Towards a System of Ethics

My name is Will Holcomb and I am a 20-year old computer science major. I come from outside of a small town called Bluff City in upper-east Tennessee. I have been at Tennessee Tech for two and a half years. I am currently a member of the Honors program maintaining a fairly solid standing in my classes.

Some of the more intangible aspects of who I am are that I enjoy thinking and discussing. I enjoy interacting with people and learning about how they see the world and why they choose to live the way that they do. I have delved some into traditional philosophy, enough that I would claim to be fairly well read; at least in some of the more abstract genres. Most of my experience as of late has been with more Eastern philosophy, and my thinking has been shaded by that. One activity that I do that helps me to clear out my thoughts when I have been mulling over an idea for a while is to write. I write, much as I am writing now, fairly often. My aim is to express my thoughts and work to develop them into a coherent pattern.

Purpose

My intent with this paper is to develop a conglomeration of several of philosophical ideas into a larger whole in such a way that they describe a system of ethical thought and the aspects of reality that make using the system advantageous. Because I consider the nature of moral action to be something that is larger than specific issues or scenarios most of this paper will deal not with any specific issue within the realm of computer science, but I will give some examples of how the system can be applied to computer science issues at the end of the paper.

Another non-traditional aspect of how I am writing this paper is the style of writing that I am going to use. As you may have noticed already I am breaking a couple of the traditional rules for a formal essay in the style of writing that I am using. I just referred to the reader directly calling whoever you are "you;" a definite faux pas in a traditional essay. I find that a less formal style of writing works better both for my expression of what I am trying to say and for the reader's comprehension of what I am describing. For that reason I am using a more conversational style rather than something more formal.

Rationality

The basest definition of rationality is that things happen for reasons. That is to say that if you put a pot of water on the stove and turn on the eye, assuming that everything is functioning as it was designed to, that the water will heat up. Also that if you take this paper and hold it in midair and let it go that it will fall, or that if it does not fall that there is some reason that it does not. Rationality is based upon a relationship between things. To carry rationality to its extremity is to be a determinist, for it is to say that all things are in relationship and that the state of all things is a product of that relationship.

The human element becomes a question at this point because most people operate as though they were imbued with free-will. Is this will a delusion? The answer to that question depends on the definition of free-will. If one means that free will is the capacity to act without any regard for the circumstances surrounding the actions, then yes, free-will is a delusion. People do not act without motivation. However, if free-will is the capacity for choice then it is by no means delusion. A person has at any time the capacity to make any choice out of those available. I have on the table beside me right now a knife, it is one of my possible choices to pick up that knife and cut myself, I am not going to however. I choose my course of action according to my experiences and my preferences, and in my experience cutting myself with that knife would not be pleasant. I am making a choice to do something based on information. I have the capacity at this point to do any number of things but my understanding of my relationship with my surroundings dictates which choice I am going to make.

Another issue that is commonly a question at this point is God. If God exists then surely God is above the purview of the system. The concept of a deity that is governed by deterministic laws is unappealing to most people. Yet rarely is a viable alternative offered; a God that was not determined would be one who spontaneously acted without any input from anywhere. That is not what is commonly described as God. The God that most people talk about is an entity that act with the best interest of humanity at heart, not just a random force spontaneously doing things with no reason. The mind of God is frequently described; to have a mind is to operate according to information and thus to be determined.

Limits On Rationality

Despite my beliefs about the rational nature of the universe I am not a rationalist (in the traditional sense at least) for a couple of reasons. The first is the basis of a new science that is emerging known as chaos theory. The basic premise is that though the elements of the world do operate in relationship with one another that the nature of that relationship is so complex that it is impossible to encapsulate it. The concept is that the complexity of the relationship between things goes ad infinitum above and below a point in the system, not only that but a decision is extended throughout time and it is impossible to compute the ramifications of a decision through time. The basic idea behind being a rationalist is that you figure out what the ramifications of your action will be and then you act so as to bring your objective into being.

There is no absolute knowledge provided by rationality. Robert Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance says: [This is a shortened version of the excerpt, which I am using in the interest of preserving space. A longer form is available in the appendix and if the idea is unclear I would recommend reading that before continuing.]

The flaw in rationality that Pirsig is pointing out ties in with chaos theory and it is this flaw that is the usual fatal error of most rationalists; that rational explanations for causes and events do not exist outside of the mind of the creator. Rational theories are a method for explaining information gathered; one is better than another only in the sense that it is more complete in its explanation of observations; as Pirsig later says, it is simply more convenient.

Another aspect of the flaw with trying to use the rational system to prove anything absolute is that, as Werner Heisenburg said, that it is fallacious to operate as though the observer and the event being observed are separate entities not in a relationship with one another. A person's understanding of the world shades incoming data so that it fits into the existing rational system. The primary benefit of an understanding of the world is that it allows us to interact with our environment, in that process of understanding we are constantly discerning about different pieces of information whether they are important enough to be recognized and when they are recognized how they exist in relation to other things.

Then there is the matter of value and meaning. Existential philosophy is based upon a lack of inherent meaning provided in the universe. One can say that the universe operates in a certain rational matter, but rationality is incapable of answering the question "Why?" Rational systems are constructed by using fundamental assumptions called axioms and by combining those assumptions and building upon them. Value judgements are axiomatic by their nature. Again, I have my knife here by my side, why do I not cut myself? Yes it is true that I will experience pain if I do so, why is it better not to experience pain than it is too experience pain? Yes, if I damage my body I might be less socially desirable and might be shunned by my peers, why is it better to be liked than to be disliked? Yes, since I am now in a public place, I might be taken away and out in an insane asylum, why is it better to be where I am rather than in an asylum? There are people known as ascetics who for religious purposes eat just enough to survive and live so as to increase their physical suffering through deprivation of their senses; their understanding of the world drives them to decrease their physical comfort just as mine just as mine oftentimes drives me to increase mine. What comparisons can be made between our belief systems?

I do not believe however that all values are equal. Some are more in harmony with reality than others. That belief has ramifications in how I see the world and it is at this point that the cross between the objective and the subjective occurs. I cannot describe a relationship of objects or a system of thought that proves that it is true that it is a higher value to preserve life than to destroy it. Yet I believe that to be true. Rationally the statement is axiomatic unless it can be broken down into a set of more basic values (for example preserving the lives of the people in the computer lab where I am now working would be a value because one of the possible repercussions of killing all of these people would be that I would probably go to jail and in jail my personal physical comfort would be reduced and my freedom would be inhibited, and my personal comfort and freedom are things that I value.)

Morality

The basic idea that I have been presenting is that people are making decisions based upon information. Hundreds and hundreds of times a day every person makes decisions; they have a nearly infinite number of choices to choose from (though most of the time they are only consciously aware of a few) and they make choices. Each time they make a choice they are also making the statement, "based on what I value and my understanding of reality this choice is the best possible choice for me to make." Morality is about what criteria a person uses to make that decision.

Moral and Ethical Models

Several developmental psychologists have presented models of how they think that a person's moral criteria change over the course of a lifetime. One of the most widely recognized is a man named Lawrence Kohlberg who wrote a book called Moral Development. A brief summary of Kohlberg's model goes as follows: [this is a summary a summary of the model as presented by James Rushing in the Tennessee Technological Universities Honors Program Handbook. For Mr. Rushing's original summary see the appendix, for Kohlberg's original work see The Meaning and Measurement of Moral Development by Lawrence Kohlberg published in 1981 by Clark University, Heinz Werner Institute. Also, the current version of the Honor's Handbook may be found online at http://www.tntech.edu/www/acad/honors/handbook/ (as of December 7, 1998 when I am writing this.)]

Kohlberg describes 6 basic stages and then a hypothetical seventh stage. His model again is about why people choose the things that they chose. In stage one they choose to do things because they want to avoid getting hurt. I do not cut myself with the knife because I do not want to experience pain. Stage two encompasses stage one, but adds another aspect, now I still will not cut myself with the knife because I do not want to get hurt, but there is the added possibility that I will do something in order to get a reward. People who exist completely in stages one and two are mainly small children; I will not cross the road because I do not want to get spanked and I will use the potty because I get candy for doing so. Stage three has an increased awareness of the desire to fit in and be a part of a social group. I will now do things because everyone else is doing it. Again, motivations from stages one and two are still present, but I am willing to do things that will not get me a physical reward or will even cause me physical pain in order to stay true to my social group. Stage four expands the concept of peer group; in three a person would be willing to steal from the store because in the grand scheme of us versus them (the person's social group being us and the rest of the world being them,) it is ok to do things to "them" that it is not ok to do to "us." In stage four the us is expanded to include all of society, so it is no longer considered ok to steal from the store. Stage 5 again sees an expansion of peer group as well as an internalization of value. Whereas in four a person has a fixation on rules and laws, in five the person attempts to define morality in terms of intrinsic value. Stage 6 sees a final expansion of peer group to include all of humanity. Rather than having fixed ethical rules the person operates according to abstract ethical principles. Kohlberg also postulated that there is a seventh stage in which a person is willing to die for the moral principles that he or she has developed, though this was never firmly supported by his research.

