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The dynamics of conventional morality in ordinary social life
0
0732-I 18x/88 $3.00+0.00 1988 Pergamon Press plc
THE DYNAMICS OF CONVENTIONAL MORALITY ORDINARY SOCIAL LIFE Review of Moralities
IN
of Everyday Life by John Sabini and Maury Silver, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982
JOHN SNAREY* and STEPHANIE EWING+ *Ethics and Human Development, Emory University, Bishops Hall, Atlanta, GA 30322, U.S.A. +Department of Psychology, Weliesley College, Freeman Hall, Wellesley, MA 02181, U.S.A. This book is about the conventional sins of everyday life-envy, moral reproach, conformity, gossip, flirtation, procrastination, and anger. These diverse topics are loosely unified under the theme that morality is central to ordinary social life. The authors are concerned with the psychology of morality as an everyday occurrence, rather than as a formal philosophical system, and so attempt to link morality and intentionality to the social world with terms familiar to the common person. From the book’s title, which parallels T/X Psychopathology of Eueqduy Life (S. Freud, 1901/1960), one might guess that the authors take a Freudian approach to morality, but they do not. From the book’s subject, one might guess that they align themselves with a Kohlbergian perspective on moral development, but they do not. The authors claim to be doing social psychology but, as they acknowledge, they do not do classic social psychology and, in fact, scorn the importance of empirical research, which forms the foundation of classic social psychology. Their aim is to demonstrate that social psychology can be more effective if it moves away from the laboratory setting and toward the “real approach, they analyze “ordinary language world.” Using a quasi-linguistic philosophy” and construct ideal types based on the distinctions and meanings inherent in everyday language. Even here, however, their approach does not fit neatly into any particular school of linguistics. So what are the authors really doing ? Despite their protest that their perspective is antithetical to Kohlberg’s, their approach bears an uncanny yet innovative similarity to his work. Like Kohlberg (1981, 1985), they focus on the language that people use in moral reasoning. One of their goals, like Kohlberg’s, is to provide an understanding of the implicit grammar or underlying structure of moral reasoning. Kolberg’s recent emphasis on the “social-moral atmosphere” of a situation also parallels their more in-depth consideration of the social context of moral reasoning. Sabini and Silver do differ radically from Kohlberg, however, in that they do not take a developmental perspective since they focus only on the conventional moral reasoning of adults. Herein, however, lies the major strength of the book. It is one thing for Kohlberg to say that individuals
261
J. Snarey and S. Ewing
262 functioning
at the
interpersonal demonstrate
and institutional expectations, but it is quite a different thing to how this conformist and conventional reasoning occurs. Sabini and
third
or
Silver assist in understanding how the conventional mind Unfortunately, chapters ranges brilliance.
fourth
stage
of
moral
development
conform
this latter process by giving us a detailed look works in a number of everyday moral situations.
the body of from boring
this book is very uneven. and confused, to quite
to
at
The quality of the intriguing, to near
The chapter on procrastination best illustrates the depth of confusion that can be found in the book. In this essay, the authors spend ten pages simply defining four different strains of procrastination. They are: (a) meeting a less important obligation instead of completing the project, (b) giving up a substantial pleasure to meet an obligation but instead frittering away the time, (c) attempting to show one’s self as a diligent worker but only working sporadically, and (d) lacking the correct schedule to accomplish the desired end. The differences between these four categories are so trivial that it is difficult to understand why the authors spend an entire chapter attempting to illustrate them. Furthermore, the authors’ attempt to link procrastination with morality is not successful. The origin of this failure is ironic. Although they obsess over the varieties of procrastination, they never clearly define the broad underlying concepts of morality and social sins. However, there is one saving point to the chapter, the observation that, “Only agents capable of recognizing what they ought to do are capable of procrastinating; it is an irrationality parasitic on rationality” (p. 130). The chapter does illustrate how irrational thinking can be fitted into a rational framework. The chapter on flirtation is the best example of the new and creative light that this work sheds on the field of social psychology. Sabini and Silver’s in-depth analysis of flirting and the role that it plays in everyday life is both amusing and thought-provoking. Many creative situations are invoked to aid in an explanation of the different purposes for and types of flirtation. The authors make a wonderful analogy between flirtation and a chess game. Certain behaviors and strategies are used in both cases. Both of the activities have a defined purpose: in the chess game the object is to mate your opponent, in flirtation the purpose is to get your partner to acknowledge a desire for sexual intimacy. They go on to explain that in flirtation, this mating motive must be veiled because if it is revealed, element
the game is often lost. Flirtation, for them , must always contain some of ambiguity. Ambiguity can be seen as a halfway point between intention and coincidence; it is of the greatest importance to prospective flirts because when engaging in a flirtation, they must struggle to disguise their intentions to gain the desired end. “Once intentions are clear, flirtation is over, although its fruit may still remain to be enjoyed” (p. 116). They use examples such as “Does Debbie’s bumping into Andy on the corner as she comes out of work three days in a row mean that he’s waiting for her or do they just get out of work at the same time?” The intention is obscured by the fact that it could just be a coincidence Other types reaction
(e.g.,
that Debbie and Andy happen to get out of work at the same time. of ambiguities that Sabini and Silver discuss are ambiguities of Why
is this person
laughing?
