometimes more powerful among people for whom those values have been embodied in religious teaching and in the examples of a few Mother Teresas. But it is possible to argue that for primitive peoples the poles of both universalism and self-offering love were there to have been chosen. They were at times lived by individual prophets and seers and, more importantly by a number of unsung individuals, those who, for instance, risked their lives to save a member of another tribe from abuse or execution.

The two sources of high morality available to all are those which Kant considered the basis of moral reasoning common to humanity: (1) the starry heavens above and the (2) moral law within. That is, the awesomeness of nature which constantly suggests that our gods are too small and our moral boundaries too narrow, and the depth morality based on instinctive empathy with others arising from our experience as children, parents and mates.

The instinctive depth morality of stages six and seven within arise from our penetration through imagination to a cosmic perspective and through empathy to compassion. These paths have been open to all people everywhere from the beginning and, this must have been behind Paul's reasoning in Romans 1, where he insists that we are all aware of being sinners and of responsibility for our sins because God has revealed the divine nature in and through all creation.

Another point Dkystra makes is that Kohlberg seems to consider moral growth natural and inevitable, as with cognitive development in Piaget's system. Exposed to enough stimulus everyone will progress from stage to stage. Of course, Kohlberg had tested prisoners in penitentiaries and found grown men who were functioning at stages 1 and 2. He knew that growth could become arrested. Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have tackled this question. He was always open to criticisms and to changes in his methodology.

In this course, I have attempted to explain how moral development can be arrested and the poisoning effect this has through the demonic self-systems. My hypotheses suggest two conclusions related to Dykstra's criticism: (l) Our passage through the stages often is conflicted, so that the lower value systems stay with us as influences in the form of sub-selves oriented around those values. And (2) growth may be arrested so an adult can continue to function at, say, a stage 2 or 3 level. But in that case, the higher stages are a continual disturbance in his life. Examples of a more open and loving style of life from the outside environment often lead to a fanatic tightening of the boundaries around the narrow orientation and a violent rejection of alternative styles because of what seems a death threat to the self.

To the extent Kohlberg suggested a natural unfolding of growth, this I reject. My understanding of human development is, as with Dykstra, a more dynamic and varied one.

Ladders and Stages

Gabriel Moran, in No Ladders to the Sky: Education and Morality (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1987) focuses his attack on the paradigm of stages, which developmentalists sometimes portray as like a ladder one must ascend to get to a predetermined end. Moran is concerned that using this one paradigm tends to wash out other equally important concerns such as living emotionally and morally in the present, the depth dimension in moral and emotional life, the element of conversion in religion, and so on. He writes:

I am not totally opposed to the image of ladder, rope, chair, or staircase; it is too prevalent in human history to be eliminated. Christian thinkers starting with St. Paul and St. John, make a fruitful use of the image within a metaphor of divine descent. However, even at its best the image of ladder is very limited in the who, what, where, and how it can encompass. A ladder downward all too easily shifts into invariant, sequential, hierarchical steps up a ladder, then proclamations of divine descent simply conflict with the established way of moral thinking and are preemptorily dismissed. We need breathing space, diversity of visual images; we need divine revelation from every direction and through every sense. ²

1. I have avoided using the word ladder for the very reasons he suggests, plus an additional one. Ladders are climbed. We do not climb upward to God. If one uses the image, then it is more correct to say that we are pushed up the ladder, from stage to stage, by the graceful help of other people. Growth is through grace and not our own self-effort, except as such effort uses the power of being already put in our lives by God through others.

I have, rather, portrayed stages as a process of expansion of the boundaries of the self, more like concentric circles or spheres than a ladder.

2. Even more important, I have contended that the process of expansion by stages (actually more akin to learning plateaus) is only one movement in the process of growth Godward. Unless it is paralleled by increase in autonomy, intimacy and compassion and internal coherence, expansion itself is pseudo-growth and dangerous.

3. I do not see our being pointed toward an end (godlikeness) as a disability, a process which takes us away from real life immersed creatively and lovingly in the present, which Moran thinks is a danger arising from an exclusive focus on developmentalism. He writes:

... the people most successful at taking down the ladder to the sky have been the great religious mystics ... Their lives demonstrated the conditions for living without an escape upward: love for creation, the experience of communion and immersion in the present. ... A favorite metaphor of many mystics is that of a woman giving birth. There are objective aspects of pregnancy and birth, but the process that leads to birth cannot be reduced to a visible acquirable object. So also the metaphors of rushing waters, healing touch, dark abyss, attentive listening, and metal throwing sparks. A moral life conceived within such language has a set of possibilities richer than a moral life imagined to be the acquisition of an object and the protection of my rights. ³

Exactly! If ladder or stage means self-centered striving for some kind of being or arriving at a goal on one's own, then this is a distortion of Christian growth and ethics. It is a needed correction for secular developmental psychology to recognize that stage movement depends not on our striving but on the graceful giving of others. This is scientific fact and not solely a religious intuition.

I contend that growth is only possible as we immerse ourselves (thoughtfully and not mindlessly) in the people and activities around us. It is only this way we put ourselves in the path of the acts of grace which open us up to movement to the next stage and to becoming capable of real compassion and intimacy.

Sexism

One of the most serious charges against Kohlberg's system is that of sexism. Unfortunately, his first longitudinal study of stages, stretching over more than twenty years, involved a group of fifty boys, no girls.

