Jennifer Cole Wright

University of Wyoming

narvik@uwyo.edu

Abstract: The conception of mature moral agency upheld by most dominant normative ethical theories is one in which mature moral agents, when faced with a moral situation, engage in a process of moral deliberation that is guided by moral principles in order to arrive at moral judgments that involve both an evaluation of the situation at hand and a decision about the appropriate action to take. This conception of moral maturity is normatively anchored by the tenets of rationality: it consists in and thus, is achieved through a process of principled moral deliberation (i.e. moral deliberation guided by principles) in accordance with norms of good reasoning (e.g. rational deliberation, impartiality, full-informedness, universality, etc.). I argue that this conception of moral maturity fundamentally misconstrues that in which mature moral agency consists and thus, the means by which it is achieved. After showing that we must abandon the idea that moral principles can provide moral guidance for and impose normative authority on the lives of mature moral agents, I develop the insights of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus and John Dewey into the outline of an alternative conception of mature moral agency.

The conception of mature moral agency upheld by most dominant normative ethical theories is one in which mature moral agents, when faced with a moral situation, engage in a process of moral deliberation that is guided by moral principles in order to arrive at moral judgments that involve both an evaluation of the situation at hand and a decision about the appropriate action to take. This conception of moral maturity is normatively anchored by the tenets of rationality: it consists in and thus, is achieved through a process of principled moral deliberation (i.e. moral deliberation guided by principles) in accordance with norms of good reasoning (e.g. rational deliberation, impartiality, full-informedness, universality, etc.). In this paper, I argue that this conception of moral maturity fundamentally misconstrues that in which mature moral agency consists and thus, the means by which it is achieved. Accordingly, in the first section, I argue that we must abandon the idea that moral principles can provide moral guidance for and impose normative authority on the lives of mature moral agents. Then, in the second section, I develop the insights of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (hereafter ‘Dreyfus’) and John Dewey into the outline of an alternative conception of mature moral agency.

If moral maturity consists of the ability to deliberate with moral principles, then mature moral agents are those whose judgments and actions are explicitly guided by such principles. In this section I argue that there are several problems with this conception of mature moral agency: 1) moral principles fail to provide anything more than "entry level" moral guidance and are, therefore, incapable of producing mature moral judgments, and 2) the role of principled moral deliberation in the actual generation of mature moral judgments is misrepresented. Moral principles, I argue, are the products of mature moral judgments. They are not employed in the process by which these judgments are achieved.

Normative ethical theories typically specify moral principles that can (and, in fact, must) be employed by moral agents in order to yield appropriate moral judgments and determine appropriate action. Now, such principles come in two distinct forms: formal principles (i.e. moral principles without specific action-guiding content) and substantive principles (i.e. moral principles with specific action-guiding content). In what follows, I consider substantive principles first, then formal. Both forms of principles, I argue, are incapable of providing the sort of moral guidance necessary to achieve mature moral judgments (i.e. judgments that are appropriate to the situations they are judgments of).

Substantive principles provide moral agents with direct, unambiguous, action-specific moral guidance. Examples of such principles are: ‘A moral agent must never lie’ or ‘Thou shalt not kill’. These principles take the form of rigid, context-less rules. Such rules function to decompose situations into basic feature/response patterns (i.e. certain features require certain responses) that are recognizable even for those who lack experience.

The problem is that although substantive principles provide specific instructions on what one ought to do, such principles are oblivious to the complex details of particular moral situations – details that, in the end, are the final arbiters of the appropriateness and justification of moral agents’ judgments and actions. Because of their inability to adapt to context, substantive principles greatly restrict the moral agents’ capacity to recognize and respond to the situation-specific characteristics of particular environmental circumstances: they reduce the range of genuine response options. For instance, while it seems generally correct to say that lying is morally reprehensible, it is possible (if not plausible) that situations might arise in which it would be morally acceptable, if not praiseworthy. Substantive moral principles do not give moral agents the means to deal with these cases, which are numerable, and so moral agents are unable to use them to make appropriate moral judgments and determine appropriate action.

Of course, one might suggest that this problem is solved by the introduction of situational ceteris paribus clauses. I think that up to a (very limited) point, this is exactly what happens. But, the number of qualifications necessary to produce moral judgments that are appropriate to the actual situations they are judgments of would quickly render the principles in question unmanageable. The usefulness of such principles has a narrow window: as Dreyfus writes, "Like the training wheels on a child’s first bicycle, these first rules allow the accumulation of experience, but soon they must be put aside to proceed."

One solution to this problem is to introduce content-less moral principles: i.e. formal principles. Examples of purely formal principles are: A moral agent must always strive to "uphold justice" or "maximize utility". The difficulty with formal principles is that they are only useful for identifying and evaluating moral issues at a very abstract level. At best, they orient moral agents by pointing in the appropriate direction. That is, they provide a perspective from which the situations moral agents face should be considered. As an example, the "maximize utility" perspective makes maximizing utility the primary orienting objective, organizing evaluation so that only the issue of maximizing utility is salient, thereby eliminating other issues from consideration.