Is it because
I’m funny
or because
Dynamics
of conventional
morality
263
my sports jacket is tasteless?) and ambiguities of intentional action (e.g., Is she helping me because she’s nice or does she like me?). It is this level of ambiguity that differentiates a flirt from a tease. A tease is someone who “declares intent and then reneges on commitment,” while a flirt never explicitly reveals intent. The tease could be seen as operating on a preconventional level of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development because such persons are concerned only with themselves. They have no respect for the “rules” of flirtation; in a sense, they play unfairly. On the other hand, flirts respect and uphold the rules of flirtation. They also respect, in some conventional sense, the rights and feelings of the person with whom they are flirting. This chapter contains a great deal of interesting observations and innovative theorizing. The most outstanding chapter is called, “Destroying the Innocent with a Clear Conscience.” Treated as a case study, the Holocaust serves as a paradoxically perfect example to explore and analyze “the evil that good people do.” This chapter also makes excellent use of the most famous studies in the history of social psychology-a rather ironic fact, given the author’s rejection of the experimental method. Sabini and Silver begin their explanation of the Holocaust by showing their readers how murder had become institutionalized, and evil, bureaucratized. The people who ran the camps did not feel responsible for the destruction of human beings; they just felt that they were doing their jobs well. Stanley Milgram called this the “agentic state” due to the fact that the people who actually carry out the orders no longer feel responsible for their actionsthey are merely agents of a higher power (1963, 1964, 1974). Using Milgram’s obedience studies to illustrate that even good people could be coerced into following evil orders if the situational pressure was strong enough, Sabini and Silver help us understand how something as horrendous as the Holocaust could have occurred, and still could occur. Both the Asch (1952, 1956) and the Zimbardo (Zimbardo & Ebbesen, 1969) experiments illustrate the power that both the actions of others and situational pressures have upon our behavior. The Asch line study illustrated how strong the pressure to conform to a group norm can be. The Zinibardo prison experiment transformed a group of white, middle class college men into either prisoners or guards through the use of situational pressures. Sabini and Silver use the example of a new female Nazi concentration camp guard whose change in behavior was due to the pressure to conform to the moral conventions of the other guards rather than to her own prediliction toward violence. In the Zimbardo prison experiment, as well as in the Nazi concentration camps, the moral norm was not clearly established until it was too late to stop the “moral drift” and the level of conventional morality had fallen to new depths. “Moral drift” is a key concept here. It refers to a phenomenon that occurs when no one in a situation is willing to reproach anyone else, and consequently no crystallization of moral norms occurs. This is a very serious occurrence because the most brutal member of the group is allowed to direct the actions of the entire group. According to Sabini and Silver, this is what occurred in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The issue of responsibility is also brought up in connection with the Holocaust.