Another commonly used model of development is one that was developed by William G. Perry and can be found in chapter 3 of The Modern American College: Responding to the New Realities of Diverse Students and a Changing Society which is a series of essays on the development of college students compiled by Arthur W. Chickering and Associates. Chapter 3 (pages 76-116) is an essay by Perry entitled "Cognitive and Ethical Growth: The Making of Meaning."

[This essay was also summarized by Rushing in the Honors Handbook (pages 69-75) and it can be found in the appendix as well.]

Perry's model is complex as well, but it shall be sufficient to say about it for this essay that as a student progresses (Perry's research was on college students ages 18-25) that there is an internalization of value and also that the perception of reality goes from dualistic to multiplistic to relativistic.

Recap

To recap what I have said thus far before continuing: I have talked about the world operating as a rational system but have talked about some of the pitfalls of traditional rationalism. Also I have talked about what ethics is and what some of the current thought on what development into mature ethical thinking looks like. As I continue I am going to delve more into a subject that I touched on in the description of rationalism; the existence of value.

God

The question that I brought up in the section on rationalism that I said that rationality could not handle was that of value. What makes one course of action more valuable than another? Rationality deals with the objective and this question falls outside of its purview because it is a question which cannot be deal with objectively.

Attempts have been made to define value within a rational system, most notably Darwin's natural selection. It said that the highest value that a creature could have was to pass on as much of its genetic material as possible to the next generation. This creates a stable rational system. Organisms exist so as to pass on their genetic material to future generations and in the human aspect, social structures are developed so as to see that the human species is propagated to the greatest extent possible. This creates a scientific motivation for action.

I am going to posit at this point something about the decision making process in people. Anything that a person chooses to do they choose to do because they believe on some level that whatever they are doing is the right thing to do. A person's defining criteria for what distinguishes right from wrong is at its most fundamental aspect emotive. Thoughts and rationalizations affect the emotive aspect, but what allows a person to say that one course of action is right and another course of action is wrong is something emotive, not even emotive perhaps, maybe something more primitive than that, something visceral. People do not make decisions on a purely cognitive level. If for no other reason than the decision of which cognitive model of reality to choose must be based on something non-cognitive. Many people have systems of thought that they were raised in, and certainly that raising plays a part in their acceptance of that system, but even then it is the person's non-cognitive attachment to their parents and their surroundings that fuels their choice to think the way that they do.

What I am saying is that value is at its basis non-cognitive. May a qualitative difference in values be established then? In the objective world I can say that given a certain set of objectives to be accomplished and a certain set of criteria to meet then any number of processes can be compared and one can be said to be quantitatively more efficient than the others. This is not possible with matters of value; it is the matters of value that establish the criteria that the system is judged by; it is impossible to use the objective process on value without incorporating value and thereby recursing.

How then may a qualitative difference between values be found? By what measure can I say that one course of action is better than another? It is possible if I agree as to the values being striven for, to figure out which method is most likely to succeed with the greatest efficiency. There is a problem though if the difference lies in the fundamental values being striven for. I personally value truth very highly, this means that there are times in my relationships when I am honest with a person even though it causes suffering to the other person. I also value harmony and not causing suffering, but those values are lower in my hierarchy than they are for other people. Some people value harmony very highly and they will rank it above honesty more readily than I. Which way of seeing things is right? Is there any way of distinguishing between the two ways of valuation or are they, (as the philosophy of subjective relativism says,) separate but equal?

Progression in Perry's model encompasses this question. As the student progresses there is a shift from accepting the values that they have been raised with to formulating their own values and expressing them. The transition between having external authority figures which dictate a right and all other ways of valuing are wrong (dualism) to the student becoming a source of authority on his or her own and seeing all values as expressed contextually (relativism) is marked by a transition where the student thinks that all values are equal (multiplicity.) This occurs in the space where the dominance of external authorities has been removed and the student has not yet discovered another method of discrimination other than external authority. The student looks to the outside world to provide him or her with some reason why one value is greater than another and it is not possible to find it. There is a difference in the values, but the method of knowing that difference is internal and contextual.

The difference between one value and another is not simply personal opinion. There is a qualitative difference that people around the world who have worked on developing mature values systems agree with in a general sense. For example, the "golden rule" of treat other people as you would like to be treated has shown up many many times over the centuries in many different traditions [for a listing of several times that this concept has shown up in the major religious traditions see an excerpt from an essay by Joseph Fletcher taken from his chapter, "Love Is Life's Best Guide," in Constructing a Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints found in the appendix.] Is this coincidental or is there some influence at play in all of these situations that caused this similar theme to appear?

It is within the realm of reason that the reoccurring development of similar themes throughout time in different individuals and different cultures is simply a product of chance or of some other consequence other than a qualitative difference in value. As I said earlier the qualitative nature of value is by its nature outside of the purview of traditional rationalism. I cannot offer a definitive proof one way or another.

It is certainly a plausible system though that a qualitative difference in value does exist and that this qualitative difference can be perceived through some method that is not verifiable objectively. Perhaps it is because this difference is extant in some form that is not discernable by known methods. Perhaps it is simply a species or life consciousness developed through evolution. Perhaps all of humanity's current understanding of reality is preparing to undergo a radical paradigm shift and the inclusion of perception and consciousness will be a part of the reformed paradigm. Those theories exist, but they are outside of the scope of this paper. I do know that I perceive a qualitative difference between different values and that other people perceive this difference as well and that there are several theories of how the reality exists in order to maintain this difference.

Ego Boundaries

[Again for the sake of preserving space there is a more complex discussion of ego boundaries from M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth to be found in the appendix.] The basic idea put forward by Peck in The Road Less Traveled is that ego boundaries are the limits on what aspect of your experience you treat as extensions of yourself. Peck is putting a meaningful life in terms of a life lived as an expression of love, love being for him centered around nurturing your own spiritual growth or someone else's. He describes a state that it is possible to reach after a while from which a person has extended their ego boundaries to include all of the world around them; this is much like what Buddhist monk and theologian, Thich Nhat Hahn, is describing in his poem "Call Me By My True Names" from his book Being Peace [yet again, for a complete rendition of "Call Me By My True Names" see the appendix.]

The idea that is presented in Peck, and it is presented in a lot of modern psychotherapy as well as in many of esoteric religious traditions, is that there is an understanding of reality which clarifies motivation for action without creating a deviation from reality in the person experiencing it. That is to say that a person acts rightly all of the time and they do so without wondering whether they should have done something else. It is possible to be this way simply by not caring about other people, what I am describing is not that. This way of acting is inherently a connection to the world around a person and they are aware of the affects of their actions on other people.

This is called in many religious traditions to be a loss of self and becoming an extension of God's will rather than a discrete entity. People who claim to do this type of thing are considered by researchers in morality to have extremely well developed morals. Also the experience of their life is more peaceful and they experience a greater depth and breadth of feeling. There are a variety of affective reasons that this practice of "annihilation into God" or "expansion of ego boundaries" or "integration of personality traits" is a valuable experience.

Practice

One question that is oftentimes asked is how to do it. A major part of this process for most people, in the beginning at least, is coming to terms with who you are. Many people are driven by fears and patterns of behavior learned in childhood that are no longer appropriate. Those who recognize what is driving them rarely enjoy being driven by fear. They desire to stop, but do not know how.

Evelyn Underhill in her book Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness presents a model based upon the life of Saint John of the Cross which describes the transitions that a person goes through in the process of refining their concept of reality. The model has five stages, first stage is awakening where a person realizes that there is a problem with how they see reality. Next comes the process of purgation where the old concept of reality is reformed to provide a clearer picture. Once the purgation is finished the person reaches a point of illumination where they have put together a new working picture of reality. These three stages are repeated in cycles for different aspects of a person's concept of reality. After a time comes the dark night of the soul; up to this point there has been an underlying concept of how the universe works that has been providing the basis for the processes of awakening, purgation, and illumination, the dark night of the soul is the time when that fundamental understanding is purged. It is much like a purgation except an order of magnitude more frightening and painful. Once the dark night of the soul is passed through comes the final stage of unification where a person is one with God.

People who are beginning in the process of unification are oftentimes disgruntled at awakening because they understand that they have a problem, but they do not know how to go about making changes. There are a variety of tools available from both psychotherapy and religious traditions to help a person make changes in themselves.

Paths

What I am describing is not only a method for making morally correct decisions, but also a method for achieving satisfaction with life. There are a good many people who are claiming to have these things and much of the time the concept of having an enjoyable life is separated from the concept of having a morally correct life. Those who have devoted their existence to pleasure are depicted as being deeply involved in physical experiences; sex, drugs, rock and roll, etc. That doesn't hold true here because the focus shifts from the physical to the spiritual or emotional, and the activities which are oftentimes pleasurable physically have negative affects spiritually which outweigh the physical gains.

The question that is essential at this point is "how does one tell what is right?" As I was saying earlier there is always somewhere a feeling of rightness. To some extent the process of decision making is always self-centered. As Peck describes though, through the extension of ego boundaries the self can be expanded to a point where a person is considering all life everywhere when making a decision, so though the decision remains self-centered it is essentially selfless because of the extent to which the self is expanded.

