[lit-ideas] Re: virtue-practical example of being taught
- From: "Stan Spiegel" <writeforu2@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:44:06 -0500
John McC wrote:
>I cannot forget one case: You are a Marine Corps Lieutenant fighting
>in Vietnam. You have a man down and in desperate need of medical
>attention. The shortest way to reach a place where medical attention
>is required is a path through a certain valley. You receive an order
>to use a roundabout route. The man for whom you are responsible will
>almost surely die. Which way do you go? Do you follow orders or take
>the shorter path?
This would seem to be an excellent way to teach moral decision-making. But I
can't help feel that teaching morality in a conformist society (which is the
military) doesn't lead to thoughtful and principled behavior. You do what
you're told and this is why: there are very clear-cut rewards and
punishments involved.
I wouldn't expect the answer in this military class on morality and
leadership to be "disobey an order" if it leads to saving the life of one of
your people. Disobeying an order is likely to be the biggest no-no in the
military. I still remember the My-Lai incident in the war in Viet nam.
Nobody disobeyed. And I recall the troubling results of the Stanley Milgram
experiments: even graduate students obeyed if the person giving the orders
was seen as an authjority -- no matter how stupid and inhumane the orders
were.
Consider the case of Colon Powell, a very successful soldier, officer,
bureaucrat -- then secretary of state. His failings as secretary of state is
the failings of any good soldier. He learned how to follow orders. Period.
If that's morality, I'm a monkey's uncle.
Given the case that John cites above, the right answer in a military
classroom is often the wrong answer for all the rest of us. In graduate
school I once took a course with Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard on his stage
theory of moral development -- and found myself electrified by the material
and where I found myself at times in the different stages.
For example, I remember at the time highway speed limits were 55 mph.
Applying Kohlberg's stage theory, one person goes 55 to avoid getting
stopped by a cop (a lower level of development: avoiding punishment);
another goes 55 because he gets better mileage than at 70 ( a little higher
level of development); a third person goes 55 because its safer at 55 than
at 70 for his passengers and the other cars on the road.
Discussing the reasons why you do things with others can heighten your sense
of morality. Open discussion also leads to the ability to grade each other
on their different levels of morality from avoidance of punishment to
principled behavior. But most important the interaction does lead to some
movement from lower levels of moraltiy to higher levels.
I feel much the way Ursula does -- queasy about having schools teach my kids
morality -- but having them discuss moral dilemmas can be remarkably
educational. I recommend it for kids, college students, and parents as well.
Stan Spiegel
Portland, ME
----- Original Message -----
From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2006 11:25 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: virtue-practical example of being taught
> On 1/2/06, Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Where did I get my morality? From my father. From books. From moral
> > exemplars around me. From books. From friends. From books. From
> > books. I have been well taught.
>
> Reviewing my own life and times, I see a dialectical process. As I've
> mentioned before I was raised in a conservative, pious Lutheran home
> in a conservative southern state. Smartass kid that I was, I rebelled
> and pursued an education that would keep my options option, i.e.,
> pursue topics in which I had a personal interest without any deep
> "this is me" commitment to one particular field.
>
> Neither of the schools I chose, Michigan State as an undergraduate and
> Cornell as a graduate student imposed a highly structured program. I
> deliberately chose both because the Honors College in the one case and
> the Anthro department in the other allowed me to do pretty much
> whatever I pleased. Neither made any effort to do what the Naval
> Academy did for my daughter, develop leadership through serious
> physical, mental or moral challenges. In retrospect, I now see both as
> exemplifying the the transformation of the university into what I
> label an intellectual hypermarket, a place where students, conceived
> as shoppers, fill their shopping baskets with whatever seems appealing
> at the moment.
>
> If asked to justify my own teaching practice, I would probably point
> to Stanley Cavell's argument in _Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome:
> The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism_ that the greatest
> teachers (Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, Gautama Buddha) offered
> themselves as models in situations where they were (perhaps
> deliberately) powerless, giving their students the option to accept or
> reject the models they offered.
>
> Now I have reached a stage where I find attractive the argument of my
> favorite sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, that while the traditional role
> of critical theory was to carve out a space for freedom to counter the
> threat of tyranny, it must now address the task of recreating the
> space—now shattered by "critique"—in which rational debate and
> discussion are possible, in which, in other words, the language games
> we play have rules that enable democratic but collective judgments
> that some propositions are better than others (never succumbing to the
> idea that any are the Truth with a capital T and, thus, a
> justification for murder).
>
> I observe that, while my wife and I both feared that the Academy would
> transform our sweet child into a stormtrooper, the actual effect was
> similar to that one sees in the muscles of weightlifters. She is still
> what she always was—but now with sharper definition. Having followed
> her education closely, I have noted that what the Academy did was not
> drill out of her the capacity for independent decision (which would
> have contradicted its fundamental mission of producing leaders able to
> operate in the most chaotic of circumstances, the fog of war). But
> neither was it simply, do whatever seems best to you. Even the
> classroom work posed sharp moral challenges, which bear out something
> that John Wager once said here, that without ambiguities there are no
> moral choices to be made.
>
> I cannot forget one case: You are a Marine Corps Lieutenant fighting
> in Vietnam. You have a man down and in desperate need of medical
> attention. The shortest way to reach a place where medical attention
> is required is a path through a certain valley. You receive an order
> to use a roundabout route. The man for whom you are responsible will
> almost surely die. Which way do you go? Do you follow orders or take
> the shorter path?
>
>
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd.
> 55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
> Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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