World of Love Sess3 - Becoming like God Through Expansion

The transition between stages in our ego's developmental history proceeds on the basis of crisis and tension. Our existing patterns of dealing with life do not fit as well as they did formerly; we must now think and act differently. ... Of course, some persons do not move as far along the possible sequence of growth as others; they fail to incorporate the new with the old. Tension and crisis can overwhelm as much as they can effect positive growth. -Edward G. Sampson ¹

What clearly emerges from research with Kohlberg's scales is that the vast majority of American adults and school age children have only reached Stages 3 and 4. They are rarely capable of making principled moral judgments and do not even comprehend those judgments when others make them. -Charles Hampdon-Turner ²

God's kind of love, agape, is the truly strong love. It is balanced in all its dimensions: power to stand alone, out-going compassion, incorporation of all people and all the universe, and, finally, inner unity, harmony.

These are the four essential sides to the divine love. When this love commands the heart of the individual it is the fulfillment of what Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point so far as the individual is concerned. This is our eternal destination and it is in the innermost heart of God.

Of course, individuals grow primarily through the grace of other. people, and by the time we reach the apex of development we are a community of people inside ourselves and also one member of some creative loving community.

The structure of God’s love can be diagrammed this way:

The seven valentines of the previous chapter offered a humorous look at Kohlberg's stages, a superficial glance. Now, let's see them as the attempt to describe what actually happens in the course of our moral development. We first list the headings of the stages and look at them from two perspectives for comparison: that of the reason for the behavior and that of the orientation underlying the decision.

The Stages of Moral Development ³

Stage	General Class	Reason for Behavior	Orientation Context
I	pre-moral	to avoid punishment	punishment, obedience
II	pre-moral	to obtain rewards, favors returned	naive instrumentalism, hedonism (pleasure/pain)
III	role conformity	to avoid disapproval, dislike	good relations, approval, role models ("good boy, nice girl")
IV	role conformity	to avoid censure by authorities, guilt	authority, law and order, codified or socially sanctioned systems.
V	self-accepted moral principles	to maintain respect (in eyes of impartial observer), community welfare	community welfare, contract rights, democratically constituted law
VI	self-accepted moral principles	to avoid self-condemnation	universal moral value, conscience, individual accepted principles

The Value of Life

Next, we take one area -- here the value of human life -- and follow it through the six stages. Kohlberg found the following differences in attitudes toward the value of human life at the various levels:

Stage 1: The value of human life is confused with the value of physical objects and is based on the social status or physical attributes of its possessor.

Stage 2: The value of a human life is seen as instrumental to the satisfaction of the needs of its possessor.

Stage 3: The value of a human life is based on the empathy and affection of family members and others toward its possessor.

Stage 4: Life is conceived of as sacred in terms of its place in a categorical moral or religious order of rights and duties.

Stage 5: Life is valued both in terms of its relation to community welfare and in terms of being a universal human right.

Stage 6: Belief in the sacredness of human life as representing a universal human value of respect for the individual. ⁴

At each stage there is an quite different quality of relationship to society and persons implied.

Characteristics of the Stages

It is important to note several characteristics of the stages and the process which Kohlberg discovered always seem to apply:

1. The movement through the stages is invariant. Every person, everywhere, must go through the stages in this order and none can be skipped. This seems true in all cultures.

2. It is possible to move through the stages at different speeds and to be found partly in and partly outside a stage.

3. It is not possible for persons really to understand a stage which is more than one level above them.

4. The movement from one stage to another is best accomplished when several factors are present:

(1) an example of the next higher stage;

(2) the influence of peers or near-age persons who articulate or live at the next level; and

(3) tension or disequilibrium in which the present stage is no longer felt adequate to solve the problems of the enlarged environment.

5. Persons can become hung up at a lower stage. Kohlberg interviewed people in prison and found some adults stuck at stage 1 or 2 thinking. ⁵

6. He found some differences related to class and culture. In lower class groups, persons evidently tend to move more slowly and stage 5 and 6 appear at a later date. He found that stages 5 & 6 tend not to be found at all in tribal or village peasant groups. ⁶

Kohlberg was not testing what people do. A person may refrain from cheating or stealing at any stage. Kohlberg studied the reasoning and motivation behind moral decisions. After long years of research, he was able to identify the stages through which everyone must pass on the way to greater maturity.

