ANNA MALITOWSKA & MATEUSZ BONECKI

MORAL JUDGMENT COMPETENCE IN PRAGMATIST CONTEXT: KOHLBERG, DEWEY, POLANYI

INTRODUCTION Everyday activities are mostly conducted spontaneously. Usually participation in social interactions does not require agents to reflect on their actions, to prove and justify them. Rather, it allows unproblematic communication and cooperation. It is only in moments of doubt and hesitation that human reflection and reasoning are required. When being confronted with a problem, conflict or dilemma, participants of social settings begin to question and analyze their conduct. They also question validity of social rules which they have hitherto taken for granted. They communicate and argue in order to reach a conclusion which may contribute to the problem solving. They engage in moral reasoning, exercise their moral judgment, and use their moral judgment competence. In his well-known formulation Lawrence Kohlberg defines moral judgment competence as the “capacity to make judgments and decisions which are moral (i.e. based on internal principles) and to act in accordance with such judgments.” (Kohlberg, 1964, p. 425) The following considerations address Kohlberg’s conception of moral judgment making. However, our intent is to analyze moral judgment making not only within cognitive-developmental psychology but also within the scope of John Dewey’s (1938) pragmatist of . We want to show that moral competence and moral judgment play a crucial role in the field of reflection on lifeworld as it is experienced by members of cultural communities. In particular, we focus on the experience of problem situations which, as we assume, results from insufficiency and inadequacy of acquired in the enculturation and socialization processes. The approach discussed here is supposed to provide a philosophical and theoretical framework which would, firstly, explain the embodiment of normative consciousness in habitual practices and, secondly, explicate the function of moral argumentation in the process of a conscious improvement of knowledge about .

TACIT ETHICAL KNOWLEDGE In his discussion of Jean Piaget’s (1973) view on the “unconscious” Georg Lind (2008) claims that the term refers to mental structures which remain unrevealed, in the sense that they do not make up an explicit content of the thinking process. This approach assumes that although a subject is not able to become aware of the inner

B. Zizek, D. Garz, E. Nowak (Eds.), Kohlberg Revisited, 155–168. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. ANNA MALITOWSKA & MATEUSZ BONECKI of the thinking process, the act and form of thought are determined by mental structure. That account of the unconscious has several implications within the field of the psychology of morals. Namely, Lind (2008, p. 323) suggests that moral agent’s ability to manifest a positive or negative attitude towards persons or things is embodied precisely in what Piaget calls the “affective unconsciousness.” It means that a moral actor may be able to utter a praise on someone’s behavior without being simultaneously capable of justifying why that conduct is morally commendable at all; an agent can show disappointment with someone else’s behavior, although the question why this should be appraised negatively would probably remain unanswered. Such evaluative operations—as far as they are conducted automatically and unconsciously—should be understood in terms of procedural knowledge which consists of procedures of conduct and as such it takes the form of knowing-how rather than knowing-that (see Ryle, 1949). Lind (2008, p. 323) states that what we declaratively express while speaking in terms of values on the level of explicit knowledge (knowing-that), manifests itself in a form of affects on the level of tacit knowing (knowing-how). Therefore, a capacity to take a moral attitude toward the world does not necessarily imply an “explicit knowledge” on what is right or wrong. It means that in day-to-day situations a moral agent is usually exercising his “” concerning values and normative issues. Both terms, i.e., “tacit” and “explicit knowledge” stem from Michael Polanyi’s philosophical writings (1962; 1966). He argued that in most contexts the vast body of human knowledge is something we are not conscious or aware of. “We can know more than we can tell,” Polanyi (1966, p. 4) emphasizes. At the same time he suggests that our practical and theoretical abilities are based on tacit knowledge which we successfully exercise, although we are unable to provide any theoretical account for such a form of knowing. This also applies to the domain of morals where our attitudes and spontaneous actions somehow are invested with moral character although we cannot explicitly tell what this moral character depends on. One can act in a “morally relevant manner” even when one is unable to submit any moral arguments in favour of the action. Before Polanyi coined the term “tacit knowing” he had readily spoken about “personal knowledge” (1962). This kind of cognition is closely connected with a particular person: it is the knowledge embodied in a person’s abilities, skills, and habits, shaped in the course of everyday practice, and resulting from past iterative experiences. A large part of the capacities and competences an individual successfully applies in practical situations cannot be clearly and explicitly communicated. Thus, personal knowledge differs from explicit knowledge which can be, for example, written down or transmitted to an interlocutor by means of verbal communication. While the former may be acquired through and imitation, the explicit (overt) one has a propositional form and can be articulated and shared linguistically. Polanyi (1962) argues that in the case of “learning by example” the learner imitates his master because he trusts the manner of his conduct, even when the learner “cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice

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