Still, what the best process is to expand the self I have not said. This is because of the varieties of religious experience and the differing needs of people. [See Ramakrishna in the appendix.] Not only that, but oftentimes a path is only a partial solution and it must be adapted to suit individual needs. The entire process of "spiritual growth" is very complicated and it requires much discipline and awareness. [See Kornfield in the appendix.]

To explain this later I will go into a transition that I have been going through lately. When I first came to college I had several problems socially and I did not get along well with people. Also I had been raised in a fundamentalist household and I had many questions about whether the beliefs that I had held unquestioningly for all of my life were really true to me. I spent a good deal of time working to free myself of my experiences of childhood. I was having to relearn how people work so that I could interact with them better. Also I was questioning my beliefs and my reasons for having my beliefs. As with most processes like this it was a complex interplay of construction and destruction, but if there were to be a primary theme it would be that I was destroying the structures from my childhood built primarily by my parents so as to have room to create something new of my own. Having done that for a while I am approaching a point now where I have the beginnings of a slate on which to make something of my own. I have certainly begun already simply through the process of working through my past. I certainly have ideas about how the world works and what is right for me, this paper is fairly evident of that. Still though most of what I have been doing is simply letting go of things that I no longer needed. I have not been actively replacing anything. The point now is that I am wanting to chose a direction to work in.

The complexity of the paths has ramifications of right action. I cannot say "my way is right" because though my way might be very right for me it is not necessarily right for anyone else. That is not to say that I cannot have a valid opinion about the work of another person; we are still headed up the mountain and if someone is actively headed down then that is observable to me. In the philosophy of Taoism there is the concept that things are as they are. Judgments about how things ought to be is inherently false because things are as they are, there is no ought to be. Because of the complexity of how things are this is true. Sometimes a regression in the journey up the mountain is necessary for whatever reason. Different people have different aptitudes and different abilities, it is possible to compare them but not to hold them to the same standard.

Why would someone chose to suffer if they did not have to? The essence of the system that I am describing is that a person grows closer to God because they experience a more satisfying way of life. It is that increased satisfaction that is the indicator of God, inherent in the system is the fact that if a person is choosing to do something they are doing so because of an internal feeling and this feeling is the basis for discerning God. People have no choice but to grow closer to God.

This statement could be used to say that individuals then have no responsibility to work towards right action. That is not true. The drive to help people is something that becomes stronger as one progresses. To see a person live a life that they do not enjoy while knowing that there is a more satisfying way to live becomes a painful experience. Again, there is the expansion of ego boundaries so that the other becomes part of the self. It is not possible though to force someone to become more enlightened. You can force them to learn teachings and perform rituals, but you cannot force them to be more open to the experience of reality. This includes coercion by fear and threat as well as some of the more forceful methods of conversion that have been used throughout the ages.

A fundamental equation that has been present all along in this paper though I have not expressly stated it is that God is reality. Whatever reality is so is God and vice versa. Being more open to God means being more open to reality. And reality is available to everyone everywhere, a person does not need to understand in any one particular way in order to be right. The same concepts about the limitations on a rational description of realty also apply to God.

Applicability to Computer Science

This paper was not explicitly about ethics in relation to computer science thought that was the assignment. The main reason for that is that there is no ethical theory that applies specifically to computer science. The process of determining right and wrong is something that supercedes specific cases within computer science and I though that it would be better to focus on the process rather than specific cases. I am going to do a case study of my current method of distinguishing right from wrong.

Privacy and intellectual property rights are two poignant issues for me as of late. On the issue of privacy I think a lot about a person's right to maintain secrecy about their identity. Let's take the example of anonymous remailers. These are computers on the internet which a person can send a e-mail message to and the remailer will then send the message on to another party that the sender has specified, but first it removes all the identifying information from the message so that the final recipient does not know who the message came from unless it is explicitly stated in the message. Usually there is information tagged into a header that travels with an e-mail message; this information is removed by the remailer.

When I am considering a philosophical issue I try to figure out first what the essential information to the point at hand is and then focus on it and discard that which is secondary. All people set bounds in a philosophical discussion, but many do not examine their criteria for doing so. Were I would reduce this argument to a conflict of values I would say that it is the right to freedom versus the right to safety. It is the possible abuses of an anonymous remailer that give it the possibility of being immoral.

On the one hand, I think that it is very important for people to have the freedom to express themselves without fear of the repercussions. Having a method of communication that protects anonymity would allow people who have ideas that other people dislike to communicate with others without fear of negative repercussions. Also, I personally believe that if it is possible to make a new resource available to people without hurting anyone else then that resource should be made available. If no one suffers from the existence of anonymous remailers then by all means if there are people who wish to use them then let them do so.

On the other hand I believe strongly in personal responsibility. I think that people should stand up for what they believe in and be willing to accept the repercussions of their decisions. If I hold a certain viewpoint than to separate myself from that viewpoint by using anonymous methods to convey it is to an extent to say that viewpoint is inferior to those that are more accepted or at the least that I do not believe strongly enough in the viewpoint that I am willing to suffer negative repercussions for having it.

Thoreau talked about the concept of civil disobedience in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. [Not surprisingly an excerpt from Thoreau can be found in the appendix.] The basic idea that Thoreau is presenting is that it is the duty of an individual to disobey unjust laws and to do so publicly. By the vary nature of the concept of disobeying an unjust law is that the repercussions of doing so will be unfair. Thoreau says is that it is the duty of a person to disobey unjust laws and suffer the unfair consequences.

Anonymous remailers protect people from having to own the consequences of their opinions. Not everyone agrees with Thoreau though; even if one thinks that one has a responsibility to the rest of society to work towards society's improvement there are a variety of different ways to go about this process. As was said in class, many of the documents that were published by the emerging government in the American revolution were published under pseudonyms so as to protect individual's anonymity. They were working to change the system of government but had they come out with their actual identities in the beginning then the effort probably would have died. There is the case of what Mohatma Ghandi did in India; Ghandi used a system of non-violent civil disobedience influenced strongly by the essays on Christianity by Leo Tolstoy. He was working publicly to change the British control of India and eventually his efforts were successful.

Is it feasible to think that all social change can be carried out through open means? Are there cases where people working for morally superior goals must resort to morally inferior methods? Does the ends justify the means? Certainly I would not say that the ends absolutely justify any means, but is there a relationship between the two to where for something significantly important it is morally acceptable to do things that would normally be immoral?

I am rapidly reaching the point that I oftentimes reach in most philosophical thinking; a series of questions that have no answer, at least nothing definitive. The Perry model encompasses the conundrum; at the top of the Perry scale things known to be relative but they are treated as absolutes until there is reason for them to change.

Conclusion

In all ethical decisions there is room for reasonable people to disagree. The process of thinking is not so as to arrive at a permanent solution, the process of thinking is so as to refine what is available as best as can be done with the available information.

Works Cited

Appendix A:

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig; pages 38-42.

"Let's tell stories then," Chris says. He thinks for a while. "Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night."

And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven't heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can't remember any.

The way I say this makes John smile. "They contain no matter," I continue, "and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds."

The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. "Of course," I add, "the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you much to believe in, but that's scientific too."

"No he wasn't. He said that when people haven't been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that."

I laugh. "I guess I'm going to have to take that back a little," I say. "I was thinking of European ghosts."

I think a little and say, "Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I'm not saying is completely wrong. Science isn't part of the Indian tradition."

"Tow White Bear said his mother and father told him not to believe all that stuff. But his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it."

He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. "Sure," I say, reversing myself, "I believe in ghosts too."

Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I'm not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.

"It's completely natural," I say, "to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other point of view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It's all but completely impossible to image a world where ghosts can actually exist."

"My own opinion is that the intellect of modern isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too."

"Oh, the laws of physics and of logic -- the number system -- the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real."

So I go on. "For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity."

"What I'm driving at," I say, "is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed."

"Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind because there wasn't anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere -- this law of gravity existed?"

"If that law of gravity existed," I say, "I honestly don't know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that law of gravity didn't have. And yet it is still common sense' to believe that it existed."

"Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

"And what that means," I say before he can interrupt, "and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It's a ghost! We are all of very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own."

"You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?"

"You've heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it."

John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, "You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy."

I counter, "That's the first normal thing I've said in weeks. The rest of the time I'm feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.

"But I'll repeat it for you," I say. "We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere millions of years before he was born and discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.

"The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It's the only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it's just that doesn't make it bad. Or ghosts either."

They are just looking at me so I continue: "Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living."

Appendix B:

From the Tennessee Technological Universities Honors Program Handbook published 1996 by Tennessee Technological University. From Chapter 10: "Models of Growth and Development;" pages 75-78.

Kohlberg's Model of Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg was a researcher who studied the development of morality. Over several years, he developed six stages of moral development that occur over the lifetime, with a postulated "soft" seventh stage added later and explained in Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and Response to Critics (1983). In addition, he has three categories of the stages, which include the pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional (autonomous, or principled) levels.

