Raising Good Children by Thomas Lickona

Author:Thomas Lickona [Lickona, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81651-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

CONSCIENCE AT STAGE 5

Stage 5 says no, you can’t abdicate personal moral responsibility. The buck stops with you.

That’s what we told the Nazi war criminals at the famous Nuremberg trials. We said they couldn’t excuse their actions by claiming, “I was just following orders.” They were accountable, as individuals, to something that transcended the orders of their superiors and the laws of their nation. They were accountable to a universal moral standard: the principle of respect for human life and dignity.

Let’s go back to the Milgram experiment. If you were Stage 5 and a subject in that experiment, how would you reason?

You might go along for a while, figuring that you and the learner had both made a commitment to the experimenter that you should keep. Keeping personal commitments or “social contracts” is very important at Stage 5. But as the learner screamed, you’d think, “I know we agreed to do this, but I don’t think either of us knew what we were getting in for. The learner is in pain and demanding to be released. Forcing him to continue violates his rights. No experiment justifies that.” At Stage 5 you could say to the experimenter, as one woman did, “No, I don’t think we have to go on. We are here of our own free will.”

A Stage 4 reasoner might also question the Milgram experiment, since Stage 4 doesn’t blindly obey authority (blind obedience is Stage 1). Stage 4 might ask, “Is the experimenter a qualified psychologist? Will the knowledge gained from this experiment help society?” If Stage 4 reasoners think an authority is not legitimate, not working within the system to help the system, they don’t feel obligated to cooperate. Stage 4’s shortcoming is that it lacks a higher moral principle by which to judge the actions of even legitimate authority.

You may remember the My Lai incident in Vietnam. In 1969, in the village of My Lai, a U.S. Army platoon massacred over 100 men, women, and children. At his trial Lt. William Calley, who gave the orders to shoot, defended his actions in terms of duty to the system as he understood it:

“I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was my mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children … I felt, and still do, that I acted as I was directed, and I do not feel wrong in doing so.”3

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