264
J. Snarey and S. Ewing
Many of the participants did not feel at all responsible for their actions because they were “just doing as they were told.” Sabim and Silver explain masterfully the differences between feeling responsible for one’s actions and actually being morally responsible for the same actions: “We may feel responsible only for what we intend; but we are responsible for all that we do” (p. 66). This quotation effectively summarizes the authors’ position in regard to moral responsibility. Although it could be argued that Eichmann did not “intend” to kill millions of Jewish people, the fact is that he is responsible for all of the deaths that resulted from the evil that he organized. This chapter allows us to understand that the Holocaust was not an abberation of its time but a meeting of mundane circumstances in a deadly combination that could conceivably occur at any time. Sabini and Silver’s brilliant essay on the Holocaust, however, must be seen in the light of what it does not do and what it probably did not intend to do. Just as the classic experiments of social psychology are quite limited in their ability to explain why some subjects, in fact, did not conform, the authors also do not explain why some German citizens did in fact heroically resist Nazism while others exhibited a sadistic contempt for human rights prior to joining Hitler’s reign of terror. To even begin to understand the resistance of Raoul Wallenberg, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and many others (Fogelman & Weiner, 1985), one must concurrently consider that moral action also varies as a function of individual psychological factors such as moral development and ego maturity (Lickona, 1976; A. Freud, 1936/1977). For instance, in an extreme situation where 95 percent of the people involved conform to an unfair practice, the more interesting question is, what is it about the 5 percent that enabled them not to conform. Moralities of Everyday Life is a daringly innovative, if uneven, work, which allows its readers to see beyond the traditional boundary lines of social psychology. Through its method of analysis and subject material, it brings social psychology together with the different fields of analytical philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. Sabini and Silver do not draw together many of their ideas into one cohesive work; as the authors state, “Our method will lead in the end to an incoherent collection of particular insights, not an integrated theory” (p. 11). However, despite the unevenness and lack of unity that characterizes their theoretical achievements, this book is worth reading for the insight it gives into the worst tragedy of the twentieth century and into the mundane tragedies of everyday life. REFERENCES Asch S. (1952) Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Asch S. (1956) Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70(g), 177-190. Fogelman E., & Weiner V. L. (1985) The few, the brave, the noble. Psychology Today, 19(g), 61-65. Freud A. (1936/1977) The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense. New York: International University Press. Freud S. (190 111960) The Psychopathology o/Everyday Life. London: Hogarth Press. Kohlberg L. (1981) The Philosophy ofMoral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg L. (1985) The Psychology of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
265
Dynamics of conventional morality Lickona T. (Ed.) (1976) Moral Development and Behavior. New Winston. Milgram S. (1963) Behavioral study of obedience. Journal Psychology,
York:
Holt, Rinehart
oJ Abnormal
and
&
Social
7, 371-378.
Milgram S. (1964) Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human Relations, 18, 57-76. Milgram S. (1974) Obedience to authority: Experimental view. New York: Harper & Row. Zimbardo P., & Ebbesen E. (1969) Influencing attitudes and changing behavior. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
‘
0732-I 18x/88 $3.00+0.00 1988 Pergamon Press plc
THE DYNAMICS OF CONVENTIONAL MORALITY ORDINARY SOCIAL LIFE Review of Moralities
IN
of Everyday Life by John Sabini and Maury Silver, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982
JOHN SNAREY* and STEPHANIE EWING+ *Ethics and Human Development, Emory University, Bishops Hall, Atlanta, GA 30322, U.S.A. +Department of Psychology, Weliesley College, Freeman Hall, Wellesley, MA 02181, U.S.A. This book is about the conventional sins of everyday life-envy, moral reproach, conformity, gossip, flirtation, procrastination, and anger. These diverse topics are loosely unified under the theme that morality is central to ordinary social life. The authors are concerned with the psychology of morality as an everyday occurrence, rather than as a formal philosophical system, and so attempt to link morality and intentionality to the social world with terms familiar to the common person. From the book’s title, which parallels T/X Psychopathology of Eueqduy Life (S. Freud, 1901/1960), one might guess that the authors take a Freudian approach to morality, but they do not. From the book’s subject, one might guess that they align themselves with a Kohlbergian perspective on moral development, but they do not. The authors claim to be doing social psychology but, as they acknowledge, they do not do classic social psychology and, in fact, scorn the importance of empirical research, which forms the foundation of classic social psychology. Their aim is to demonstrate that social psychology can be more effective if it moves away from the laboratory setting and toward the “real approach, they analyze “ordinary language world.” Using a quasi-linguistic philosophy” and construct ideal types based on the distinctions and meanings inherent in everyday language. Even here, however, their approach does not fit neatly into any particular school of linguistics. So what are the authors really doing ? Despite their protest that their perspective is antithetical to Kohlberg’s, their approach bears an uncanny yet innovative similarity to his work. Like Kohlberg (1981, 1985), they focus on the language that people use in moral reasoning. One of their goals, like Kohlberg’s, is to provide an understanding of the implicit grammar or underlying structure of moral reasoning. Kolberg’s recent emphasis on the “social-moral atmosphere” of a situation also parallels their more in-depth consideration of the social context of moral reasoning. Sabini and Silver do differ radically from Kohlberg, however, in that they do not take a developmental perspective since they focus only on the conventional moral reasoning of adults. Herein, however, lies the major strength of the book. It is one thing for Kohlberg to say that individuals
261
J. Snarey and S. Ewing
262 functioning
at the
interpersonal demonstrate
and institutional expectations, but it is quite a different thing to how this conformist and conventional reasoning occurs. Sabini and
third
or
Silver assist in understanding how the conventional mind Unfortunately, chapters ranges brilliance.