Obviously, there are several axes that must go into any person's morality. Simply put, morality addresses the question "Why do good?" and its corollary, "Why not do bad?" Autonomy is an important aspect to moral judgment in addressing the "Why?" of morality. Are we good because we've been told to be? Do we obey the laws because we'll go to jail if we don't? Or do we follow a higher moral code of universal value of life and liberty? Another aspect of morality involves the value structures involved. Do we esteem our societal values more highly than those of the aborigines? What makes us right and Hitler wrong? How do we discern which values we will internalize and which we will reject? Notice that Kohlberg is more interested in the why of moral development and thought rather than the what -- the intent of moral action is more important in this case than the action.

Kohlberg argues for a process of internalization of moral values, and has built a model of stage development to depict this process. Generally, the trend moves from external to internal authority, narrow to broad (world or universal) consciousness, and less to more empathic understanding of Otherness. A difference between Perry's model and Kohlberg's is that the moral stages are considered to be "hard" stages -- that is, the person in question moves from one discrete, distinct level to the next discrete, distinct level. Whereas Perry's model includes regression, Kohlberg's shows only forward movement except in exceedingly rare and statistically non-significant cases.

Pre-Conventional Level

These stages, which occur during childhood, include actions which are viewed by the society as morally correct but are motivated by physical or hedonistic drives. Morality is defined by power over external events, and the rules of conduct are clearly and physically defined.

Since Kohlberg examined the development of morality across the life span, the first two stages occur very early in a child's development. Stage 1 begins when the child first makes the connection between an action and an aversive consequence: "If I draw on the wall, I will get spanked." In this stage, the child in question does good because the consequences of not doing good are unpleasant. There is no understanding of the deeper moral reasons behind the actions, simply a connection between actions and consequences: a "Might makes Right" rule. Avoidance of punishment is equated with "goodness," and the morality centers around the physical consequences of actions regardless of intrinsic value or meaning. Obedience is sufficient reason for morality, and "because I said so" is a perfectly sound reason for actions. Actions are considered physically instead of psychologically: "you hurt his feelings" is less understood than "you broke his truck," and the physical loss is more important.

Stage 2 marks the development of an egocentric, hedonistic morality that includes the possibility of reward. Punishment remains a viable deterrent for wrong action, but reward now offers an alternative reason for doing good. At this stage, a definite quid pro quo predominates: "Clean your room and I'll give you some ice cream." Morality is viewed as that which instrumentally satisfies one's needs. A beginning sense of empathy is also employed, though usually as a means to an end, not out of a sense of connectedness. "What's in it for me?" is the question that summarizes the feeling of this stage, and fairness and reciprocity are central values.

The social perspective at this stage is a concrete individualistic perspective. The child is aware that just as it is his right to pursue his own satisfaction, so is it everyone else's right too, and that these desires conflict at times. The understanding that right is relative (at least in the concrete sense) leads the child to an empathy with others and a beginning consideration of the values of others.

Conventional Level

At this point, a growing awareness of society and community brings the person into a desire for conformity and acceptance. To that end, the person will do what is right in the eyes of that community, in hopes of being labeled a "good boy" or "nice girl" and thus receiving validation by the group. There is an increasing knowledge of the responsibilities which come with being part of the group, and an adherence with the laws of the society is upheld. Law is respected as the highest rule of action, never to be broken except in extreme cases where one social duty conflicts with another.

It is in the conventional level stages that most people stay in terms of morality. Very few move beyond these to stages 5 and 6.

Stage 3: Mutual Interpersonal Expectations, Relationships, and Interpersonal Conformity

A strong desire to "fit in" develops and right is decided by the group. Often this is a cultural or societal group, but it can also be a peer group or subculture as well: gangs, school clubs, church groups, and political movements or parties. Loyalty and conformity are highly prized virtues, and the person's moral identity is the moral identity of the whole. "Being good" is important at this stage and entails showing concern for others and having good motives. Belief in the Golden Rule -- do to others as you would be done to -- and the need to be a good person in one's own eyes are also hallmarks of this stage of development.

A greater awareness of the inter-relatedness of the group develops and the needs of the many begin to outweigh the needs of the one. However, the person at Stage 3 does not yet see a generalized social model of action but sees morality in terms of interpersonal honesty. A good example of this is the shoplifting that many young people indulge in as an expression of rebellion. A student who steals a book from the bookstore may believe that in this case stealing is perfectly justified or acceptable, yet the same student would not steal any amount of money from a friend. Both actions are stealing, but one is acceptable because the institution of the bookstore is not recognized as one of "us" and is therefore outside the umbrella of moral action.

At this point the person begins to see himself as a part of the society as a whole and therefore responsible to uphold the laws of the land and respect its various parts. A respect of authority and an orientation toward fixed rules and the maintenance of social order become prevalent. The student in question in the above paragraph would no longer find it acceptable to steal from the bookstore because the student has realized that the institution is just as important as the individual in keeping social balance. There is a strong legal sense to the morality at this stage, and a focus on doing one's duty and showing respect for authority.

This is the moral level of the military and other similar establishments. Discipline (or adherence to the rules) is prized while individual effort is frowned upon. People are expected to perform as part of a team, and any right actions are for the good of the group or society as a whole. The laws are to be obeyed without question, and the most upstanding citizen is the one who supports the status quo and abides by the laws.

Post-Conventional, Autonomous, or Principled Level

In these stages, there is a clear effort to define moral values in terms of intrinsic worth. Authority is internalized; moral action is performed in accordance with an internal, personal value structure. An awareness of the relativity of values leads to a deeper understanding of universal beliefs. The welfare of the society (and later, of humanity) takes precedence over abiding by the rules, but since this end is usually achieved through obeying the law, the person will abide by society's rules. However, some non-relative values and rights like life and liberty must be upheld in any society regardless of majority opinion. This level also includes ideas of universal human rights and justice and a sense of a universal set of moral values that are internalized and acted upon.

The laws are upheld, not because of a particular group or the authority of the governing body but because of the laws themselves. This is the official Kohlberg stage of the United States of America; likewise, the Declaration of Independence ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") is a Kohlberg 5 statement. It is people at this stage who perform the mature form of civil disobedience in which they rebel against unjust laws and governments. Utilitarian overtones mark this stage: a focus on doing the greatest good for the most people. No longer does the person blindly follow authority; be becomes discerning and introspective considering his moral stances. He recognizes that moral and legal points of view sometimes conflict, and rather than arbitrarily assume one right and one wrong, struggles to integrate the viewpoints into a broader perspective of society.

At this stage much of the social reconstruction finds its birth. Unjust laws are condemned or overturned, prejudices are rooted out, and laws are made to enforce equality among people. Personal contracts (i.e., within a smaller sub- or peer group) are not as valid as the understood contract between the rational person and the society. The individual is aware of values and rights prior to social attachments. At this point, the Kantian imperative becomes an axiom: behave as though one's every action could become universal law. Referring to the bookstore analogy, the student would not steal from the bookstore because he realizes that just as he is an individual and has certain inalienable rights, so the bookstore has rights as well, and they are just as sacred. He also begins to see the delicacy of the structure: no longer are institutions quite as invulnerable as they once were for him. He sees them for what they are: collections of individuals working together toward a common goal. Once institutions become humanized, it becomes harder to take advantage of their weaknesses.

This is perhaps the most autonomous of the stages. Morality is defined within the person, not by society. An internal value structure guides and corrects, and laws are only valid because they rest on immutable and universal principles of justice: the equality of human rights, the sanctity of human life, and respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons. When the laws conflict with the principles, one acts in accordance with the principles. This moral structure is not arbitrary or unmindful, but is built of several years of careful introspection and observation. The person has freed herself from prejudices and external authority, and has built an internal system in accordance with universal human principles instead of societal ones. These principles are abstract ethical rules of being instead of concrete moral rules of behavior, much more like the golden rule or the categorical imperative than the ten commandments.

An identification with humanity as a whole pervades this stage; more than stage 5, which identifies with human rights but on the societal level. There is a movement toward seeing the "human race" instead of the "United States," and the idea of a global interconnected society is understood. A person at stage 6 might describe herself as a citizen of the world rather than as an American. Also, there is a concomitant increase of empathy and compassion for other cultures and societies that may or may not have been evident before. The person at stage 6 cares deeply for the starving people in Africa in a real, personal way, as well as the starving people in the United States.

Additional Comments

Measurement, Populations, and Biases

One problem that arises for any researcher studying a topic as ill-defined as morality is that of definition and measurement. Views of morality change across the world; what is immoral for one person might be common practice for another. One way that Kohlberg avoids that bias is by focusing on the reasoning for morality instead of the actions themselves. He contends that the ways people reason about morality are universal, and that the differences lie in particulars only.

Several researchers take exception to this idea, and point out various areas of alleged bias in Kohlberg's model. An excellent codification of the criticisms and defenses of Kohlberg's model can be found in his book Moral Stages: A Current Formation and a Response to Critics (1983). One of the most notable critics is Carol Gilligan, a Harvard professor who wrote In a Different Voice (1982) to address, among other things, the issue of women's morality.

