Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. 

― Martin Luther King, Jr. 

In the last chapter, you learned about how much the larger community may affect our happiness as individuals and that being happy and having a life worth living may mean working to improve that community. In this chapter, the lesson is about what may help to guide us in making the difficult moral choices that we may need to make along the way. 

We all have a sense of fairness that evolved to enable us to live with and get along with other people. In the special video for this chapter, you will see how this sense of fairness may even exist in other species. This sense of fairness readily becomes apparent when you see one sibling in a family get more dessert than another or when someone cuts in front of you in line at the grocery store. 

In order to get along with each other and have a just and healthy society, it is important that things be distributed fairly, and that there is justice for those who are harmed or who harm others. The author Karen Armstrong has pointed out that every world religion has a version of the Golden Rule, which in its Christian form, is to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” At the same time, there is much debate about the concept of fairness and whether everyone should be treated the same or whether the justice system should take individual differences into account and focus more on equity and creating a level playing field for everyone. 

In this chapter, I will tell you about three things that can benefit us in making the difficult moral choices that are sometimes necessary for living well together in community. 

The first two have to do with how we make these choices and the last may help us reduce the bias that can prevent us from making the best choice. There are two primary schools of thought about what may inform moral choices and they mirror the way that we sometimes feel pulled between our thoughts and emotions, on one hand, and between equality as treating everyone the same and equity as considering individual differences and the context. 

The first school is called the Justice Tradition and was founded by Lawrence Kohlberg who identified six stages that we may move through from lower to higher levels of moral development.

The first stage is called “obedience and punishment driven” where we focus on the consequences of an action in deciding whether it is right or not. It is right as long as we don’t get punished, which may simply mean we don’t get caught.

The second stage is called “self-interest driven” or the “what’s in it for me stage” and it involves rationalising that what we do is right as long as it is good for us as individuals. 

The third stage is driven by “interpersonal accord and conformity” where we think that  something we do is right as long as our close circle of family and friends approve or benefit. 

The fourth stage is driven by “authority and social order obedience” where we obey the laws of the society because we don’t think it could function if we didn’t. 

The fifth stage is driven by the “social contract” where laws are not viewed as set in stone but as social contracts than can be changed when a new law may do a better job of promoting the greater good. 

Finally, the sixth stage is driven by universal ethical principles that are based on abstract reasoning about what may be moral or just across situations, cultures, and time. 

From Kohlberg’s perspective, it was rare to find anyone whose level of moral judgement consistently operated at the sixth stage. Also, you can see how the later stages place a greater emphasis on larger groups of people and making decisions that might place less emphasis on one person or group vs. another. Thus, Kohlberg emphasized identifying the guiding principles for making moral choices and applying them equally and consistently across different people and situations. 

Interestingly, the other primary school of thought that contrasts with Kohlberg’s emphasis on abstract reason and universal principles was founded by one of his students. This student was Carol Gilligan, a woman who has focused more on the value of emotion, relationships, and context in making tough moral choices. She founded what has been called the Care Tradition of moral reasoning, which has three primary stages that may better reflect the experience of women and others not part of a dominant power structure: 

The first stage is called “orientation to individual survival” and it is focused on enabling us to make it through the earlier times in life when we are most helpless and vulnerable. 

The second stage is called “goodness defined as self-sacrifice for others” and reflects the experience of women and others whose life may be defined by a role of service to others. 

The third and final stage is called the “morality of non-violence: not hurting self or others” which echoes the philosophy of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and stresses self-kindness and self-compassion we talked about in Chapter 8 about love. 

In addition, because of the biases that may come with power, Gilligan places more emphasis on the context of those who are at a disadvantage and the necessity of considering their vulnerability. Thus, while Kohlberg emphasized universal principles that don’t favour one group over another, Gilligan provides a potential corrective in asking us to also consider the context of those with less power. 

The final thing that may help us make tough moral choices has to do with the way that open-mindedness has been defined and understood in the VIA classification. 

While some define open-mindedness as simply being open to different people and perspectives, the VIA classification, open-mindedness is defined as actively searching for evidence against our favoured beliefs, plans, or goals, and weighing such evidence fairly. 

This active searching is necessary because of our “selective exposure” bias whereby we often unknowingly only expose ourselves to beliefs we are already comfortable and familiar with. Thus, a conservative person may only watch Fox news, a progressive person may only watch Rachel Maddow, and the empathy that a community positive psychology might try to foster and extend is cut short. 

Selective exposure is similar to what has been called a “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of our pre-existing beliefs. Thus, if a conservative person does watch Rachel Maddow or a progressive person watches Fox news, they may unknowingly maintain their beliefs by filtering what they hear through a particular way of interpreting it. 

The result may be that people get lost in different narratives and become polarized losing out on the opportunity to make better moral decisions because they don’t have the whole picture. The genius of the VIA definition of open-mindedness is that it emphasizes “actively searching for evidence against our favoured beliefs” which can help us overcome our selective exposure and confirmation biases. 

So, in putting together what we know about the need for making moral choices and what can help us make better ones, there are three important points to remember: 

First, when we know that being happy and having a life worth living may involve working for a better community, we will be faced with tough choices about the kind of fairness and justice that are necessary for us to live well together. 

Second, while Kohlberg demonstrated that universal ethical principles may help us avoid favouring one person, situation, or group over another; Gilligan challenged us to also take into account the way that having power may distort the picture and create a bias against those who are most vulnerable. 

Third, the kind of open-mindedness that actively searches for evidence contradicting what we assume to be true may help us avoid the kind of biases that Gilligan highlights and that people in a dominant group or with power may be particularly vulnerable to.

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter 

The tasks focus on our relationship with the community and how to foster fairness and justice in our relationships with each other and the larger community and world. 

Fisrt, there is a special video to watch about a fascinating experiment on fairness with Capuchin monkeys and a question for you to reflect on regarding when you may have had a similar reaction as the monkey who was treated unfairly. 

Second, there is a task that involves writing about ways you have fallen into selective exposure and how you can practice open-mindedness to reduce it. This may be promising for us begin to do our part in reducing polarisation about things like religion and politics. 

Thirdly, the next task is to do something to support one of the causes that you identified in the last chapter and writing about what you did and how it went. This can help us learn how much meaning and gratification we can find in contributing to the greater good. 

Fourth, we want you to identify ways that you can demonstrate love, kindness, and compassion for yourself and do at least one of them in the future. One of the reasons that people are not able to sustain acts of kindness and support for the causes that they believe in is that they do not take adequate care of themselves. As we discussed in the chapter on love, the ability to love and be kind and compassionate toward your self is a form of love that can be very important but that many neglect or don’t practice well.