Methodology

His methodology was to pose a series of moral or ethical dilemmas in the form of stories and then ask the person being tested to decide which course of action should be followed and why.

Look for example at the age-related results with regard to the value of human life.

He asked Tommy, at age 10, "Is it better to save the life of one important person, or a lot of unimportant persons?" Tommy answered, "... all the people aren't that important because one man has just one house, maybe a lot of furniture, but a whole bunch of people have an awful lot of furniture, and some of these poor people might have a lot of money and it doesn't look it."

This is stage 1 thinking, confusing the value of a human being with the value of property. 6

Kohlberg studied the same group through almost two decades, so was able to return to Tommy and others again and again, asking similar questions.

At age 13, Tommy is asked whether it is right for a doctor to "mercy kill" a woman requesting death because of the pain. Tommy replies, "Maybe it would be good to put her out of her pain, she'd be better off that way. But the husband wouldn't want it; it's not like an animal. If a pet does you can get along without it -- it isn't something you really need. Well, you can get a new wife, but it's not really the same."

The answer is stage 2 reasoning. The value of the woman to herself is considered, but it is her value to her husband, who would have difficulty replacing her, which is more important.

At age 16, Tommy answers, "It might be best for her, but her husband -- it's a human life -- not like an animal; it doesn't have the same relationship that a human being does to a family. You can become attached to a dog, but nothing like a human being, you know."

This, Kohlberg says, is a stage 3 view, "based on a husband's distinctively human empathy and love for someone in his family." The emphasis is not the universal value of a human being but the family's attachment.

At the same age, another boy, Richard, displays stage 4 reasoning in saying, "God put life into everybody on earth and you're taking away something from that person that came directly from God, and you're destroying something from that person that is very sacred. It's in a way a part of God and it's almost destroying a part of God."

At age 20, Richard said, "There are more and more people in the medical profession who think it is a hardship on everyone, the person, the family, when you know they are going to die. When a person is kept alive by an artificial lung or kidney, it's more like being a vegetable than a human. If it's her choice, I think there are certain rights and privileges that go along with being a human being. ... You have a world of which you are the center and everybody else does too and in that sense we are all equal.

This is clearly stage 5 reasoning, universal rights but in a context of relativity.

At age 24 Richard says, "A human life takes precedence over any other moral or legal value, whatever it is. A human life has inherent value whether or not it is valued by the particular individual. The worth of the individual human being is central where the principles of justice and love are normative for all human relationships."

This represents stage 6 because it expresses the value of a human life "as absolute in representing a universal and equal respect for the human as an individual."

Kohlberg's summary is particularly helpful:

The person at stage 6 has disentangled his judgments of -- or language about -- human life from status and property values (stage 1), from its uses to others (stage 2), from interpersonal affection (stage 3), and so on; he has a means of judgment which is universal and impersonal. ⁷

Cross-cultural Study

It is difficult to believe that this same process could be common to the whole human race, so it is necessary to give an illustration of the cross-cultural studies Kohlberg did or supervised. The context and content of morality may be quite different, he says, but the stages are the same.

Ten year old boys in Taiwan and Malaya were posed a similar dilemma: A man's wife is starving to death and the store owner won't give him food unless he can pay, which he can't. Should he break in and steal food?

The Taiwan boy replies that he should steal the food because funerals are expensive. The Malayan boy says he should steal the food because he needs his wife to cook for him. Both are stage 2 reasoning, but the answers indicate a different content in the values and priorities of the culture.