Kohlberg's model focuses primarily on justice orientation: ideas of fairness, agreement, and quid pro quo interactions. Gilligan contends that as a result of that focus, women (who focus on a morality of beneficence and care) score lower than men on standardized tests of moral development. She submits that the justice orientation of the tests represents a male sexist bias and is therefore not representative of the female population. Gilligan broadens her indictment to say that "the current research supports critics of Kohlberg's theory who claim that particularly at the post-conventional level, that theory reflects a limited Western male perspective and may therefore be biased against women and other groups whose moral perspectives are somewhat different" (1982, p. 36). Kohlberg replies in Moral Stages that "considerations of care and considerations of justice are interwoven in working out resolutions to moral dilemmas" (1983, p. 125). Even though the ethic of care and the ethic of justice may be two different modes of moral reasoning, Kohlberg believes his model to include both because they are inseparable when dealing with moral decision-making.

James Rest developed the Defining Issues Test, which attempts to measure moral reasoning objectively. He has had some success with it, though the test tends to flatten out toward the top: stages 5 and 6 are ill-defined within the test and sometimes the scores are ambiguous. The questions themselves may be ambiguous as well, which confounds the test scores.

"Soft" Stages vs. "Hard" Stages

Kohlberg's model as he has defined it is a hard model; that is, there are discrete boundaries to the stages and people move through them in order. For contrast, Perry's model is a soft model, with transitions and a flowing movement through the stages. A possible weakness of the Kohlberg model as it is would be that humans seldom move from one distinct place to the next; in fact, with morality the tendency is anything but. It may be useful to keep in mind that there are several axes of moral development, and one can be differently advanced in any number of them.

Morality and the Development of Autonomy

As with Perry's model, the development of autonomy underlies the maturation of moral reasoning. As the person moves toward more generalized morality (that is, she moves from more to less egocentric) she also begins to internalize authority. At the early stages the focus is very much personal: how do I avoid punishment, what do I get out of it, and so on. Likewise, authority is completely external; the girl in question does "right" because someone in authority has told her to do so. However, we see that in stages 3 and 4 she begins to move toward a more general consciousness, and more autonomous actions begin to emerge as she realizes her contributions to the society. The movement toward internalized authority culminates in a personal understanding of universal rights and a personal internal structure of morality that she acts in relation to.

Kohlberg postulated (though never statistically proved) the existence of a hypothetical soft seventh stage beyond the Universal Ethical Principled level. He said that "a Stage 7 response to ethical and religious problems is based on constructing a sense of identity or union with being, with life, or with God" (Kohlberg, 1983). In general, the moral identification has gone beyond society and humanity and has attached to a picture of "ultimate good" and thus universalized to a cosmic consciousness. An action that could be identified with stage 7 would be those persons who sacrifice themselves in the service of a universal cause: Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jesus Christ, and others like them. A memorable example of a stage 7 decision is one of a German soldier during World War II. After conquering a small town, his commander lined up the women and children and ordered his soldiers to open fire on them in a reprisal. This particular soldier protested, believing that killing innocent civilians was wrong. His commander informed the company that anyone who disobeyed his order to fire would be shot. The soldier laid his rifle on the ground, walked over to the line, and stood with the women and children. The remaining soldiers opened fire and killed them all.

Our first reaction might be to denounce his action as a waste. After all, would he not have been more effective if he were alive? In refusing to compromise his beliefs, however, he has maintained his own personal integrity and held true to what he believed was right. He was a loyal German; he was not refusing because he did not believe in the war, but because he did not approve of something he had been ordered to do. In the end, his moral judgment placed his respect for the lives of the civilians above following orders, and he accepted the consequences of his actions, dying rather than compromising his moral values.

Appendix C:

From the Tennessee Technological Universities Honors Program Handbook published 1996 by Tennessee Technological University. From Chapter 10: "Models of Growth and Development;" pages 69-75.

Perry's Model of Cognitive and Ethical Development

William Perry, a Harvard researcher, has spent a lifetime studying the cognitive and ethical development of college-age students, the 18-to-25-year group. He has built a model which describes the ways a person's reasoning changes as that person matures. He argues, with many appropriate qualifiers, that students generally move through these positions in order, though one moves through different subjects or categories at different rates. For example, you could be at Position 3 in some of your attitudes about sex or religion, and simultaneously be at Position 5 in the way you reason about politics. Also, it is useful to note that even though Perry's pool of subjects was 18-to-25-year-olds, the boundaries of the positions stretch far beyond those limits, such that it is not impossible to find a person who is 40 years old and still working out of Position 3 or 4. Likewise, despite the research, it is rare to find a person who is younger than 25 and working on the relativism-with-commitment stages. Most people enter college at Position 2 or 3 and leave at 5 or 6, with occasional forays into 7 (usually vocation or career). An important aspect to note is the level of autonomy in each stage: the student who moves through Perry's stages moves from relying on external authority to working in accordance with an internal ethical and autonomous structure.

We will now go through a step-by-step analysis of Perry's model. This model can be found in Perry's article "Cognitive and Ethical Growth: The Making of Meaning." Perry has ethical and cognitive development separated into three broad categories: dualism, relativism (multiplicity), and relativism with commitment; three stages to each category; and, since these stages are all "soft" stages (i.e., there aren't discrete boundaries between them), transitional periods between the stages.

Typically, the Position 1 person is very young; however, it is not uncommon to find college students who still work in some mental categories from this understanding of the universe. Here, Right Answers exist for everything, and we can trust our Authorities to know them and inform us of whatever we need to know. We are the good guys; anyone else is "out there," such that they don't really exist. In Position 1 the behavior roles are very distinct: the Authorities (our parents, teachers, etc.) exist to give us the Answers, and we exist to obey them. Knowledge and rightness are measured by the amount of Right Answers we can repeat back to whichever Authority is questioning us, and goodness is attained by hard work and obedience.

One can live in this small but simple world only so long before noticing that "others" do exist -- those who don't believe the same way. In college, this happens when we listen to someone's comments in class or in the dorm and realize that they are saying something that is totally wrong -- or at least, is not what we've always thought. The beginning of understanding that others believe other things marks the transition to the next position. This does not, however, mean that we accept other's beliefs -- things are much too black-and-white for that at this point in our growth.

Several things go on at once here. Faced with the realization that there are other systems of beliefs in the world, we feel compelled to protect ours, or to retreat into the protection of ours. In a dualistic world, if "our" Authority is good, then all other Authorities are bad, and this is exactly the conclusion we come to in Position 2. Those who do not believe as we do are wrong, and to take it a step further, those who do not offer clear-cut answers are also wrong. There is no "both-and" in this stage. Simplicity is the rule of the day, and those would-be Authorities who offer complexities are not to be trusted.

So what happens when "our" Authorities offer complexities? What happens when our teacher refuses to give a straight answer? The obvious answer here (to us) is that our Authority, for whatever ineffable reasons, is trying to teach us to think. If our Authority gives us complexities, it is to teach us to find the Answers for ourselves. Authority knows the Answers, but is holding them back from us to teach us something.

This last statement gives rise to a more disturbing realization. If we have to search for the answers, then maybe so do the Authorities. Even our "good" Authorities don't have all the answers (yet). The assumption at this transition is that there are Answers out there, and if we simply wait for a while, our Authorities will find them and give them to us, and this leads us straight into Position 3.

Having realized that our Authorities don't have all the answers, we settle down to wait for them to find the Authorities to find them. There is uncertainty here -- after all, the safety of Position 1 has been challenged by this new information -- but the uncertainty is understood to be temporary. Here, when our Authorities don't agree, their answers are legitimate, at least until we find the real Answers, when all our Authorities will line up again behind the Truth. The idea here is that our good Authorities don't have all the answers -- yet.

The transition comes when we realize that the "yet" could take a very long time -- in fact, the Authorities could never find the answers. The feeling of disbelief and horror is summed up in this statement by a student going through this transition: "Here was this great professor and he was groping too!"

There are two transitions that are arguably the most stressful of one's development. The first comes at this point, between dualism and multiplicity. The transition between Positions 3 and 4 presents an ontological shift -- a shift in the actual structure of meaning, and of being in relation to meaning -- such that it becomes very difficult to go back to the relative safety of duality. For some, this movement from dualism to multiplicity is liberating: they have felt bound by rules and structure and welcome the flowing freedom of multiplicity and relativism. For others, however, it is horrifying. Gone is the safe and understandable world of dualism. We can no longer rely on our Authorities to give us the answers, yet nothing before this has prepared us for the full weight of the choices that are laid out before us. Some common reactions to this transition are fear, anger, betrayal, depression, and grief. These reactions usually come back for the transition between 4 and 5, but that will be discussed later in the chapter. For now, realize that this is a very difficult shift, and virtually no one makes it out unscathed.

Here we break with the linear pattern of growth to split into two possibilities: the rebellious Position 4a and the game-playing of 4b. Most people only do one of these stages on the way to position 5 -- they are two different ways to deal with the impending uncertainty of relativism.

