Debating Human Morality

The Association for Moral Education Conference Comes to HGSE

"Such a wonderful sense of collaboration" is how Mary Casey, lecturer of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, describes the atmosphere at the 31st annual conference of the Association for Moral Education (AME). The event, which took place November 3, 4, and 5 at HGSE and the Sheraton Commander Hotel on Garden Street in Cambridge, brought the AME conference together, for the first time, with the annual meeting sponsored by Harvard Law School (HLS) and Facing History and Ourselves, a nonprofit organization that helps increase student and teacher awareness of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism by examining the historic conditions that led to examples of collective violence such as the Holocaust.

"The whole weekend is very interdisciplinary," says Casey, who cochaired the event with psychology professors Sharon Lamb of Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, and Kaye Cook of Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. "The AME came into being to support and further the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, who was such a huge influence on the fields of education and psychology and who inspired so many of the people at this conference. The Kohlberg Memorial Lecture, which is hosted every year by the AME, was delivered by [HGSE and HLS faculty member] Martha Minow, whose work at the Law School is involved with Facing History and also with students from HGSE."

Indeed, the keynote address by Minow, the Bloomberg Professor of Law at HLS, continued the collaboration, which provided a fitting example of the kind of community-building promoted by Kohlberg, a professor at HGSE in the 1970s and '80s who has influenced several generations of scholars with his theory that children are inherently moral agents. Kohlberg's stages of moral development are today taught in nearly every Psych 101 course and analyzed exhaustively by moral-education students around the world. Beginning with toddlers realizing their actions have consequences, Kohlberg's six stages progress through the "what's in it for me" approach of early childhood to the ideals of social justice achieved--it is hoped--in young adulthood and beyond. In her introduction to Minow, Casey pointed out that in helping to smuggle Jews out of Europe during World War II, Kohlberg himself was one of the "limited number" of people--along with such legendary figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King--who reach the final plateau, developing and acting on higher principles rather than merely conforming to society's norms.

Minow explored Kohlberg's philosophy in light of the rule of law and what it should mean to civics education. She began with the "gold standard" of the Nuremberg Trial and touched on the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Sierra Leone to arrive at the recent trial of Pfc. Lynndie England, the Abu Ghraib guard who posed for photos while humiliating Iraqi prisoners, igniting an international human rights scandal. The dilemma: The rule of law says individuals must disobey orders that they know are illegal. But how can they be certain what's illegal, particularly when it's a question that scholars, the military, and White House lawyers have been grappling with for years? And who's at fault, the officer who issued the orders or the private who carries them out? Finally--and perhaps most importantly to the audience of moral educators--what would it take for someone like Pfc. England to do the right thing?

"How can the capacity to think--and, crucially, act--for oneself be taught?"
–Faculty Member Martha Minow, giving the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture

"She would have to think for herself," Minow said in answer to her own question. This perfectly logical response, of course, brought a whole new set of queries, from "How can the military run efficiently without the unquestioning acquiescence to authority?" to "How can the capacity to think--and, crucially, act--for oneself be taught?"

Minow likened the military, in this situation, to "what students face in schools--with friends, with teachers, with gangs. It's a set of questions you bring to the rest of your life," she said, concluding, to a standing ovation, that thinking for oneself is even less likely to be taught in this country in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings and 9/11.

Minow's questions continued to be debated the next day in a lunchtime discussion led by Robert Selman, Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development at HGSE and a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, who studied under Kohlberg and is known among students and colleagues as a generous mentor. Centered on moral dilemmas regarding racism and how to both study and teach sensitivity to the issue, the conversation--while lively and intellectually challenging--seemed, like many debates on morality, only to result in even more possible responses to some of the complexities Minow raised.

The discussion came full circle with Jerome Kagan's special plenary address on human morality. Kagan, Starch Research Professor of Psychology who is best known for his research that showed temperament--in particular, the "high-reactive" or "low-reactive" states exhibited by infants as young as 16 weeks--remains a force throughout one's life.

Kagan began his talk by noting that of the four or five distinguishing features of humans, as distinct from apes, "the fifth--a sense of right and wrong, a conception of self as virtuous and nonvirtuous," is not only the most important, but also, "probably the most adaptive [and indeed] the competing motive for evolutionary fitness." Or at least it was, when Homo sapiens were living on the savannah, in hunter-gatherer groups of 40 or 50 mostly genetically related individuals. "That social ecology required cooperation, loyalty, suppression of self-aggrandizement, and absolute suppression of narcissism," he said. But today, "the capacity to be selfish, narcissistic, and individualistic" is more important in industrialized nations--which accounts, he postulated, for much of the tension between the Islamic world and the West.

Both stances, Kagan maintained, are equally friendly to the human genome, but history has forced on us a very unnatural ethical posture. "And," he concluded, "it's exacting a price."