Carol Gilligan, in her seminal study, In a Different Voice , raises the question of whether, in fact, the moral reasoning of girls is not quite different from that of boys, women's from that of men. ⁴

This questioning began with an unease about that fact that girls tended to be scored about a stage lower than boys of the same age, simply on the basis of their answers to the dilemmas which Kohlberg had devised and was using with his boys. Was it,
Carol Gilligan asked, that women's approach to ethical and moral dilemmas is different, so that their answers, while just as valid, do not fit the scoring criteria set up for boys. Gilligan found that boys tend to think in either-or terms, and have more interest in problem-solving on a basis of abstract justice. Girls, on the other hand, were always seeking for a way that expressed cooperation rather than competition, a winning situation for everyone involved in stead of justice for one or two. The answers of the girls seemed more vague and rambling, more searching, less clean-cut. As a result they appeared often to belong to a lower stage of moral development than those of the boys.

Gilligan's study and conclusions have become widely accepted, and were incorporated to some degree by Kohlberg and his associates into revisions of the scoring manuals as well as in other respects. Continued work is being done on differences in the moral reasoning of the two genders and the seemingly complementary values of both kinds.

Madonna Kolbenschlag in her germinal book, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-bye, suggests that girls and women are becoming more and more able in the justice kind of reasoning without losing their previously existing strengths. As women break out of the home and kitchen ghetto they become doubly versatile, as indeed men should also. She writes:

As women grow more practiced in decision making and problem-solving, their capacity for ethical choice will increase. In Kohlberg's paradigm, we will see many more women developing beyond "Stage Four" (moral good is equated with faithful conformity to and performanance of social norms, irrespective of the effect on the self) to "Stage Five" (fidelity to autonomous personal commitments and capacity to critique-received values, norms) or "Stage Six" (conscience is able to act in opposition to an authoritative or social consensus concerning correct conduct, moral judgments are "reversible, consistent and universalizable"). Some women will progress to a seventh stage in which the ethical imperative of "doing harm to no one" will be extended by a willingness to "suffer persecution for justice's sake" -- the ethical standard of heroism, faith and sanctity. ⁵

Women add to Kohlberg's objective, cold Kantian univeralism of scale a unique compassion and sensitivity to interpersonal relationships and nuances which belong to the wholistic personality. A whole person, a divinized person, surely will have mastered the strengths of both genders and their modes of reasoning and feeling.

Elitism

There is one last criticism which I suspect is more often felt than articulated. It is a kind of instinctive populist rebellion against the whole idea of stages because this subtly suggests that some people are better than others, more mature, because they reason at stage 5 rather than stage 3. It seems to open up a sort of Gnostic hierarchy so that people can be categorized and then put down: "Oh, you're only a stage 3?!!?"

More important from the standpoint of liberals and liberation theologians is the suggestion that people in third world countries, particularly those who still live in tribal cultures or small rural villages, are somehow inferior to educated, "cultured," technologically advanced peoples. As suggested earlier, studies have shown that rural village and tribal people tend to move more slowly through the stages and often stages 5 and 6 are not present.

One illustration from experience:. When I was a college student I preached weekends in a small Kansas town and stayed with a farm couple in their fifties. Frances, the wife, had only finished junior high school and had not traveled out of the state. She would have scored on the Kohlberg scale at a solid stage 3, no higher, no lower. She was totally family and church oriented. In fact the church was for her an extended family.
But morally and ethically, she was perhaps the finest person I have ever met, in terms of empathy and compassion. She had a serious heart condition and suffered frequent heart attacks from which she barely recovered. She was in almost constant pain and had accepted freely and joyously the fact that she was always only a minute away from the next world. Yet she took a warm personal interest in everyone around her.
She was beloved by all who knew her. People came from all around bringing her their problems. She listened to them, advised them and doted on them. She knit up broken marriages and rescued rebellious teenagers reconciling them with their families. Within the narrow circuit of her concerns she was Christlike to the nth degree, compassionate, caring, unstintingly giving of her tiny energies, reckless of her life for the sake of others.

I remember some years later telling the story of Frances to a liberal, militant young woman and mentioned in passing that she was conservative Republican and strongly opposed to labor unions. My young friend scoffed at my naiveté. For all her virtue, she pointed out, politically Francis was reactionary and served by neglect to keep the poor of the world oppressed.

If anyone were acceptable to God as faithful within the confines of the world as she knew it, Frances was. She served and loved and healed with all her might. More to be praised and honored was she than multitudes of stage 5 social activists who give only a fraction of themselves to causes and even less to those in their immediate vicinity.

Let us praise faithful men and women who at stage 3 work more compassion and healing than many of us who are more expanded in our concerns will ever manage, and who contribute a grace of growth in compassion to all who come in contact with them.

And yet at the same time, let us recognize that wholistic maturity is more than this. If it were just a matter of qualifying for heaven, there's no question Frances would beat us there by light years. But if it is a question of becoming like God, then Francis has still some growing to do in future lives, particularly in the areas of autonomy and expansion.

Any stage 5 person who feels himself superior to a stage 3 person, has a lot more growing to do, in understanding what agape is all about. He has some heavy wilderness wandering and foot-washing to do.

Contact the author at: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Paulist Press, Ramsey, NJ, 1981
2. Harper & Row Publishers, San Francisco, 1987, page 7
3. ibid., pages 5,6
4. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982
5. Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-bye, Doubleday and Company, Inc., NY, 1979, Bantam edition, 1981, page 179

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