With the realization of fallibility on the part of the Authorities comes an easy generalization: where the Authorities don't have the answers, everyone's opinion is equally valid! Note that we still accept that Authorities have the Answers and that they still give them to us; the difference here is that we realize that our Authorities are not necessarily omniscient or expert. Here we see the typical student struggling to assert some sort of independence in critical cognitive skills -- in those places where the Authorities don't know, it's safe for us to make our own answers. However, we still have not built a way to discern "better" answers, so we must assume that everyone's answers are equally right.

The answers that the student has who operates at Position 4a are very individual; that is, they need not make sense or be true beyond the student's personal experience. As long as the Authorities cannot prove a statement wrong, it is assumed to be right. These statements are largely unexamined; there need not be evidence to back up statements, and as long as Authority does not disagree with the statement, it is accepted as right. Students who are working at Position 4a are sometimes confused by the difference in grading quality vs. quantity; they are accustomed to supporting facts with other facts, but this new method of supporting opinions and interpretations with facts is difficult to understand. A student would respond with confidence when asked to tell whether abortion is wrong but might be perplexed when asked why he believed that way. For most people meta-cognition, or thinking about thinking, has not yet been developed.

The shift comes when the student realizes that she must support her opinions with facts. This places her in the uncomfortable position of needing to discern between "more" and "less" right answers, and opens up the opportunity for more abstract reasoning about meaning. The student has realized that simple opinions are not enough, and that it is important to have fact to back up belief. This leads the student on a quest for meaning: not only meaningful answers, but the ur-meaning, the deeper meanings. A question that epitomizes the thought of this transition and the next stage might be: "What is it that makes this true?"

Here we pick up the other possibility of Position 4, that which we sometimes call "playing the Game." These students do not assume that all answers are equally valid, but instead try to stay away from that level of autonomy by playing by the rules. The idea is that if we tell the Authorities what they want to hear, that will do just as well as the "right" answers. Trusting that Authorities have the right to grade the student even in areas of uncertainty, the student sets out to find the rules by which the Authorities grade. Ironically, the student often learns to think independently because she believes that is what the Authorities want her to do: in other words, the student is being independent under orders.

There is still an assumption at this Position that the Authorities, even if they don't have all the answers, still control most of them. So the point is to find out the rules governing the answers. Typically, the student knows that what she is saying is not what she truly believes, but is rather parroting back the answers she has received ex cathedra (that is, infallibly) from her instructors on the assumption that they have external validity for their statements.

The student begins to perceive a general relativism not only of her own knowledge but also of the Authority's as well. The previously unassailable position of rightness that the Authorities enjoyed to this point is now beginning to be shaken. This transition marks the turning point of complexity and reason -- usually the student will not be able to look at things as simply black and white any more, and in some cases there is even a sort of amnesia for the reorganization involved, so that the student has a hard time remembering ever not seeing the world in shades of gray.

This is possibly the most uncomfortable of all the stages. The student has been rudely thrust into a place where he must be autonomous, where the Authorities can no longer be counted on to provide any answers that are worthwhile. Nothing before this has prepared him for this eventuality: even though he has known for a while that the Authorities don't know all the answers, there has always been an assumption or hope that the Authority would save him if it was important. The assumption has always existed for him that right answers exist somewhere, and that Authorities exist somewhere to give him those answers. At Position 5, those assumptions are coldly and powerfully shattered. As a result, a deep feeling of loss, bewilderment, betrayal, and even rage can erupt. Students may flounder for weeks or months feeling that nothing has meaning.

This Position offers a deep perception of paradoxes -- for every "truth" there is an opposite but equally valid "truth" -- but no way to bring them together. The student is left to flounder in the uncertainty, with nothing to direct him. It is in this stage that we find the "existential angst" of Camus, Sartre, Dostoevski and Beckett -- that philosophy and state of mind that sees possibility of meaning but has no internal way of discerning between conflicting meanings and no way to bring the paradoxes together. Here is the first taste of true autonomy, but ironically enough, the student has nothing to stand on to make decisions, and he is left with the understanding that he is independently and self-sufficiently confused.

This position is very traumatic for most people, and they find several ways of avoiding the full brunt of the uncertainty of Position 5. Very few students, in fact, do not indulge in at least one of these avoidance patterns during their growth. We will examine those now.

One common way that students at Position 5 attempt to avoid the uncertainty is through temporizing. This method involves simply waiting, refusing to make decisions or commitments in the hope that some Authority will come back to set things right. This apathy often results in feelings of guilt or shame for what the student sees as a failure of responsibility with which she felt helpless to cope. Here we see a strong nostalgia, a desire to go back to earlier, simpler times, and a poignant but futile refusal to see the ambiguity. The student who indulges in temporizing usually waits for events to decide themselves: he remains reactive instead of proactive.

Another method, retreat, involves moving back to previous stages. We have seen earlier that it is very difficult to move back to dualism once the transition from 3 to 4 has been made; however, this does not mean that it is impossible. In reaction to the terrifying uncertainty of relativism, the student regresses to Position 2, but with an added moralistic righteousness and a hatred of Otherness. Not only are others wrong, but they are so wrong that they deserve no rights at all. Here we find an immense amount of prejudice, bigotry, and close-mindedness as the student attempts to regain the certainty he once understood.

Escape has a more nebulous definition. It entails a desire to deny the reality of the relativism. The student who is trying to escape feels the inexorable pull of relativism but does not want to be there. Studies of adults show that the alienation of Escape can become a settled condition. However, in general the students come to terms with the deeper truth of multiplicity, and experience in themselves the origin of meaning, which they had previously expected to come from outside themselves. This brings about a greater degree of autonomy as they begin to realize that if they are to make sense of the universe, they must make meaning for themselves.

As the student understands the pervasive nature of relativism, she begins to realize that the only way to make sense of the ambiguities of Position 5 is to make some sort of commitment. As of yet, exactly how to make this commitment is not evident, but the realization helps her to move into the next position.

In this position the student begins to see the necessity of commitment. Having lived through the plethora of choices available in multiplicity and relativism, Position 6 is seen as a "narrowing down" of choices in preparation for the Commitment of Position 7. There is also a newfound sense of inner strength that comes of the autonomy of choosing; that is, the reality that the choice is hers grants the student a confidence in herself, or at any rate, a realization that the choice is hers to make. The awareness of Position 6 also makes the choices more personal and proactive instead of reactive: the choices are not because They have told us to think this way, but because we have decided this on our own. This does not necessarily mean that we have discounted the words of our former authorities, simply that they have now taken a more reasonable place in our minds as fallible and human. Our choice becomes ours instead of theirs, and our beliefs are distinctly ours.

Commitments take place in any of several domains. The student may decide to Commit to a set of values, a vocation, a person, or some other ideal. The domain that usually marks this Position for most students is that of a career (or vocation), although some people Commit to a set of moral beliefs, a spiritual path, or a significant other first. Whatever the domain, the commitment is the important aspect. It is the commitment that gives a place to stand in the uncertainty; it offers structure in the ambiguity of relativism.

It is important to notice the difference between Positions 2-3 and Positions 7-9. A person who is working from Position 2 might hear a person's Position 7 statement and agree -- and see no difference in their stances. However, the difference lies in the level of autonomy of the statements, not in the statement itself: the person who is at Position 2 espouses this belief because it is what he has been told to believe by his authorities, who are still very much infallible at this point; while the Position 7 person has made a decision after living the alternatives and coming to a reasoned decision.

Unfortunately, Perry does not delineate his model past Position 7. Broadly, Position 7 contains the ontological shift that comes with making a formal Commitment; Position 8 entails learning to make more Commitments in different domains; and Position 9 involves balancing Commitments and devotion to the commitments. Position 9 is a more distinct balancing of paradox such that the ambiguities that were discovered in Position 5 and categorized or prioritized in Position 7 are now brought into play and lived. The ambiguities become an integral part of who we are: no longer does the student fight the uncertainty, but rather accepts it as a part of himself and works in relation to the uncertainty.

Perry does not address the transition between Positions 6 and 7. One reason for this is that even though his subjects did attain positions beyond 6, it is exceedingly rare to find an undergraduate who has made the formal ontological Commitment. This typically happens in graduate school, although many people make an analogue of the commitment with career during undergraduate work. However, the transition is interesting and perplexing in that it includes previous shifts all at once. Because the student is trying to understand how to Commit without having contexts for this shift, he must try to understand using his previous experiences. In doing so, he often will regress to Position 3 in an attempt to reclaim the certainty of that position. As we've seen before, the certainty of Position 3 strongly resembles the confidence of Position 7, but they are significantly different and this difference prohibits the student's settling at Position 3.

In reaction to the immaturity of Position 3 the student then moves into Position 5. This is more or less a review of the choices that are available. There is a brief time of confusion as all these equally possible choices are seen, and in the transition from here comes the understanding of Commitment. Once the Commitment is made, the other choices and issues clarify around this central topic. If the Commitment is made to a career, the other career choices crystallize from equal possibilities to subordinate choices. This gives the student a sense of purpose, and much of his life is lived (for a while at least) in relation to that Commitment.