The problem is that such principles are unable to provide information about what actually would, in a given situation, uphold justice or maximize utility. That is, formal principles fail to provide moral agents with the tools necessary to evaluate the complex details particular situations confront them with, or to develop appropriate moral solutions. For instance, reliance on the "maximize utility" perspective, by itself, can lead to deeply troubling dilemmas: e.g. maximizing utility through the saving of ten lives with the sacrifice (or enslavement) of one.

Moral principles are like the tips one finds in books on chess when first taking up the game. Such tips are attempts to distill the knowledge possessed by chess masters into a set of basic rules. As helpful as these rules are to a novice, it would be a mistake to think that the games played by masters are guided – explicitly or otherwise – by them. In fact, it would be impossible for masters to play a master-level game of chess if they were. Likewise, it is impossible to produce mature moral judgments and actions using moral principles, because they do not provide the sensitivity or flexibility necessary to respond appropriately to the complexities of particular situations. As a result, moral principles, whether formal or substantive, prove incapable of providing the moral guidance necessary for mature moral agency.

Moral psychologists largely accept the conception of mature moral agency I’m arguing against. That is, they assume that mature moral agents both can and should deliberate with moral principles to form judgments and determine appropriate action. Currently, principled moral deliberation is considered to be an indicator of moral maturity. In this vein, Lawrence Kohlberg’s work has been taken as empirical evidence that moral development can be tracked according to the adequacy of principled moral deliberation. Yet, by requiring moral agents to evaluate hypothetical moral dilemmas and give explicit reasons for how and why they formed their judgments, Kohlberg’s methodology misconstrues the role principled moral deliberation normally plays in moral evaluation. It does so by: 1) giving moral agents abstract written scenarios to analyze (scenarios that leave out most of the particular details that are relevant in real-life moral situations) and 2) asking those agents to articulate reasons for their moral judgments, something which naturally leads to a retrospective appeal to moral principle(s) (e.g. "Why shouldn’t the man take the drug? Because that is stealing and people shouldn’t steal"). But, this does not mean that they actually employed these principles in a deliberative process during the evaluation itself. In fact, far from it. There is much evidence to suggest that people commonly engage in post hoc reasoning when articulating reasons for their actions. As Dreyfus suggests, the more mature moral agents’ judgments are, the more likely what they are actually doing is what experts in a host of different domains do when trying to explain, describe, and/or justify their actions after the fact: they are appealing to the recognized rules/principle of the domain in an effort "to find words within the jargon to talk about something that [they] don’t think is particularly describable."

In social psychology, a growing body of research has begun to offer an alternative picture of moral judgments, one in which moral agents engage in moral judgments from the ‘bottom up’ instead of the ‘top down’. Research by Jonathan Haidt, for example, suggests that moral judgments are primarily intuitive, "gut-level", emotionally-grounded evaluations . These evaluations appear to be able to both identify morally relevant issues and provide insight into appropriate action without requiring explicit deliberation or reference to moral principles. In fact, appeal to such principles, if it occurs at all, happens (as in Kohlberg’s studies) only after the fact, when moral agents are called upon to explain and/or justify judgments already made. Thus, such research suggests that moral judgments and actions are not typically guided by principles, but are in fact prior to them.

Interestingly, the independence of the process by which moral judgments are formed and principled moral deliberation appears to have some empirical support. When shown that principled deliberation leads to a different moral judgment than the one they originally gave, moral agents often fail to give up their original judgment. In fact, they report still feeling compelled by their original judgment, which they find cannot be dispelled by their recognition of the deliberated alternative. Yet, if, on the other hand, they are encouraged to see (i.e. imagine) the judged scenario differently, their original judgment can often be effectively over-ridden by a new one.

Similarly, research on the development of ‘wisdom’ suggests that moral maturity (one component of wisdom) does not involve an increased ability to deliberate with moral principles, nor to assume some sort of stance of ‘ideal rationality’. Instead, moral maturity appears to involve highly developed moral sensibilities (which involve emotional and other forms of deeply engrained, intuitive knowledge) that lead to spontaneous judgments and actions that are appropriately responsive to the situations encountered. In other words, mature moral agents are those that are able to imaginatively draw upon a broad network of experiences and intuitive understanding, allowing them to "feel" their way through complex situations much in the same way that we unconsciously and spontaneously "feel" our way through the physical environment through which we walk.