fourth
stage
of
moral
development
conform
this latter process by giving us a detailed look works in a number of everyday moral situations.
the body of from boring
this book is very uneven. and confused, to quite
to
at
The quality of the intriguing, to near
The chapter on procrastination best illustrates the depth of confusion that can be found in the book. In this essay, the authors spend ten pages simply defining four different strains of procrastination. They are: (a) meeting a less important obligation instead of completing the project, (b) giving up a substantial pleasure to meet an obligation but instead frittering away the time, (c) attempting to show one’s self as a diligent worker but only working sporadically, and (d) lacking the correct schedule to accomplish the desired end. The differences between these four categories are so trivial that it is difficult to understand why the authors spend an entire chapter attempting to illustrate them. Furthermore, the authors’ attempt to link procrastination with morality is not successful. The origin of this failure is ironic. Although they obsess over the varieties of procrastination, they never clearly define the broad underlying concepts of morality and social sins. However, there is one saving point to the chapter, the observation that, “Only agents capable of recognizing what they ought to do are capable of procrastinating; it is an irrationality parasitic on rationality” (p. 130). The chapter does illustrate how irrational thinking can be fitted into a rational framework. The chapter on flirtation is the best example of the new and creative light that this work sheds on the field of social psychology. Sabini and Silver’s in-depth analysis of flirting and the role that it plays in everyday life is both amusing and thought-provoking. Many creative situations are invoked to aid in an explanation of the different purposes for and types of flirtation. The authors make a wonderful analogy between flirtation and a chess game. Certain behaviors and strategies are used in both cases. Both of the activities have a defined purpose: in the chess game the object is to mate your opponent, in flirtation the purpose is to get your partner to acknowledge a desire for sexual intimacy. They go on to explain that in flirtation, this mating motive must be veiled because if it is revealed, element
the game is often lost. Flirtation, for them , must always contain some of ambiguity. Ambiguity can be seen as a halfway point between intention and coincidence; it is of the greatest importance to prospective flirts because when engaging in a flirtation, they must struggle to disguise their intentions to gain the desired end. “Once intentions are clear, flirtation is over, although its fruit may still remain to be enjoyed” (p. 116). They use examples such as “Does Debbie’s bumping into Andy on the corner as she comes out of work three days in a row mean that he’s waiting for her or do they just get out of work at the same time?” The intention is obscured by the fact that it could just be a coincidence Other types reaction
(e.g.,
that Debbie and Andy happen to get out of work at the same time. of ambiguities that Sabini and Silver discuss are ambiguities of Why
is this person
laughing?
Is it because
I’m funny
or because
Dynamics
of conventional
morality
263
my sports jacket is tasteless?) and ambiguities of intentional action (e.g., Is she helping me because she’s nice or does she like me?). It is this level of ambiguity that differentiates a flirt from a tease. A tease is someone who “declares intent and then reneges on commitment,” while a flirt never explicitly reveals intent. The tease could be seen as operating on a preconventional level of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development because such persons are concerned only with themselves. They have no respect for the “rules” of flirtation; in a sense, they play unfairly. On the other hand, flirts respect and uphold the rules of flirtation. They also respect, in some conventional sense, the rights and feelings of the person with whom they are flirting. This chapter contains a great deal of interesting observations and innovative theorizing. The most outstanding chapter is called, “Destroying the Innocent with a Clear Conscience.” Treated as a case study, the Holocaust serves as a paradoxically perfect example to explore and analyze “the evil that good people do.” This chapter also makes excellent use of the most famous studies in the history of social psychology-a rather ironic fact, given the author’s rejection of the experimental method. Sabini and Silver begin their explanation of the Holocaust by showing their readers how murder had become institutionalized, and evil, bureaucratized. The people who ran the camps did not feel responsible for the destruction of human beings; they just felt that they were doing their jobs well. Stanley Milgram called this the “agentic state” due to the fact that the people who actually carry out the orders no longer feel responsible for their actionsthey are merely agents of a higher power (1963, 1964, 1974). Using Milgram’s obedience studies to illustrate that even good people could be coerced into following evil orders if the situational pressure was strong enough, Sabini and Silver help us understand how something as horrendous as the Holocaust could have occurred, and still could