Aswad
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ORIGINAL: gypsygrl
But, very few people live in a world that can be regulated by conscience. Within the system you presented, we're necessarly stuck somewhere around stage 4/5 because we're bound by the laws of the land. Politically speaking, if our conscience doesn't conform to those laws, and we follow our conscience even when it contradicts the laws, we're in trouble.
You misunderstand. Behavioural self-regulation by the moral mechanism is different from the conscious cost/benefit tradeoff. The moral mechanism regulates by causing distress/dissonance, while the tradeoff mechanism is simply an evaluation without such a factor.
And, interestingly enough, most are stuck at stages 3 and 4 for the better part of their lives. Note, though, that this is about internalized rules, not about laws. It's about what will cause the mental/emotional distress of doing something "wrong".
But, yes, acting in accordance with the closest internally self-consistent approximation of the average moral beliefs of your culture will most likely get you arrested at some point in time. Which happens all the time with some people.
This isn't exclusive to morals, though. People have all sorts of reasons for breaking the law. Moral grounds are only part of it.
Interestingly enough, the predominance of stage 3 and stage 4 can be argued as instrumental to the outcome of the Milgram experiment and later duplications of it, as well as being an important part of the mechanism behind the brutalities of WWII (nazi doctors, death camps, Nanking massacre, etc.), as they make it a moral imperative to act in such a way under certain conditions. I would posit that the people who do not comply under such experiments as that conducted by Milgram, are divided into two camps: one that refuses because of a different moral stage, and one that refuses due to profound empathy causing stronger distress than the moral imperative to comply.
Anyway, with stage 6, he is skating on thin ice, empirically speaking, but well within the bounds of what I've observed (in a less than a handful of people, which explains why the empirical grounds are shaky). With stage 7, he's skated off a cliff, and is trying to fly, or maybe waiting for angels to carry him off. 
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So, we can posit post-conventional stages, but it will be very difficult to find examples using a positivist method. The psychologists have to hand it all back over to the philosophers as we're left with speculation as our only method. And, history because its always possible to talk about whats already happened.
I'm not a positivist. But, in any case, the post-conventional stages (5 and 6) are not that hard to find examples of. Stage 5 is readily apparent, while stage 6 requires a very large sample size to document. If one accepts my position that moral relativism is valid, and that the model can be transferred, I would claim to be an example of stage 6, although I can't claim that self-evaluation is scientifically valid.
Either way, I don't buy what he said outright, I synthesized a model based on it that I pared down in my post. And I'm more concerned with the mechanisms involved, and the associated psychological structure, than with the contents and "symptoms" of any given level.
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But, if you look at ethics historically, different cultures have different ways of "organizing" ethical values. Its not just that the values themselves are contingent, but the way they're put together is also contingent.
Certainly. Moral content is always complicated. But the parts of our brain that would be capable of dealing with anything beyond stage 3 have not had enough time to evolve to a point where the mechanisms can be particularly complicated. Ref the work being done on the basic algorithms of the neocortex, for instance.
And content certainly varies with time. I'd recommend reading What You Can't Say, by Paul Graham, as linked. You've probably thought the same things yourself, but it's an entertaining read. And one I'd recommend to many BDSM'ers.
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Kohlberg's system is a hiearchy organized along a vertical axis with the higher being "better" than the lower stages.
Actually, it may be that I misunderstood him, but my understanding was that it is quite similar to any other developmental model, in being temporally organized instead. For instance, languages usually only get seperate words for blue and green at a late stage in their evolution; IIRC at least one oriental language still uses "grue like the sky" and "grue like the grass" to distinguish them.
There is no value judgement inherent, the way I read it. Which is odd, since he is a moral absolutist, and thus would presumably judge the content as being more important than the organization.
I certainly don't put a value judgement in it myself. It's quite simple: at any point you are faced with a challenge that requires more abstraction to solve it, you start the process of migrating to a higher level of abstraction. Which is, again, not a judgement of "quality". Also, he claims it is not possible to "skip" a level, and I'd tend to agree with him, from a basis that the human brain usually resorts to local algorithms, and those tend to find local minima, not global minima.
Basically, in the face of dissonance, you either resolve the dissonance, sustain mental health injuries, or become desensitized to the stimuli that caused the dissonance.
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Using what you say as an example (your conviently available), when you say somewhere in your post that a given stage isn't "better" its just "different," you're introducing a new principal of organization and refusing the hiearchy.
Again, it may be that I'm biased in the direction of assuming good faith, but I think this is what he meant, too, although I suspect many who do not think this way may have been making specific assumptions about this. When all you have is a hammer, anything will look like a nail, etc...
But, yeah, I guess a clearer way of getting it across is to say that there are several different processes leading to a development that is lumped into a single model due to people not being sufficiently aware of the processes. Some candidate processes are avoidance - habituation - social integration - individuation, habit - form - meaning - awareness - meta-awareness, and so forth.
I have never met anyone that I evaluated as operating at stage 6 that did not also have some form of meta-ethics awareness, although it does perhaps seem like Kohlberg isn't quite implying that this is a requisite. In that sense, one might posit meta awareness as a 7th stage, and it might be the case that formal logic is an 8th stage, or both of these could be branches off the main tree at some point.
But such complexity goes beyond the scope of the thread, so you might want to take it to PM or a different thread (and alerting me by PM), unless everyone else is amused as well. It would perhaps be interesting to "dissect" the moral mechanics of people at the other stages as well, for purposes of more generally answering the OP. What I've said in my posts can be applied to disciplining a stage 6 person, but not all of it can be generalized to every stage.
I was only trying to give some pointers about using the most effective behavioural regulation mechanisms to achieve the desired behaviour from one's sub/slave; morals cause distress / dissonance when tested or violated, and so are fairly ideal in obtaining obedience and conditioned behaviour.