People move through the stages sequentially, without skipping stages. However, it should be noted that everyone does not necessarily go through all these positions. In fact, few are the people who actually make it to Position 9 and beyond. Most people tend to cluster around Positions 3 and 6, with the particularly rebellious types as 4a, the existentialists at 5, and the strongly prejudiced people at 2. Also, many people may vacillate between stages before actually making the transition; a person who is moving from 3 to 4 might try to live at Position 4 but lack the contexts to remain there, and would keep regressing to 3 until he had built enough data to make the formal shift.

We've said before that one of the central issues in cognitive and ethical development is the development of autonomy. Even though when speaking of autonomy we might be tempted to see it as a dichotomous state -- one is either autonomous or not -- the reality of the situation is that we grow into degrees of autonomy. We learn, as we see the fallibility of the people who have always given us the answers, that we cannot rely absolutely on authorities outside ourselves to keep us safe, and in that learning, we build an internal authority that grants us our autonomy.

What we see as we move along the model is a movement toward an autonomous, inward centered decision-making model. The student begins with authority outside, and decisions outside: he has but to listen to the answers and respond in kind. Nothing is demanded of him but obedience. As the authority's reliability crumbles, it becomes more and more necessary to listen to what he wants and feels, and he starts building (as early as 4, though mostly in 6) an internal guidance system. Once this system of values is in place, he works in reference to that system ever after in increasing amounts.

The shift from outward authority to inward authority happens most obviously when the student makes the shift from 5 to 6, and then again from Position 6 to 7. Between Positions 5 and 6 is a conscious decision to go to something besides the crumbled authority that the pre-5 mentality invested in. Taking the initiative, the student puts her faith in herself and makes her own decision toward commitment. As of yet, the student has not made a formal commitment but has started moving toward self-reliance. Between 6 and 7 the student trusts the internal structure enough to make life-changing decisions in accordance with its urgings, and that trust restructures the way she thinks and feels about things. As the Commitment eases the tensions of Position 6 it engenders a confidence in that internal structure and allows the student to move more fully into autonomous thought.

As a point of interest, most of the decisions up to Position 5 are done in relation to the external authority -- even the rebellion of 4a and 4b. One might be tempted to see Positions 4a and 4b as autonomous actions, until we realize that the rebellion (or lack of it, as in the 4b "Playing the Game") is done in relation to the Authority. The Authority is still very real in these stages, and reaction against is still action within its domain. The Authority remains external, and even though the student is rebelling against it, there is no internal guide that marks the building of autonomy. Emotional attachment to the Authority is still evident, although intellectual rebellion has built superstructures that attempt to move away from the external structure. Furthermore, the deeper emotional belief maintains the invulnerability and puissance of the authority figure.

One of the chief problems that comes up when examining Perry's scheme is that of population. His subjects were predominantly white male Harvard students between the ages of 18 and 25. This is not, to say the least, a representative sample of the United States, so generalizing the scheme to the human population is a tricky proposition. However, there are and have been several concomitant studies in different areas of the country, and for the most part they agree with Perry's findings. Carol Gilligan, a Harvard professor, believes that men and women have different methods of development involving moral and cognitive processes (Gilligan, 1977).

An important question to ask when viewing this process is whether or not the process of autonomy is due to a natural process or outside forces. For example, is the movement toward autonomy a product of our educational system? It seems that we train our students to be unquestioning of authority in earlier years of education and then expect them to think on their own in the later years. Is the model simply a product of our educational system? Questions like these are important to keep in mind when using and relating to the model.

Appendix D:

From Constructing a Life Philosophy: Opposing Viewpoints, sixth edition, edited by David L. Bender; chapter 4: "How Do Others Make Moral Decisions," section 1 by Joseph Fletcher, "Love is Life's Best Guide;" page 159.

"In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all others as we regard our own self, and should therefore refrain form inflicting upon others such injury as would appear undesirable to us if inflicted upon ourselves."

"Whosoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. [Matthew 7:12 KJV]"

Appendix E:

From The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth by Morgan Scott Peck M.D. Chapter 3, "Love," sections 2 and 4 "Falling in Love" and "More About Ego Boundaries;" pages 84-90 and 94-97.

To understand the nature of the phenomenon of falling in love and the inevitability of its ending, it is necessary to examine the nature of what psychiatrists call ego boundaries. From what we can ascertain by certain evidence, it appears that the newborn infant during the first few months of its life does not distinguish between itself and the rest of the universe. When it moves its arms and legs the world is moving. When it is hungry the world is hungry. When it sees its mother move, it is as if it is moving. When its mother sings, the baby does not know the it is itself not making the sound. It cannot distinguish itself from the crib, the room and its parents. The animate and the inanimate are the same. There is no distinction yet between I and thou. It and the world are one. There are no boundaries, no separations. There is no identity.

But with experience the child beings to experience itself — namely, as an entity separate from the rest of the world. When it is hungry, mother doesn't always appear to feed it. When it is playful, mother doesn't always want to play. The child then has the experience of its wishes not being its mother's command. Its will is experienced as something separate from its mother's behavior. A sense of "me" begins to develop. This interaction between the infant and the mother is believed to be the ground out of which the child's sense of identity begins to grow. It has been observed that when the interaction between the infant and its mother is grossly disturbed — for example, when there is no mother, no satisfactory mother substitute or when because of her own mental illness the mother is totally uncaring or uninterested — then the infant grows into a child whose sense of identity is grossly defective in the most basic ways.

As the infant recognizes its will to be its own and not that of the universe, it begins to make other distinctions between itself and the world. When it wills movement, its arm waves before its eyes, but neither the crib nor the ceiling move. Thus the child learns that its arm and its will are connected, and therefore its arm is its and not something or someone else's. In this manner, during the first year of life, we learn the fundamentals of who we are and who we are not. By the end of our first year we know that this is my arm, my foot, my head, my tongue, my eyes, and even my viewpoint, my voice, my thoughts, my stomachache, and my feelings. We know our size and our physical limits. These limits are our boundaries. The knowledge of these limits inside our minds is what is meant by ego boundaries.

The development of ego boundaries is a process that continues through childhood into adolescence and even into adulthood, but the boundaries established later are more psychic than physical. For instance, the age between two and three is typically a time when the child comes to terms with the limits of its power. While before this time the child has learned that its wish is not necessarily its mother's command, it still clings to the possibility that its wish might be its mother's command and the feelings that its wish should be its mother's command. It is because of this hope and feeling that the two-year-old usually attempts to act like a tyrant and autocrat, trying to give orders to its parents, siblings and family pets as if they were menials in its private army, and responds with regal fury when they won't be dictated to. Thus parents speak of this age as "the terrible twos." By the age of three the child has usually become more tractable mellow as a result of an acceptance of the reality of its own relative powerlessness. Still, the possibility of omnipotence is such a sweet, sweet dream that it cannot be completely given up even after several years of painful confrontation with one's own impotence. Although the child of three has come to accept the reality of the boundaries of its power, it will continue to escape occasionally for some years to come into a world of fantasy in which the possibility of omnipotence (particularly its own) still exists. This is the world of Superman and Captain Marvel. Yet gradually even the superheroes are given up, and by the time of mid-adolescence, young people know that they are individuals, confined to the boundaries of their flesh and the limits of their power, each one a relatively frail and impotent organism, existing only by cooperation within a group of fellow organisms called society. Within this group they are not particularly distinguished, yet they are isolated from others by their individual identities, boundaries and limits.

It is lonely behind these boundaries. Some people — particularly those who psychiatrists call schizoid — because of unpleasant, traumatizing experiences in childhood, perceive the world outside of themselves as unredeemably dangerous, hostile, confusing and unnurturing. Some people feel their boundaries to be protecting and comforting and find a sense of safety in their loneliness. But most of us find our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves. The experience of falling in love allows us this escape — temporarily. The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more!

In some respects (but certainly not all) the act of falling in love is an act of regression. The experience of merging with the loved one has in it echoes from the time when we were merged with our mothers in infancy. Along with the merging we also reexperience the sense of omnipotence which we had to give up in our journey out of childhood. All things seem possible! United with our beloved we feel we can conquer all obstacles. We believe that the strength of our love will cause the forces of opposition to bow down in submission and melt away into darkness. All problems will be overcome. The future will be all light. The unreality of these feelings when we have fallen in love is essentially the unreality of the two-year-old who feels itself to be king of the family and the world with power unlimited.

Just as reality intrudes upon the two-year-old's fantasy of omnipotence so does reality intrude upon the fantastic unity of the couple who have fallen in love. Sooner or later, in response to the problems of daily living, individual will reasserts itself. He wants to have sex; she doesn't. She wants to go to the movies; he doesn't. He wants to put her money in the bank; she wants a dishwasher. She wants to talk about her job; he wants to talk about his. She doesn't like his friends; he doesn't like hers. So both of them, in the privacy of their hearts, begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have his or her own desires, tastes, prejudices and timing different from the other's. One by one, gradually or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place; gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love. Once again they are two separate individuals. At this point they either begin to dissolve the ties of their relationship or to initiate the work of real loving.