The point here is this: we have to be careful not to confuse the product with the process. To see this, imagine the Mona Lisa. And then imagine a paint-by-numbers replication of it. Regardless of their superficial similarity as a product, the process that went into each painting was completely different: the former involved creative painting, while the latter involved following rules. Importantly, this also means that even if the creative master-level product of the Mona Lisa can be decomposed (after the fact) into a novice-level pattern of rule-following procedures, we cannot equate the process through which the Mona Lisa was originally made with the process through which its paint-by-numbers replication was made. Similarly, while it may be possible (at least in part) to explain and/or justify the product of mature moral judgments by making reference to moral principles, it would be a mistake to hold that the process through which such judgments were formed was, therefore, principled moral deliberation. This is the case even if the decomposition of mature moral agents’ judgments into principles makes them potentially reproducible by another moral agent through principled moral deliberation. I say "potentially" because, considering again the Mona Lisa example, it is important to remember that the paint-by-numbers decomposition of the original painting allows only for the reproduction of that (and no other) painting. When it comes to moral judgments, however, the possibility of being faced with the exact same situation (which would call for the exact same judgment) appears to be incredibly small. And moral judgments are only mature moral judgments when they are appropriate to the situations they are judgments of. This means that the reproduction of the same judgment in different situations would not necessarily make that judgment mature. Not to mention the fact that the process by which that judgment is generated would not be the same process used by mature moral agents. In the latter case, the moral judgment "leads" the principles; in the former case, it follows them.

This is not to say that mature moral agents do not make reference to moral principles; they do. But such reference represents an effort to articulate their experience, not to govern their behavior. That is, for the mature moral agent moral principles are descriptive, not prescriptive. As Philip Kapleau writes (in the context of Zen Buddhism): "Remember, the [principles] are not moral commandments…Rather they reveal how a deeply enlightened, fully perfected person…behaves. Such an individual doesn’t imitate the [principles]; they imitate him". As such, moral principles are not necessary to provide justification for the actions of – and thus, cannot impose normative authority upon – mature moral agents.

Dreyfus has presented an account of "ethical expertise" that captures the essential features of mature moral agency. Comparing the development of moral maturity to the development of other forms of expertise, Dreyfus shows that while moral principles play a role in moral agents’ early moral judgments, they necessarily drop out of the picture as maturity is achieved. The moral novice relies on principles to introduce her to the rough "parameters", or basic rules, of moral practice. Over time and through experience, though, such reliance is gradually replaced with the capacity for an "immediate, intuitive response" to the details of particular situations, a response that springs from a cultivated body of embodied experience that affords a heightened awareness and affective attunement to one’s environments (both internal and external). Once an agent has advanced past the early stages of development, principled moral deliberation is no longer necessary. The conception of moral maturity as consisting in principled moral deliberation is thus turned on its head.

According to Dreyfus, "…an expert [in this case, a mature moral agent] does not solve problems. He does not reason. He does not even act deliberately." Rather, he acts spontaneously, intuitively: that is, immediately, without deliberative effort, yet with the appropriate judgment or action. Just as the professional ski racer is able, without deliberation, to apply the right amount of pressure to her skis in order to bring herself rapidly around a steep turn; just as the master chess player is able to respond immediately and decisively to the moves of her opponent; just as the Native American Indian is able to identify which manner of man and/or animal has passed through his territory; the mature moral agent is able to intuitively perceive and understand the morally relevant features of complex situations and to act spontaneously in a morally mature manner in response to such situations. As one Japanese martial artist writes:

On this alternative conception of mature moral agency, the development of moral maturity comes not through principled moral deliberation, but rather through the conscientious cultivation of the kinds of experiences that, through the attentive development of habitual practice, become ingrained in moral agents’ intuitive response repertoires.

Seeing this, Dewey emphasized the role of habit formation in the development of moral maturity:

Accordingly, for Dewey, the cultivation of habit has moral significance, for it is the process by which the moral agent’s disposition to respond to and act in the world is formed. Through habit formation, patterns of action and perception are developed that not only structure moral agents’ tendencies to respond and act in certain ways – they also structure the way moral agents’ see and interpret the world by determining what kinds of stimuli they attend to and what kinds of features they recognize (i.e. see) as relevant. The cultivation of moral maturity thus requires not only that moral agents actively attune themselves to the morally relevant details of their environments (a process accomplished by modeling respected others and learning through experience how to attend to certain features of their environments), but also that they develop a stable disposition to respond and to act appropriately (through a sustained, mindful, and directed cultivation of habitual practice). As moral agents’ actions begin to reflect the (initially untrained) insights of their moral sensibilities, those sensibilities are strengthened and stabilized, thereby expanding their capacities to transform their insights into a stable foundation of what Francisco Varela has called embodied "ethical know-how". Through repeated activity such know-how is employed and, by way of direct feedback, fine-tuned and increased. Through this process, moral maturity is achieved.

I have argued that the mature moral agent does not need to guide her actions according to moral principles. This is not because she has these principles memorized or has somehow internalized them, but rather because she has developed the skill necessary to interact with the world in a way that reflects what these principles are, themselves, attempting to capture. Thus, she lives a morally excellent life not because she has it in her mind to do so, but because she has mastered the ability to intuitively recognize and respond to the moral complexities of her environments. In this sense, the world has become a moral landscape and she moves through it effortlessly – with compassion, awareness, and grace.