The Development of Baby's Political Rebellion -- Part 3

This article follows up Part 1 and Part 2. It will continue in Part 4.

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The book Twelve to Sixteen: Early Adolescence includes an article, written by sociologists Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan, titled "The Adolescent as a Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Post-Conventional World".

Book Cover

Kohlberg and Gilligan argue that a young person's moral philosophy develops through three main stages:

The preconventional stage happens before elementary school. The child understands moral actions in relationship to rewards and punishments that are applied to himself.

The conventional stage generally happens during elementary school. The child understands moral actions in relationship to social conventions. The child learns that his society and institutions have rules that are good for everyone. A person who conforms to those rules is a moral person.

The post-conventional stage generally happens after elementary school. The child learns increasingly that life contains many situations where the conventional rules are problematical. There are moral uncertainties, dilemmas and conflicts, and everyone must morally navigate through them.

Baby Houseman's elementary-school years coincided with the Eisenhower presidency -- a period of extraordinary prosperity and power for the USA. Social conformity was a good path to personal success. If you dressed correctly, studied hard, and got married like you were supposed to do, then you almost certainly would enjoy a happy life. Social rebels would fail in life, and their failure would be there own fault.

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Kohlberg and Gilligan interviewed many adolescents to determine their current moral stage. One moral question that helped to determine whether an adolescent was in the post-conventional stage was this:

In Europe, a woman was near death from a very bad disease, a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug

The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000, which was half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it."

Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.

Should the husband have done that? Was it right or wrong?

An adolescent in the post-conventional stage recognizes and so must navigate the moral dilemma. Various reasonable arguments can be formulated either way -- that the theft was morally right or morally wrong.

If this question were posed to Baby Houseman, then she would have to deal with the moral dilemma itself and also with her personally loyalty to her father, who argued that the free market was the best way for society to make medical decisions. Baby knew that her father would argue that high prices for new drugs are always necessary in order to motivate new investments to develop future new drugs.

Baby might recognize her father's logic but still feel very troubled by Heinz's inability to use an available drug to save his wife's life. After all, Heinz even offered to pay the full cost but merely asked for some more time to do so.

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Adult life is full of such moral dilemmas, and so every adolescent must begin to develop his own moral philosophy to navigate through such dilemmas.

For Baby, her own beginning of moral self-definition coincided with the 1960 presidential election when she was 14 years old. As she and her father watched John Kennedy on television, she heard her father criticizing Kennedy, but she herself felt that Kennedy seemed to be rather reasonable.

Kennedy won the presidential election in November 1960 and was inaugurated as the US President in January 1961. Just three months later, President Kennedy suffered a fiasco when he launched the so-called Bay of Pigs Invasion to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba.

Jake Houseman would exclaim, "I told you so!" about Kennedy, who indeed seemed to be too naive and foolish to wield so much political power. Baby had to agree with her father's opinion, at least for a while.

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In August 1961, however, President Kennedy's Peace Corps went into effect, as its first  volunteers traveled abroad to help poor people in poor foreign countries.

Baby felt strongly inspired by the Peace Corps and soon decided that she herself wanted to join it as soon as she became eligible in a few years. One feature that she especially liked was that the US Government would pay the full expenses for Peace Corps volunteers to provide some free medical care to the poor foreigners.

This moral exception to her father's free-market arguments was justified by the argument that the Peace Corps helped to persuade poor foreign countries to ally themselves with the USA against the Communist Bloc. Baby could argue to her father that this was a case where free medical care was a smart policy.

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 As adolescents go through the post-conventional stage of moral thinking, they appreciate increasingly that their own country's current social conventions are a limited case in world history. In particular, the USA's social conventions in the late 1950s and early 1960s were reasonable and practical for that particular society of that particular time. However, other countries had their own social conventions that were reasonable and practical for themselves. Furthermore, the social conventions of the past were different from the present but were reasonable and practical for past times. And social conventions surely would evolve differently in the future but would be reasonable and practical.

In other words, social conventions are relative to a society's particular location, time and situation. This understanding helps people in a post-conventional stage of moral thinking to consider and adopt new alternatives.

The opportunity to experience a foreign culture -- to experience different conventions -- in the Peace Corps attracted Baby strongly. Not only would she help other, poor people, she also would learn from them and would enrich her own moral philosophy.

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During the years 1960-1962 Baby began to develop her own moral philosophy in her own personal post-conventional stage of moral thinking. Her political opinions began to drift away from her father's political opinions. She was charmed by President Kennedy's intelligent, humorous and graceful political persuasion of the US population.

However, Baby still respected her father's political opinions and expressed her agreement with him frequently. She did not argue about politics with him.

Although Baby was entering her post-conventional stage, she still was partly in her conventional stage of moral thinking. She still wanted to be a "good girl" who earned praise by being nice, obedient and dutiful. In particular, she still wanted to be a "daddy's girl" who pleased her father simply by doing what he wanted her to do.

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This series continues in Part 4.

This series of articles follows up an earlier series, "Baby Houseman's Thinking About Social Justice" -- Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.