Having proclaimed the experience of "falling in love" is a sort of illusion which in no way constitutes real love, let me conclude by shifting into reverse and pointing out that falling in love is in fact very, very close to real love. Indeed, the misconception that falling in love is a type of real love is so potent precisely because it contains a grain of truth.

The experience of real love also has to do with ego boundaries, since it involves an extension of one's limits. One's limits are one's ego boundaries. When we extend our limits through love, we do so by reaching out, so to speak, toward the beloved, whose growth we wish to nurture. For us to be able to do this, the beloved object must first become beloved to us; in other words, we must be attracted toward, invested in, and committed to an object outside of ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the self. Psychiatrists call this process of attraction, investment and commitment "cathexis" and say that we "cathect" the beloved object. But when we cathect an object outside of ourselves we also psychologically incorporate a representation of that object into ourselves. For example, let us consider a man who gardens for a hobby. It is a satisfying and consuming hobby. He "loves" gardening. His garden means a lot to him. This man has cathected his garden. He finds it attractive, he has invested himself in it — so much so that he may jump out of bed early Sunday morning to get back to it, he may refuse to travel away from it, and he may even neglect his wife for it. In the process of his cathexis and in order to nurture his flowers and shrubs he learns a great deal. He comes to know much about gardening — about soils and fertilizers, rooting and pruning. And he knows his particular garden — its history, the types of flowers and plants in it, its layout, its problems and even its future. Despite the fact that the garden exists outside of him, through his cathexis it has also come to exist within him. His knowledge if it and the meaning it has for him are part of him, part of his identity, part of his history, part of his wisdom. By loving and cathecting his garden he has in a quite real way incorporated the garden within him, and by this incorporation his self has become enlarged and his ego boundaries expanded.

What transpires then in the course of many years of loving, of extending our limits for our cathexes, is a gradual but progressive enlargement of the self, an incorporation within of the world without, and a growth, a stretching and thinning of our ego boundaries. In this way the more and longer we extend ourselves, the more we love, the more blurred becomes the distinction between the self and the world. We become identified with the world. And as our ego boundaries become blurred and thinned, we begin more and more to experience the same sort of feeling of ecstasy that we have when our ego boundaries partially collapse and we "fall in love." Only, instead of having merged temporarily and unrealistically with a single beloved object, we have merged realistically and more permanently with much of the world. A "mystical union" with the entire world may be established. The feeling of ecstasy or bliss associated with this union, while perhaps more gentle and less dramatic than that associated with falling in love, is nonetheless much more stable and lasting and ultimately satisfying. It is the difference between the peak experience, typified by falling in love, and what Abraham Maslow has referred to as the "plateau experience." The heights are not glimpsed and lost again; they are attained forever.

It is obvious and generally understood that sexual activity and love, while they may occur simultaneously, are often dissociated, because they are basically separate phenomena. In itself, making love is not an act of love. Nonetheless the experience of sexual intercourse, and particularly of orgasm (even in masturbation), is an experience associated with a greater of lesser degree of collapse of ego boundaries and attendant ecstasy. It is because of this collapse of ego boundaries that we may shout at the moment of climax "I love you" or "Oh, God" to a prostitute for whom moments later, after the ego boundaries have snapped back into place, we may feel no shred of affection, liking or investment. This is not to say that the ecstasy of the orgasmic experience cannot be heightened by sharing it with one who is beloved; it can. But even without a beloved partner or any partner the collapse of ego boundaries occurring in conjunction with orgasm may be total; for a second we may totally forget who we are, lose track of self, be lost in time and space, be outside of ourself, be transported. We may become one with the universe. But only for a second.

In describing the prolonged "oneness with the universe" associated with real love as compared to the momentary oneness of orgasm, I used the words "mystical union." Mysticism is essentially a belief that reality is oneness. The most literal of mystics believe that our common perception of the universe as containing multitudes of discrete objects — starts, planets, trees, birds, houses, ourselves — all separated from one another by boundaries in a misperception, an illusion. To this consensual misperception, this world of illusion which most of us mistakenly believe to be real, Hindus and Buddhists apply the word "Maya." They and other mystics hold that the true reality can be known only through a giving up of ego boundaries. It is impossible to really see the unity of the universe as long as one continues to see oneself as a discrete object, separate and distinguishable from the rest of the universe in any way, shape or form. Hindus and Buddhists frequently hold, therefore, that the infant before the development of ego boundaries knows reality, while adults do not. Some even suggest the path toward enlightenment or knowledge of the oneness of reality requires that we regress or make ourselves like infants. This can be a dangerously tempting doctrine for certain adolescents or young adults who are not prepared to assume adult responsibilities, which seem frightening and overwhelming and demanding beyond their capacities. "I do not have to go through all this," such a person may think. "I can give up trying to be an adult and retreat from adult demands into sainthood." Schizophrenia, however, rather than sainthood, is achieved by acting on this supposition.

Most mystics understand the truth that was elaborated at the end of the discussion of discipline: namely, that we must posses or achieve something before we can give it up and still maintain our competence and viability. The infant without its ego boundaries may be closer in touch with reality than its parents, but it is incapable of surviving without the care of these parents and incapable of communicating its wisdom. The path to sainthood goes through adulthood. There are no quick and easy shortcuts. Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. An identity must be established before it can be transcended. One must find one's self before one can lose it. The temporary release from ego boundaries associated with falling in love, sexual intercourse or certain psychoactive drugs may provide us with a glimpse of Nirvana, but not with Nirvana itself. It is a thesis of this book that Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through the exercise of real love.

In summary, then, the temporary loss of ego boundaries involved in falling in love and in sexual intercourse not only leads us to make commitments to other people from which real love may begin but also gives us a foretaste of (and therefore an incentive for) the more lasting mystical ecstasy that can be ours after a lifetime of love. As such, therefore, while falling in love is not itself love, it is part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.

Appendix F:

From Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh; pages 63-64

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow

because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second

to be a bud on a spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

in order to fear and to hope,

the rhythm of my heart is the birth and

death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the

surface of the river,

and I am the bird which, when spring comes,

arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the

clear water of a pond,

and I am also the grass-snake who,

approaching in silence,

feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly

weapons to Uganda.

I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee

on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean after

being raped by a sea pirate,

and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with

plenty of power in my hands,

and I am the man who has to pay his

"debt of blood" to my people,

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes

flowers bloom in all walks of life.

My pain is like a river of tears, so full it

fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and my laughs

at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart can be left open,

the door of compassion.

Appendix G:

Ramakrishna, 19th century saint, quoted from page 56 of The Illustrated World's Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions by Huston Smith.

"God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion. One may eat a cake with icing either straight or sidewise. It will taste sweet either way. As one can ascend to the top of a house by means of a ladder or a bamboo or a staircase or a rope, so diverse are the ways to approach God, and every religion in the world shows one of these ways.

"Bow down and worship where others kneel, for where so many have adored, the kind Lord must manifest himself, for he is all mercy.

"People partition off their lands by means of boundaries, but no one can partition off the all-embracing sky overhead. The indivisible sky surrounds all and includes all. So it is ignorant people who say, 'My religion is the only one, my religion is the best.' When a heart is illuminated by true knowledge, it knows that above all these wars of sects and sectarians presides the one indivisible, eternal, all- knowing bliss.

"There was a man who worshiped Shiva, but hated all other deities. One day Shiva appeared to him and said, 'I shall never be pleased with you as long as you hate other gods.' The man, though, was stubborn. After a few Shiva again appeared to him and repeated, 'I shall never be pleased with you while you hate.' The man kept silent.

"Several more days elapsed, after which Shiva made a third appearance. This time one side of his body was Shiva and the other Vishnu. Half pleased and half displeased, the man shifted his offering to the side representing Shiva. Shiva gave up, saying, 'This man's bigotry is incorrigible.'"

Appendix H:

From chapter 3, "Take the One Seat," of A Path With Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life by Jack Kornfield; page 32.

Two disciples of a master got into an argument about the right way to practice. As they could not resolve their conflict, they went to their master, who was sitting among a group of other students. Each of the two disciples put across his point of view. The first talked about the path of effort. He said, "Master, is it not true that we must make a full effort to abandon our old habits and unconscious ways? We must make great effort to speak honestly, be mindful and present. Spiritual life does not happen by accident," he said, "but only by giving our wholehearted effort to it." The master replied, "You're right."

The second student was upset and said, "But master, isn't the true spiritual path one of letting go, of surrender, of allowing the Tao, the divine, to show itself?" He continued, "It is not through our effort that we progress, our effort is based on our grasping and ego. The essence of the true spiritual path is to live from the phrase, Not my will but thine.' Is this not the way?" Again the master replied, "You're right."

A third student listening said, "But master, they can't both be right." The master smiled and said, "And you're right too.

Appendix I:

Excerpt from "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau [1849, original title: Resistance to Civil Government.] Taken from the Project Geutenburg achieves at uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext93/civil10.txt

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil Government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that "so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that it, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniencey, it is the will of God. . .that the established government be obeyed--and no longer. This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other." Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well and an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.