Moral Development and Intensity Factors

Consider and comment on the following:

Identify one well-known person today (politician, celebrity, etc.) who appears to be a pre-conventional moral reasoner, and describe how they demonstrate this?

Do the same thing for one person who appears to be a principled moral reasoner.

Preconventional Reasoning
The pre-conventional level of moral reasoning is the most primitive. At the pre-conventional level, choices are assessed based only on personal consequences. In other words, the actor makes choices that render rewards and refrains from choices that render punishments (Graham, 1995). Preconventional reasoning is as much as non-human animal reasoning typically allows. Granted, it is not uncommon for some mammals to act self-sacrificially to preserve their offspring, and there have been reports of pets putting themselves in harms way to protect their human owners, but these are limited contexts. In almost every other situation, animals are driven first and foremost by self-preservation, and secondly, self-optimization. Preconventional reasoning is also the first strategy learned in the sequence of human development. Children typically think about their own consequences when deciding upon behavior. If doing chores is rewarded with an allowance, and coloring on the walls will result in grounding, children are likely to embrace the former and avoid the latter, all other things being equal. Although the vast majority of humans graduate from this level, it is important to note that many adults still regularly make choices that are based predominantly on preconventional reasoning. This is to say, selfish acts are frighteningly common.

Principled Reasoning
The final level of moral reasoning development is that of principled reasoning. Preconventional motives of personal consequences and conventional motives of societal conformance are never completely removed from moral assessment, but principled reasoning subordinates those elements to a more important virtue: an objective assessment of right and wrong (Leming, 1978). In other words, individuals capable of principled reasoning are inclined to do the right thing in a given situation notwithstanding personal consequences or the popularity of such actions. The ability to reason at the principled level is far too rare (our history books would almost certainly be far less bloody and obscene of such abilities were common), but a few demonstrative examples stand out. Perhaps the most obvious is that of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was, of course, responsible for the end of slavery in the United States, but at the time this was not a political position that reaped many rewards or made many friends. Lincoln fought cunningly (and, some would say, underhandedly) to garner the necessary support for the 13th Amendment and the emancipation proclamation, and as a man who had already been elected to the highest office in the land, Lincoln had little to gain personally from such a move. Additionally, a majority of the nations legislature opposed the abolition of slavery, so the move was not in harmony with the zeitgeist of the time. Regardless, Lincoln was of such strong moral character that he found the idea of slavery to be fundamentally abhorrent regardless of its context, and he fought for its defeat with everything he had, ultimately giving in his life as an unexpected but not altogether unimaginable cost of his work in this regard. Another similar character in human history is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about whom weve already discussed supra insofar as his transformational leadership style contributed to his notoriety. MLK Jr. was another principled moral thinker who made the ultimate sacrifice in furtherance of his reasoned assessment that color segregation was wrong, and that discrimination against anyone based on immutable characteristics offends the conscience. Imagine what the world might be like if everyone were as morally sophisticated as Lincoln or King.

Last Completed Projects