Reflexive and stimulus-response conditioning are different matters, of course.
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Critical doesn't necessarily mean a negative evaluation, it just implies a reflexive awareness and ability to step out of a system in order to evaluate it. It gets really interesting here because, in effect, the contents of the system are being deployed against its form.
Stepping outside a system to evaluate it is operating in a different frame of reference, which is chosen as part of the evaluation. This may be an empty frame of reference, an approximation of a different system, or whatever. The mechanism doesn't go away fast enough for it to be viable to "disconnect" it for purposes of introspection, so instead the system is externalized and viewed in another frame of reference. I use this if I want to change anything, or need to check for a formal error (I'm only human).
Without a frame of reference, you cannot operate on it. Just like light and dark are both needed for "brightness" or "darkness" to have any meaning. Contrast.
And, yes, I guess you could say this is using a mechanism on itself.
Basically, there's a certain bit of a limbo here. My morals are stable, they do not drift, and the only changes in my moral judgements, within a given set of axioms, come about as I get more information about the case under consideration, or if I've only made a partial evaluation (which is never the case for actions, but may be the case for discussions in some instances).
But at the same time, they are entirely changeable, although it takes a bit of time to integrate, and then a bit of time for things to settle. I can certainly understand how moral absolutism might be a "comfortable" alternative; it does not cause distress for me, as I don't need that "rock" to hold on to, but I can certainly see it causing distress for many.
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Right. I hear you on that one. Although, it is possible to take refuge in fatalism and let the complexity take care of itself. This doesn't involve denial so much as surrender.
In my experience, attempting this didn't do me any good when I did (can you say 'anarcho-nihilism-gone-worse'?), and I really owe turning out as "well" as I did to a history teacher (I hated the subject at the time, until I got him, and I was amazed at the way he used his mind) and to my nephandi (I progressed from 4 to 6 over the years with her, as a result of the conflict between wanting to be a couple and having strong views on things, as well as learning to see good in humanity, not just bad).
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Interesting. I never thought of ethics quite so concretely, but it makes sense.
Part of assimilating information, for me, is organizing it quickly into a whole, rereading to get the parts and interconnections, and then refactoring into orthogonal units and storing these. As an unfortunate side-effect, self-contradictory units tend to get lost along the way, along with those that contradict other units from the same source.
This is why I am pedantic about language, I guess. When the terms are precise, it is a lot simpler to identify the orthogonal units and their interconnections/interactions. Many small building blocks will offer more possible configurations than a few large ones.
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Although, I would add ethics is oriented towards interaction rather than just action.
I disagree. It's oriented towards cognition. Or, more precisely, mental process, not just the conscious parts.
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It regulates behavior towards others but thats a rather pendantic point since all our behavior is inevitably social and oriented towards others.
That's more of a social construct, or perhaps a social view of it. There are several of my axioms that regulate my behaviour in the absence of ohters, or even with regard to myself, and these function in the same way.
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But, it means that someone who is incapable of understanding how their actions intersects and combines with the actions of others would be incapable of ethical action.
No. Or, rather, not in the sense of "ethics = behavioural self-regulation", and not in the sense of "ethics = values and reasoning based on them". I've seen examples of people being absent either while not being absent the other.
The question is more one of their progression being "wrong", or lack of the drives and motives that would lead to "regular" ethics. For instance, if you don't see the cause and effect relationship due to abusive parents, progressing beyond the pre-conventional stages may be difficult; subtract about one sigma empathy, and you've got a prime candidate for a sociopath. Absence of social integration (like I experienced) can do quite interesting things at stage 3, with interesting consequences for what is internalized when transitioning to stage 4, but doesn't necessarily preclude hitting stage 3. Absence of the desire for social contact might, though. And so forth.
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Ethics, in the emphatic sense, can only really be spoken about at stages 5 and 6. (Im assuming a developmental framework here, even though I don't believe in it. My bad.
Empathy can act at any stage, IMO. I can remember feelings of empathy from ages at which I was operating at a pre-conventional stage, in contexts that have been verified as actual and accurately remembered events by parents etc... Even before I went for the "all life is equal" axiom, I had trouble swatting a wasp that had stung me, emotionally.
But, yes, empathy varies in strength between individuals, and levels 3 and 4 do not leave a whole lot of room for empathy to dominate dissonance, which brings us back to WWII, mass behaviour, bumfighting, etc... The pack instinct is strong in humans; empathy can be, but this doesn't appear to be common, nor covariable with moral development.
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But, I'm stuck with the vocabulary/grammar of my culture, and in order to avoid this contradiction, I would have to invent a whole new world view.
I do this all the time. It's part of my job sometimes.
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Its here we confront something like Sartre's nausea.
Not familiar with that term. Care to explain?
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I was engrossed to see the way you used the simplified version of Kohlberg's model in matters of discipline, especially to address the question of "Positive/Negative" styles.
I had to look up "engrossed", as English is not my native language, but if I understood the term correctly, this is a compliment. In which case, thank you.
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I agree that its necessary to be very much aware of the individual's own default system of behavioral regulation particularly in applied matters, though I'm not, strictly speaking, a subjectivist. If I'm a relativist, I'm a cultural relativist and tend to understand things in their social /historical context. But, for practical purposes, the kind of subjectivism your appealing to works well enough.
I'm just arguing that knowing the structure is fundamentally important to altering the content, and that embedding conditioning into a person's morals will be a very effective way to achieve the desired behaviour; also, this knowledge also provides more info on the stimuli a person will be receptive to learning from.
Awareness of preexisting content is also useful, of course, but may take more time to identify than the structure, particularly if you want to identify all of it.
Regards,
Aswad.
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RE: Positive and Negative Discipline - 
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