Shortly after Kohlberg's death, an article was published in Psychology Today by John Snarey, associate professor at Northwestern University, which confirms the results of earlier research. He surveyed all the cross-cultural studies available based on Kohlberg's work, some forty-five research reports completed in twenty-seven different cultures. He concluded that while there were cultural differences in the content of the answers, the stage structure are the same. The first four stages appear in all cultures in basically the same forms they appear in ours. He found, however, that for the higher stages, significant variations in answers appear in collective or communal cultures, such as an Israeli kibbutz. He noted:

Stage 1 was present in about 90 percent of the 19 studies that included people age 10 or younger; stages 2,3 and 4 were present in about 90 percent of all 45 studies; but stage 4/5 or 5 was reported in only 64 percent of the 25 studies that included people 18 or older. Thus, with the exception of the highest stages, all were virtually universal. ⁸

Note that half stages also are considered often in scoring. 4/5 would be scoring between the two stages. In my own testing at about the age of 60, I scored between stages 5 and 6, or 5/6.

Is There a Stage 7?

Kohlberg speculated about a possible stage 7. In one place he suggests it represents the difference between most of us and such special persons as Jesus, Gautama Buddha or Socrates.

A definition of stage 7 is offered in chapter nine of The Philosophy of Moral Development. 8 Here he says that stage 6 universal moral values represent the culmination of the natural development of a sense of justice in the child. This sense of justice is derived from an expansion of the self and identification with others in an ever enlarging circle, finally including all humanity. This is basically a Kantian sort of justice. It arises, he said, from the implications of life itself. The critique of this disputed point is taken up in Appendix B.

Reasoning including all people would seem to the end of the growth process. What could lie beyond?

According to Kohlberg, the "metaphorical notion" of a stage 7 represents a cosmic as opposed to a universal humanistic perspective. While such a viewpoint may be religious and theistic, he contended that it need not be. He wrote:

In religious writing the movement to Stage 7 starts with despair. Such despair involves the beginning of a cosmic perspective. It is when we begin to see our lives as finite from some more infinite perspective that we feel despair. The meaninglessness of our lives in the fate of death is the meaninglessness of the finite from the perspective of the infinite. The resolution of the despair which we call "Stage 7" represents a continuation of the process of taking a more cosmic perspective whose first phase is despair. It represents, in a sense, a shift from figure to ground. In despair we are the self seen from the distance of the cosmic or infinite. In the state of mind we identify ourselves with the cosmic or infinite perspective itself, we value life from its perspective. ⁹

The key phrase here is "a continuation of the process of taking in a more cosmic perspective." The expanding sphere of the self, eventually, reaches the developmental crisis of despair over finiteness and death.

People, if they reflect on existence, have to incorporate into their perspective the whole cosmos, all history, all of time and space, and the necessity of coming to terms with their own deaths. Coming to terms means establishing some faith perspective, even if it is a conclusion that all life is meaningless.

Kohlberg notes that at stage 7 we stand outside the self and view it from a cosmic perspective. The question arises, he said, "Why be moral ... particularly given the fact that I must die and all is seemingly meaningless?" The answer does not emerge from within the process, not in the same way that a Kantian universal perspective on justice arises at stage 6 as a consequence of reflection on universality and fairness to all. At that point it was clear that reciprocity in matters of justice was an inevitable consequence of identification with humanity as a whole rather than with a narrower circle which left some persons outside.

Kohlberg insisted that stage 7 is only a hypothesis to be tested. We have so few examples of persons at the cosmic stage (if any) that we are not clear what it is like. It is primarily, at this point, a matter of extrapolation from stage 6, which is itself not as securely established and defined scientifically as are the first five stages.

I consider stage 7 to be a hypothesis to be tested. I call it the cosmic/transcendent/ecstatic stage, in the same sense that stage 2 is referred to as the instrumental stage.

Note that all growth in maturity involves a greater and greater ability to stand outside oneself and look objectively at self, others and universe. The other pole of this ability is growth in empathy and compassion.

To fully inhabit stage 6, we must include in our perspective all persons, and not just as an intellectual process. To integrate at that level, our lives have to be reorganized around the revolutionary facts that all persons are enormously valuable to God and that all our decisions are to be made on that basis.

Becoming integrated as a personality on a particular stage level, and not just reasoning at that level, is a step beyond Kohlberg's definition of operation. He is talking about reasoning, not action. This difference will be spelled out later.

