Moral (noun): the moral significance or practical lesson
The subject of our recent class, as well as the subject of my most recent reading, pertains to morality. Right and wrong, good and evil. The question of who (or what) decides which thoughts, behaviors, and actions belong in which column is as old as nature itself. Nature is actually one of the first places I look to for answers on morality. Distilling right and wrong to their origins brings us to the simple concept of survival. What choices/actions/behaviors are most likely to help us survive and reproduce, and thus survive themselves? Also, questions of morality regarding humanity become much more complex when put in the context of morality regarding the environment.
To guide us into (and challenge) our thinking about morality and how it informs education, the professors assigned us to read excerpts from a book from 1984 titled In a Different Voice; Psychological Theory and Women's Development by Carol Gilligan.
Gilligan herself is a moral psychologist, and from the excerpts we learned about her investigation into the different moral development of boys and girls using a technique developed by another moral psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg developed six "stages of moral development", each belonging to one of three "levels": Pre-conventional, Conventional, and Post-Conventional. The stages that Kohlberg developed, and that Gilligan used and critiqued in her own research, are most often explained using a story (I believe also created by Kohlberg) that some of you may or may not know about: The Heinz Dilemma. I'll try and paraphrase it.
Heinz' wife is dying. There is a drug that will cure her, and the chemist who created the drug lives in the same town. Heinz tries to buy the drug from the chemist, but the cost of the drug is too expensive. Heinz gets help from family and friends but can only raise half of the price of the drug. Heinz pleads with the chemist to sell it for a cheaper price or let him pay the money back over time. The chemist refuses.
Here is the crux of the story, the question posed and the answers to which are graded using Kohlberg's Six Stages. Should Heinz steal the drug?
Perhaps you can come up with your own answers and grade yourself using the stages. But the real issues that came up in class were not about individual moral development, but about how morality is shaped by different factors: intrinsic factors like gender and personality, and extrinsic factors like media influence, parental guidance, and social norms.
A key argument with the reading was centered around the results of two eleven-year old children who were interviewed and both asked to answer the Heinz dilemma. The boy's answer was immediately in favor of stealing the drug. His reasoning centered on the judicial system; the acknowledgement that morality may not correspond to the law, that laws "can have mistakes". The girl was adamant that the woman shouldn't die, but held firm that Heinz shouldn't have to steal it. Her reasoning was more focused on the network of relationships stemming from Heinz, his wife, and the chemist. The moral dilemma for her was not so much a question of whether or not Heinz should commit a crime in order to save his wife's life, it was a question of why the chemist refuses to provide the means to save a life when he has it.
It seems like they both have an intelligent grasp of morality, albeit with different means of expressing their views on right and wrong. And yet on the Kohlberg scale, the girl was graded at a lower level of moral development. Gilligan argued that the stages themselves were male-biased and skewed, but something that I and my classmates noticed was how the examples themselves fit the traditional male/female stereotype.
I wonder what trends we would see now in children, almost 40 years later. I also wonder at how different personalities between girls and boys affect how they are scored, because each boy and girl will follow slightly or widely different logic than the two examples.
Ironically, "The Moral of the Story" is also the title of a song by the artist Ashe (the first photograph), with a beautiful and eerie piano accompaniment that I'm (slowly) learning. Her lyrics are similarly beautiful and sad. They inspire further questions about right and wrong in the choices we make, and really pull at your heartstrings. They're the kind of words that, when you listen to them, you immediately want to make it a mantra. They are words that I dream of singing to my own child.
"Some mistakes get made,
that's alright, that's okay,
In the end it's better for me,
that's the moral of the story, babe."
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