occur. Both the Asch (1952, 1956) and the Zimbardo (Zimbardo & Ebbesen, 1969) experiments illustrate the power that both the actions of others and situational pressures have upon our behavior. The Asch line study illustrated how strong the pressure to conform to a group norm can be. The Zinibardo prison experiment transformed a group of white, middle class college men into either prisoners or guards through the use of situational pressures. Sabini and Silver use the example of a new female Nazi concentration camp guard whose change in behavior was due to the pressure to conform to the moral conventions of the other guards rather than to her own prediliction toward violence. In the Zimbardo prison experiment, as well as in the Nazi concentration camps, the moral norm was not clearly established until it was too late to stop the “moral drift” and the level of conventional morality had fallen to new depths. “Moral drift” is a key concept here. It refers to a phenomenon that occurs when no one in a situation is willing to reproach anyone else, and consequently no crystallization of moral norms occurs. This is a very serious occurrence because the most brutal member of the group is allowed to direct the actions of the entire group. According to Sabini and Silver, this is what occurred in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The issue of responsibility is also brought up in connection with the Holocaust.
264
J. Snarey and S. Ewing
Many of the participants did not feel at all responsible for their actions because they were “just doing as they were told.” Sabim and Silver explain masterfully the differences between feeling responsible for one’s actions and actually being morally responsible for the same actions: “We may feel responsible only for what we intend; but we are responsible for all that we do” (p. 66). This quotation effectively summarizes the authors’ position in regard to moral responsibility. Although it could be argued that Eichmann did not “intend” to kill millions of Jewish people, the fact is that he is responsible for all of the deaths that resulted from the evil that he organized. This chapter allows us to understand that the Holocaust was not an abberation of its time but a meeting of mundane circumstances in a deadly combination that could conceivably occur at any time. Sabini and Silver’s brilliant essay on the Holocaust, however, must be seen in the light of what it does not do and what it probably did not intend to do. Just as the classic experiments of social psychology are quite limited in their ability to explain why some subjects, in fact, did not conform, the authors also do not explain why some German citizens did in fact heroically resist Nazism while others exhibited a sadistic contempt for human rights prior to joining Hitler’s reign of terror. To even begin to understand the resistance of Raoul Wallenberg, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and many others (Fogelman & Weiner, 1985), one must concurrently consider that moral action also varies as a function of individual psychological factors such as moral development and ego maturity (Lickona, 1976; A. Freud, 1936/1977). For instance, in an extreme situation where 95 percent of the people involved conform to an unfair practice, the more interesting question is, what is it about the 5 percent that enabled them not to conform. Moralities of Everyday Life is a daringly innovative, if uneven, work, which allows its readers to see beyond the traditional boundary lines of social psychology. Through its method of analysis and subject material, it brings social psychology together with the different fields of analytical philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. Sabini and Silver do not draw together many of their ideas into one cohesive work; as the authors state, “Our method will lead in the end to an incoherent collection of particular insights, not an integrated theory” (p. 11). However, despite the unevenness and lack of unity that characterizes their theoretical achievements, this book is worth reading for the insight it gives into the worst tragedy of the twentieth century and into the mundane tragedies of everyday life. REFERENCES Asch S. (1952) Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Asch S. (1956) Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70(g), 177-190. Fogelman E., & Weiner V. L. (1985) The few, the brave, the noble. Psychology Today, 19(g), 61-65. Freud A. (1936/1977) The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense. New York: International University Press. Freud S. (190 111960) The Psychopathology o/Everyday Life. London: Hogarth Press. Kohlberg L. (1981) The Philosophy ofMoral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kohlberg L. (1985) The Psychology of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
265
Dynamics of conventional morality Lickona T. (Ed.) (1976) Moral Development and Behavior. New Winston. Milgram S. (1963) Behavioral study of obedience. Journal Psychology,
York:
Holt, Rinehart
oJ Abnormal
and
&
Social
7, 371-378.
Milgram S. (1964) Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human Relations, 18, 57-76. Milgram S. (1974) Obedience to authority: Experimental view. New York: Harper & Row. Zimbardo P., & Ebbesen E. (1969) Influencing attitudes and changing behavior. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
‘