The logic of the process of expansion is this: If we are to reach stage 7 and integrate fully there, we have to experience the infinite Void and our own personal death, including the impact of despair involved in full acceptance of our finitude. To reach stage 6 and integrate there requires a universal love. To reach stage 7 to the same degree requires overcoming death in this life, whatever else may be involved. This is examined in chapter 9.

Qualifications

There are several additional points about the social significance of the stages which are important to this study. They include the following.

Both individuals and societies today tend to be strung out across all the stages. All the stages and their values are alive and active within us and around us continuously.

Even those hung up at a lower stage than the average societal level suffer the impact from stages 5 and 6 as seen in the lives of others around them.

This is the greater complexity we have to deal with today in comparison to earlier centuries. The conflicts among such a variety of diverse values makes interpersonal communication more difficult. It is not so simple as in Transactional Analysis where a person is said to speak in the logic and voice of a child, adult or parent at various times, and must learn to sort out incoming messages by the same trilogy. If, in fact, we are speaking out of six different levels of development and maturity, then the potential for cross-communication conflicts and potential misunderstandings is enormous.

Similarly, modern societies have an much more difficult time reaching consensus on any issue, facing five or six different levels of interpretation on any one piece of legislation. On the other hand, having more stage 5 people, with their greater objectivity, helps.

In the first volume of his papers on moral development, Kohlberg included an article on the relationship of stages to Supreme Court justices' viewpoints on capital punishment, which is a first rate illustration of the above point. He shows how arguments in opposition to capital punishment show influence of a stage 6 perspective, while advocacy of death penalties reveals a preponderance of stage 4 and 5 influence.

Primitive societies which had not reached beyond stage 3, a kind of familial/tribal orientation, issues were much simpler and more direct.

This introduction to the stages is too brief. The thoughtful objections by experts are dealt with in Appendix B. We will come back in subsequent chapters to the stages in relationship to history, biblical interpretation, renewal of the church, and personal and social issues.

Next, in session 4, the god-self, is defined and examined. This is followed by two chapters on the nature of evil, individual and social, which lay the foundation for demonstrating how the god-self and the stages interact in individuals and society.

Our becoming the wholistic love of God depends, in part, on the expansion of the boundaries of the self to the universal, and ultimately, the cosmic. Only the god-self has the pattern big and strong enough to contain such scope and diversity without disintegration. Expansion is only one of the four poles of our complex developmental process.

This means we will not have to defend ourselves against all those critics of Kohlberg who contend that the system is too formal and cold, leaving out compassion and creativity. All four dimensions are essential and in Kohlberg we find only the one. If expansion of the boundaries of the self were the only element, then we might well all become cosmic moral monsters with the lust for control and domination of a Darth Vader.

Questions for Thought

1. Consider or discuss: Kohlberg, in an article analyzed the votes of Supreme Court justices in capital punishment cases. He found that those who voted for capital punishment tended to be a state lower (stage 4) than those who voted against (stage 5). What is the difference between these two stages, and why should it affect such decisions?

2. Where would you score yourself on Kohlberg's scale. And why?

Contact the author: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Sampson, Edward E., Ego at the Threshhold, 169-170
2. Hampdon-Turner, Charles, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-social Development , etc., p. 138
3. This table is a construct in Kohlberg language from the following references: The article, "Moral Development" in The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Vol. 10, pp. 483-494; Duska, Ronald and Whelan, Mariellen, A Guide to Piaget and Kohlberg, Paulist Press, NY, 1975, pp. 42-70; and the article by Kohlberg, "The Child as Moral Philosopher," Colloquy, May-June, 1973, Vol. 6, No. 5, pp. 10-15.
4. Colloquy, op cit., pp. 12-13
5. A Guide to Piaget and Kohlberg, op. cit. p. 52. See also the other references mentioned previously.
6. Colloquy, op. cit., pp. 13-14
7. ibid., p. 14
8. Psychology Today, June, 1987, pages 6-8
9. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development, Harper & Row, 1981.

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